Bono's NAACP acceptance speech

The Big Question: Does the RED campaign help big Western brands more than Africa?

By Paul Vallely
Published: 09 March 2007
Why are doubts being raised?
The American advertising trade magazine Ad Age claimed in its cover story this week that the U2 front man's idea to raise money for the Global Fund to Fight Aids in Africa by selling RED products has "raised a meagre $18m [£9.3m]... in a year" despite a marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola and others estimated to be as high as $100m. The ratio between the marketing money spent and the amount raised for Africa was thus very poor, it claimed.
How much has RED raised to fight Aids?
The figure is actually $25m during the six months since the RED product range was launched in the United States last October. That is five times the amount given to the Global Fund by the private sector over the previous four years. Which is a pretty significant increase by anybody's standards.
Ah, but how much has it cost to raise it?
Certainly not the $100m Ad Age claimed. The biggest spender of the big brand names that have launched RED products was the clothing company Gap. Its total advertising budget for its RED launch was $7.8m. Even adding in the money spent by the other RED firms - Apple, Motorola, Converse sneakers and Giorgio Armani (the RED Amex card is only available in the UK not the US) - the total spend of advertising, RED sources suggest, was less than a third of the $100m cited in the magazine.
Ad Age, noticeably, cited no source for its $100m, which it presented with the weasel words that "some [people] estimate" without saying who, or how the figure was arrived at.
Experts in the US advertising industry reckon that the magazine added together a variety of figures, such as, one insider suggested, estimates of "the value of the TV, billboard, print and interactive ads as well as a content integration play, in-store materials and a pop-up store that was employed by one of the partners". There was even a suggestion that it included an estimate of the time Bono received on prime time TV shows such as Oprah, and what it would have cost to buy that time at advertising rates.
"It was a phantom number Ad Age pulled out of thin air," a spokeswoman for RED said. "The maths just simply doesn't make sense."
Even so, is that a good rate of return?
Most businesses would think that to raise $25m in just six months on an investment of well under $40m was a staggeringly good rate of return. But to ask that question is to make a fundamental muddle. Gap, Motorola, Converse, Apple and the rest would have spent that money to market their T-shirts, phones, trainers and iPod nanos anyway. The marketing men and women wouldn't otherwise have spent less and given the balance of their budget to the Global Fund.
So what happened was that existing marketing money was used both to raise awareness of the scale of the Aids epidemic in Africa - something that was nowhere near as well-publicised in the US as it was in the UK - and at the same time to promote RED products. Half the profits from those products were allocated to the Global Fund, which suggests that the actual rate of return was $50m total profit on less than $40m outlay.
So has big business done better out of this than poor Africans?
The idea behind Product RED was always that it would create a win-win result. The firms with RED products would do better and so would Africans with Aids. Some charity activists in the United States have been critical of the RED initiative, arguing that it allows firms to take on the patina of philanthropy while cutting their real charitable giving.
But the facts suggest this argument is flawed. The "corporate social responsibility" budgets of most firms are dwarfed by their marketing budgets. Donations to charity tend to be given as one-off cheques. What the RED initiative has set out to do - and with some success if $25m in six months is half the profits RED products have made - is create a stream of revenue for the fight against Aids in Africa which will far exceed one-off payments from corporate philanthropy budgets. It looks set to create a major source of cash for the Global Fund, and one which is sustainable. It is an entirely new model for fund-raising.
But wouldn't people be better off giving more to charity rather than buying luxury items they don't need?
If only that were the choice. But most people wouldn't give the cost of a new iPod to the Global Fund. Some idealists might hope so. The Ad Age article was inspired by a website called www.buylesscrap.org which attacks Product RED for proposing consumption as the cure to the world's evils. "Can't we just focus on the real solution - giving money?" it says.
This is a rather romantic, and American, notion. Private charitable giving has never offered a solution to the major structural problems in the Third World. At best, charities like aid agencies create exemplars of ideal projects, or help build a public mood that something has to be done, forcing governments to act. Aids is too massive a problem for anyone but governments to tackle.
Bono set up RED because he thought that Make Poverty History, Live8 and the One Campaign (a massive lobby in the United States) had successfully put on the pressure to get governmental action at the international level. But not every one wants to join such campaigns. And not everyone gives to charities. There were two areas yet untapped - the private sector and consumers who like buying stuff, like the idea of helping others, but who are too idle or too self-centred to actually get up and do anything. RED was the attempt to draw into the wider coalition for Africa people who, if they didn't buy a RED iPod would just have bought one of another colour.
So, has RED been a success or a failure so far?
The money RED has raised means that some 160,000 Africans will be put on life-saving anti-retrovirals in the coming months, orphans are being fed and kept in school in Swaziland and a national HIV treatment and prevention programme has begun in Rwanda. Some 99 per cent of funds raised go directly to life-saving schemes.
Motorola is printing the packaging for its RED phones in Africa - a requirement agreed to by each RED brand - to help boost African local economies.
Data collected for RED's chief executive, Bobby Shriver, shows that people who became aware of crises through Red's marketing have increased their charitable giving, rather than thinking they have done enough by buying RED.
The United States anti-Aids strategy, with strong personal backing from President George Bush, is now funded to the tune of $15bn a year. The US Congress has just agreed a record $724m donation to the Global Fund for 2007. It is all the result of concerted political pressure of which Red, with its constant advertising exposure of the message that "6,500 Africans died needlessly yesterday of a preventable and treatable disease" has been a key part.
Is RED a big flop?
It all sounds like a pretty convincing success story to me. Buy Less Crap? The only people who seem to need to take that advice are the editorial staff of an American trade magazine called Ad Age.

My friend Scooter Libby: No good deed . . .

Pardon Libby Now: It will be good for Bush and good for the country.

Scenes from the Gingrich Campaign: Don't rule out Newt in 2008.

Hamilton's Red-letter spring is made for Hollywood

'That's Not Nice': Our political discourse needs less censorship and more self-discipline.

...Our country now puts less of an emphasis on public decorum, courtliness, self-discipline, decency. America no longer says, "That's not nice." It doesn't want to make value judgments on "good" and "bad." We have come to rely on censorship to maintain decorum. We are very good at letting people know that if they say something we don't like, we'll shame them and shun them, even ruin them.

But censorship doesn't make people improve themselves; it makes people want to rebel. It tells them to toe the line or pay a price. People who are urged in the right direction and taught in the right direction will usually try to discipline and improve themselves from within. But they do not enjoy censorship from without. They fight back. They are rude in order to show they are unbroken.

This is human.
...I [think] the atmosphere of political correctness is now experienced by normal people--not people who speak on TV, but normal people--as so oppressive, so demanding of constant self-policing, that when someone says something in public that is truly not nice, not nice at all, they can't help but feel that they are witnessing a prison break.

As long as political correctness reigns, the more antic among us will try to break out with great streams of Tourette's-like forbidden words and ideas.

We should forbid less and demand more. We should exert less pressure from without and encourage more discipline from within. We should ask people to be dignified, hope they'll be generous, expect them to be fair. When they're not, we should correct them. But we shouldn't beat them to a pulp. Because that's not nice.

If Memory Serves

Our Constitution guarantees every person accused of a crime the right to call witnesses in his or her defense. This right is so critical to fundamental fairness that trials in which it is not safeguarded have been deemed by the U.S. Supreme Court to suffer from a "structural error" so serious that an automatic reversal of any criminal conviction is always required, no matter how heinous the crime.

The central theory of Mr. Libby's defense was that if he made any misstatements, either to the FBI or to the federal grand jury, they were caused by faulty memory -- either his or that of the witnesses who testified against him. For over 30 years, psychological scientists have studied the mechanics of memory and conducted extensive and rigorous research on the subject -- reaching conclusions that are generally accepted in the scientific community. Of signal importance to the jurors in the Libby trial, the science of memory is diametrically opposed to the popular understanding of how the memory and the mind work...

The Libby defense team planned to call Robert A. Bjork, a distinguished member of the faculty at UCLA and a person so qualified in his field that the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, did not even contest the point. Moreover, the trial judge, Reggie Walton found the proposed evidence sufficiently reliable to satisfy the Supreme Court's stringent Daubert standard for the admissibility of expert-witness evidence.

However, after a day-long hearing (during which one of the authors of this article testified), Judge Walton barred Dr. Bjork from appearing as an expert witness. Essentially, the judge held that the science of memory is not "science" at all, but common knowledge and common sense. He further held that the right of cross-examination was an effective substitute for the right to offer evidence. Finally, he held that the proposed evidence was more likely to confuse the jury than educate it...

The Scooter Libby verdict was neither fair nor just because the jury never heard one of the most important pieces of evidence: an expert explanation of why faulty memory could be consistent with innocence.

Ms. Loftus is a professor of psychology and criminology at the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Steinberg is a criminal defense lawyer based in Detroit.

Music's New Gatekeeper

From their Silicon Valley cubicles, Apple staffers have become music's unlikely power brokers. Our reporters on the horse-trading that can turn unknowns into stars.

By NICK WINGFIELD and ETHAN SMITH
March 9, 2007; Page W1

Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying -- out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target's ad circular.

What makes up an iTunes page? Find out the difference between "swooshes" and bricks.

How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site -- or whether Nickelback gets no mention?

Apple has jettisoned some of the conventions of traditional music retailing -- notably, the practice of selling prime promotional spots to recording companies willing to pay for better visibility for their acts. But behind the scenes there's plenty of horse-trading going on that influences which songs are seen and purchased by iTunes customers.

Apple -- now one of the largest sellers of music in the U.S. -- offers home-page placement in exchange for things such as exclusive access to new songs, special discount pricing or additional material such as interviews with stars. Most other big retailers, digital and physical, also seek exclusive offerings, but Apple is especially aggressive and has outsize clout when it comes to the slightly out-of-mainstream music it often emphasizes.

The decisions by the small group of Silicon Valley and music-industry veterans running iTunes can help put an unknown band on the map, adding millions of dollars in sales, while relegating others to the obscurity of the site's virtual back bins.

Push for Exclusives

Apple's muscle-flexing has begun to rub some artists and music companies the wrong way. During a recent radio interview, outspoken British pop singer Lily Allen accused iTunes of "bullying" artists into supplying exclusive content. There's a further worry among music executives that the few spots available to promote artists on iTunes are dwindling as Apple remakes the store into a broader entertainment destination for TV shows, movies and games.

Lily Allen accuses Apple of "bullying" musicians into providing exclusive content.

But so far, most labels comply because of the site's ability to drive sales. During a week when an album is featured on the iTunes home page it can sell about five times more copies on average through the site than it does in the three to five weeks that follow, when the album isn't featured, says one industry executive.

"The way MTV used to be the place where you had to have a video playing as one of the key legs of the stool, iTunes is now one of the key legs of the stool," says Chris Douridas, an influential deejay at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., and a former consultant to iTunes.

Not only does securing a spot on the iTunes home page require concessions by music companies -- it also depends on having material that resonates with the tastes of iTunes staffers. Three months before Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment was gearing up to promote a handful of older Prince titles, timed to coincide with the musician's recent performance at the Super Bowl halftime show, the label entered into talks with iTunes. The result: Four albums, including "Purple Rain," received prominent positions in the store and were priced at $7.99 -- $2 less than Apple's standard album price.

"They said, 'We'd like to be able to offer it at a special price,'" says David Dorn, Rhino's senior vice president for digital strategy. "I said, 'We'd like to get in the New Music Tuesdays newsletter and home-page placement.' I gave a little, they gave a little. But no cash changed hands."

Prince cut prices on old albums for iTunes, timed to his Super Bowl gig.

After the prime display, digital sales of "Purple Rain" rose fivefold, according to SoundScan, while sales of "The Very Best of Prince" more than doubled. Three less-known albums in the promotion saw modest increases.

In January, iTunes executives approached several record labels to set up a promotion in which they would slash the prices of 20 greatest-hits albums to $7.99, and Apple in turn would flag the entire group on the home page. The first album that came up, Queen's 34-song "Greatest Hits 1 & 2," originally released by Walt Disney's Hollywood Records in the mid 1990s and normally sold on iTunes for nearly $34, zoomed to No. 1 on the site's album-sales chart. It stayed in the top 10 for the entire 10 days of the promotion.

Groups like Gnarls Barkley have enjoyed significant boosts from iTunes. Last year, the alternative-soul duo's "Crazy" became the first song to hit No. 1 on the British pop charts based solely on digital sales. When the Shins' third album, "Wincing the Night Away," made its debut in January at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album-sales chart, nearly 30% of the first-week sales were made online -- most on iTunes.

For consumers, Apple's growing influence means exposure to a wider range of music. Apple has told some recording companies that music from independent labels accounts for about 15% of iTunes sales, compared with about 5% for physical retailers.

Mike Schiller, a management consultant in Cleveland, says the iTunes home page, along with Apple's New Music Tuesday newsletter, has frequently introduced him to music and movies that he later purchased, including an album by a British act called Guillemots and a Mark Wahlberg football movie called "Invincible." "It's pretty powerful," says Mr. Schiller, 48 years old, who worked as a record-store clerk while a teenager in Omaha, Neb. "It will give you exposure to stuff that you don't normally see."

Rare Growth Story

ITunes is housed at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in a cluster of nondescript cubicles that could easily be confused with a software-development group but for a smattering of music posters on the walls, according to people who have visited or worked there.

The iTunes staff includes people with music pedigrees, including Alex Luke, a longtime deejay who is the director of music programming and label relations. (Mr. Luke still sits in occasionally for stations like Los Angeles's Indie 103.1 FM.) Bruno Ybarra, who co-founded a house-music record label, manages relationships with independent music companies. Denzyl Feigelson, a South African who was a manager for singer Paul Simon's "Graceland" tour, is a music editor for iTunes in London. In all, dozens of iTunes editors and label-relations staffers collaborate in meetings and discussions throughout the week to determine what the home page of the iTunes Store will look like when it is refreshed every Tuesday.

Apple is a rare growth story in the music business. It nearly monopolizes digital-music sales, just about the only growth area for the beleaguered industry, which saw CD sales fall for seven years running. ITunes sold 1.2 billion songs last year compared with 30 million in 2003, its first year in operation, Apple says. The company says it passed Amazon.com last year to become the fourth-largest music retailer in the U.S., behind Wal-Mart Stores, Target and Best Buy, a claim that isn't disputed by music companies. At the end of last year, Apple was selling five million songs a day at 99 cents each.

Its growing clout has transformed Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs -- who kick-started online music sales several years ago with a set of breakthrough song-licensing deals with major recording companies -- into a figure music executives alternately admire and grouse about. Mr. Jobs recently caused a kerfuffle by urging music executives to consider dropping their insistence on digital copy-protection software on songs, which Mr. Jobs believes is holding back Internet music sales.

Label executives say that since Apple began selling TV shows and movies in the past year, they must begin discussions with Apple three to six months before a major music release if they want a shot at home-page promotion. In physical stores, such prime real estate is typically for sale. To secure prominent "end-cap" placement on CD racks near the ends of aisles at national retail chains, major music labels can pay as much as $5 per disc displayed in the form of discounts, "cooperative advertising" payments and other fees, according to executives. That adds up to tens of thousands of dollars for a major promotion involving 5,000 discs or more. Such hefty payments can effectively erase any profit on the CDs on display in an end-cap.

Apple says it shunned pay-for-placement -- as have online rivals including RealNetworks' Rhapsody -- to provide unbiased music recommendations. Eddy Cue, the Apple vice president who oversees iTunes, says the company hopes to recapture some of the spirit of independent record stores, when clerks would give uncompromised tips on promising performers. "That for us was kind of gone in the new retail environment," Mr. Cue says. Customers used to believe that advice on music "was coming from someone who really liked it versus someone who was paid to say they liked it."

Apple isn't under as much pressure to squeeze profits from iTunes because of the money it makes on iPods. In fact, it earns little from iTunes after paying fees for the music and credit-card processing. ITunes typically pays major labels about 72 cents a track, while it pays most independent labels around 62 cents.

Exclusive material greatly increases the likelihood that iTunes will turn up its promotion machine. In some cases, that involves getting artists such as Sting or Willie Nelson to record interviews and performances that Apple sells as a package. The company recently struck up a relationship with the Las Vegas casino the Palms to record live concerts by artists such as John Legend, for which it pays production costs.

The Orchard, an online distributor of music from independent labels, recently agreed to let Apple have an album of material by the artist G. Love one week before other Internet retailers got it. Apple ran a promotion on the front page of iTunes and the album reached No. 17 on the site's album charts, says Greg Scholl, the distributor's CEO.

Yet Ms. Allen, the young British singer behind the hit "Smile," complained during the recent radio interview about Apple's tactics. "They won't advertise your album unless you give them extra material," Ms. Allen said. She said iTunes pushed her to quickly turn out a version of a song, so she planned to give them a "rubbish remix." Ms. Allen said she would offer a better version free on her MySpace page. Apple declined to comment on Ms. Allen's remarks, and a spokeswoman for her label, EMI Group's Capitol Records, said the singer and her manager weren't available to elaborate.

And while Apple has made it a practice to seek out new artists, iTunes still has glaring gaps in its inventory. The best known is the absence of anything by the Beatles and much of the band members' subsequent solo recordings -- a situation that stemmed partially from a trademark dispute between Apple and the band's Apple Corps Ltd. record label. (Apple has said it's hopeful it will get the Beatles on iTunes following a recent settlement between the company and Apple Corps.) Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Radiohead, too, haven't licensed their music to the service. And due to licensing issues, some albums are sold minus one or more songs. Elvis Costello's "Spike," from 1989, is missing one track, while only three songs from the J. Geils Band's 1972 "Full House 'Live'" are available on iTunes.

Still, Apple is being fawned over by much of the music industry. Digital Music Group, a Sacramento, Calif., company that handles online distribution for independent labels, has four people on staff who spend most of their time chatting up iTunes editors and sending them CDs of bands in an attempt to get promotion on the site. Tuhin Roy, the distributor's chief strategy officer, is impressed by the knowledge of the Apple staffers. "Clearly, they know the music they're dealing with," he says.

Josh Deutsch, chief executive of Downtown Records, went so far as to bring urban artist Kevin Michael to Cupertino to perform for iTunes staffers. Apparently impressed, iTunes executives committed to releasing an Apple-only collection of tracks next month, in advance of Mr. Michael's debut album. While some music executives are frustrated about what it takes to woo Apple, "The flip side is, when they do step out on a new artist, it's that much more meaningful," Mr. Deutsch says.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com and Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com

The Great Depression: Richest country: saddest people--any coincidence?

by Bret Stephens

"Oh, my God, I am so starving," says high-school student Brittany Birnbaum, who ate nothing except "a Twix and a half bag of Fritos" before her cheerleading tryout and whose stomach revolts at the sight of her mother's salisbury steak. "You know," she warns, "it's against the law to treat your kids like this."

"My God, I am starving," rejoins Kitum Asosa, starving African. "I would walk 100 miles through the desert to reach a handful of millet. The sight of a sparrow carcass would make my mouth water, if only I were not too dehydrated to salivate."

I am reminded of this immortal exchange--a satirical Point/Counterpoint in the online pages of the Onion--after reading about the results of a study, recently reported in Forbes, purporting to show that the U.S. has the highest rate of depression among a survey group of 14 countries. The study, jointly conducted by the World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School and based on more than 60,000 face-to-face interviews world-wide, found that 9.6% of Americans suffer from "bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder or chronic minor depression." A whopping 18.2% of Americans were also found to be experiencing "mood and anxiety disorders, such as obsessive compulsive disorder and panic disorder."

Apple buffs marketing savvy to a high shine

"Apple's arsenal of attention-getting tools holds lessons for any company: design cool, innovative products. Have a streamlined product line. Invest in memorable ads. Work your customer base to make customers feel special and create word-of-mouth agents. Most important: keep the world and media surprised, to generate gobs of attention."

Robert D. Novak: A Verdict on the Wilson Affair

...The trial provided no information whatsoever about Valerie Plame's status at the CIA at the time I revealed her role in her husband's mission. No hard evidence was produced that Libby was ever told she was undercover. Fitzgerald had argued that whether or not she was covert was not material to this trial, and U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton had so ruled. Yet in his closing argument, Fitzgerald referred to Mrs. Wilson's secret status, and in answer to a reporter's question after the verdict, he said she was "classified."

In fact, her being classified -- that is, that her work was a government secret -- did not in itself meet the standard required for prosecution of the leaker (former deputy secretary of state Armitage) under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. That statute limits prosecution to exposers of covert intelligence activities overseas, whose revelation would undermine U.S. intelligence. That is why Fitzgerald did not move against Armitage.

Some questions I was asked in television and radio interviews after the verdict implied that I had revealed Armitage's name to Fitzgerald.

Actually, in my first interview with Fitzgerald after he was named special prosecutor, he indicated that he knew Armitage was my leaker. I assumed that was the product of detective work by the FBI. In fact, Armitage had turned himself in to the Justice Department three months before Fitzgerald entered the case, without notifying the White House or releasing me from my requirement of confidentiality.

On Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" Tuesday night, superlawyer David Boies said Fitzgerald never should have prosecuted Libby because there was no underlying criminal violation. Boies scoffed at Fitzgerald's contention that Libby had obstructed him from exposing criminal activity. Boies, who represented Al Gore in the 2000 election dispute, is hardly a Bush sympathizer. But neither is he a Democratic partisan trying to milk this obscure scandal.

New York Post Editorial: FREE SCOOTER LIBBY

Bush Should Pardon Libby Now, By Charles Krauthammer

...Everyone agrees that Fitzgerald's perjury case against Libby hung on the testimony of NBC's Tim Russert. Libby said that he heard about Plame from Russert. Russert said he had never discussed it. The jury members who have spoken said they believed Russert.

And why should they not? Russert is a perfectly honest man who would not lie. He was undoubtedly giving his best recollection.

But he is not the pope. Given that so many journalists and administration figures were shown to have extremely fallible memories, is it possible that Russert's memory could have been faulty?

I have no idea. But we do know that Russert once denied calling up a Buffalo News reporter to complain about a story. Russert later apologized for the error when he was shown the evidence of a call he had genuinely and completely forgotten.

There is a second instance of Russert innocently misremembering. He stated under oath that he did not know that one may not be accompanied by a lawyer to a grand jury hearing. This fact, in and of itself, is irrelevant to the case, except that, as former prosecutor Victoria Toensing points out, the defense had tapes showing Russert saying on television three times that lawyers are barred from grand jury proceedings.

This demonstration of Russert's fallibility was never shown to the jury. The judge did not allow it. He was upset with the defense because it would not put Libby on the stand -- his perfect Fifth Amendment right -- after hinting in the opening statement that it might. He therefore denied the defense a straightforward demonstration of the fallibility of the witness whose testimony was most decisive.

Toensing thinks this might be the basis for overturning the verdict upon appeal. I hope so. This is a case that never should have been brought, originating in the scandal that never was, in search of a crime -- violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- that even the prosecutor never alleged. That's the basis for a presidential pardon. It should have been granted long before this egregious case came to trial. It should be granted now without any further delay.

The Libby Travesty: Mr. Bush owes the former aide a pardon, and an apology.

WSJ Editorial
The word "guilty" had barely crossed the airwaves yesterday in the perjury case of Scooter Libby before critics were calling it proof that President Bush "lied us into war" and demanding that Dick Cheney be strung up next. Maybe now Mr. Bush will realize that this case was always a political fight over Iraq and do the right thing by pardoning Mr. Libby.
The conviction is certainly a travesty of justice, though that is not the jury's fault. The 11 men and women were faced with confusing evidence of conflicting memories in a case that never should have been brought. In the end, they were persuaded more by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's story line that Mr. Libby, a former aide to Mr. Cheney, had lied to a grand jury about what he knew when about the status of CIA official Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joseph Wilson.
In hindsight, the defense seems to have blundered by portraying Mr. Libby as the "fall guy" for others in the White House. That didn't do enough to rebut Mr. Fitzgerald's theory of the case, and so the jury seems to have decided that Mr. Libby must have been lying to protect something. The defense might have been better off taking on Mr. Fitzgerald for criminalizing political differences.
For that, in essence, is what this case is really all about. We learned long ago--and Mr. Fitzgerald knew from the start of his probe in 2003--that Mr. Libby was not the source of the leak to columnist Robert Novak that started all this. Mr. Libby thus had no real motive to cover up this non-crime. What he did have strong cause to do was rebut the lies that Mr. Wilson was telling about the Administration and Mr. Cheney--lies confirmed as lies by a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004.
Mr. Libby did talk to some reporters about the Administration's case for war in 2003, and he did mention Ms. Plame in some cases. So the jury apparently decided that, when asked about those conversations by the FBI and grand jury, he had lied about his own sources of information about Joe Wilson and his wife. In other words, he has not been convicted of lying to anyone about the case for war in Iraq, or about Mr. Wilson or his wife.
Rather, he has been convicted of telling the truth about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame to some reporters but then not owning up to it. One tragic irony is that if Mr. Libby had only taken the Harold Ickes grand-jury strategy and said "I don't recall," he probably never would have been indicted. But our guess is that he tried to cooperate with the grand jury because he never really believed he had anything to hide. This may also explain why Mr. Libby never retained an experienced Beltway attorney until he was indicted.

None of this has stopped critics of the war from trying to blow this entire case into something far larger. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hailed the conviction as proof that the White House tried to "manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics." But the charges against Mr. Libby had nothing to do with intelligence, and Mr. Wilson was himself so discredited by summer 2004 that the John Kerry campaign dropped him as a spokesman once the Senate exposed his deceit.
What Mr. Reid and others are doing is showing how much all this really has been about a policy dispute over Iraq. The fact that they are now demanding Mr. Cheney's head is further evidence of the political nature of this entire episode. But it should also be a warning to Mr. Bush and his advisers that they too bear much responsibility for Mr. Libby's conviction.
Rather than confront Mr. Wilson's lies head on, they became defensive and allowed a trivial matter to become a threat to the Administration itself. They allowed Attorney General John Ashcroft to recuse himself and Mr. Fitzgerald to be appointed even though Justice officials knew that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had been the first official to leak Ms. Plame's name to reporters. Mr. Libby got caught in the eddy not because he was dishonest but because he was a rare official who actually had the temerity to defend the President's Iraq policy against Mr. Wilson's lies.
As for the media, most of our brethren were celebrating the conviction yesterday because it damaged the Bush Administration they loathe. But they too will pay a price for holding Mr. Fitzgerald's coat. The Bush Administration will soon be history, but the damage Mr. Fitzgerald has done to the ability to protect media sources and to the willingness of government officials to speak openly to reporters will last far longer.
Mr. Bush will no doubt be advised to wait for the outcome of an appeal and the end of his Administration to pardon Mr. Libby. We believe he bears some personal responsibility for this conviction, especially for not policing the disputes and insubordination in his Administration that made this travesty possible. The time for a pardon is now.

What You Aren't Hearing About Scooter Libby

Pardon Libby

By The Editors

President Bush should pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The trial that concluded in a guilty verdict on four of five counts conclusively proved only one thing: A White House aide became the target of a politicized prosecution set in motion by bureaucratic infighting and political cowardice.

When partisans pounced on Bob Novak’s July 14, 2003, revelation that the wife of administration critic Joe Wilson worked at the CIA, they adopted Wilson’s paranoid persecution theory. Then a scandal-hungry media joined in. Novak’s unidentified administration sources were widely accused of criminal wrongdoing: having “outed” a covert agent.

The alleged motive for the leak was to punish Joe Wilson, whose account of his mission to Niger supposedly unmasked the administration’s manufactured case for the war in Iraq. The victim in this set piece was Valerie Plame Wilson, and the villains were Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby.

From the very beginning of the ensuing spectacle, petty agendas subverted justice. The CIA, at war with the White House, and in particular with the vice president’s office, referred the leak to the Justice Department, even though the agency certainly knew that there had been no criminal violation since Plame wasn’t “covert.” (According to the relevant statute, only the leak of a covert agent’s identity is a criminal act.) The CIA’s spokesman had also confirmed Plame’s employment to Novak, without sounding any alarms over the revelation of classified information. The referral to Justice—leaked to the media—was the act of an agency more concerned with shifting the blame for faulty Iraq intelligence than with protecting a supposedly vulnerable agent.

With the matter in the Justice Department’s lap, such critics as New York senator Charles Schumer demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor, claiming that then–attorney general John Ashcroft couldn’t oversee the probe because he had a conflict of interest. Even though there was no evidence that the department’s career prosecutors were unable to handle the case, Ashcroft and his top deputy, James Comey, quickly gave in to Schumer’s demands. Comey appointed his friend in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, as the special prosecutor, and gave him even more powers than the old independent counsels had.

None of this was a profile in courage on the administration’s part, but the true insanity of the situation was withheld from the public until years later, when we learned that, long before the Justice Department had appointed Fitzgerald, it knew who had leaked to Novak. Early in the investigation, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage informed investigators that he had told Novak about Mrs. Wilson (although he left out the fact that he had also leaked to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward). But like the savvy bureaucratic infighter that he is, Armitage kept quiet publicly, allowing the vice president’s office to take the heat for something he had done.

So why did Fitzgerald go forward? Maybe someday he’ll tell us, but we’re not betting on it. Reasonable people can conclude that it was only Scooter Libby’s imperfect memory—not willful deception—that gave rise to the charges of lying under oath and obstruction of justice. Among the supporting players—including CIA officials, Bob Novak, Woodward and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and Time’s Matthew Cooper—no two participants in any conversation about Valerie Plame had the same recollection.

Whatever his motivations, Fitzgerald adopted the discredited Wilson’s script and focused his three-year investigation on Cheney, Libby, and Rove—and not, inexplicably, on others. Not on Armitage. Not on Ari Fleischer, either. The recent trial revealed that the former White House press secretary was granted immunity from prosecution, and that he admitted to telling two reporters about Plame’s employment. Those reporters were never even questioned. Nor did any charges arise from Fleischer’s faulty memory, even though a third reporter (Pincus) testified that Fleischer had told him too about Plame—something that Fleischer denied under oath.

There should have been no referral, no special counsel, no indictments, and no trial. The “CIA-leak case” has been a travesty. A good man has paid a very heavy price for the Left’s fevers, the media’s scandal-mongering, and President Bush’s failure to unify his own administration. Justice demands that Bush issue a pardon and lower the curtain on an embarrassing drama that shouldn’t have lasted beyond its opening act.

The Coming McCain Moment

John McCain’s apostasies from conservatism, unlike Rudolph Giuliani’s, are well known. The mayor’s polls form a ceiling. McCain’s could be a floor, if conservatives are willing to reconsider their view of him. If they do, then the current Giuliani moment will be succeeded by a McCain moment. I think conservatives will give him a second look — as they should.
By Ramesh Ponnuru

Let's Make a Deal

Social conservatives, Rudy Giuliani, and the end of the litmus test.
by Noemie Emery

Citizen Bono Brings Africa to Idle Rich

By DAVID CARR

If you are a rock star with a touch of the messiah complex, saving the world one song at a time has its limits. Even John Lennon didn’t make much progress on world peace before he died.

So Bono, the rare rock star with an ability to make a dent in something besides the pop charts, has met with everyone from Pope John Paul II to President Bush in an effort to achieve debt relief and address poverty and AIDS in the undeveloped world. He is also pushing his agenda one T-shirt at a time with a product line called Red that includes clothing, iPods and credit cards.

But even those combined efforts have been slow going. So now Bono is opening up another front with an unlikely weapon: as the guest editor of the July issue of Vanity Fair, he will try to rebrand Africa.

“We need to get better at storytelling,” Bono said, sitting in the 22nd floor of the office of Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. “Bill Gates tells me this all the time. We’ve got to get better at telling the success stories of Africa in addition to the horror stories. And this magazine tells great stories.”

Vanity Fair does tell great stories and serious ones, but it sits atop the American magazine industry, in no small part because it takes as its preoccupations the needs and doings of the idle rich. The current Hollywood issue is its biggest ever, 500 pages jammed with glitz, celebrity and so many ads that the magazine could injure someone if it fell off the coffee table. Just outside Mr. Carter’s office, a framed to-do list with hundreds of items details Vanity Fair’s preparations for one of its past Oscar parties, which is a long way from Mogadishu.

“Bono will make a different issue about Africa than we would,” Mr. Carter said. “I think there isn’t one editor in the world who would not pay attention if Bono pulled up and said he wanted to edit a magazine.”

It would be easy to render in a cartoon — storied rock star, fizzy magazine, collaborating to noble ends. But Bono doesn’t look at wealth (fantastic wealth in his case) and charity as a contradiction. At a time when many people think they can consume their way to virtue, he is happy to accommodate.

“We are trying to deal with the Sally Struthers thing,” he said, a stack of story ideas in front of him. “When you see people humiliated by extreme poverty and wasting away with flies buzzing around their eyes, it is easy not to believe that they are same as us.”

Mr. Carter has used his magazine to political, even partisan ends, including the second impending “green” issue and a relentless drumbeat against the current administration. Bono, on the other hand, gives the current president very high marks for making practical efforts to address the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“Hey, I’d meet with Lucifer if I thought it would do any good,” Bono said. Mr. Carter gives up a sporty laugh at that, pretty sure he is talking about someone else.

Bono has traded out his sunglasses for the editor’s eye shade before. He guest edited The Independent in London and was the first guest editor of the French newspaper Libération. And back in August, Elevation Partners, a private equity group in which he is a partner, bought an interest in Forbes magazine.

Some rich guys buy baseball teams or soccer teams, but Bono’s tastes lean toward the sport of kings — publishing.

“I live in that world, the world of media,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about Forbes right now, but I will say this: One of the things that I have learned of in Africa is the crucial role that commerce will play in taking its people out of extreme poverty. Everyone talks about China being the next big thing, but if you spend any time in the bars or hotels in Africa, you see a lot of Chinese doing deals there. There is tremendous opportunity there.”

There is, of course, the danger that the effort to chic out Africa — “Africa is sexy and people need to know that,” Bono said — will seem like a hobby born of extreme wealth. His eyes narrow and he stands up rather suddenly when it is suggested that there is something a bit cheeky about the whole enterprise.

“Really?” he said. “What is more interesting to me is that we are losing the fight against AIDS in Africa. There are still 5,000 Africans dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, dying for lack of drugs that are available at any corner drugstore.”

Mr. Carter frankly said that he hopes a co-mingling of brands will help sell a tough subject. “We plan on making this an event with more separate cover treatments than the magazine has ever had.”

“I wanted him to change the title and call it ‘Fair Vanity,’ ” Bono said. “He said he’d do that just as soon as I change the band’s name to 2U.”

Mr. Carter said, “Bono really does see the world through rose-tinted glasses.”

As a writer, it is tough not to wonder what it might be like to get a call: “Bono doesn’t think your story is working.” Bono explained that if he wasn’t singing in a band, he would have been a journalist, but that he may not be the writer’s best friend.

“Strangely, maybe not,” he said. “I want this issue to be a best-selling issue of Vanity Fair, I want to make a hit record. These are the best writers in America, but I am a devotee of the 45,” he said, referring to the predigital single that required economy and precision.

“I want to turn some of these novels into pop songs,” he said. “My colleague here,” he said, indicating Mr. Carter, “will fight for the writers, but I don’t want the reader to be weighed down.”

He’s already learned the first lesson of editing: strike fear in the hearts of writers.