There are 45 days to go until the national referendum on the CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY and COMPETENCE of the _resident and the VICE _resident...Here's what a real headline, heralding a real story written by real journalists, in a real big city newspaper looks like: "US Death Toll in Iraq at least 52 This Month." Here's what a real lead to a real story by real journalists looks like: "Iraqi insurgents pressed their assault on U.S. and allied forces Thursday as two Americans and a Briton were kidnapped from their Baghdad house and three Marines were killed, bringing the number of U.S. military deaths in the country this month to at least 52. The brazen abduction of the employees of a Middle East-based construction firm continued a violent week that has left more than 200 Iraqis dead, and it followed a similar kidnapping of two Italian women from their office 10 days ago." Kudos to Los Angeles Times, and to Ashraf Khalil and Patrick J. McDonnell. MEANWHILE...We are two weeks out from Labor Day, and the quick fix to the Deep Fix is unraveling...The _resident didn't get a bounce from the brown shirt convention in NYC -- indeed, he was losing ground because of the purple heart band-aids and Zell Miller (D-Phillip Morris) -- so the US regimestream news media delivered a fabricated bounce cooked up by its shameless pollsters (Gallup, in particular)and spun by its craven propapunditgansists...But, as we said, the quick fix to the Deep Fix is unraveling. Yes, it is unraveling under the withering attacks of Kerry-Edwards and the irreversible momentum of events in Iraq, the Economy, etc. Something is SINKING IN for the US electorate, something about the _resident's foolish military adventure and the Mega-Mogadishu it has created for our military, yes, something is SINKING IN...And despite the despicable spinning of NotBeSeen's Tom Brokaw, who said that the Iraqi insurgents are trying to influence the US presidential campaign (remember to look up his salary in the LNS searchable database), the US electorate is turning against the Bush Cabal, its wholly-owmed-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party AND their sponsors in the US regimestream news media. This unholy Triad of shared special interest (i.e. oil, weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacoo, etc.) is going to be dealt a defeat on Nov. 2. There is an Electoral Uprising coming...Here are SEVEN very important stories that should dominate the air waves and command headlines above the fold, but they won't...Please read them and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote. And, please, remember that the US regimestream news media does not want to inform you about this presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you...
Columbia Journalism Review Campaign Desk: There's a history here; the same wild variance in September polls took place during the 2000 presidential campaign. In that year, Gallup showed Al Gore leading by 10 percentage points on September 20, yet losing by 13 percentage points on October 26 -- a stunning 23-point shift in 36 days. (Meanwhile, polls commissioned by Fox and by Reuters/MSNBC on those same days showed statistical ties -- which, of course, pretty well mirrored what happened on election day.)
There were a few outlets that showed a willingness to recognize that competing and wildly divergent poll results had been released on the same day, like the Associated Press and CNN, which ran a story headlined "Latest Presidential Polls Vary Widely."
So whom do you believe today -- Pew, which portrays a dead heat, or Gallup, which shows Bush pulling away smartly? Our suggestion is to treat the polls as what they are -- snapshots, not predictions, and snapshots taken by different cameras with different focus, shutter speeds, refraction and lens angles.
That's the story that you don't read or hear from the news organizations that commission the polls in question -- and at this point, they all ought to be in question. It's much simpler for newspapers to offer up raw numbers rather than to explain the intricacies of any given poll or trying to explain why one poll differs so wildly from another. Horse race numbers create easily digestible storylines, after all, and storylines, it is thought, keep people interested and sell papers.
Besides, relying on a poll to, in effect, do your reporting for you, instead of relying on said poll to put your reporting in perspective, is the easy way out. The new Gallup poll, with its disputed methodology, should not rate a banner headline in one of the nation's most widely read newspapers; readers in search of an accurate take on the state of the race deserve better.
www.mediamatters.org: According to analysis released September 14 by Media Tenor International (an independent and nonpartisan research organization), ABC, CBS, FOX News Channel, and NBC evening news reports on Senator John Kerry's military service far outnumbered reports on other topics relating to President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry. The analysis surveyed the period of August 1 through August 29; the "other topics" included campaigning and campaign strategy; foreign and domestic policy; personality; and terrorism.
www.fair.org: In the past week, a handful of stories have cast doubt on whether George W. Bush fulfilled his National Guard obligations 30 years ago. Reports by the Associated Press (9/7/04), Boston Globe (9/8/04) and U.S. News & World Report (9/20/04) have all raised new questions about Bush's military service. Though each of these stories has been accompanied by significant official documentation, developments in the investigations by AP, U.S. News and the Boston Globe have been largely sidetracked by the fixation on questions about the authenticity of documents aired on CBS on September 8...Instead of asking the White House tough questions about the well-documented information contained in these reports, media have focused almost exclusively on the claims and counter-claims made about the Killian memos-- as if the discrepancies over Bush's service record stand or fall based on this one set of disputed documents. It's the equivalent of covering the sideshow and ignoring the center ring.
Associated Press: A woman wearing a T-shirt with the words "President Bush (news - web sites) You Killed My Son" and a picture of a soldier killed in Iraq (news - web sites) was detained Thursday after she interrupted a campaign speech by first lady Laura Bush.
Police escorted Sue Niederer, of Hopewell, N.J., from a rally at a firehouse after she demanded to know why her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in Iraq. Dvorin died in February while trying to disarm a bomb.
As shouts of "Four More Years" subsided, Niederer, standing in the middle of a crowd of some 700, continued to shout about the killing of her son. Local police escorted her from the event, handcuffed her and put her in the back of a police van.
Democratic National Committee: In response to news reports of a New Jersey woman, whose son was killed while serving in Iraq and who after attempting to ask First Lady Laura Bush a question at a campaign event was arrested, put in a police wagon, and taken to jail, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe issued this statement:
"George W. Bush has cultivated a culture in which a grieving mother in New Jersey gets arrested for asking a question at a Bush campaign event. It’s the same culture that allows an Alabama woman to be fired for expressing her beliefs with a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car. You ask a question they don’t want to answer and they arrest you. You express a belief that they disagree with and you get fired.
David J. Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, American Progress: As Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, Cheney helped lead a multinational coalition against Iraq and was one of the architects of a post-war economic embargo designed to choke off funds to the country. He insisted the world should “maintain sanctions, at least of some kind,” so Saddam Hussein could not “rebuild the military force he’s used against his neighbors.”
But less than six years later, as a private businessman, Cheney apparently had more important interests than preventing Hussein from rebuilding his army. While he claimed during the 2000 campaign that, as CEO of Halliburton, he had “imposed a ‘firm policy’ against trading with Iraq,” confidential UN records show that, from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that sold more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was in charge. Halliburton acquired its interest in both firms while Cheney was at the helm, and continued doing business through them until just months before Cheney was named George W. Bush’s running mate.
Perhaps even more troubling, at the same time Cheney was doing business with Iraq, he launched a public broadside against sanctions laws designed to cut off funds to regimes like Iran, which the State Department listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. In 1998, Cheney traveled to Kuala Lumpur to attack his own country's terrorism policies for being too strict. Under the headline, “Former US Defence Secretary Says Iran-Libya Sanctions Act ‘Wrong,’” the Malaysian News Agency reported that Cheney “hit out at his government" and said sanctions on terrorist countries were "ineffective, did not provide the desired results and [were] a bad policy.”
Two years later, Cheney traveled to another country to demand America weaken restrictions on doing business with Iran’s petroleum industry, despite Clinton administration warnings that Iranian oil revenues could be used to fund terrorism. “We're kept out of [Iran] primarily by our own government, which has made a decision that U.S. firms should not be allowed to invest significantly in Iran,” he told an oil conference in Canada. “I think that's a mistake.”
Now new reports suggest Cheney’s desire to do business with Iran may have amounted to more than words. Details of Halliburton’s activities in Iran have been investigated by the Treasury Department and were recently forwarded to the U.S. attorney in Houston. Such an action is taken only after Treasury finds evidence of ‘serious and willful violations’ of sanctions laws. Halliburton already admits one of its subsidiaries “performs between $30 [million] and $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran.”
Ray McGovern, www.truthout.org: "Have they all drunk the Kool-Aid?" asked a former CIA colleague, referring to the stampede to appoint a new director and radically restructure the intelligence community. The Kool-Aid allusion was to the "group-think" that led disciples of self-anointed "messiah" Jim Jones to mass suicide via poisoned Kool-Aid in 1978...
Goss co-authored an opinion piece in The Tampa Tribune on March 8, claiming that in the 1990s Sen. John Kerry "was leading efforts in Congress to dismantle the nation's intelligence capabilities." And in June, Goss interrupted debate on the House floor by displaying a sign with a 1977 quote from Kerry that called for cuts in the intelligence budget. These antics raise legitimate concerns with respect to Goss's ability to be nonpartisan.
Even more troubling to veteran intelligence analysts is the way Goss' prepared statement parroted the president's rhetoric to the effect that terrorists "are committed to the destruction of our economy and our way of life" - boilerplate that merits as much credence as the now thoroughly discredited pre-war claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
James Wolcott, www.jameswolcott.com: So far I have watched four cable news interviews with Kitty Kelley, author of The Evil Clampetts. And here is what I have learned about her book.
Not much.
The interviewers are all working off of the same talking points, the tone and thrust of their questioning so similar it's as if they all received the same fax from the Republican National Committee...
The worst interviews were on CNN. Aaron Brown fretted over the methodology and wondered why Kelley focused on the Bushes, since so many privileged families such as the Kennedys and the Rockefellers get away with all sorts of behavior without having to pay the price most people do--why pick on them?
Kelley smartly retorted that the Bushes have paid less price than most (what she didn't say, and could have, was two assassinations of Kennedy brothers was worse than anything the Bushes have had to endure)... Brown at least wasn't a snitty little twit, like the CNN interviewer this morning whose name, I believe, is Heidi Hairdo. From the outset her tone was brisk, assistant district-attorneyish, and yet schoolgirlishly naive, as when she couldn't understand why anyone would be "afraid" of the Bushes and Kelley laughed in snorting disbelief, as if she had to explain the facts of life to Miss Snippy.
Heidi Hairdo, like some of the other interviewers, seem to keep up an invisible cordon sanitarire, a starchy, disdainful discomfort at having to share the set with an author so disreputable and, oh dear, tacky. This from people who fawn over every narcissistic piece of Hollywood horseflesh making the rounds to promote their latest lousy movie.
What's clear is that the news media are uncomfortable with someone investigating the arrogant and disturbing patterns of behavior in the Bush dynasty. They can't ignore Kitty Kelley, but they want to keep her in her litter box. But she's a tiny tigress, and will not be contained.
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.campaigndesk.org/
September 17, 2004
Hidden Angle
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
On the way to work this morning, we picked up one of New York's free papers, Metro, and discovered the headline, "Poll Says Bush, Kerry Tied." Once at the office, we clicked over to USA Today, only to see the cover story, headlined "Bush Clear Leader in Poll." Readers of both publications could be forgiven for being confused. And their confusion would only continue if they read on: "The boost Bush received from the Republican convention has increased rather than dissipated," USA Today exclaimed. No, declared the AP story in Metro, in reality Bush's post-convention bounce had all but evaporated between September 8 and September 14.
The poll referenced by Metro, which showed a statistical tie, came from the Pew Research Center, which just three days earlier had released a different poll showing Bush with a 15-point lead among likely voters. (Meantime, a Harris poll taken in between the two Pew efforts showed a slim Kerry lead, and argued the "'convention bounce' has now disappeared.") The poll featured in USA Today showing a huge Bush lead comes from Gallup.
There's a history here; the same wild variance in September polls took place during the 2000 presidential campaign. In that year, Gallup showed Al Gore leading by 10 percentage points on September 20, yet losing by 13 percentage points on October 26 -- a stunning 23-point shift in 36 days. (Meanwhile, polls commissioned by Fox and by Reuters/MSNBC on those same days showed statistical ties -- which, of course, pretty well mirrored what happened on election day.)
USA Today regularly commissions polls from Gallup, though they didn't commission this most recent one, erroneous media reports notwithstanding. The paper still gave the poll prominent play, however; according to Susan Page, who wrote the story, "we felt very comfortable comparing it to previous polls because it used the same methodology" as other polls that the paper had commissioned this year. Though the story does mention the contrasting Pew poll in the seventh paragraph, the lede, like the headline, presents the Gallup poll results as largely beyond question, asserting that the poll heralds "the first statistically significant edge either candidate has held this year."
There were a few outlets that showed a willingness to recognize that competing and wildly divergent poll results had been released on the same day, like the Associated Press and CNN, which ran a story headlined "Latest Presidential Polls Vary Widely."
So whom do you believe today -- Pew, which portrays a dead heat, or Gallup, which shows Bush pulling away smartly? Our suggestion is to treat the polls as what they are -- snapshots, not predictions, and snapshots taken by different cameras with different focus, shutter speeds, refraction and lens angles.
That's the story that you don't read or hear from the news organizations that commission the polls in question -- and at this point, they all ought to be in question. It's much simpler for newspapers to offer up raw numbers rather than to explain the intricacies of any given poll or trying to explain why one poll differs so wildly from another. Horse race numbers create easily digestible storylines, after all, and storylines, it is thought, keep people interested and sell papers.
Besides, relying on a poll to, in effect, do your reporting for you, instead of relying on said poll to put your reporting in perspective, is the easy way out. The new Gallup poll, with its disputed methodology, should not rate a banner headline in one of the nation's most widely read newspapers; readers in search of an accurate take on the state of the race deserve better.
--Brian Montopoli
Posted 09/17/04 at 04:33 PM
Go to comments
http://mediamatters.org/items/200409170002
Media Tenor report: Negative reports on Kerry's military service dominated TV news in weeks between Dem, GOP conventions
According to analysis released September 14 by Media Tenor International (an independent and nonpartisan research organization), ABC, CBS, FOX News Channel, and NBC evening news reports on Senator John Kerry's military service far outnumbered reports on other topics relating to President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry. The analysis surveyed the period of August 1 through August 29; the "other topics" included campaigning and campaign strategy; foreign and domestic policy; personality; and terrorism.
Media Tenor also found that, while negative statements about Kerry's military service significantly outnumbered positive statements on both the network evening news programs and on FOX News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume -- by a margin of more than two to one -- FOX News Channel's negative statements outnumbered those of the networks by 462 to 252.
In addition, Media Tenor tracked the number of anonymous sources cited in statements about Kerry's military service; the report revealed that Hume cited anonymous sources in twelve negative statements, compared with a total of four anonymously sourced negative statements on the three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC).
— N.C.
Posted to the web on Friday September 17, 2004 at 10:43 AM EST
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.
Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy
Subscribe to MMFA Email Updates
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/cbs-bush-documents.html
FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 112 W. 27th Street New York, NY 10001
MEDIA ADVISORY:
Media Should Probe Bigger Questions About Bush's Record
September 14, 2004
In the past week, a handful of stories have cast doubt on whether George W. Bush fulfilled his National Guard obligations 30 years ago. Reports by the Associated Press (9/7/04), Boston Globe (9/8/04) and U.S. News & World Report (9/20/04) have all raised new questions about Bush's military service. Though each of these stories has been accompanied by significant official documentation, developments in the investigations by AP, U.S. News and the Boston Globe have been largely sidetracked by the fixation on questions about the authenticity of documents aired on CBS on September 8.
Weighing the credibility of evidence is an essential function of journalism. Experts have weighed in on both sides on the authenticity of CBS's so-called Killian memos (New York Times, 9/14/04; Washington Post, 9/14/04); efforts to establish the origin of those documents should continue. However, news outlets that focus on this tangent of the National Guard story to the exclusion of the unchallenged new evidence that has recently emerged are neglecting another essential journalistic task: holding powerful people and politicians accountable.
In the wake of the stories scrutinizing Bush's stateside service during the Vietnam era, it's hard to imagine a better situation for the White House than to have the press corps ignore a range of evidence raising questions about Bush's fulfillment of his obligations while obsessing singularly on one set of documents from one story.
A review of some of the information uncovered in recent news reports:
The September 7 Associated Press story, based on new records the White House had long maintained didn't exist, debunked a Bush assertion that he'd skipped his flight physical because the jet he was trained on was becoming obsolete. According to AP, Bush's unit continued to fly the same jets for two years after the missed physical.
The September 8 Boston Globe expose concluded that Bush failed in his military obligations by missing months of duty in Alabama and in Boston. As the Globe revealed, Bush had signed contracts on two separate occasions swearing to meet minimum Guard requirements on penalty of being called up to active duty. According to the military experts consulted by the Globe, Bush's Guard attendance was so bad "his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973 or 1974."
U.S News & World Report (9/20/04) reviewed National Guard regulations and reported that the White House has been using "an inappropriate-- and less stringent-- Air Force standard in determining that he had fulfilled his duty." The magazine noted that Bush committed to attend at least "44 inactive-duty training drills each fiscal year" when he signed up for the Guard, but that Bush's own records "show that he fell short of that requirement, attending only 36 drills in the 1972-73 period, and only 12 in the 1973-74 period." The magazine explains that even by using the White House's preferred methodology for measuring Bush's service, he still fell short of those minimum requirements.
An NBC Nightly News segment (9/9/04) played a clip of Bush being interviewed in 1988, acknowledging that favoritism sometimes played a part in getting into the National Guard. While he had said that he didn't think that happened in his case, he did voice his approval of the practice: "If you want to go in the National Guard, I guess sometimes people made calls. I don't see anything wrong with it." (He continued with a remark that could be taken as an insult to the men and women who did face combat during the war: ''They probably should have called the National Guard up in those days. Maybe we'd have done better in Vietnam.")
Even CBS's September 8 broadcasts, the subject of so much scrutiny, included important information beyond what is contained in the disputed memos. On the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes II that night, CBS featured Ben Barnes, the former speaker of the Texas legislature, describing how he used his political influence to help a young George W. Bush bypass a waiting list and secure a coveted position in the Guard. In addition, the CBS stories also featured an interview with Robert Strong, a former colleague of Bush's commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, the purported author of the disputed documents. Strong described the pressure Bush's commander was working under: "He was trying to deal with a volatile political situation, dealing with the son of an ambassador and a former congressman.... And I just saw him in an impossible situation. I felt very, very sorry because he was between a rock and a hard place."
Instead of asking the White House tough questions about the well-documented information contained in these reports, media have focused almost exclusively on the claims and counter-claims made about the Killian memos-- as if the discrepancies over Bush's service record stand or fall based on this one set of disputed documents. It's the equivalent of covering the sideshow and ignoring the center ring.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you'd like to encourage the media to follow up on these stories, you can find contact information on FAIR's website:
http://www.fair.org/media-contact-list.html
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040917/ap_on_el_pr/laura_bush_protester_5
Woman Disrupts Laura Bush Speech in N.J.
Thu Sep 16, 8:10 PM ET
By JOHN P. McALPIN, Associated Press Writer
HAMILTON, N.J. - A woman wearing a T-shirt with the words "President Bush (news - web sites) You Killed My Son" and a picture of a soldier killed in Iraq (news - web sites) was detained Thursday after she interrupted a campaign speech by first lady Laura Bush.
Police escorted Sue Niederer, of Hopewell, N.J., from a rally at a firehouse after she demanded to know why her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in Iraq. Dvorin died in February while trying to disarm a bomb.
As shouts of "Four More Years" subsided, Niederer, standing in the middle of a crowd of some 700, continued to shout about the killing of her son. Local police escorted her from the event, handcuffed her and put her in the back of a police van.
Niederer was later charged with defiant trespass and released.
The first lady continued speaking, touting her husband's record on the economy, health care and the war on terror to those attending the rally in this suburban community of 90,000 people near Trenton.
She made several references to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and said that many in New Jersey, including some in neighborhoods near the firehouse, lost family members that day.
"Too many people here had a loved one that went to work in New York that day," Bush said. "It's for our country, it's for our children, our grandchildren that we do the hard work of confronting terror."
Sep 17, 2004
http://www.democrats.org/news/200409170002.html
McAuliffe: Gold Star Mother's Arrest Emblematic of Bush's Disrespect of the Military
Washington, D.C. – In response to news reports of a New Jersey woman, whose son was killed while serving in Iraq and who after attempting to ask First Lady Laura Bush a question at a campaign event was arrested, put in a police wagon, and taken to jail, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe issued this statement:
"George W. Bush has cultivated a culture in which a grieving mother in New Jersey gets arrested for asking a question at a Bush campaign event. It’s the same culture that allows an Alabama woman to be fired for expressing her beliefs with a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car. You ask a question they don’t want to answer and they arrest you. You express a belief that they disagree with and you get fired.
"This is not the way we treat anyone, and especially not the families of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice -– families who deserve our respect, our thanks, and our empathy. Unfortunately, this incident is emblematic of the way the President disrespects our military, our veterans, and their families. America can do better, and with John Kerry we will."
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040918/ap_on_el_pr/kerry_navy_awards_6
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8498
The Greed Factor
Sanctions against rogue regimes would have been abandoned if Dick Cheney had had his way.
By David J. Sirota and Jonathan Baskin
Web Exclusive: 09.15.04
Print Friendly | Email Article
In 1992, the Republican Party launched a vicious assault against Bill Clinton for traveling overseas and speaking out against his country’s foreign policy during the Vietnam War. It was the beginning of a strategy to demean the national-security credentials of the Democratic Party. Now, twelve years later, Vice President Dick Cheney has updated the tactic, hammering those who question George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war on terror and impugning John Kerry’s commitment to national security. His rhetoric has been so vitriolic, he actually suggested last week that a Kerry presidency would mean "we will get hit again" by terrorists.
Beyond blatantly mischaracterizing Democrats’ positions on defense, these shameless attacks serve to distract from the vice president’s own proclivity for undermining American foreign policy. The record shows that over the last decade, Cheney was willing first to do business with countries on the U.S. government’s terror list, then to travel abroad and condemn U.S. counter-terrorism policy when it got in his way. In the process, Cheney proved repeatedly he could be trusted to put Halliburton’s bottom line ahead of his country’s national security.
As Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, Cheney helped lead a multinational coalition against Iraq and was one of the architects of a post-war economic embargo designed to choke off funds to the country. He insisted the world should “maintain sanctions, at least of some kind,” so Saddam Hussein could not “rebuild the military force he’s used against his neighbors.”
But less than six years later, as a private businessman, Cheney apparently had more important interests than preventing Hussein from rebuilding his army. While he claimed during the 2000 campaign that, as CEO of Halliburton, he had “imposed a ‘firm policy’ against trading with Iraq,” confidential UN records show that, from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that sold more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was in charge. Halliburton acquired its interest in both firms while Cheney was at the helm, and continued doing business through them until just months before Cheney was named George W. Bush’s running mate.
Perhaps even more troubling, at the same time Cheney was doing business with Iraq, he launched a public broadside against sanctions laws designed to cut off funds to regimes like Iran, which the State Department listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. In 1998, Cheney traveled to Kuala Lumpur to attack his own country's terrorism policies for being too strict. Under the headline, “Former US Defence Secretary Says Iran-Libya Sanctions Act ‘Wrong,’” the Malaysian News Agency reported that Cheney “hit out at his government" and said sanctions on terrorist countries were "ineffective, did not provide the desired results and [were] a bad policy.”
Two years later, Cheney traveled to another country to demand America weaken restrictions on doing business with Iran’s petroleum industry, despite Clinton administration warnings that Iranian oil revenues could be used to fund terrorism. “We're kept out of [Iran] primarily by our own government, which has made a decision that U.S. firms should not be allowed to invest significantly in Iran,” he told an oil conference in Canada. “I think that's a mistake.”
Now new reports suggest Cheney’s desire to do business with Iran may have amounted to more than words. Details of Halliburton’s activities in Iran have been investigated by the Treasury Department and were recently forwarded to the U.S. attorney in Houston. Such an action is taken only after Treasury finds evidence of ‘serious and willful violations’ of sanctions laws. Halliburton already admits one of its subsidiaries “performs between $30 [million] and $40 million annually in oilfield service work in Iran.”
Why is this record important in the current presidential debate? Because as Cheney barnstorms around the country touting the Bush administration’s record, his years at Halliburton indicate he is willing to put other priorities before America’s national security. Even as Iran built ties to terrorists and worked to develop a nuclear weapon, Cheney insisted corporations must do “business in countries that may have policies that the U.S. does not like.” His reasoning? “The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United States.”
Such comments contrast sharply with the Republicans’ message at their national convention. Far from embodying lofty ideals of “freedom” and “democracy,” Cheney’s record depicts a man governed by greed. As the election nears, that poses an important question to all Americans: Are we really comfortable with this person -- and this ideology -- shaping U.S. policy in an age of global terror?
David Sirota is the Director of Strategic Communications at the American Progress Action Fund. Jonathan Baskin is the Fund’s research assistant.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: David J. Sirota, "The Greed Factor", The American Prospect Online, Sep 15, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091804D.shtml
Gossing over the Record
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 17 September 2004
"Have they all drunk the Kool-Aid?" asked a former CIA colleague, referring to the stampede to appoint a new director and radically restructure the intelligence community. The Kool-Aid allusion was to the "group-think" that led disciples of self-anointed "messiah" Jim Jones to mass suicide via poisoned Kool-Aid in 1978.
Attorney General John Ashcroft warned on May 26 that the government has "credible intelligence from multiple sources that Al Qaeda plans an attack on the United States" before the November election. Yet the president and Congress have picked this very time - as our intelligence and security forces are ordered to battle stations - to create mammoth distraction and uncertainty among those on whom we rely for our safety.
As my colleague put it: "It just doesn't parse. Besides, if nominee Porter Goss, R-Fla., becomes CIA director and the president does not win re-election, Goss has but six weeks before becoming a lame duck. And then still further disruption and uncertainty would be in store for an intelligence community that yearns in vain for stability."
I reminded my friend that this is not about stability, efficiency or preparedness. The current hyperactivity is driven by politics, and experience has shown that politics and intelligence reform are a noxious mix.
In the light of 9/11 and the debacle in Iraq, no politician wishes to risk being seen as putting the brakes on intelligence reform.
In this highly charged atmosphere the Republican-led Senate would confirm Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, were the president to nominate him.
As one wag put it referring to Goss, a bird in the hand is worth it for Bush. Even if the president is reelected, he cannot be sure he will have so docile a Senate next year.
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., recently commented: "Porter is a team player...and will probably defer to what the president wants." Which, of course, is a very large part of the problem - as so dramatically illustrated by the sycophancy of former CIA Director George Tenet.
"The Record is the Record"
With those words, Mr. Goss tried to deflect questioning at his nomination hearing on Sept. 14. Okay, we'll bite. Let's look at that record.
On June 19, 1997, The Washington Post reported:
"The House Intelligence Committee criticized U.S. intelligence agencies for having 'limited analytical capabilities...an uncertain commitment and capability to collect human intelligence...a lack of analytic depth and expertise...and a lack of foreign language skills and limited in-country familiarity.' The panel's sharply written report on the fiscal 1998 intelligence authorization bill carried more weight than usual because for the first time it was chaired by a former C.I.A. operations officer, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.)."
Goss chaired that committee for more than seven years, overseeing (overlooking?) a steady decline in all of those areas. The fact that during that period he did not use the committee's power of the purse and its watchdog prerogative to ensure that those deficiencies were corrected gives a hollow ring to his current assertion, "I can make that happen." Instead of doing so as head of the intelligence committee, Goss spent seven years cheering for the CIA - which he still affectionately calls his "alma mater" - until last June when the signals from the White House changed and he stunned everyone by abruptly becoming its harshest critic.
To their credit, Sens. Levin, Durbin and DeWine asked tough questions of Goss during Monday's hearing and found him entirely unresponsive.
Politics and Reform Don't Mix
Mr. Goss also lacks what is demonstrably a sine qua non qualification for a Director of Central Intelligence - experience managing a large, highly complex organization.
Moreover, the job for which he has been nominated requires the kind of nonpartisan approach that is alien to anyone who has functioned for very long in the highly politicized ether of the U.S. Congress - again, as the tenure of George Tenet, who made his mark serving Senators, so amply demonstrated.
Goss co-authored an opinion piece in The Tampa Tribune on March 8, claiming that in the 1990s Sen. John Kerry "was leading efforts in Congress to dismantle the nation's intelligence capabilities." And in June, Goss interrupted debate on the House floor by displaying a sign with a 1977 quote from Kerry that called for cuts in the intelligence budget. These antics raise legitimate concerns with respect to Goss's ability to be nonpartisan.
Even more troubling to veteran intelligence analysts is the way Goss' prepared statement parroted the president's rhetoric to the effect that terrorists "are committed to the destruction of our economy and our way of life" - boilerplate that merits as much credence as the now thoroughly discredited pre-war claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The situation is much more complex than that. If Mr. Goss believes what he said, he has not read the definitive work on "why they hate us," CIA analyst Michael Scheuer's recent book Imperial Hubris . And if he doesn't grasp this complexity, how can he convey it to the leaders relying on his counsel?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray McGovern - a CIA analyst for 27 years from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush - has written "A Compromised C.I.A.: What Can Be Done?", a chapter in "Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense", published this month by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation. The chapter includes a detailed discussion of the qualities needed in a CIA director. McGovern is a member of the steering group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and a member of the Truth-Telling Coalition.
This article first appeared at TomPaine.com
http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2004/09/kitkat_club.php
James Wolcott is a VANITY FAIR contributing editor
« Fall Migration | JamesWolcott.com | Wedding Belle »
Kit-Kat Club
Posted by James Wolcott
So far I have watched four cable news interviews with Kitty Kelley, author of The Evil Clampetts. And here is what I have learned about her book.
Not much.
The interviewers are all working off of the same talking points, the tone and thrust of their questioning so similar it's as if they all received the same fax from the Republican National Committee.
Normally when an author comes on to talk about a book as big and ambitious, the questioning is general before it moves to the specific. Normally, the average harried host would ask, "What made you decide to write about the Bushes? Who is the most interesting of the Bush family? Who is the most dangerous? What is the biggest public misconception about them?"
Etc.
But with Kelley, the questioning is super-specific, skeptical, and suspicious from the outset, keys in on the same hotspots from interview to interview (coke at Camp David, his refusal to take a flight physical, Laura's reputed past as a distribution point on campus for wacky weed), and cuts her answers short whenever she begins to dilate on the Bush modus operandi.
They grill her on sources, their authenticity, whether she spoke to that person directly or relied on hearsay. And in the interviews I've seen, Kelley has been cucumber-cool and composed, going up to the brink of the available evidence and no further, refusing to back down from her claims of Dubya's drug use, and more than holding her own.
The hypocrisy of the cable newsers reeks to low hell.
For years they've been hyping and peddling every variety of fishy speculation and brazen assertion about the Clintons, Vince Foster, Monica, Gary Condit-Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, this rape case, that abduction case; they've rolled out the ratty carpet for every Swift Boat slob; and now, now, they decide to get loftily anal.
The worst interviews were on CNN. Aaron Brown fretted over the methodology and wondered why Kelley focused on the Bushes, since so many privileged families such as the Kennedys and the Rockefellers get away with all sorts of behavior without having to pay the price most people do--why pick on them?
Kelley smartly retorted that the Bushes have paid less price than most (what she didn't say, and could have, was two assassinations of Kennedy brothers was worse than anything the Bushes have had to endure). He was also troubled that she was implying Bush skipped his flight physical because of drug use, to which she said it was a logical inference and all Bush had to do was release the appropriate records.
Brown at least wasn't a snitty little twit, like the CNN interviewer this morning whose name, I believe, is Heidi Hairdo. From the outset her tone was brisk, assistant district-attorneyish, and yet schoolgirlishly naive, as when she couldn't understand why anyone would be "afraid" of the Bushes and Kelley laughed in snorting disbelief, as if she had to explain the facts of life to Miss Snippy.
Heidi Hairdo, like some of the other interviewers, seem to keep up an invisible cordon sanitarire, a starchy, disdainful discomfort at having to share the set with an author so disreputable and, oh dear, tacky. This from people who fawn over every narcissistic piece of Hollywood horseflesh making the rounds to promote their latest lousy movie.
What's clear is that the news media are uncomfortable with someone investigating the arrogant and disturbing patterns of behavior in the Bush dynasty. They can't ignore Kitty Kelley, but they want to keep her in her litter box. But she's a tiny tigress, and will not be contained.
09.15.04 12:30PM