The White House yesterday issued one of the replies that falls in the category of “non-denial denial”, beginning with a vague attack on the source followed by a vague non-response.

Q Dana, can I follow on that?

MS. PERINO: Follow on that? Okay.

Q Yes, follow on that. This weekend the New Yorker magazine came out with an article claiming that this summer the President, or at least the White House in general, asked the Joint Chiefs to redraw plans to attack Iran. Is that true?

MS. PERINO: Look, you know, I’m glad you brought it up. Every two months or so, Sy Hersh writes an article in The New Yorker magazine, and CNN provides him a forum in which to talk about his article and all the anonymous sources that are quoted in it.

Q So the President —

MS. PERINO: The President has said that he believes that there is a diplomatic solution that we can use to solve the Iranian problem. And that’s why we’re working with our allies to get there.

Q That’s what he said before we went to Iraq, too.

Q But what’s the — can you answer actually on the substance of whether or not the White House asked — I mean, if it’s not true, then you can say Sy Hersh is wrong and CNN was wrong to air it. You could say that, but —

MS. PERINO: We don’t discuss such things, Ed.

Masterful, if your goal is confusing the issue and distracting the public.

I also enjoyed former Senator Mike Gravel’s appearance on the PBS News Hour last night. Gravel has come out of political hibernation to join the candidates for president. I don’t really support his central issue, a national initiative bill. But he had some fine things to say. I especially liked his opening salvo.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, the big news from the campaign trail for many candidates today, the quarterly reports on fundraising. How did you do?

MIKE GRAVEL: I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I don’t know. For some candidates, it may be big news. It’s not big news for me. Stop and think. We all know that money is the corrupting element of politics. Why should we pay attention to who’s got big money, except to define who are the most corrupt running for office?

That’s a fine turning of the tables, although the simple logic doesn’t seem to be having much impact, given top fundraiser Clinton’s top place in the polls. By the way, Maureen Dowd had a fine column on Sunday that’s worth reading, now that NY Times columns are available to all.

On the war, Gravel said he wants to get American troops out of Iraq within 120 days.

According to Gravel’s campaign biography:

He is most prominently known for his release of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive U.S. administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. After the New York Times published portions of the leaked study, the Nixon administration moved to block any further publication of information and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents.

From the floor of the senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) insisted that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read 4,100 pages of the 7,000 page document into the senate record. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Senator Gravel did not have the right and responsibility to share official documents with his constituents.

He then published The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press (1971). This publication resulted in litigation, Gravel v. U.S., resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision (No. 71-1017-1026) relative to the Speech and Debate Clause (Article 1, Section 6) of the United States Constitution.

Thank you, Mr. Gravel.

And the issue of whistleblowing is still on the front burner. The ACLU is pushing for reforms in federal whistleblower protections, and their web site links to other related resources.

Hey, this sounds somewhat familiar. It turns out there’s another high-speed ferry project getting a bit of scrutiny these days. This ferry is in Alaska, pushed by Senator Ted Stevens, the political brother of Hawaii’s Dan Inouye.

Good to know…I was ready to go to the law library yesterday to track down a 1919 Hawaii Supreme Court case relating to the Galbraith Estate. Before heading for the bus, I tried a Google search and discovered that many of those old Hawaii law reporters have been scanned as part of Google’s digital library project, including the 1919 volume containing this particular case.  This one is marked as coming from Harvard University. So I was able to download the volume as a large pdf file and then simply extract the pages containing this decision.