Four more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? These young men and women are dying, in a Mega-Mogdishu, for a neo-con wet dream and a Three Stooges Reich...How could this nightmare happen to America? It's the Media, Stupid.
Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: Now and then, something happens that causes our esteemed Washington press corps to exhibit its collective posterior to a wondering nation...
Every news article and TV feature I saw regarding
Clinton’s book featured the quote from Michiko
Kakutani’s frontpage New York Times review, "sloppy,
self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull."
Positive reviews by "Lonesome Dove" author Larry
McMurtry and Ben Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson
got little play...
Interestingly, the Times ’ review neglected to mention
that Clinton spent many pages deconstructing its own
dreadfully bad Whitewater reporting. Reading it, he
wrote, "felt like an outof-body experience." Regarding
the Times’ ? The Washington Post’s and everybody
else’s failure to disclose the contents of the
Pillsbury Report, the eight-volume study by a
Republican law firm that exonerated the Clintons of
Whitewater wrongdoing in December 1995—years before
independent counsel Kenneth Starr—Clinton quoted my
friend Lars-Erik Nelson, the late New York Daily News
columnist. Nelson spent years in Moscow covering the
Soviet Union. "The secret verdict is in," he wrote.
"There was nothing for the Clintons to hide.... [I] n
a bizarre reversal of those Stalin-era trials in which
innocent people were convicted in secret, the
President and the First Lady have been publicly
charged and secretly found innocent."
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/story_Editorial.php?storyid=69194
Here’s the beef
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Now and then, something happens that causes our
esteemed Washington press corps to exhibit its
collective posterior to a wondering nation. Such an
event was the publication of Bill Clinton’s
biographical memoir, "My Life." Following the extended
funeral rites for former President Ronald Reagan,
Clinton’s humongous Bildungsroman left pundits
scrambling madly to master a new collective script.
"Bildungsroman" is professor-speak for "10 pounds of
ego in a 5-pound sack." Nobody writes an autobiography
without a big ego. Not even St. Augustine. But what
was Clinton’s real motive? Speaking on "NBC Nightly
News," Andrea Mitchell (Mrs. Alan Greenspan) thought
she knew. "All Clinton may want to do," she opined,
"is outsell his wife’s book, which sold almost three
million copies worldwide." Time’s Margaret Carlson
echoed her on CNN’s "Capital Gang." Where do they find
them? Write a 972-page book to show up your wife? In
my experience, when people pontificate about the
motives of people they scarcely know, it’s their own
motives they display.
Apart from horses and high school guidance counselors,
it’d be hard to find an equivalent group as consumed
with status anxiety as the Washington punditocracy.
Every news article and TV feature I saw regarding
Clinton’s book featured the quote from Michiko
Kakutani’s frontpage New York Times review, "sloppy,
self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull."
Positive reviews by "Lonesome Dove" author Larry
McMurtry and Ben Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson
got little play.
Interestingly, the Times ’ review neglected to mention
that Clinton spent many pages deconstructing its own
dreadfully bad Whitewater reporting. Reading it, he
wrote, "felt like an outof-body experience." Regarding
the Times’ ? The Washington Post’s and everybody
else’s failure to disclose the contents of the
Pillsbury Report, the eight-volume study by a
Republican law firm that exonerated the Clintons of
Whitewater wrongdoing in December 1995—years before
independent counsel Kenneth Starr—Clinton quoted my
friend Lars-Erik Nelson, the late New York Daily News
columnist. Nelson spent years in Moscow covering the
Soviet Union. "The secret verdict is in," he wrote.
"There was nothing for the Clintons to hide.... [I] n
a bizarre reversal of those Stalin-era trials in which
innocent people were convicted in secret, the
President and the First Lady have been publicly
charged and secretly found innocent."
Yet Kakutani charges Clinton with "lies" about "real
estate." Challenged by Salon’s Eric Boehlert to
stipulate any, he says she never called back. Times
editor Bill Keller alibied that the independent
counsel’s Whitewater report mentioned "inaccurate
statements."
But if inaccurate statements are lies, the
Timesprinted even more lies about Whitewater than
"weapons of mass destruction." Indeed, had editors
heeded problems with its "investigative" reporting
during Clinton’s first term when some of us started
calling attention to them, they might have spared
themselves a lot of trouble. Judith Miller’s bad
reporting about Iraq and Jeff Gerth’s about Arkansas
had certain basic similarities: Both reporters went to
places they knew little about, put themselves into the
hands of con men with axes to grind and suppressed
dissenting voices eventually proved correct.
As George Seldes observed, however, "the most sacred
cow of the press is the press itself." Hence, The
Washington Post, too, editorialized that Clinton’s
memoir "veers from the nonfiction category" regarding
Whitewater, adding: "The tangled real estate
investments... merited investigation, and the inquiry
produced numerous convictions."
But in fact the Clintons made exactly one real estate
investment involving roughly $200,000, repaid the
loans in full and lost about $50,000. None of the
convictions Starr obtained involved transactions to
which they were a party.
Most had no relationship to their investment
whatsoever.
Starr himself, apparently one of the unreliable
sources from whom reporters took dictation, blandly
assured a PBS interviewer that "very few individuals
who are caught up in the process of criminal
justice... walk out saying how much I love the
prosecutor." Cute, but Clinton’s beef is more pointed.
He produces a list of persons, such as Kathleen
Willey, whom he says Starr rewarded for lying, and a
list of others like Susan Mc-Dougal who he says got
indicted for refusing to lie.
Self-serving? Maybe. But a Little Rock jury acquitted
McDougal, and a Virginia jury failed to convict Julie
Hiatt Steele on Willey’s say-so. Unfortunately,
Clinton’s book overlooks one of Starr’s most stunning
transgressions: convicting Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy
Tucker on the basis of a repealed statute. Yes, you
read correctly. Starr destroyed the career of Tucker
(a Clinton rival, incidentally, to whom he says he
apologized for not having pardoned him) by using an
expired tax law. It took Tucker five years of costly
appeals to prove it, and it opens to further appeal a
second conviction of Tucker that Starr obtained
through the testimony of convicted embezzler David
Hale. But the courtiers of the Washington press have
no time for such trivialities. Speculating about the
Clintons’ marriage makes better entertainment.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock
author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
850 + US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? Meanwhile...Sea change.
Will Hutton, Guardian: For my entire journalistic life, the most salient political and cultural fact has been the rise of the American right. It is not just that America has been governed by Republican presidents or by Bill Clinton within the penumbra of the conservative intellectual and cultural ascendancy; it's that the conservative victory in the battle of ideas in the US has had a spill-over affect on the rest of the West.
It is no accident, for example, that the election of Ronald Reagan launched a fivefold increase in the numbers held in American prisons or that the profound growth of inequality also began with him. Whether it's criminal justice or tax policy, Britain and the industrialised West have been profoundly affected by the retreat of American liberalism...
Which is why this year's presidential election is so important, not just for the result but for the way the underlying argument is developing. Bush's strategists thought it would all be sewn up by now; they would have defined Democrat challenger John Kerry as a flip-flop, ultra liberal senator who was unsound on the war against terrorism...
In short, Iraq is emerging as a crucial turning-point in the 25-year-long conservative ascendancy. In his important book, After the Empire, French intellectual Emmanuel Todd argues that what has betrayed the US's attempt to sustain a global hegemonic position and win the battle against terrorism is its partisanship and retreat from universalist principles...
Events are giving the Democrats the ammunition to make the case that America needs friends anfd that to win them means adhering to international law. But the US is not going to undergo a Damascene conversion. Only cumulative evidence will change minds.
But opinion is moving. My bet remains that it will carry John Kerry to the White House - just. Of equal importance is the fact that neo-conservatism is on the defensive and that American liberalism has its best chance to regain ground for the first time in a generation.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1248400,00.html
Your time is up, George: No wonder Bush is running scared - 25 years of neo-conservative ascendancy in the US is under grave threat
Will Hutton
Sunday June 27, 2004
The Observer
For my entire journalistic life, the most salient political and cultural fact has been the rise of the American right. It is not just that America has been governed by Republican presidents or by Bill Clinton within the penumbra of the conservative intellectual and cultural ascendancy; it's that the conservative victory in the battle of ideas in the US has had a spill-over affect on the rest of the West.
It is no accident, for example, that the election of Ronald Reagan launched a fivefold increase in the numbers held in American prisons or that the profound growth of inequality also began with him. Whether it's criminal justice or tax policy, Britain and the industrialised West have been profoundly affected by the retreat of American liberalism.
Would Britain, for example, have so readily retreated from its long-held view that prison is essentially a last resort and rehabilitation of offenders must be the centrepiece of any penal policy if it had not been engulfed by the American conservative view that both propositions were wrong?
Equally, would our readiness to stand by progressive taxation have been so weakened without the view from the US that high rates of income tax on the rich are morally and economically wrong?
We had Mrs Thatcher, but arguably her dominance in British politics would have been less secure had it not been for the succour she took from American policies and conservative ideas. Britain is not a slave to American influences, but it cannot ignore the international common sense which the US more than any other nation shapes.
Britain may have elected two Labour governments in succession, but the extraordinary caution of New Labour in championing even a modest social democratic programme is itself tribute to how difficult it is to declare independence from the international consensus. Progressive politics in Britain will gather no momentum until that begins to change - and that requires change in the US.
Which is why this year's presidential election is so important, not just for the result but for the way the underlying argument is developing. Bush's strategists thought it would all be sewn up by now; they would have defined Democrat challenger John Kerry as a flip-flop, ultra liberal senator who was unsound on the war against terrorism.
Two-term American presidents have habitually established an unassailable lead over the summer before the November election; the Bush team had hoped to achieve that by now with Kerry. Instead, they are involved in a pitched battle with a growing possibility that they might lose. The Democrats are daring to hope and the Republicans are testy and on edge. On trust, on economic competence, on approval ratings and on whether the President is best for America, Bush's poll ratings are poor and falling. In the majority of so-called 'swing' states across the Midwest that Kerry must win, he is registering small but consistent leads; and despite spending a record $80 million on attack adverts, Bush is trailing Kerry nationally, albeit by a small and fluctuating margin.
Bush is enduring the most wretched months of his presidency. The furore over the maltreatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib; the continuing loss of American lives in Iraq and the sense, despite the handover this week, that the US has lost control of events; the charge by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the US that there was no evidence of a collaborative relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam have all badly wounded him.
There was never unanimity within Republican ranks, let alone within the wider US, that fighting a pre-emptive war of choice without hard justification and international legitimacy, where victory would confer the victors the impossible task of building a nation, was smart politics or even feasible. Now the debate is out in the open.
The risk for Bush is that none of this is going to get any better. Already the neocons are more on the defensive than at any time in the past 10 years. One small sign was the extravagant praise Bush felt he needed to heap on their hate figure, Bill Clinton, at the unveiling of his portrait in the White House.
More substantively, the concessions made to win UN endorsement for the handover and last week's cave-in on the US's attempt to get a further two-year extension on US troop immunity from International Criminal Court prosecution both highlight neocon weakness. The US is having to accept that it cannot make the international weather as it chooses.
In short, Iraq is emerging as a crucial turning-point in the 25-year-long conservative ascendancy. In his important book, After the Empire, French intellectual Emmanuel Todd argues that what has betrayed the US's attempt to sustain a global hegemonic position and win the battle against terrorism is its partisanship and retreat from universalist principles.
Palestinian deaths are not equal to Israeli deaths; terrorist suspects have no right to a fair trial or fair treatment in prison; countries not for the war on terror on American terms are necessarily against the US.
It is these attitudes that undermine its moral claims, the 'soft power' that hitherto has underpinned its international leadership. Todd believes that this decline of universalism abroad could not have happened without the decline of universalism within the US; that indifference to colossal inequality and differential rights of US citizens, now expressing itself as rising black infant mortality rates, creates the culture that pursues nakedly unfair policies abroad. America's failures abroad and at home are umbilically linked - and the root of both is neo-conservatism.
Few in the US would diagnose the situation in those terms, whatever the underlying truth, but there are signs in Bush's poll ratings that an emerging American majority do see that the philosophy underpinning his policies is a dead-end and that change is needed.
Kerry is criticised for not being more tactically aggressive, but his caution is justified.
A 25-year ascendancy does not dissolve overnight; the close network of funders, think-tanks, media supporters, corporate beneficiaries and the cultural coalition of anti-gun control, anti-gay and pro-evangelical groups is not going to run up the white flag without sustained resistance.
Events are giving the Democrats the ammunition to make the case that America needs friends and that to win them means adhering to international law. But the US is not going to undergo a Damascene conversion. Only cumulative evidence will change minds.
But opinion is moving. My bet remains that it will carry John Kerry to the White House - just. Of equal importance is the fact that neo-conservatism is on the defensive and that American liberalism has its best chance to regain ground for the first time in a generation.
It is not just American politics that could be transformed by Iraq, but our own. To believe in universal rights and fair societies might become respectable again.
Be vigilant, be vocal, be vociferous. They will try to steal it. Whether or not they have another Trifecta ticket to cash in...
Andrew Gumbel, LA City Beat: Late Monday, word came that Mischelle Townsend, Riverside County’s Registrar of Voters, had abruptly quit her job mid-term. She said she wanted to spend more time with her family, and nurse her father-in-law through his impending knee surgery. Worthy sentiments, for sure. But she didn’t mention anything about a controversial March 2 election for county supervisor that was still being contested, and the recount that had become entangled in problems attributable, in part, to the county’s electronic voting machines. Nor did she mention anything about potentially explosive new details regarding the possible manipulation of those machines. Likewise, no mention of the big list of questions to this effect from Los Angeles CityBeat sitting on her desk since last Saturday.
Instead, the state’s most outspoken champion of e-voting machines, who was leading a lawsuit against Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to try to revoke a list of 23 improved voting security measures imposed last month, is stepping down and vanishing. Townsend leaves not only a mass of unresolved questions about the contested supervisor seat, but also about the fate of e-voting in this state.
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1013&IssueNum=55
DOWN FOR THE COUNT
by Andrew Gumbel
Riverside County’s outspoken registrar was a national poster child for touchscreen voting, but problems with the machines may have just ended her career
RIVERSIDE – Late Monday, word came that Mischelle Townsend, Riverside County’s Registrar of Voters, had abruptly quit her job mid-term. She said she wanted to spend more time with her family, and nurse her father-in-law through his impending knee surgery. Worthy sentiments, for sure. But she didn’t mention anything about a controversial March 2 election for county supervisor that was still being contested, and the recount that had become entangled in problems attributable, in part, to the county’s electronic voting machines. Nor did she mention anything about potentially explosive new details regarding the possible manipulation of those machines. Likewise, no mention of the big list of questions to this effect from Los Angeles CityBeat sitting on her desk since last Saturday.
Instead, the state’s most outspoken champion of e-voting machines, who was leading a lawsuit against Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to try to revoke a list of 23 improved voting security measures imposed last month, is stepping down and vanishing. Townsend leaves not only a mass of unresolved questions about the contested supervisor seat, but also about the fate of e-voting in this state.
The Power of Incumbency
Elections can be brutal things, but shortly after the polls closed on the night of March 2, supporters of Linda Soubirous, an underdog candidate for the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, had reason to feel happy with her performance. She had gone up against three-time incumbent Bob Buster, in a county where incumbents rarely face serious competition. And she had given him a real run for his money, thanks largely to the support of law enforcement groups sympathetic to her nationally recognized campaigns on behalf of the families of police officers killed in the line of duty.
As the first official results came in, it looked as if the Soubirous campaign had forced Buster into a runoff, which was as much as she had hoped for. With 46 of the county’s 157 precincts counted, Buster was running at about 47 per cent – three points below the 50 percent plus one he needed to win outright – with Soubirous at 37 percent and a third candidate, Kevin Pape, at 15. But then some very strange things started to happen.
The expectation was that the rest of the results would come in very quickly. Speed, after all, was one of the big attractions of Riverside’s pioneering touchscreen computer voting system – with its instant precinct-by-precinct vote tallies and ostensibly easy-to-operate system for centralized results tabulation. But the anticipated rapid-fire updates simply failed to materialize. After the initial results posting at 8:13 p.m., there followed a long period of silence.
At around 8:50, Soubirous’s campaign manager, Brian Floyd, received a call from an election observer in Temecula informing him that the vote count had been stopped – apparently by Registrar Mischelle Townsend herself. The reason was not made clear. So Floyd and another Soubirous campaigner named Art Cassel jumped into a car and drove to Townsend’s office to investigate. Sure enough, the counting area appeared to be near-deserted. But then they noticed two men huddled at one of the vote tabulation computers.
One, according to their account, was typing away on the computer keyboard, while the other was standing just next to him.
The two men turned out to be employees of Sequoia Voting Systems, the private company which manufactures Riverside County’s AVC Edge touchscreen machinery. Their presence was unusual, to say the least, and even the possibility that they might be making changes to the vote tabulation software in the middle of an election was alarming to Cassel and Floyd. Sequoia insists the two men’s activities were entirely benign – merely generating lists of data to send to the Secretary of State’s office in Sacramento that had nothing to do with the tabulation software. Soubirous’s campaign staff has made no direct accusations, although it has strongly criticized the registrar’s office for allowing at least an appearance of impropriety at a time when the sanctity of the electoral process should have been paramount. Cassel and Floyd said the man at the keyboard, a Sequoia vice president called Mike Frontera, was wearing a county employees’ ID badge – something that has not been adequately explained by anyone. “What they were doing there we’ll never know,” Cassel said.
When Floyd confronted Registrar Townsend directly, she denied that the vote count had been halted. But at 9:10, according to Cassel’s account, something seemed to have changed because county employees piled back into the counting area, and results from the outstanding precincts began to be posted shortly afterward. As the night went on, Buster’s lead over Soubirous steadily lengthened until he finished up a slender 92 votes over the 50 percent threshold he needed to avoid a runoff.
Over the next few days, as the totals from absentee and mail-in ballots were added, the margin shrunk down to a tantalizing 45 votes. And that part of the count remains highly contentious, too. On March 4, Floyd and Cassel saw the second Sequoia employee, Eddie Campbell, return to the registrar’s office and watched him pop into his pocket what looked like a PCMCIA card similar to those used to store votes on individual touchscreen machines. The Sequoia AVC Edge machines do not make a paper record of individual votes, and any record of total votes for a potential recount – vital in a race ‹ separated only by 45 votes – would only be stored on that kind of card.
Floyd shouted out: “Where are you going with that?” But he received no answer.
Accompanied by different county employees, Campbell walked all the way to the vote tabulation terminals where, according to Cassel, he sat down at the same computer he and Frontera had used on election night. Cassel says he saw the head of the registrar’s information technology department, Brian Foss, log Campbell on to the computer – presumably with his own password – and then leave the room. Campbell, now on his own, called up a screen that Cassel said he recognized as the WinEds tabulation software used on the Sequoia system.
What happened next is less than clear. According to Cassel, Campbell began moving from terminal to terminal – as though he was having difficulty being accepted by whatever system he was trying to enter. Floyd, meanwhile, was anxious for an explanation and tried to track down Mischelle Townsend. It took him all day to find her, and when he did she at first said that Eddie Campbell was not authorized to be in the system and then, in the presence of Brian Foss, changed her tune and said he was.
For the moment, we have only Cassel and Floyd’s version of these events. CityBeat gave Townsend a long list of written questions outlining their account and inviting her to rebut it with her own. At first she said she would be glad to answer, but she missed a mutually agreed deadline, and failed to respond to messages left at her office. Eventually reached on her cell phone, she said she had been advised by her lawyers not to contribute to an article that “obviously was not going to be factual.” Pressed on what she meant by this, she ended up answering some questions, but would not be drawn in on the specifics of Cassel and Floyd’s allegations.
She also failed to mention that she had just quit her job. The next morning, as this article was going to press, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported that she was retiring early. Perhaps she really is concerned about her father-in-law’s upcoming knee surgery, but her detractors in Riverside County have their doubts. Indeed, the fallout from the Buster-Soubirous race suggests it is a textbook case of how not to conduct an election in just about every respect.
Recount Follies
Given the closeness of the supervisor’s race, the Soubirous campaign requested a recount in early April. Because of the alarm bells raised by the initial count, Linda Soubirous also hired a lawyer, who drafted a closely worded formal request for 44 separate items that would cast maximum light on the workings of the Sequoia voting machines, and cross-check the voting totals on the individual touchscreen machines with the tallies tabulated at the registrar’s headquarters. As pointed out by the growing chorus of critics of touchscreen machines, none of these safeguards constitutes a full recount exactly, because there is still no independent paper record of ballots confirming each voter’s intentions. If the machines drop or alter data – either because of a software glitch or some kind of malicious intervention – there is no way of knowing because they can print out only the information stored inside them, not the information as originally entered.
Touchscreen advocates like Townsend, however, argue that there is plenty of backup in the event of a vote-counting dispute. Townsend’s own website boasts of “an extraordinary number of safeguards,” including redundant storage of votes in two different places and a paper “audit trail.” It was this kind of information that Soubirous’s lawyer requested, based on his interpretation of his client’s rights under the California election code. But in almost every instance, Soubirous got neither answers nor materials.
Of the 44 items requested, only five were provided. Others were offered at different times, but in the end the recount went ahead without any examination of redundant data, audit logs, error reports, or any information documenting the chain of custody for data passed around on cartridges or over Intranet systems. The county is legally obliged, for example, to print out “zero tapes” proving that each touchscreen machine and cartridge or card is completely clear of votes before the polls open. Those zero tapes, in turn, are supposed to be made available to the public at a reasonable cost if anyone should ask for them. But they have not materialized.
Gregory Luke, the Santa Monica-based lawyer representing Soubirous, called the recount “a process that only Katherine Harris could love.”
“We were subjected to a reprint, not a recount,” he said, calling it “an empty formality suitable only for banana republics or dictatorships.”
After he wrote to Townsend expressing his dismay at her refusal “to provide information which has already been generated, and should have been retained by you in the ordinary course of your official business,” her lawyers wrote back that the materials requested were “not relevant to the counting of ballots” and, in many cases, did not exist – for reasons they did not elaborate. The materials, the lawyers argued, would become relevant only if it could be shown that they had been subject to fraud or error – an argument that turns the issue on its head because, of course, the only way to find out if anything is wrong is to inspect the materials first.
Still, the recount was not without hiccups. Almost 300 paper ballots that had not been counted the first time suddenly turned up – Townsend said the marks on them had been too faint to be picked up by the counting machines – shaving Bob Buster’s share of the vote down to 50.07 percent, or just 35 votes above the runoff threshold. The Soubirous campaign continued to demand its 44 items, but Townsend then threw in some Catch-22 logic of her own. Having conducted and completed the recount her own way, she decreed that Soubirous could no longer ask for any materials because that would be tantamount to holding a second recount, which she wasn’t about to grant.
Riverside was the first California county to embrace touchscreen, or Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting. The experiment began in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, and came to look little short of a coup de génie by the time the 2000 presidential election rolled around, exposing the country’s aging punchcard technology to international ridicule. Townsend was held up as an example to be followed everywhere, and won high praise from Wired magazine, the Bible of the digital age, as some kind of visionary for the new century.
In truth, though, the system was beset with problems from the outset. Although little reported at the time, election night in November 2000 was a near-disaster, as the tabulation software overloaded and started deleting votes from the tallying system. The system was righted, at least according to Sequoia, but Riverside’s results were not published until two hours after San Bernardino County, then still using punchcards. The man who headed Sequoia’s resuscitation team in Riverside, southern sales manager Phil Foster, was subsequently indicted in Louisiana for “conspiracy to commit money laundering and malfeasance” – charges later dropped in exchange for his testimony against Louisiana’s state commissioner of elections.
Long before the current controversy over the safety and reliability of touchscreens, Riverside ran into difficulty over the legal requirements for providing paper audit trails of the ballots inside each individual voting machine. The issue was discussed at length when California considered the Proposition 41 bond measure that overhauled the state’s voting systems and rewrote the state elections code. Because of concerns about Riverside and other emerging e-voting counties, Section 19234 (e) of the new Elections Code specifically called for a paper version of every ballot cast – something that Riverside has always been reluctant to provide. (Evidence from the original purchase orders suggests a large number of Riverside’s 4,250 Sequoia Edge machines do not have printing capabilities, although Mischelle Townsend denies this.) Riverside’s difficulties were swept away, however, thanks to then-Secretary of State Bill Jones, who in late 2001 declared that printers on touchscreen machines were now “an optional item” and opted for an extremely loose interpretation of Section 19234 (e). After he left office in 2002, Jones went on to become a paid consultant to Sequoia – following two former staff members who also hold senior positions in the company.
As the tide of public opinion turned against DRE machines, Townsend found herself increasingly in the spotlight because she, more than any other California county registrar, had grown almost messianic in her advocacy of touchscreen technology. In 2002, she and the county were taken to court by a Palm Desert resident, Susan Marie Weber, who had grown suspicious after a local ballot measure which had failed twice using the old voting technology passed the first time with Sequoia’s machines. Weber sued for the introduction of a voter-verified paper trail, arguing that it was the only way to guarantee the integrity of the system. Her suit was thrown out by the federal appeals court last year, largely on the grounds that Sequoia’s AVC Edge system contains adequate safeguards – the very same redundant data, multiple storage points and ballot images that the registrar’s office has now refused to show to Linda Soubirous and her lawyers.
That court victory was a fortuitous piece of timing for Townsend, because barely a month later the new Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, ordered the introduction of the very voter-verified paper trail Weber had been after by January 2006. That, in turn, led to a virtual state of war between Townsend and her ostensible masters in Sacramento, culminating in a lawsuit in which she is seeking to have a number of Shelley’s rulings struck down. The fate of that lawsuit is far from clear in light of her resignation.
Her credibility was not exactly helped by the Soubirous controversy. And she was further rocked by a string of damaging revelations on conflict-of-interest issues, raising troubling questions about the good-old-boy nature of Riverside County politics and the way loose-knit political allies choose to interpret the rules of public office.
Revelation number one was her failure to file a statement of her personal economic interests, as required by state law, for four of the past six years. She hastily submitted the relevant forms to the county clerk’s office as soon as the news hit the papers at the end of March. Copies obtained by CityBeat (complete with stamped date of receipt) show that parts of the forms – particularly regarding her husband’s employment with a private government contractor called Maximus, Inc., which has done business in Riverside County – are left blank. Next to her signature she put the date the forms should have been filed, as opposed to dates corresponding to when they actually were filed.
Revelation number two came in her 2003 filing, which showed that she had accepted more than $1,000 worth of travel ‹ and hotel expenses from Sequoia to appear in a promotional video in Florida. Not only did the amount exceed Riverside’s $340 gift limit for public officials, it also triggered demands from a former Banning councilman, Joe Lucsko, for Townsend to be suspended from her job pending an investigation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
Revelation number three concerned the hiring of the Sacramento law firm Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, which is now representing her in the Soubirous recount controversy. County documents show that the request to retain outside counsel was submitted to the Board of Supervisors on April 8 and approved on April 13. However, the contract establishing the terms of the law firm’s activities on Townsend’s behalf – obtained by CityBeat – is dated April 7. In other words, the lawyers appear to have been hired first and approved only later (at a cost to the taxpayer of $2,000 a day for work in Riverside County, and at least $350 an hour for everything else).
Townsend has denounced much of the above as “groundless and politically motivated innuendo.” At one point in April, she went to the Riverside District Attorney, Grover Trask, and asked him to open an investigation into the allegations against her regarding the Soubirous-Buster election. But here, too, was a possible conflict of interest. Trask had openly endorsed Bob Buster in his election campaign. Both men had ties to the same political consulting group, O’Reilly Public Relations. One of O’Reilly’s other clients also happens to be Sequoia Voting Systems. To the surprise of nobody in the county, the district attorney came back after a few days and announced that the election had been in perfect accordance with state and federal law. Art Cassel and Brian Floyd said the district attorney’s office reached its conclusion without talking to either of them.
The Myth of Proprietary Software
Much of the opprobrium thrown at the makers of touchscreen voting machines has focussed on Sequoia’s rival, Diebold Election Systems. In fact, when Diebold’s source code was left lying around on the Internet and found sorely wanting by a team of computer scientists who analyzed it last year, Sequoia gloated that “while Diebold relies on a Microsoft operating system that is well known and understood by computer hackers, Sequoia’s AVC Edge runs on a proprietary operating system that is designed solely for the conduct of elections.” Mischelle Townsend offers her own testimonial in similar terms on the Sequoia company website. “Sequoia’s software is proprietary,” she writes, “not sold off-the-shelf and available to anyone, making it much more secure.”
However, these claims are at best misleading and, at worst, entirely bogus. Sequoia’s statement omits the fact that its WinEds vote-tallying software – as opposed to the vote-gathering part of the operation – runs on a Microsoft operating system and uses a Microsoft database. At least in the version in use until late last year, WinEds was written in a computer language called Visual Basic, which is notorious for its popularity with virus writers. VB is banned under the Federal Electoral Commission’s 2002 voting systems standards; WinEds, like much of the software in use in computer voting machines in this country, is certified under the pre-Internet age 1990 FEC standards.
It is not true, either, to say that the software used to run the touchscreen machines is “proprietary” and “not sold off-the-shelf.” According to a 2001 report by Wyle, an independent testing lab that analyzes voting software as part of the federal certification process, the AVC Edge machine has, “at its core,” a commercially available operating system called pSOS.
We are learning much more about the architecture of Sequoia’s computer codes because they, too, showed up on an unguarded File Transfer Protocol site on the Internet last year and are now being studied in earnest. Jeremiah Akin, a Riverside County computer scientist and anti-touchscreen campaigner, has discovered a way of writing modifications into the WinEds ballot management software in such a way that all trace of outside intervention vanishes automatically. (Sequoia did not respond to messages seeking comment.) “You can change the code, run it, save it and then, when you close down the system and you bring the system back up, all the modifications you made will be rewritten,” Akin said. “The system will set it back to the original code.”
Sounds like a handy way of rigging elections. A similar flaw was noticed in a Technical Security Assessment Report commissioned by the state of Ohio last year, which noted: “There is a risk that an unauthorized person with access to the administrator account … might use any Operating Database Connectivity compliant product to access the Sequoia server and access or modify the database.” The Ohio report didn’t consider this very likely because it assumed some basic security procedures would be in place at county registrars’ offices. Ask Linda Soubirous’s friends whether it could happen in Riverside County, though, and they might not be so skeptical.
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It's the Media, Stupid. And that truth cuts both ways.
Editors and Publishers: They like Mike. While the country as a whole appears split, along political lines, over the controversial Michael Moore documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," movie reviewers at U.S. daily newspapers are not.
An E & P survey of 63 daily papers that ran reviews, in "red" and "blue" states alike, finds that 56 gave the film a positive nod, with only 7 abstaining, an almost 90% favorable rating...
Among the few negatives, Phoebe Flowers in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel called the film "hyperbolic hysteria," and Lawrence Toppmann in the Charlotte Observer observed that Moore "rakes muck like nobody else, but almost as much of it sticks to him as to his subject."
But they were drowned out by praise, not only from some of the expected big city papers but from smaller towns. Boo Allen of the Denton Record Chronicle in Texas referred to "Maestro Moore." Philip Martin in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette called the film "tough and true," while James Sanford in the Kalamazoo Gazette found it to be a "skillfully" directed "two-hour indictment."
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000553027
One Group That's Not Polarized: 9 out of 10 Film Reviewers for Daily Papers Back 'Fahrenheit'
By E & P Staff
Published: June 27, 2004
NEW YORK They like Mike. While the country as a whole appears split, along political lines, over the controversial Michael Moore documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," movie reviewers at U.S. daily newspapers are not.
An E & P survey of 63 daily papers that ran reviews, in "red" and "blue" states alike, finds that 56 gave the film a positive nod, with only 7 abstaining, an almost 90% favorable rating.
The seven in the "anti" camp were: Detroit Free Press, Denver Rocky Mountain News, San Jose Mercury-News, New York Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Philadelphia Daily News and the Charlotte Observer.
Among the "pro" crowd were reviewers from moderate to conservative papers such as the Boston Herald, Los Angeles Daily News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Many of the positive reviews expressed reservations but overall weighed in on the plus side.
Among the few negatives, Phoebe Flowers in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel called the film "hyperbolic hysteria," and Lawrence Toppmann in the Charlotte Observer observed that Moore "rakes muck like nobody else, but almost as much of it sticks to him as to his subject."
But they were drowned out by praise, not only from some of the expected big city papers but from smaller towns. Boo Allen of the Denton Record Chronicle in Texas referred to "Maestro Moore." Philip Martin in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette called the film "tough and true," while James Sanford in the Kalamazoo Gazette found it to be a "skillfully" directed "two-hour indictment."
Mary Pols in the Contra Costa(Ca.) Times pretty much covered the waterfront in calling the film "passionate, clever, scathing, funny, snarky, brutal, sad, glib and at times superficial."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E & P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)
The botched, bungled so-called "war on terrorism" is NOT the strength of the Bush abomination, it is the SHAME of the Bush abomination.
Los Angeles Times Editorial: The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation's unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm's length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire.
It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world's most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans' memory banks.
Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.
Cleanse the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Their War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
June 27, 2004 E-mail story Print
EDITORIAL
The Disaster of Failed Policy
In its scale and intent, President Bush's war against Iraq was something new and radical: a premeditated decision to invade, occupy and topple the government of a country that was no imminent threat to the United States. This was not a handful of GIs sent to overthrow Panamanian thug Manuel Noriega or to oust a new Marxist government in tiny Grenada. It was the dispatch of more than 100,000 U.S. troops to implement Bush's post-Sept. 11 doctrine of preemption, one whose dangers President John Quincy Adams understood when he said the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy."
In the case of Vietnam, the U.S. began by assisting a friendly government resisting communist takeover in a civil war, though the conflict disintegrated into a failure that still haunts this country. The 1991 Persian Gulf War, under Bush's father, was a successful response to Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait — and Bush's father deliberately stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq.
The current president outlined a far more aggressive policy in a speech to the West Point graduating class in 2002, declaring that in the war on terror "we must take the battle to the enemy" and confront threats before they emerge. The Iraq war was intended as a monument to his new Bush Doctrine, which also posited that the U.S. would take what help was available from allies but would not be held back by them. It now stands as a monument to folly.
The planned transfer Wednesday of limited sovereignty from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government occurs with U.S. influence around the world at a low point and insurgent violence in Iraq reaching new heights of deadliness and coordination. Important Arab leaders this month rejected a U.S. invitation to attend a summit with leaders of industrialized nations. The enmity between Israelis and Palestinians is fiercer than ever, their hope for peace dimmer. Residents of the Middle East see the U.S. not as a friend but as an imperial power bent on securing a guaranteed oil supply and a base for U.S. forces. Much of the rest of the world sees a bully.
The War's False Premises
All the main justifications for the invasion offered beforehand by the Bush administration and its supporters — weapons of mass destruction, close ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, a chance to make Baghdad a fountain of democracy that would spread through the region — turned out to be baseless.
Weeks of suicide car bombings, assassinations of political leaders and attacks on oil pipelines vital to the country's economy have preceded the handover.
On Thursday alone, car bombs and street fighting in five cities claimed more than 100 lives. Iraqis no longer fear torture or death at the hands of Hussein's brutal thugs, but many fear leaving their homes because of the violence.
The U.S. is also poorer after the war, in lives lost, billions spent and terrorists given new fuel for their rage. The initial fighting was easy; the occupation has been a disaster, with Pentagon civilians arrogantly ignoring expert advice on the difficulty of the task and necessary steps for success.
Two iconic pictures from Iraq balance the good and the dreadful — the toppling of Hussein's statue and a prisoner crawling on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison with a leash around his neck. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to a hero's welcome and a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."
A year later, more than 90% of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave their country. The president boasted in July that if Iraqi resistance fighters thought they could attack U.S. forces, "bring them on." Since then, more than 400 personnel have been killed by hostile fire.
Iraqis hope, with little evidence, that the transfer of limited sovereignty to an interim government will slow attacks on police, soldiers and civilians. Another goal, democracy, is fading. The first concern remains what it should have been after the rout of Hussein's army: security. The new Iraqi leaders are considering martial law, an understandable response with suicide bombings recently averaging about one a day but a move they could hardly enforce with an army far from rebuilt.
The new government also faces the difficulty of keeping the country together. In the north, the Kurds, an ethnically separate minority community that had been persecuted by Hussein, want at least to maintain the autonomy they've had for a decade. The Sunnis and Shiites distrust each other. Within the Shiite community, to which the majority of Iraqis belong, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the violent Muqtada Sadr are opponents. Sadr was a relatively minor figure until occupation officials shut his party's newspaper in March and arrested one of his aides, setting off large protests and attacks on U.S. troops.
The U.S. carries its own unwelcome legacies from the occupation:
• Troops are spending more time in Iraq than planned because about one-quarter of the Army is there at any one time. National Guard and Army Reserve forces are being kept on active duty longer than expected, creating problems at home, where the soldiers' jobs go unfilled and families go without parents in the home.
• The Abu Ghraib prison scandal has raised questions about the administration's willingness to ignore Geneva Convention requirements on treatment of prisoners. Investigations of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay must aim at finding out which high-ranking officers approved of the abuse or should have known of it. The U.S. also must decide what to do with prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention requires they be released when the occupation ends unless they have been formally charged with a crime. The International Committee of the Red Cross says fewer than 50 prisoners have been granted POW status. Thousands more detained as possible security threats also should be released or charged.
• The use of private contractors for military jobs once done by soldiers also demands closer examination. Civilians have long been employed to feed troops and wash uniforms, but the prevalence of ex-GIs interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison raises harsh new questions. For instance, what, if any, charges could be brought against them if they were found complicit in mistreatment?
Investigate the Contracts
The administration also put private U.S. contractors in charge of rebuilding Iraq. Congress needs to take a much closer look at what they do and how they bill the government.
Halliburton is the best-known case, having won secret no-bid contracts to rebuild the country. A Pentagon audit found "significant" overcharges by the company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney; Halliburton denies the allegations.
Iraqis say they want the Americans out, but most understand they will need the foreign forces for many more months. A U.S. troop presence in Iraq should not be indefinite, even if the Iraqis request it. By the end of 2005, Iraq should have enough trained police, soldiers, border guards and other forces to be able to defend the country and put down insurgencies but not threaten neighboring countries.
The Bush administration should push NATO nations to help with the training. Once the Iraqis have a new constitution, an elected government and sufficient security forces, the U.S. should withdraw its troops. That does not mean setting a definite date, because the U.S. cannot walk away from what it created. But it should set realistic goals for Iraq to reach on its own, at which time the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad becomes just another diplomatic outpost. It also means living up to promises to let Iraq choose its own government, even well short of democracy.
France, Germany and others that opposed the war seem to understand that letting Iraq become a failed state, an Afghanistan writ large, threatens them as well as the U.S. and the Middle East. But other nations will do little to help with reconstruction if Iraq remains a thinly disguised fiefdom where U.S. companies get billion-dollar contracts and other countries are shut out.
A Litany of Costly Errors
The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation's unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm's length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire.
It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world's most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans' memory banks.
Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
What the US electorate could not get from the "US mainstream news media," (i.e., the Truth about Fraudida, 9/11, Iraq, the Bush cabal itselt, etc.) has been delivered by the Internet-based Information Rebellion, which has now spread from cyber space into bookstores (and best-seller lists), movie theatres and DVD distribution...
Cameron McWhirter, Atlantic Journal-Constitution: "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's polemical film blasting the Bush administration, is on course to be the top-grossing documentary film of all time. It also appears likely to be the top-grossing film of any genre for the weekend...
"This blows away any conceivable record for box office of a documentary," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0604/27fahrenheit.html
Moore's jab at Bush a success: 'Fahrenheit 9/11' a box office hit
By CAMERON McWHIRTER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/26/04
"Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's polemical film
blasting the Bush administration, is on course to be
the top-grossing documentary film of all time. It also
appears likely to be the top-grossing film of any
genre for the weekend.
On Friday, its first day of national release, the film
earned about $8.2 million, already making it the
fourth-most profitable documentary in terms of
domestic gross receipts, according to the Web site Box
Office Mojo.
"This blows away any conceivable record for box office
of a documentary," said Paul Dergarabedian, president
of box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
Movie theaters nationwide reported sold-out shows.
>From New York to Michigan to California, theater
owners said they added shows to accommodate crowds. In
metro Atlanta, 12 theaters showed the film this
weekend.
Shawn Young, 35, of Atlanta bought his tickets
Saturday at Landmark's Midtown Art theater in Atlanta,
a Democratic stronghold. Young said he wanted to see
the movie on its opening weekend because he admired
Moore's Oscar-winning documentary "Bowling for
Columbine."
Also, he said, "I'm not a big fan of Bush.
"It's definitely a political statement," he said about
attending the film.
Gideon Carson Kennedy, first assistant manager at
Midtown Art, said the theater sold out most showings
of the film. The theater is showing the movie in rooms
that seat 350 and 150. "Even the midnight show was
sold out," he said.
Sales were somewhat slower at AMC Theatres at Discover
Mills in Gwinnett County, a traditional Republican
stronghold. A manager said sales were good, but not
overwhelming.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" opened in 868 theaters nationwide,
far more than most previous documentaries. "Bowling
for Columbine" — which earned about $21.5 million to
become the largest grossing documentary in history —
was shown in only 248 theaters.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" presents Bush as a feckless leader
whose administration cynically used the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks to convince the public that the country
needed to attack Iraq. In May, the Cannes Film
Festival awarded the movie its top honor.
Just before Cannes, Disney, which funded production of
the film through its subsidiary Miramax, announced it
would not release the movie because of its overtly
political content. Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob
Weinstein bought back the film and hooked up with
Lions Gate Films and IFC to distribute it.
If the movie does become the top-grossing documentary,
it still would bring in only a fraction of what a
Hollywood blockbuster does. To date, Moore's gross for
all his films is $37.5 million, according to Box
Office Mojo. "Titanic," the top-grossing film of all
time, has earned $1.8 billion.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
The DVD version of "Fahrenheit 911" will be available in...September 2004. Yes, there is an Electoral Uprising coming...
David Germain, Associated Press: "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's assault on President Bush, took in $8.2 million to $8.4 million in its first day, positioning it as the weekend's No. 1 film, its distributors said Saturday.
Based on Friday's numbers, "Fahrenheit 9/11" was on
track for an opening weekend that would surpass the
$21.6 million total gross of Moore's "Bowling for
Columbine," his 2002 film that earned him an Academy
Award for best documentary.
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=502&e=4&u=/ap/20040627/ap_on_en_mo/fahrenheit_911
Fahrenheit 9/11' Tops $8M in First Day
1 minute ago
By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer
LOS ANGELES - "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's
assault on President Bush (news - web sites), took in
$8.2 million to $8.4 million in its first day,
positioning it as the weekend's No. 1 film, its
distributors said Saturday.
Based on Friday's numbers, "Fahrenheit 9/11" was on
track for an opening weekend that would surpass the
$21.6 million total gross of Moore's "Bowling for
Columbine," his 2002 film that earned him an Academy
Award for best documentary.
"Bowling for Columbine" holds the record for highest
domestic gross among documentaries, excluding concert
films and movies made for huge-screen IMAX theaters.
Friday grosses for "Fahrenheit 9/11" ran about $1.5
million ahead of its closest competitor, the Wayans
brothers comedy "White Chicks." The performance of
"Fahrenheit 9/11" was even more remarkable considering
it played in just 868 theaters, fewer than a third the
number for "White Chicks."
"Fahrenheit 9/11" benefited from a flurry of praise
and condemnation. Supporters mobilized liberal-minded
audiences to see it over opening weekend to counter
efforts by some right-wing groups to discredit the
film.
"It always helps when there's a group out there that
says, 'Don't go see this movie. It's bad for you,'"
said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Films, one of
the film's distributors.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" paints Bush as a neglectful
president who ignored terrorism warnings before Sept.
11, then stirred up fear of more attacks to win public
support for the Iraq (news - web sites) war. The movie
won the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival (news -
web sites) in May.
The film has ridden a wave of publicity since just
before Cannes, when Moore began assailing Disney for
refusing to let subsidiary Miramax release "Fahrenheit
9/11" because of its political content.
Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein bought back
the film and hooked up with Lions Gate (news - web
sites) Films and IFC to distribute it.
The fury over "Fahrenheit 9/11" resembled the
firestorm created by Mel Gibson (news)'s "The Passion
of the Christ," which rose to blockbuster status amid
debate over whether it was anti-Semitic.
"It's like how 'The Passion of the Christ' redefined
what a certain genre of movie could do at the box
office, 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is doing the same thing,"
said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office
tracker Exhibitor Relations. "This blows away any
conceivable record for box office of a documentary."
It's the Media, Stupid.
The name of RTE (Irish State Broadcasting) journalist Carole Coleman will be scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes.
Miriam Lord, The Irish Independent: THE White House has lodged a complaint with the Irish Embassy in Washington over RTE journalist Carole Coleman's interview with US President George Bush...The Irish
Independent learned last night that the White House
told Ms Coleman that she interrupted the president
unnecessarily and was disrespectful.
She also received a call from the White House in which
she was admonished for her tone.
And it emerged last night that presidential staff
suggested to Ms Coleman as she went into the interview
that she ask him a question on the outfit that
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit.
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
mainstream news media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1205871&issue_id=11063
Angry White House pulls RTE interview
ADVERTISEMENT
THE White House has lodged a complaint with the Irish
Embassy in Washington over RTE journalist Carole
Coleman's interview with US President George Bush.
And it is believed the President's staff have now
withdrawn from an exclusive interview which was to
have been given to RTE this morning by First Lady
Laura Bush.
It is understood that both RTE and the Department of
Foreign Affairs were aware of the exclusive
arrangement, scheduled for 11am today. However, when
RTE put Ms Coleman's name forward as interviewer, they
were told Mrs Bush would no longer be available.
The Irish Independent learned last night that the
White House told Ms Coleman that she interrupted the
president unnecessarily and was disrespectful.
She also received a call from the White House in which
she was admonished for her tone.
And it emerged last night that presidential staff
suggested to Ms Coleman as she went into the interview
that she ask him a question on the outfit that
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit.
Miriam Lord
Two more US marines died in Iraq over night. For what? Meanwhile, both Bill Clinton's book and Michael Moore's movie are breaking records and breaking chains all over America...There is an Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004...The poltical end is near for the Bush cabal, the "vast reich wing conspiracy" and the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader...
Joe Conason interviews Bill Clinton: Have the fiscal
policies of the Bush administration destroyed your
legacy?
No, but they've destroyed the surplus! [Laughs]. I
think that he returned to trickle-down economics
because that's what they believe in. They don't
believe it's important to keep the deficit down, keep
debt down, keep interest rates down. They spend money
on what they want to spend money on and cut taxes,
especially for upper income people. Though he has
reversed our policy, he can't destroy our legacy. Our
legacy is how many people got jobs, how many people
got homes, how many people got college aid -- how many
people were helped.
Nothing is permanent in politics, but they can't
change whether people were better off when you left
than when you started. The country needs to return to
an economic policy that's an updated version of the
one I followed ... with even more emphasis on a new
energy policy to create jobs and free us from foreign
oil and do our part to deal with the environmental
challenges we face ... What they've done is
undisciplined and shortsighted and wrong on the
economic front.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/25/clinton/index.html
The Salon Interview: Bill Clinton
The former president blasts the Bush-Cheney rush to war, explains why Gore lost in 2000 and tells how Kerry can win in 2004.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Joe Conason
June 25, 2004 | At several points in "My Life," Bill
Clinton chastises himself appropriately for the
reckless selfishness and dishonesty of his affair with
Monica Lewinsky. He writes that he was disgusted by
his own misconduct and appalled by the consequences to
his family, friends, his country and his reputation.
None of this should come as news to the media, which
has devoted ample attention to that episode and its
aftermath for the past six years.
Yet publication of his exhaustive memoir has been
treated as the occasion to renew that same old
obsession while matters of substance are neglected or
ignored. "Everything has changed" since Sept. 11, or
so the portentous slogan goes, but some things haven't
changed at all.
As might be expected, Clinton is less preoccupied with
the subject of sex than Oprah, Larry King, and Michiko
Kakutani. He is perfectly willing to address other
questions, including those for which he has no glib
reply.
On Thursday afternoon, he spoke with Salon about his
administration's "inexcusable" failure to intervene
militarily against the 1994 genocide, which cost
hundreds of thousands of lives, and about his own
responsibility for the rise of a "dangerous"
Republican hegemony in Washington. But he also had
remarkably harsh words for the Bush administration's
dubious claims about Iraq, the "broken pottery" left
by its unilateral foreign policy and the president's
curious nonchalance about the exposure of CIA agent
Valerie Plame. He was frank about why he thinks Al
Gore won but lost the 2000 campaign ("The NRA ... hurt
us bad") and what John Kerry has to do to win in
November.
For a man often accused of worrying too much and too
publicly about his legacy, the former president sounds
relaxed and confident. While he confesses to lapses of
wisdom and courage, he cannot quite conceal the sense
that almost every day, the extremism and incompetence
of the Bush administration make his controversial
tenure look better by contrast. After years of mostly
refraining from overt criticism of his successor,
Clinton evidently feels free to be more candid from
now on. If his book tour offers his political
adversaries a fresh opportunity to attack him, it also
provides him a national platform to speak his mind
about them.
"We were in better shape when I left office than we
are now," he said. He was talking about the number of
Americans who lack health insurance -- but the
unavoidable inference went much further.
Al Gore gave a speech in Washington Thursday about the
Bush administration's attempts to link Iraq and
al-Qaida. Do you agree with him that the
administration misled the country about those alleged
links?
The whole time I was there [in the White House], I
knew of no links. Now, I don't think you can say for
sure that there was never an al-Qaida member that was
inside Iraq, but in terms of them being operational
partners, I didn't know anything about that. I also
never had any doubt that Iraq was not behind 9/11,
because they didn't have the terrorist capacity to do
it.
I supported -- as the whole world did -- resuming the
weapons inspections inside Iraq, for a simple reason.
When any kind of tyranny is running out of steam -- as
Iraq seemed to be -- I was afraid if they still did
have any of those chemical or biological agents,
somebody might sell them or give them away, or they
might be stolen. But in terms of [Iraq and al-Qaida]
working together, I never saw any evidence of it. And
I have not seen any evidence since -- from what's been
in the press -- that supports that contention. And
apparently the 9/11 commission doesn't agree [with the
allegation that Iraq worked with al-Qaida] either.
Now I hear Vice President Cheney continuing to assert
that there is a connection, but there's a difference
between assertion and evidence. If they have some kind
of evidence, they can come forward with it, but I
haven't seen any yet.
The administration and its supporters have often cited
statements from you and your administration about
Saddam Hussein's regime to justify the decision to go
to war in Iraq. I have heard you say recently that the
invasion was too precipitous -- and that the president
should have waited until the inspections were
completed, at least. Do you believe the war was
justified?
Well, I believed at the time that it was far more
important to win a complete victory in Afghanistan, do
everything we could to try to find Osama bin Laden and
al-Qaida's leadership, and help Hamid Karzai be the
president of the whole country and not just Kabul. Now
it seems to be moving in the right direction anyway
because Karzai has proved to be a very able man and
because we beefed up our support a little bit and the
rest of the world came in a little bit. I thought at
the time that we should take care of our Afghan
obligations first. I thought it was curious -- given
who did 9/11 and what the big terrorist threat was --
that we were sending 150,000 troops to Iraq and had
only between 12,000 and 15,000 in Afghanistan.
But Paul Wolfowitz always had a theory that if they
got rid of Saddam Hussein they could build a democracy
in the Middle East that would shake up the other
authoritarian Arab regimes, and that would give them
greater leverage in making peace between the
Palestinians and the Israelis. The only legal
justification they had for going to war was Saddam
Hussein's failure to comply with the U.N. resolutions
[requiring his regime to destroy its illicit arsenal].
And I didn't see how we had triggered that by
substituting our judgment for that of [chief U.N.
weapons inspector] Hans Blix. If Blix had said this
guy won't cooperate, he's bad, and we ought to take
him out, then I would have favored military action.
But had that happened, then whether the Security
Council voted for it or not, we would have had many
more allies and far fewer enemies, and no one would
have thought we had a different agenda.
You've said that Prime Minister Tony Blair was caught
in a dilemma between our government's position on Iraq
and the European viewpoint, and that he understandably
tried to maximize his leverage with his decision to go
forward with President Bush ...
Remember that Blair first tried to pass another
[Security Council] resolution that the Bush
administration didn't want. He tried to get a
resolution through that would have extended the
inspection time by another four to six weeks. The
Chileans and the Mexicans in the end decided not to
vote for it because they thought the Russians would
veto it anyway ...
But did Blair make the right decision in the end?
I think he made the decision he thought was right. You
know, I'm not the British prime minister. He believed,
as I did, that there was at least a strong chance that
there were some chemical and biological stocks still
there. We didn't know how much we had destroyed in the
1998 bombing. He believed that having gone as far as
he did, to turn around and go back to the continental
European position would have undermined his ability
over the long run to maintain the transatlantic
alliance. I think that's what he was thinking -- and I
think it was a defensible position given the fact that
the Bush administration played such a hard hand and he
couldn't get anybody to vote for his U.N. resolution.
He had two bad alternatives ...
What I thought the evidence showed was apparently
different from what they thought, too. To me, the
evidence was more limited than what Vice President
Cheney said. There were unaccounted-for stocks of
chemical and biological agents; a few unaccounted-for
missiles that could be loaded with chemical and
biological agents; and some quite limited laboratory
capacity to do very preliminary work toward nuclear
weapons. That's what we knew. I never knew of any
yellowcake from Niger or any of that stuff.
My view was that it would be good if we could account
for all that. And if we had a corollary benefit of
installing a more representative, less tyrannical
government in Iraq, that would be a good thing. But I
thought we didn't want to start the doctrine of
preventive war there, because we had a lot of fish to
fry with bin Laden and al-Qaida and Afghanistan.
My view was somewhere, I guess, between where Al
Gore's was and where Bush and Blair were. I never
liked Saddam Hussein and I wasn't sure he didn't have
some of that chemical and biological weaponry left. So
I was left without a home for my policy when Hans Blix
wasn't allowed to finish his job. Blix was plainly an
honest and competent man who wasn't rolling over for
Saddam Hussein. He was tough on the Iraqis when they
didn't help him. He tried to totally play it straight.
Speaking of yellowcake, how would you have handled the
"outing" of a CIA agent such as Valerie Plame Wilson
by officials in your administration? Do you think that
Bush's response was adequate?
Well, I'm not sure what he did. I would have done my
best to find out who did it, fire them, and make sure
they had to live with the consequences ... I know Joe
Wilson. He was a career diplomat, a straight-up
professional guy who did a lot of valuable work for me
and for America in Africa. What happened to his wife
was unforgivable as well as illegal -- and potentially
dangerous, and damaging to our intelligence networks.
And it plainly came from someone who didn't like the
fact that Joe didn't give the accepted line [on Iraq].
So it's hard for me to believe they can't find out who
outed her. And I would have gone to extraordinary
lengths to find that out, and then taken the
appropriate steps.
In your book, you describe the American and allied
failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 as one of your
worst errors. How did you reach that decision to do
nothing while the genocide was going on there?
That's one of the most regrettable things about it.
It's not like we had a decision. I don't know that we
ever had a high-level meeting on it. At that time I
think the whole foreign policy apparatus, including
me, was geared to getting into Bosnia as quickly as
possible. We knew we were going to have a problem in
Haiti. We were still reeling from what had happened in
Somalia. And I think even though there were a lot of
indications that Rwanda was going to be quite bad, I'm
not sure anybody focused on the fact that 10 percent
of a country, 700,000 or 800,000 people, could be
killed in 90 days with machetes ...
If we'd moved right away, we might have been able to
save a couple of hundred thousand people. They still
could have killed a lot of people before we could have
deployed in acceptable numbers there. [Later] we went
into the camps and we kept a lot of people alive, both
safe from violence and also rehydrating kids ... We
saved tens of thousands of lives, but we could have
saved a couple of hundred thousand more if we'd moved
more quickly. We hadn't really developed a clear
doctrine of when we would go in and when we wouldn't.
There was a lot of sentiment against such intervention
in the Congress. And the worst thing about it was that
we didn't have a meeting with an options paper where
we said yes, no, or maybe. We didn't even do that. And
before we knew it, they were lying dead.
It was inexcusable. We didn't even seriously consider
it, and I feel terrible about it. It's very
interesting though: the only people who have never
excoriated me for it are the Rwandans. When I went
there and apologized to them, their response was,
"You're the only person that ever even said you were
sorry. There were other people who could have helped
us, too."
The Bush administration has sharply criticized the
deal you made with North Korea as a failure, because
it was revealed that they have begun to clandestinely
reprocess uranium and built at least a couple of
nuclear weapons. What is your response to that
criticism? How should the United States deal with
North Korea?
I disagree with that, and if you look at the press
reports from the past few days it seems that the Bush
administration is coming back to our policy again.
Let's get the facts out first. When I became
president, it became obvious that North Korea was
moving toward the capacity to build several nuclear
weapons a year ... I was determined not to let that
happen. We had a very tense set of negotiations with
North Korea, which got quite tense when they kicked
the U.N. inspectors out ... Eventually, we made a deal
after we told them that under no circumstances would
we allow them the capacity to make several nuclear
weapons a year. So the deal we made was that we, along
with the Japanese, South Koreans, and other interested
parties, would provide them with food and [energy aid]
if they would put all the nuclear fuel rods in a place
where they could be inspected. That agreement worked
and on its own terms was not violated. In 1998 we
reached an agreement where they agreed to stop testing
their long-range missiles. In 2000, we nearly reached
an agreement where they nearly agreed to stop
producing and selling those missiles.
After I left office, the Bush administration
discovered, and briefed me about it, that in 1998 the
North Koreans had started a much smaller program in a
lab with highly enriched uranium -- enough to produce
perhaps a weapon or two. Does that mean my policy was
a failure? No, because if we hadn't stopped their
reactor program [in 1994], they could have been
producing not one or two nuclear weapons but maybe six
to 10 a year. Colin Powell said they would have had
dozens of weapons by this time, and the State
Department in the Bush administration has supported
our Korea policy.
What should be done now? North Korea wants three
things. They don't want to disappear. They want to eat
and stay warm, and they can't grow food or afford
power. And they want to be treated as an important
country that deals with the U.S. and other countries
in their region. They want some sort of official
recognition from us.
They're not going to bomb South Korea or Japan. The
danger is that a country that builds world-class bombs
but can't feed itself or stay warm will sell them ...
What we need to try to do is to get an agreement, with
the Chinese, the Russians, the Japanese and the South
Koreans, where they finally end all those nuclear and
missile programs, and we arrange for them to get food
and energy. And we continue to support the
rapprochement between North and South Korea. Now it
looks to me as if the Bush administration is in the
right place and moving in the right direction.
There could hardly be a greater contrast between your
view of how to deal with the world and our allies, and
the much more unilateral approach of this White House.
As you travel around the world, how do you assess the
reaction to this change? Do you feel the Bush
administration has undone the goodwill and prestige
that grew from a more open, multilateral policy?
There's no question that we have suffered some loss,
if not of prestige then at least of support in the
world by following a more unilateral course. But
that's not very important to [the Bush White House],
because they saw 9/11 as an opportunity to move the
country to the right and mold the world the way they
thought it ought to be molded.
That's why they morphed the attack by al-Qaida into
the war on Iraq, which is something they wanted to do
beforehand. Paul Wolfowitz tried to get me to depose
Saddam ... They see the world very differently. I
believe we ought to be trying to build more and more
institutional cooperation in the world, while
reserving the right to act alone when we have to. They
have believed, at least for the first three and a half
years, that they should act alone whenever they can,
using the springboard of what happened on 9/11 -- and
cooperate when they have to. In the end it may bring
us to the same place. In Iraq they've gone to the U.N.
to get a resolution. But in the meanwhile we're
leaving a lot of broken pottery along the way ...
That's one of the things that ought to be debated
thoroughly in this election.
Senator Kerry got in trouble earlier this year for
suggesting that leaders around the world are hoping he
will be elected in November. Have you picked up that
sense abroad?
I think that a lot of countries would like to see us
go back to a more cooperative, multilateral approach
like I followed, even though there were times when
they didn't agree with me. Now, I signed every
international agreement except the landmines treaty,
because I thought that had two parts that were
malicious and would put our soldiers at risk. And I
was doing more to destroy landmines than anybody who
signed the treaty.
There will always be times when we are at odds with
the rest of the world. But what they want to know is
that we basically favor cooperation and that we care
what happens to them. When they don't feel that way,
they hope for a change in policy. So I think that
[what Kerry said] is accurate. John got in trouble
partly because nobody can be "outed" admitting that.
He would have been better off not saying it, and
letting other people say it. None of these people
could afford to admit that and make their relations
with America even more tenuous.
Iraq was the last straw. They also didn't support the
International Criminal Court, although today I see
they've changed their policy on that ... They got out
of the climate-change agreement, which hurt America's
prestige enormously. They got out of the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty. They don't want to strengthen the
Biological Weapons Convention. So Iraq has to be seen
in the larger context.
Many critics, including some Democrats, believe that
your presidency damaged the Democratic Party by
bringing the party to its present diminished state,
where the Republicans control the White House, both
houses of Congress, many state houses and the Supreme
Court. How do you respond?
I talk about this a lot in my book. I did play a role
in losing the Congress in '94. Part of it was
inevitable. We had to clean up their fiscal mess and
we lost some votes because we did it. The Republicans
portrayed our budget as nothing but a tax increase and
we didn't effectively counter that ... We should never
have lost the White House and we didn't -- we just
didn't win by enough to stay out of the Supreme Court.
When I left office, about 65 percent of the American
people approved of what the administration had done,
and we should have won the White House on that.
I feel terrible about that, because I think it's very
dangerous for the country to have a party as far right
as the Washington Republican Party is, in control of
the White House and the Congress, packing the courts
with all of these ultraconservative people. It came
out today that one of the people who wrote these
questionable legal opinions about the treatment of
people in Iraq is now a Court of Appeals judge.
Whatever they find out about what he did, he's now got
a lifetime job.
Did Al Gore make an error in 2000 by seeking to put
some distance between himself and his campaign for the
presidency, and you and your administration?
In the beginning, I supported his going out on his own
with Joe Lieberman, because every vice president has
the same problem in running directly for the
presidency. People don't give the vice president
credit for the good things that happen in the
administration, as much as they should. I tried to
solve that by giving Al lots of credit all through the
eight years, but [voters] don't absorb that ... I
thought Gore ought to be independent ...
But I thought it was not a good idea to not embrace
the record more explicitly and say we ought to keep
the change going in the right direction. Remember in
Los Angeles, he said the issue was the people versus
the powerful, which it certainly was. Every powerful
right-wing interest group in the country was behind
Bush. But that didn't send a clear signal that it was
necessary to vote for Gore to keep the prosperity
going. At the end of the election, when Gore came back
to that theme, about eight days before Election Day,
he made up points in a hurry and actually won the
election by about 500,000 votes ... He probably would
have won by enough to stay out of the Supreme Court if
that had been the theme from August straight through
November ... I campaigned in California and Arkansas,
and those were the states where we beat the three
incumbent Republicans that lost in the House.
I believe Al lost Arkansas because of the National
Rifle Association ... and maybe Missouri, and maybe
Tennessee, and maybe New Hampshire (in addition to the
Nader vote) ... I don't think the NRA got near as much
credit as they deserve for Bush's election. They hurt
us bad.
If you were John Kerry, what would you do to close the
deal with voters this year? They seem to be wavering
in their support of President Bush, to say the least,
but not yet fully embracing Senator Kerry.
They don't know Kerry yet. That's why Bush is running
all these ads, trying to fill in the blanks in a
negative way, saying Kerry is not a positive figure,
he's focused on the past, and all that. What he needs
to do is keep doing what has been doing, saying what
he thinks and what he would do. To win he needs to
have a very good convention in Boston, and then acquit
himself well in the debates, and then maximize the
time he has following the convention.
Right now he's got a real problem because he got
nominated, in effect, so early that even the Democrats
in states that weren't involved in the nominating
process didn't know him all that well. The
independents and the Republicans who would like to
vote for somebody other than Bush didn't have much
information about him. It's just the downside of the
early nomination, although we got more out of that
than we lost because we're united and raising lots of
money for him on the Internet and doing a lot of good
things. He just has to keep doing what he believes is
right and keep carrying on. I think he's doing it very
well ... The chances are more than 50-50 that he's
going to win this election.
Have the fiscal policies of the Bush administration
destroyed your legacy?
No, but they've destroyed the surplus! [Laughs]. I
think that he returned to trickle-down economics
because that's what they believe in. They don't
believe it's important to keep the deficit down, keep
debt down, keep interest rates down. They spend money
on what they want to spend money on and cut taxes,
especially for upper income people. Though he has
reversed our policy, he can't destroy our legacy. Our
legacy is how many people got jobs, how many people
got homes, how many people got college aid -- how many
people were helped.
Nothing is permanent in politics, but they can't
change whether people were better off when you left
than when you started. The country needs to return to
an economic policy that's an updated version of the
one I followed ... with even more emphasis on a new
energy policy to create jobs and free us from foreign
oil and do our part to deal with the environmental
challenges we face ... What they've done is
undisciplined and shortsighted and wrong on the
economic front.
If you had another chance, how would you change your
approach to achieving universal healthcare? Although
some incremental changes were made, we're still a long
way from the goal you set in 1992.
Well, we were in better shape when I left office than
we are now. We had a decline in the number of people
without insurance. We passed the Children's Health
Insurance Program, which covered about 5 million kids
and was the biggest expansion in healthcare since
Medicare. We needed a simpler plan ... When Senator
Dole decided to filibuster any healthcare plan we
should have stopped and moved on to welfare reform,
and then come back after the [1994] election ... .If
you're not going to have an employer mandate, then
probably the only way to do it is some version of what
Rep. Rahm Emanuel [D-Ill.] is now suggesting -- which
is to allow all the uninsured people to buy into the
Federal Employee Health Benefit Program. That's a
private plan with a lot of different options and
costs. And then subsidize the purchases for small
businesses and those who can't afford it. That's the
simplest way to do it, with low administrative costs.
You promoted regional and global trade agreements --
some would say at the expense of labor and
environmental standards. Is there a way that
globalization can enhance rather than diminish those
standards in both the developing and the developed
world?
Sure. We don't have enough votes in Congress to do it
right now. When they had the World Trade Organization
meetings in Seattle, I went out there and said the
demonstrators in the street are wrong in saying that
trade is making the world poorer but they're right in
saying that you can't have a trade-only policy and
build the kind of world you want. I went to the World
Economic Forum in Davos and said the same thing to the
WTO and the International Labor Organization ...
They're going to have to open the process of the WTO
up, involve the nongovernmental organizations more,
and integrate the labor and environmental concerns
into their multilateral deliberations ...
We need to do more to make sure that the global
economy doesn't just make the rich richer and the poor
poorer. The problem is that without labor and
environmental agreements, and without significant new
investments in health, education and development, you
can lift a lot of people out of poverty with trade --
but all the population growth is occurring in the
poorest countries, so there will still be more poor
people every year. You cannot have a global economy
without some sort of global social compact.
People sometimes mention possible future jobs for you,
such as head of the World Bank or secretary-general of
the U.N. when Kofi Annan leaves. What do you plan to
do next?
I can't imagine that [those jobs] would ever be a
serious option. I haven't thought about it. What I
plan to do now is complete the book tour, do whatever
I can to help Senator Kerry, and then as quickly as
possible get back to work on my foundation.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Joe Conason writes a twice weekly column for Salon. He
also writes a weekly column for the New York Observer.
His new book, "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda
Machine and How It Distorts the Truth," is now
available. Join Joe Conason along with Ann Richards,
David Talbot and others on the Salon Cruise
Sound Off
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Here is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence you could offer against the shameful betrayal of everything good being perpetrated by the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader...Appointments to the federal judiciary, especially likely Supreme Court appointments within the next few years, is, as it was in 2000, reason enough to reject the candidacy of the shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Ralph-Nader and to call it what it is...yes...a shameful betrayal of all that is good...
John Nichols, The Nation: In one of the most
significant setbacks for the Bush Administration's
campaign to rewrite regulations to favor big business,
the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in
Philadelphia rejected the rationale the FCC used to
ease media ownership limits and ordered the commission
to revisit the issue with an eye toward protecting,
rather than undermining, the public interest in
diverse ownership or local and national media.
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0625-05.htm
Published on Friday, June 25, 2004 by The Nation
Big Blow to Big Media
by John Nichols
More than a year after the Federal Communications
Commission narrowly endorsed a radical rewrite of
media ownership laws in a manner that would have
strengthened the hand of media conglomerates, a US
appeals court has determined that the FCC went too
far.
In one of the most significant setbacks for the Bush
Administration's campaign to rewrite regulations to
favor big business, the US Court of Appeals for the
Third Circuit in Philadelphia rejected the rationale
the FCC used to ease media ownership limits and
ordered the commission to revisit the issue with an
eye toward protecting, rather than undermining, the
public interest in diverse ownership or local and
national media.
The appeals court panel, which last year stayed
implementation of the rule changes, complained that
the FCC had relied on flawed reasoning and reached
contradictory conclusions to justify rule changes that
would have allowed the consolidation of media
ownership in local markets across the country. One of
the FCC approved rule changes would have allowed a
single corporation to own the daily newspaper, as many
as eight radio stations and as many as three
television stations in the same community.
"The court ruling affirmed what many of us have been
saying for a long time," explained US Representative
Maurice Hinchey, D-New York, one of the most ardent
Congressional critics of the rule changes. "Chairman
Powell's gift to media conglomerates was made without
basis in legitimate research. He cannot show that the
commission's decision was made in the public's best
interest. On the contrary, it threatens the ability of
the public to have its voice heard and to have access
to other diverse voices."
The court's 2-1 ruling requires the FCC to come up
with a research-based argument that some public good
will be served by allowing the development of a
one-size-fits-all media. That's going to be hard to
do, as the court rejected the industry-friendly
methodology the commission had used to justify the
rule changes. At the least, a new push to relax the
rules would take months, and perhaps years, to
complete.
And time may not be on the side of Powell or his
big-media allies.
With the presidential election approaching, the
appeals court decision would seem to assure that media
ownership regulations will not be loosened before this
fall's presidential vote. That raises the prospect
that big media's long campaign to relax the regulation
of ownership limits on the television, radio and
newspaper industries could be thwarted for years to
come. If President Bush, a prime proponent of the rule
changes, is defeated, Democrat John Kerry would be in
a position to create an FCC majority that supports
diversity in media ownership.
The commission is currently split 3-2, with three
Republicans supporting special-interest demands for
relaxation of ownership rules and two Democrats siding
with public-interest groups that oppose the lifting of
limits on media monopoly. If elected, Kerry could
select a Democrat to replace Powell as chairman and,
while past Democratic Presidents have often made bad
appointments to the FCC, unions that are close to
Kerry have been pressuring him to pick a new member
who would side with Democrats Michael Copps and
Jonathan Adelstein.
"This is a major victory in preventing a handful of
huge corporations from controlling what the American
people see, hear and read," declared US Representative
Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, a leading Congressional
advocate for media reform. "It also vindicates the
millions of Americans from across the political
spectrum who spoke out and contacted the FCC on this
issue. The law unequivocally stands with the public
values of localism, diversity and competition in the
media, and that's what the court maintained."
Before the FCC voted by a 3-2 margin on June 2, 2003,
to endorse the rule changes, groups ranging from
Common Cause and MoveOn.org to the National Rifle
Association and the Traditional Values Coalition
raised concerns about the determination of FCC chair
Michael Powell and his two Republican allies on the
commission to implement rule changes that would make
it dramatically easier for a handful of large media
corporations to control the vast majority of print and
broadcast communications at the local and national
levels. Groups representing print and broadcast
journalists, including the Newspaper Guild, the
National Association of Black Journalists and the
National Association of Hispanic Journalists, were
also outspoken in their criticism of the proposed rule
changes.
After the commission voted for them, public outcry led
to votes in the US House and Senate for different
measures to override some or all of the FCC decisions
regarding the rules. But pressure from the Bush
Administration, and moves by House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay (R-Texas) to block necessary votes, have so far
prevented the reconciliation of the House and Senate
stances.
By blocking Congressional action that could resolve
the issue, Bush and DeLay have placed themselves in
direct opposition to clearly expressed public
sentiments.
More than two million Americans have contacted the FCC
and members of Congress demanding retention of limits
on media monopoly at the local level and controls on
consolidation of broadcast media ownership nationally.
And they now have the courts on their side.
The court challenge to the FCC ruling, which was
brought by the Prometheus Radio Project in
Philadelphia, was considered a long shot initially, as
the courts have historically been slow to intervene in
such matters. But with strong support from the Media
Access Project, lawyers for the Prometheus Radio
Project and allied media-reform groups were able to
convince the judges in Philadelphia that the FCC had
endorsed rule changes that posed a genuine threat to
localism, diversity and competition--which the FCC is
supposed to protect.
"This outstanding decision comes at a time when
unprecedented debate on the role of media outlets in
Americans' lives is taking place," said Prometheus
Program Director Hannah Sassaman. "Thousands of
Americans are telling the Commission and everyone who
will listen that consolidation is bad for their
communities and families. It is of paramount
importance that the FCC use that testimony to inform
new ownership rules that will preserve and protect
America's diverse, local voices."
Will that happen? Congressional critics of the FCC
aren't placing much faith in the commission--at least
as it is currently composed.
That's why Sanders, Hinchey, US Senator Byron Dorgan
(D-North Dakota) and a bipartisan coalition of
media-reformers in both houses of Congress continue to
promote legislation that would permanently prevent the
FCC from writing rules that favor big media. "The
court decision is step one," says Sanders. "The
American people, however, will not be satisfied until
Congress has totally ended the very dangerous idea of
allowing more media consolidation. Now, it is time to
become proactive and to fight for legislation which
will allow for more localism, more diversity of
opinion and more competition in the media."
John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent,
has covered progressive politics and activism in the
United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is
currently the editor of the editorial page of Madison,
Wisconsin's Capital Times. Nichols is the author of
two books: It's the Media, Stupid and Jews for
Buchanan.
Copyright © 2004 The Nation
###
The Nazis burned books, the Bush Cabal burns treaties, perhaps most notably the Kyoto Accords and the ABM Treaty...The central issue of the national referendum on the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident is SECURITY: National Security, Economic Security *and* Environmental Security...Are you safer today than you were four years ago? Personally? Economically? Environmentally? NOTE to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta): Run on Iraq AND 9/11, run on job loss, Medifraud AND the Deficit, and yes, run on the prostitution of the EPA AND global warming. Don't worry, John, just do it. The US Electorate is way out front on these issues.
U.S. Newswire: Eighty-one percent of Americans polled said that they support the targets of the legislation, commonly known as the McCain-Lieberman legislation or the Climate Stewardship Act, which calls for large companies to reduce their emissions to year 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. When told it has been estimated that this would increase costs to the average American household by about $15 a month, 67 percent still said they would support it. If a candidate would support the legislation, 52 percent said this would increase their likelihood of voting for him or her, while just 14 percent said that it would decrease the likelihood (no effect: 32 percent)...
Eighty-two percent favored requiring car manufacturers to meet higher fuel efficiency standards. When asked next What if that meant it would cost more to own or lease a car? 63 percent still said they would favor higher fuel efficiency standards. Seventy-one percent favored that by 2010, half of all new cars produced are hybrid-electric or some other type that is very fuel-efficient.
Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=119-06252004
Eight in 10 Support McCain-Lieberman Climate Change Legislation; Majority Willing to Accept Increased Costs of $15 a month
6/25/2004 12:19:00 PM
To: National Desk
Contact: Steven Kull of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, 202-232-7500 WASHINGTON, June 25 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Eighty-one percent of Americans polled said that they support the targets of the legislation, commonly known as the McCain-Lieberman legislation or the Climate Stewardship Act, which calls for large companies to reduce their emissions to year 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. When told it has been estimated that this would increase costs to the average American household by about $15 a month, 67 percent still said they would support it. If a candidate would support the legislation, 52 percent said this would increase their likelihood of voting for him or her, while just 14 percent said that it would decrease the likelihood (no effect: 32 percent). These are some of the findings of a new PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll of 753 Americans nationwide conducted June 8-14 (margin of error plus or minus 3.6 percent). Other highlights include:
A 62 percent majority opposes the idea, included in the McCain-Lieberman legislation, of permitting companies to trade greenhouse gas emission allowances (known as cap and trade). But a modest majority did find the arguments in support of the idea convincing, suggesting opposition is not deep-seated.
Seventy-five percent supported providing tax incentives to utility companies to encourage them to sell environmentally clean energy, and 80 percent favored giving cash incentives like tax credits and rebates to individual households that upgrade to more energy-efficient appliances.
Eighty-two percent favored requiring car manufacturers to meet higher fuel efficiency standards. When asked next What if that meant it would cost more to own or lease a car? 63 percent still said they would favor higher fuel efficiency standards. Seventy-one percent favored that by 2010, half of all new cars produced are hybrid-electric or some other type that is very fuel-efficient.
Americans overestimate how much their elected representatives support the Kyoto Treaty. Two-thirds (64 percent) said they would want their member of Congress to support the Kyoto Treaty. Fifty-eight percent assume that their member of Congress would vote for Kyoto, 46 percent assume that the majority of Congress would vote for it, and only 48 percent are aware President Bush does not favor it.
To view the full analysis/press release and questionnaire, see http://www.pipa.org
http://www.usnewswire.com/
-0-
/© 2004 U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/
The logical conclusion of the complaint filed against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, of course, is that Faux News should also be shut down after July 30th...Yes, it's the Media, Stupid...
Alexander Bolton, The Hill: Michael Moore may be prevented from advertising his controversial new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” on television or radio after July 30 if the Federal Election Commission (FEC) today accepts the legal advice of its general counsel.
At the same time, a Republican-allied 527 soft-money group is preparing to file a complaint against Moore’s film with the FEC for violating campaign-finance law.
In a draft advisory opinion placed on the FEC’s agenda for today’s meeting, the agency’s general counsel states that political documentary filmmakers may not air television or radio ads referring to federal candidates within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election.
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.thehill.com/news/062404/moore.aspx
Fahrenheit 9/11’ ban? Ads for Moore’s movie could be stopped on July 30
By Alexander Bolton
Michael Moore may be prevented from advertising his controversial new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” on television or radio after July 30 if the Federal Election Commission (FEC) today accepts the legal advice of its general counsel.
At the same time, a Republican-allied 527 soft-money group is preparing to file a complaint against Moore’s film with the FEC for violating campaign-finance law.
In a draft advisory opinion placed on the FEC’s agenda for today’s meeting, the agency’s general counsel states that political documentary filmmakers may not air television or radio ads referring to federal candidates within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election.
steve finn/Getty images
Michael Moore
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The opinion is generated under the new McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which prohibits corporate-funded ads that identify a federal candidate before a primary or general election.
The proscription is broadly defined. Section 100.29 of the federal election regulations defines restricted corporate-funded ads as those that identify a candidate by his “name, nickname, photograph or drawing” or make it “otherwise apparent through an unambiguous reference.”
Should the six members of the FEC vote to approve the counsel’s opinion, it could put a serious crimp on Moore’s promotion efforts. The flavor of the movie was encapsulated by a recent review in The Boston Globe as “the case against George W. Bush, a fat compendium of previously reported crimes, errors, sins, and grievances delivered in the director’s patented tone of vaudevillian social outrage.”
The FEC ruling may also affect promotion of a slew of other upcoming political documentaries and films, such as “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,” which opens in August, “The Corporation,” about democratic institutions being subsumed by the corporate agenda, or “Silver City,” a recently finished film by John Sayles that criticizes the Bush administration.
Another film, “The Hunting of the President,” which investigates whether Bill Clinton was the victim of a vast conspiracy, could be subject to regulations if it mentions Bush or members of Congress in its ads.
Since the FEC considers the Republican presidential convention scheduled to begin Aug. 30 a national political primary in which Bush is a candidate, Moore and other politically oriented filmmakers could not air any ad mentioning Bush after July 30.
That could make advertising for the film after July difficult since it is all about the Bush administration and what Moore regards as its mishandling of the war on terrorism and the decision to invade Iraq.
After the convention, ads for political films that mention Bush or any other federal candidate would be subject to the restrictions on all corporate communications within 60 days of the Nov. 2 general election.
“Fahrenheit 9/11” opens nationally tomorrow.
The film’s distributor, Lions Gate Films, an incorporated organization, would almost certainly pay for its broadcast promotions.
David Bossie, the president of Citizens United, plans to allege that “Fahrenheit 9/11” violates federal election law, arguing that “Moore has publicly indicated his goal is to impact this election season.”
Bossie had planned to file a complaint with the FEC yesterday but postponed action because his lawyers want to review it at the last minute, said Summer Stitz, a spokeswoman for Bossie’s group.
“I don’t think much of Michael Moore or his two-hour political advertisement — that’s all it is,” Bossie said. “He uses all of these words to make it look like he makes documentaries, but it’s the furthest thing from the truth. Documentaries tend to be fact-based.”
Sarah Greenberg, a spokeswoman for Lions Gate Films who is serving as Moore’s spokeswoman, did not return a call for comment.
The FEC counsel’s draft advisory opinion responded to a request for guidance from David Hardy, a documentary film producer with the Bill of Rights Educational Foundation. Hardy asked whether he could air broadcast ads that refer to congressional officeholders who appear in his documentary.
At issue in the FEC’s opinion is whether documentary films qualify for a “media exemption,” which allows members of the press to discuss political candidates freely in the days before an election.
In its opinion, the general counsel wrote, “In McConnell vs. FEC … (2003) the [Supreme] Court described the media exemption as ‘narrow’ and drew a distinction between ‘corporations that are part of the media industry’ as opposed to ‘other corporations that are not involved in the regular business of imparting news to the public.’”
“The radio and television commercials that you describe in your request would be electioneering communications,” the counsel concluded. “The proposed commercials would refer to at least one presidential candidate. … They would also be publicly distributed because you intend to pay a radio station and perhaps a television station to air or broadcast your commercials. … Finally, they would reach 50,000 people within 30 days of a national nominating convention and or the general election.”
However, one commissioner, Michael Toner, has a different view of what restrictions may be placed on political films.
“I think there’s evidence that when Congress created the press exemption they intended for it to cover media in all its forms,” said Toner. “If a documentary produced by an independent company would be subject to restriction or, equally important, if efforts to promote the documentary would be subject to restriction, I think that is very problematic.”
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There is an Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004.
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: The other dagger Moore put into me came during his montage of the media coverage of the war. Journalist after journalist is shown rhapsodizing Bush, his administration and the war. Each and every one of them carried forth that which we now know to be bald-faced lies: That Iraq had WMDs, that Iraq was a threat, that we had to go, and that everything is fine. It was a slideshow of the nonsense Americans have been spoon-fed for far too long.
If you doubt this, Sidney Blumenthal's aggressive and effective actual journalism, as found in his most recent report titled 'Reality is Unraveling for Bush,' should help you along. "Most of the media was on the bandwagon or intimidated," writes Blumenthal. "Cheney himself called the president of the corporation that owned one of the networks to complain about an errant commentator. Political aides directed by Karl Rove ceaselessly called editors and producers with veiled threats about access that was not granted in any case. The press would not bite the hand that would not feed it."
With a single stroke, Michael Moore has undone three years of poor, slanted, biased, factually bereft, compromised television journalism. This, in the end, is the final greatness of 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' Not only will Americans get a sense of the depth of the deception they have endured, but 'journalists' all across the country will be forced to endure the humiliation they so richly deserve.
I was privileged to see this film in the company of three groups - Military Families Speak Out, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Veterans for Peace - which have stood against this disastrous war from day one. Many in the theater had family in Iraq, or had lost family in Iraq, or had lost family on 9/11 and seen their beloved dead used as an excuse for unwarranted war, and there was not a dry eye in the house.
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/0625041.shtml
Thank You, Michael Moore
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 25 June 2004
"The light at the end of the tunnel could be the bulb in a film projector."
- Jeanette Castillo
Screens in Bartlett, Chattanooga, Jackson, Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee will be showing it. Screens in Layton and West Jordan, Utah will be showing it. If you find yourself in Leawood, Merriam, Shawnee or Wichita, Kansas, you can see it. The same goes for Centerville, Fairfax and Abington, Virginia. If you happen to be in Akron, Bexley, Dublin or Elyria, Ohio, you're all set. Hoover, Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama will not be left out.
Laramie, Wyoming? It's there. Bozeman, Montana? Indeed. Should you call home Grand Island, Lincoln or Omaha, Nebraska, you have not been forgotten. The largest mall in the country, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, will have it in its theater. If you are a soldier at Camp Lejune or Fort Bragg, about to be shipped to Iraq, you can see it in nearby Fayetteville, North Carolina.
These towns, large and small, along with towns large and small from sea to shining sea and straight through the American heartland, will begin screening Michael Moore's documentary, 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' beginning at 12:01a.m. Friday morning, the 25th of June, 2004. For the majority of people who will see this movie, in those towns large and small, the experience will be nothing short of a mind-bomb.
The Who once sang about how the hypnotized never lie, but as we have seen, people hypnotized by television and deliberately enforced fear can certainly support a war, and a President, which are fundamentally at odds with basic American decency. In fact, people hypnotized by television and deliberately enforced fear will feed themselves into the meat grinder with "God Bless America" on their lips.
Michael Moore's film will snap that hypnosis, but good. Those Americans who believed what their President told them because they saw it on the TV will, after less than two hours in their local theater, look at both their television and their President with doubt and loathing when they walk from the darkness into the bright light of day. There are millions of Americans who believed what they were told - about 9/11, about Iraq, about George W. Bush himself - who will come into that bright light with the realization that they have been lied to.
Speaking personally, none of the data in this film surprised me. Having spent every day of the last three years working to expose as many Americans as possible to the truth of the man they call President, Mr. Moore was unlikely to explode any shells across my bow. The connections between Bush, the Saudis, the Carlyle Group and the 9/11 attacks were there. The connections between Cheney and Halliburton were there. The connections between Enron, Unocal, natural gas pipelines, the war in Afghanistan and a little-known country called Turkmenistan were there. I enjoyed the fact that Moore showed off unredacted copies of Bush's military service record, allowing us to see the parts of those documents which had been blacked out. I found no fact, no assertion in this film to question or doubt. I have done my homework, and as was made painfully clear, Michael Moore did his.
Most Americans don't know about this stuff, and seeing it fully documented and meticulously researched on the big screen will be, to say the least, revelatory. Yes, Virginia, there are billions of dollars to be made off this Iraq war for Bush's friends. The second door on the left is the recruiting office. Sign on the line that is dotted, and be the first kid on your block to die for the benefit of Carlyle's stock options. Be sure to save your pennies beforehand, however, because the Army will dock your pay for the days you are dead. It's policy, you see.
Mr. Moore put two daggers into me with this film, the first of which had to do with American soldiers. Trooper after trooper spoke frankly for Moore's camera, condemning both the war and the people who thrust them into it. Several scenes graphically explained what happens to a soldier's body when it is caught in an explosion. The result is ruinous, and the cries of the wounded and the dying will ring in my ears forever.
The most wrenching scenes in the film center around a woman named Lila, who loves her country, loves her flag, and above all loves her children whom she actively persuaded to join the armed services. We learn that Lila has a son in Iraq, and because of that, she despises those protesting the invasion. We find out later that her son was killed in Karbala on April 2nd, when his Blackhawk helicopter was shot down. We watch her read her son's last letter home, in which he rages against Bush and the war. We last see Lila standing at the gates of the White House, tears boiling from her eyes, as she discovers her true enemy, the one who took her baby from her.
The other dagger Moore put into me came during his montage of the media coverage of the war. Journalist after journalist is shown rhapsodizing Bush, his administration and the war. Each and every one of them carried forth that which we now know to be bald-faced lies: That Iraq had WMDs, that Iraq was a threat, that we had to go, and that everything is fine. It was a slideshow of the nonsense Americans have been spoon-fed for far too long.
If you doubt this, Sidney Blumenthal's aggressive and effective actual journalism, as found in his most recent report titled 'Reality is Unraveling for Bush,' should help you along. "Most of the media was on the bandwagon or intimidated," writes Blumenthal. "Cheney himself called the president of the corporation that owned one of the networks to complain about an errant commentator. Political aides directed by Karl Rove ceaselessly called editors and producers with veiled threats about access that was not granted in any case. The press would not bite the hand that would not feed it."
With a single stroke, Michael Moore has undone three years of poor, slanted, biased, factually bereft, compromised television journalism. This, in the end, is the final greatness of 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' Not only will Americans get a sense of the depth of the deception they have endured, but 'journalists' all across the country will be forced to endure the humiliation they so richly deserve.
I was privileged to see this film in the company of three groups - Military Families Speak Out, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Veterans for Peace - which have stood against this disastrous war from day one. Many in the theater had family in Iraq, or had lost family in Iraq, or had lost family on 9/11 and seen their beloved dead used as an excuse for unwarranted war, and there was not a dry eye in the house.
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is not a victory for anyone. We the People should have known better, We the People should have been given the facts before sending 851 of our children to die. We the People have been betrayed, by our leaders and by a media that profited, and profits still, from the daily sale of lies. This film drove that horrid fact home with a mallet, and it hurt.
I was reminded, as I filed out with this company of heroes, of a portion of Shakespeare's rendition of Henry's speech before Agincourt:
He that outlives this day and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Many of us were not hypnotized. Millions of us took to the streets in this country and around the world, to try and stop this madness before it was unleashed. The people in that theater with me had done this, had never stopped doing this, though their President and their media named them traitor. They were right. They were right. They were right.
Michael Moore has unleashed a wolf within Mr. Bush's fences. There is no getting around it. Perhaps, now that it is far too late, we as a nation will wake up. On the day of that awakening, those of us who never stopped standing, never stopped marching, learned to live without sleep, learned to live in a nation that scorned truth for televised fantasy, those patriots I was with tonight in that theater can pause for breath. We can sit upon the grass on a bright day, strip our sleeves, and show our scars.
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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
It's the Media, Stupid.
Michael Moore, Craig Unger, www.michealmoore.com: In the June 28, 2004 issue of Newsweek Magazine, Newsweek writer Michael Isikoff makes completely false and misleading statements about facts and issues contained in Fahrenheit 9/11. Isikoff has also gone on television shows repeating the charges...
It would be one thing if Isikoff had simply made an honest error; but that clearly is not the case. When he called me, I specifically told Isikoff that the evacuation process involved brief interviews of the bin Ladens which fell far short of the kind of intense criminal investigation that should have gotten underway after the murder of nearly 3,000 people. The worst crime in American history had just taken place two days earlier, and the FBI did not even bother to check the terror watch lists. Isikoff omitted all that. Instead, he put words in my mouth that are simply not in the movie. <
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US mainstream news media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/f911facts/isikoff.php
June 23rd, 2004
Michael Isikoff and Newsweek Magazine Deceive the Public About Fahrenheit 9/11
In the June 28, 2004 issue of Newsweek Magazine, Newsweek writer Michael Isikoff makes completely false and misleading statements about facts and issues contained in Fahrenheit 9/11. Isikoff has also gone on television shows repeating the charges.
Here are some of the falsehoods he is telling, and the truth:
Saudi Flights: Isikoff writes that "The movie claims that in the days after 9/11, when airspace was shut down, the White House approved special charter flights so that prominent Saudis - including members of the bin Laden family - could leave the country. Author Craig Unger appears, claiming that bin Laden family members were never interviewed by the FBI. Not true, according to a recent report from the 9/11 panel."
Isikoff's account of the movie is flatly untrue.
What the movie says is this: "It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis. At least six private jets and nearly two dozen commercial planes carried the Saudis and the bin Ladens out of the U.S. after September 13th. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country."
These facts are based entirely on the findings contained in the 9/11 commission draft report, which states, "After the airspace reopened, six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin." National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Threats and Responses in 2001, Staff Statement No. 10, The Saudi Flights, p. 12;
Isikoff claims that Fahrenheit 9/11 says that these flights out of the country took place when commercial airplanes were still grounded. The film does not say this anywhere. The film states clearly that these flights left after September 13 (the day the FAA began to slowly lift the ban on air traffic).
Moreover, in an interview with author Craig Unger, the film makes reference to the fact that these individuals were briefly interviewed before they were allowed to leave. Here is how Unger put it in a Letter to the Editor to Newsweek today (June 22, 2004):
To the Editors:
In "Under the Hot Lights," Michael Isikoff attacks Fahrenheit 9/11 by asserting that "Craig Unger appears, claiming that bin Laden family members were never interviewed by the FBI." The article then goes on to say that this assertion is false.
Unfortunately for Isikoff, I make no such statement in the movie. I do argue -- accurately -- that the bin Ladens and other Saudis were whisked out of the country without being subjected to a serious investigation. But the sequence to which Isikoff refers ends with director Michael Moore summing up my account of the bin Laden evacuation by saying, "So a little interview, check the passport, what else?" "Nothing," I respond.
It would be one thing if Isikoff had simply made an honest error; but that clearly is not the case. When he called me, I specifically told Isikoff that the evacuation process involved brief interviews of the bin Ladens which fell far short of the kind of intense criminal investigation that should have gotten underway after the murder of nearly 3,000 people. The worst crime in American history had just taken place two days earlier, and the FBI did not even bother to check the terror watch lists. Isikoff omitted all that. Instead, he put words in my mouth that are simply not in the movie.
Isikoff also wrongly asserts that the Saudi "flights didn't begin until September 14 -- after airspace reopened." In fact, as I reported in House of Bush, House of Saud, the first flight took place on September 13, when restrictions on private planes were still in place. According to the St. Petersburg Times, that flight has since been corroborated by authorities at Tampa International Airport. Isikoff knew all this. I told him. I even gave him the names of two men who were on that flight and told him how to get in touch with them. But Isikoff left all that out as well -- as he did other information that did not suit his agenda. In dismissing the Bush-Saudi ties, Isikoff even omits the fact that more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts went from the House of Saud to companies in which the Bushes and Cheney have been key figures -- all of which is itemized in my book. Isikoff begins his article by asking, "Can Michael Moore be believed?" The real question should be whether Michael Isikoff can be believed. Clearly, the answer is no.
Craig Unger
New York City, NY
(Note: The St. Petersberg Times article to which Unger refers also states, "The 9/11 Commission, which has said the flights out of the United States were handled appropriately by the FBI, appears concerned with the handling of the Tampa flight... Most of the aircraft allowed to fly in U.S. airspace on Sept. 13 were empty airliners being ferried from the airports where they made quick landings on Sept. 11. The reopening of the airspace included paid charter flights, but not private, nonrevenue flights." Jean Heller, TIA now verifies flight of Saudis; The government has long denied that two days after the 9/11 attacks, the three were allowed to fly.
St. Petersburg Times, June 9, 2004.)
2. Carlyle and United Defense. Isikoff writes, "The movie quotes author Dan Briody claiming that the Carlyle Group 'gained' from September 11 because it owned United Defense, a military contractor. Carlyle Group spokesman Chris Ullman notes that United Defense holds a special distinction among U.S. defense contractors that is not mentioned in Moore's movie: the firm's $11 billion Crusader artillery rocket system developed for the U.S. Army is one of the only weapons systems canceled by the Bush administration."
This is completely misleading. The Crusader contract was canceled AFTER UNITED DEFENSE WENT PUBLIC, which is the entire point of the movie.
Here is what the film says: "September 11th guaranteed that United Defense was going to have a very good year. Just 6 weeks after 9-11 Carlyle filed to take United Defense public and in December made a one day profit of $237 million dollars."
This is exactly what happened, to wit:
"On a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries, the Army's fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company public only after the Sept. 11 attacks... On Sept. 26, [2001], the Army signed a $665-million modified contract with United Defense through April 2003 to complete the Crusader's development phase. In October, the company listed the Crusader, and the attacks themselves, as selling points for its stock offering. Mark Fineman, "Arms buildup is a boon to firm run by big guns," Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2002.
"Or its 1997 purchase of United Defense for $ 180 million. Four years later -- just before Rumsfeld canceled its Crusader howitzer program -- Carlyle took United Defense public and sold about half the stock for $ 588 million." Greg Schneider, "Connections and then some," The Washington Post, March 16, 2001
In "Crusader a Boon to Carlyle Group Even if Pentagon Scraps Project," Washington Post's Walter Pincus wrote (May 14, 2002):
Carlyle's financial success with United - and the success of others associated with the Crusader - shows how major Pentagon weapon systems can turn into cash cows. In turn, United's lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions show why they can be so difficult to kill, as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld announced he would try to do with the Crusader last week.
'Carlyle's aggressive approach ...is one reason why the Crusader lived this long,' said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary in the Reagan Pentagon and now director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Even if Rumsfeld's decision stands, Korb said, United still will have received $ 2 billion from the Crusader program and will receive substantially more to close it down.
Still, in its annual report for 2001, United announced that it had been awarded a three-year, $ 697 million contract to complete full upgrading of 389 Bradley units and had added a $ 655 million contract modification to complete the Crusader's "definition and risk-reduction phase contract," which would be worth $ 1.7 billion through 2003. Together, the Crusader and Bradley programs contributed 41 percent of United sales in 2001, the report said.
With Crusader and the Bradley upgrade in hand, a decision was made to sell United stock to the public in late 2001. In preparation, United refinanced the roughly $ 180 million it owed on the original purchase loan, securing a new $ 600 million loan and $ 200 million in revolving credit.
...
After the debt restructuring came the stock offering. The United offering filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission included this boilerplate caveat to potential investors: 'The Carlyle group, our other stockholders and our executive officers will realize substantial benefits from the offering.'
When it took place, in December 2001, Carlyle sold 11 million shares of the 20 million offered at $ 19 a share, receiving a total of about $ 225 million. Even so, Carlyle still owns more than 47 percent of the outstanding United shares and controls United's board of directors.
Also in late 2001, according to SEC filings, Peay and Shalikashvili were paid 'performance' bonuses, though their separate employment contracts filed with the SEC state they only are to serve as directors and receive $ 25,000 annual retainers plus stock options and reimbursed expenses. Peay received $ 160,000, and Shalikashvili $ 102,586, according to a filing with the SEC.
A United spokesman said the generals did no lobbying and that their bonuses were similar to ones given company officers based on "the performance of the company." Neither retired general responded to requests for comment. Korb, who served as a vice president at Northrup, said he had never heard of company directors receiving bonuses based on the performance of the company.
The Emperor has no uniform...
Joe Strupp, Editors and Publishers: The Associated Press has sued the Pentagon and Air Force, seeking access to all records of President George W. Bush's military service, but the news agency wonders why it has come to this.
"It seems a little curious because the president made a pretty forceful presentation that he had nothing to hide," said AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, when asked for his reaction to what the AP considers government stonewalling. "But we are not surprised."
Tomlin told E&P the lawsuit is needed to get access to a portion of Bush's record that may offer more information than the paper files previously released. "The paper file may not be everything," he said. "It has been there a long while, it could conceivably be tampered with."
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000550641
AP Lawyer: It's 'Curious' We've Had to Sue for Bush Records
By Joe Strupp
Published: June 24, 2004 12:01 AM EST
NEW YORK The Associated Press has sued the Pentagon and Air Force, seeking access to all records of President George W. Bush's military service, but the news agency wonders why it has come to this.
"It seems a little curious because the president made a pretty forceful presentation that he had nothing to hide," said AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, when asked for his reaction to what the AP considers government stonewalling. "But we are not surprised."
Tomlin told E&P the lawsuit is needed to get access to a portion of Bush's record that may offer more information than the paper files previously released. "The paper file may not be everything," he said. "It has been there a long while, it could conceivably be tampered with."
Because the microfilm record has been in storage and "it can't be altered, that access to the microfilm would settle the matter," Tomlin added.
When asked why a lawsuit was needed, he said, "the administrative efforts we've made just aren't getting traction."
Tomlin said he did not expect White House officials to "rush right over with the information," after the lawsuit was filed, but expected a proper response. "It is important to get this; we'd like to see priority handling on it."
The suit, filed in federal court in New York on Tuesday, seeks access to a copy of Bush's microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin. The White House has said it has already released all records of Bush's military service.
The Air National Guard has control of the microfilm, which should be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, the lawsuit claims. AP says the records "are being unlawfully withheld from the public." The lawsuit adds that no one has looked at any of the Bush military records at the state archives since 1996.
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Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is senior editor for E&P.
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Copyright 2004 Editor & Publisher
It's the Media, Stupid.
Reuters: Director Michael Moore's controversial documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" turned on the box office heat in its first day in theaters breaking single-day records at the two New York City theaters where it played.
The movie, which aims a critical eye at President Bush and his prosecution of the war in Iraq, sold $49,000 worth of tickets at the Loew's Village 7 theater, beating the venue's single-day record of $43,435 held by 1997's "Men in Black," according to distributors Lions Gate Films and IFC Films.
At the Lincoln Plaza theater, "Fahrenheit 9/11" took in more than $30,000 to top the $24,013 set by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000.
Break the Bush Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://money.cnn.com/2004/06/24/news/midcaps/fahrenheit.reut/
'Fahrenheit' turns on box office heat
Michael Moore's anti-Bush film breaks the single-day records at the two New York theaters.
June 24, 2004: 2:45 PM EDT
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Director Michael Moore's controversial documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" turned on the box office heat in its first day in theaters breaking single-day records at the two New York City theaters where it played.
The controversial film opens nationwide on Friday, but as CNN's Jason Carroll reports, 'Fahrenheit 9/11' has already started people talking.
The movie, which aims a critical eye at President Bush and his prosecution of the war in Iraq, sold $49,000 worth of tickets at the Loew's Village 7 theater, beating the venue's single-day record of $43,435 held by 1997's "Men in Black," according to distributors Lions Gate Films and IFC Films.
At the Lincoln Plaza theater, "Fahrenheit 9/11" took in more than $30,000 to top the $24,013 set by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000.
A spokesman for Lions Gate Films said the company debuted the movie in the two theaters to help build good word-of-mouth -- friend telling friend -- publicity ahead of the wide debut Friday when it plays in 868 theaters in all 50 states.
The film has caused a storm of controversy because director Moore, whose past work includes Oscar-winning documentary "Bowling for Columbine," makes a case that the Bush administration was determined to invade Iraq following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The movie links Bush family members and business associates with wealthy Saudi Arabian families, including that of Osama bin Laden, and Moore clearly wants to see the president fail to win re-election in this fall's presidential campaign.
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Groups have organized support for and against the movie, and audiences appear to be keen to see it.
Online ticket service Fandango.com reported Wednesday that "Fahrenheit 9/11" was making up 48 percent of advance ticket sales for the weekend ahead, compared to 11 percent for "Dodgeball" and 9 percent for next week's "Spider-Man 2."
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It's the Media, Stupid.
Rex Reed, New York Observer: Michael Moore leaves no turn unstoned. There are multitudes of shattering, seminal moments in his brilliant Bush-whacking documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, that reveal more about the cynicism, greed and ineptitude in the U.S. government than you will ever learn from any sound bite on the right-wing late-night cable-channel blabfests, but one will stay with me forever. Forget about the "official" reports from the White House about the activities of George W. Bush on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, insisting he learned about the Al Qaeda attacks while meeting with Florida pre-schoolers and quickly dashed from the room to save the country. The truth, it is now revealed, is that he was informed of the first attack on the World Trade Center before he even entered the schoolroom, and he decided to continue with his photo-op anyway. There he is on camera when Andrew Card informs him of the second plane and utters the fatal words, "We’re under attack!"—but he continues to read My Pet Goat for another seven minutes, his eyes sliding sideways in his puzzled face, like a moron looking for a bathroom, until his staff insists that he leave. (He stayed for another half hour.) If nothing else, that defining moment says volumes about what we can expect from the President of the U.S. in the center of a supreme, history-altering crisis: He’s just clueless.
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http://www.observer.com/pages/onthetown.asp
Moore’s Magic: 9/11 Electrifies
by Rex Reed
Michael Moore leaves no turn unstoned. There are multitudes of shattering, seminal moments in his brilliant Bush-whacking documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, that reveal more about the cynicism, greed and ineptitude in the U.S. government than you will ever learn from any sound bite on the right-wing late-night cable-channel blabfests, but one will stay with me forever. Forget about the "official" reports from the White House about the activities of George W. Bush on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, insisting he learned about the Al Qaeda attacks while meeting with Florida pre-schoolers and quickly dashed from the room to save the country. The truth, it is now revealed, is that he was informed of the first attack on the World Trade Center before he even entered the schoolroom, and he decided to continue with his photo-op anyway. There he is on camera when Andrew Card informs him of the second plane and utters the fatal words, "We’re under attack!"—but he continues to read My Pet Goat for another seven minutes, his eyes sliding sideways in his puzzled face, like a moron looking for a bathroom, until his staff insists that he leave. (He stayed for another half hour.) If nothing else, that defining moment says volumes about what we can expect from the President of the U.S. in the center of a supreme, history-altering crisis: He’s just clueless.
There are other moments that will impact some viewers and polarize others. So many, in fact, that you watch Fahrenheit 9/11 with disbelief, and leave shaking with rage. Sometimes sarcastic, always funny, Mr. Moore is armed with facts, and he presents them accurately and succinctly. The controversial filmmaker stated on the Today show that White House mouthpieces have denounced the film as "outrageously false" without seeing it, and right-wing Republicans have charged Mr. Moore with staging a "left-wing conspiracy" to influence the forthcoming election. Well, duh. For years, reactionary conservatives have been famous for staging right-wing conspiracies of their own to disgrace and discredit elected Democratic public officials. Maybe this is payback time. Whatever it is, everyone should see Fahrenheit 9/11 first—before debating the issues. The purpose of any documentary is to influence opinion. But instead of the customarily droning voice that comments on the action and tells you what to think, this one asks tough, logical questions, gets rational answers, and never loses its entertainment value.
Mr. Moore, who has tackled corporate greed (Roger & Me) and gun control (Bowling for Columbine), now feels driven and obligated to strip the façade from a swaggering, bow-legged, grammatically challenged bully and a cabinet that is beginning to look more like the Third Reich every day. He accuses them of lying about their motivations for declaring war against Iraq, a country that never threatened America in the first place, killing thousands of innocent civilians in retaliation for the acts of 9/11 aggression, although not one of the terrorists was from Iraq, and killing more than 800 of our own American kids (all from ethnic or working-class families). Nobody denies that Saddam Hussein was a monster, but not the Iraqi women and children who have been "saved" from one villain only to be burned and shot and maimed for life without arms and legs by villains in a different uniform. At the same time, Mr. Moore shows Mr. Bush justifying American atrocities against Saddam Hussein by actually saying to the camera, "He tried to kill my daddy." Like his daddy, he knows he might also get kicked out of the White House after serving only one term. Still, he pursues a war that is losing the "hearts and minds" of even the boys who fight it (the interviews with our soldiers on the front lines will make you weep) while earning the U.S. unprecedented heights of global hatred and distrust, even from long-standing allies. And he does it on the golf course, ignoring the pressing domestic issues of health care, education, Social Security, unemployment and the economy while instructing frustrated reporters to watch his next drive. (In his first eight months in office, he was on vacation 42 percent of the time.) Meanwhile the current occupants of the White House, bolstered by an irresponsible press that has never bothered to ask the right questions, have courted public support by hammering home the kind of fear and born-again religious ideology that keep people subservient and paralyzed. Mr. Moore is saying that in the lineup of fear factors, terrorists and sinners may have replaced Communists and beatniks, but if you keep the people frightened enough, the bully always wins.
The movie begins with the awesome night in 2000 when the U. S. Supreme Court decided the election, not the American voters, then unveils footage that was never reported on TV of the Bush inauguration limousine being pelted with raw eggs. Instead of the traditional walk to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he was so afraid to leave the car that he became the first President in history who was forced to sneak into the White House through a back door.
It was downhill from there, and Mr. Moore has obtained amazing film to illustrate the graphic two-hour slam-dunk that follows. In the wimpy reportage that has dominated the media for four years, very few journalists have bothered to investigate the shroud of secrecy surrounding the Bush Presidency that keeps the people ignorant, to write about it, to explain it. Mr. Moore does it with wit and cleverness. There’s no doubt that he would do anything to prevent a Bush re-election, but there is no conjecture here. No embellishment. He doesn’t need any. Dubya & Co. are easy targets: Mr. Moore simply turns on his cameras and lets them hang themselves. He proves the $1.5 billion in profits the Bush clan has made from oil interests of the family of Osama bin Laden, the real perpetrator of the 9/11 disaster, then asks why, when all aircraft were grounded after 9/11, the White House allowed several planes to fly around the country picking up the bin Laden family and protectively escorting 142 Saudis out of the country without interrogation, overruling the protests of the F.B.I. You can say, "Yes, but his family has denounced Osama, so what’s the problem?" The problem is that the Bushes, père et fils, were in business with his family at the same time that Osama was under surveillance as a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist and neglected to make a full disclosure.
Mr. Moore also reveals Dubya’s military records, blotting out the name of a fellow pilot whose flight status was suspended for refusing to take a physical exam. The friend Bush was trying to protect turns out to be James R. Bath, who both managed the U.S. financial investments of the bin Laden regime and bankrolled the various oil interests of the Bush brigade. Cut to Dubya, arrogantly stating: "Access is power." Then, when he was investigated by the S.E.C., the man who got Bush out of hot water, Robert W. Jordan, was later appointed ambassador to—you guessed it—Saudi Arabia. The ironies pile up like body bags.
Now that the merde has hit the oscillator, so to speak, Mr. Moore charges that the Bush administration is still trying to hide evidence of its own stupidity by censoring 28 pages of the independent report by the 9/11 commission. If you don’t gasp at the sight of Mr. Bush dining with the Saudi ambassador with part of the Pentagon in flames in the background, this movie is not for you. No need to talk about the President welcoming the Taliban to the State Department, knowing they were harboring the man who bombed the U.S.S. Cole. No need to go into the plans to build an underground pipeline through Afghanistan pumping money into a company owned by Vice President Dick Cheney. Alarmingly, it’s all gone unreported by an irresponsible press corps. With $860 billion currently invested by the Saudis in American business, no wonder our tax money pays for a six-man detail to protect the Saudi ambassador in Washington. But why does it take Michael Moore to tell us? This is all very dispiriting. But unless you’ve lost your sense of humor completely, you’ve just gotta laugh when Mr. Moore intercuts Mr. Bush’s tough talk from cowboy movies with actual footage of the corny cowboys in those movies saying exactly the same things.
I’ve hardly scratched the surface of this electrifying documentary. Mr. Moore even cruises through Washington reading from a loudspeaker the idiotic USA PATRIOT Act—hastily passed by Congress without ever reading it—and chronicling the lunacy it has inspired: groups and individuals harassed by cops for holding private club meetings, a woman who was refused admittance to an airplane because she was carrying breast milk. All diversionary tactics, says Mr. Moore, to distract the American people from viewing the corpses sent home from Iraq for funerals that have never once been attended by President George W. Bush, or debunking the myth of "weapons of mass destruction." People of all ages are shown voicing doubts about the kids who have died in a questionable war with no end in sight, and for what? Bush says, "Defending freedom." This movie says, "Making money." And talk about imbalance. Fact: Out of 535 members of Congress, only one has a child serving in Iraq. One of the most telling scenes in Fahrenheit 9/11 is Michael Moore, standing outside the U.S. Senate with a microphone, trying to convince members of Congress to enlist their own children for the war. Not a single Senator or Representative is willing to send his own children into harm’s way. This is one of the few scenes in which the director appears at length. One of the things that makes this movie better and more convincing than his previous films is the way Mr. Moore stays mostly in the background, compiling facts and letting the evidence speak for itself.
The Cannes cognoscenti and the limousine liberals have already declared Fahrenheit 9/11 the blockbuster documentary of the year. Who knows how it will play in Punkin Crick? I think it should be required viewing for every American, but as usual, I fear the people who could learn the most from the issues it raises will avoid it like a fund-raiser for free abortions. Mr. Moore’s opponents will label it ideologically fueled partisan agitprop, which it is, but any visionary who tries to cultivate change is destined to harvest adversaries. With his usual fury channeled and under control, Mr. Moore sets out to prick, probe and sound a wake-up call in an emotionally charged election year where the truth has been buried six feet under, and succeeds with humor and bite. The result is undeniably galvanizing, immensely watchable and damned good filmmaking. If it convinces one nonvoter to think, it will serve a purpose. The saddest and most infuriating thing I learned from Fahrenheit 9/11 is not the political hackwork, but the reality of what a lightweight the President is in the context of American history. George W. Bush may be the first President of the U.S. who has brainwashed himself.
You may reach Rex Reed via email at: rreed@observer.com.
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This column ran on page 22 in the 6/28/2004 edition of The New York Observer.
Another prominent Republican and business leader deserts the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident and joins the ranks of the UNPRECEDENTED, broad-based and truly bi-partisan resistance to the Bush abomination. His name will be scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes...There is an Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004...
US Newswire: Chairman of the Chrysler Corporation Lee Iacocca today endorsed Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry for President. Having backed George W. Bush in 2000, Iacocca is switching his support in 2004 after over three years of jobs failure by the Bush administration...
In 2000, Iacocca backed Bush, citing jobs, particularly in the Michigan automobile industry, as one of his chief concerns. Iacocca was an active campaigner who appeared in television ads and GOTV calls focused on the need to protect jobs in Michigan.
However after three and a half years, the Bush administration's jobs record has been characterized by failure -- losing 134,900 manufacturing jobs in Michigan alone.
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Lee Iacocca Endorses Kerry for President; 2000 Bush Backer Swings Support to Kerry in 2004
Thu Jun 24, 1:17 PM ET
To: National Desk and Political Reporter
Contact: Allison Dobson of John Kerry (news - web sites) for President, 202-464-2800, Web: http://www.johnkerry.com
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Former Chairman of the Chrysler Corporation Lee Iacocca today endorsed Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry for President. Having backed George W. Bush in 2000, Iacocca is switching his support in 2004 after over three years of jobs failure by the Bush administration
Iacocca announced his support for Kerry in San Jose Calif., at an event focused on Kerry's plan to create high-tech, high-paying jobs and strengthen America through a greater commitment to technology and innovation.
"I want to thank Lee Iacocca for his powerful endorsement of our plans to build a stronger America," Kerry said. "He knows the test of leadership is not whether it's Republican or Democratic, but whether it will move this country forward. I'm proud to have his counsel and his support. There are few men more respected not just in corporate America, but in all of America, than Lee Iacocca."
In 2000, Iacocca backed Bush, citing jobs, particularly in the Michigan automobile industry, as one of his chief concerns. Iacocca was an active campaigner who appeared in television ads and GOTV calls focused on the need to protect jobs in Michigan.
However after three and a half years, the Bush administration's jobs record has been characterized by failure -- losing 134,900 manufacturing jobs in Michigan alone.
George Bush faces the worst jobs record of any President who has run for reelection in nearly sixty years. From January 2001 when Bush first took office until May 2004, the economy has lost 1.9 million private sector jobs. While American jobs have been shipped to countries overseas, the Bush administration has stood by, even praising the benefits of outsourcing. Jobs that are being created pay significantly less than the jobs we have lost.
John Kerry knows America can do better and that we can have an economy that lifts families up with new, high-paying jobs. As President, Kerry will end tax breaks that encourage companies to ship jobs overseas and create 10 million new and better jobs in America, including 342,000 in Michigan. He will cut taxes for 99 percent of businesses and invest in technology and worker training, so that American workers are prepared for the jobs of the future.
http://www.usnewswire.com/
"He BETRAYED this country...Truth shall rise again!"
Al Gore: I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Our current president has gone to war and has come back into "the city" and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.
Save the US Constitution, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.algoredemocrats.com/news/gnn/EpllEpAluZQjrdFGci.shtml
Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger
1:44 PM PST
by Al Gore
American Constitution Society
Georgetown University Law Center
Remarks as prepared
When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an executive, whether he be a king or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.
It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's stewardship at the beginning of this 21st century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he -- the president -- label any citizen an "unlawful enemy combatant," and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty -- even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal.
What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners -- and that any law or treaty which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together.
What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power -- even without a declaration of war by the Congress -- to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.
How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current president's recent claim, in Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as commander in chief.
I think it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger that has the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.
Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn't we ask ourselves how we have come to this point?
Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history -- a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self-governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person.
Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent -- that is, when war transformed America's president into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty.
That is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the Constitution, assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president, but retaining for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not, and when, our nation might decide to go war.
Indeed, this limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, "The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature."
In more recent decades, the emergence of new weapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to war and the waging of war have naturally led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-making power. But the practicalities of modern warfare which necessarily increase the war powers of the president at the expense of Congress do not render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the making of war by the president -- when added to his other powers -- carries with it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our Constitution, and in the process, threatening our liberty.
They were greatly influenced -- far more than we can imagine -- by a careful reading of the history and human dramas surrounding the democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman republic. They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Senate's long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces. Though the Senate lingered in form and was humored for decades, when Caesar impoliticly combined his military commander role with his chief executive role, the Senate -- and with it the Republic -- withered away. And then for all intents and purposes, the great dream of democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for 17 centuries, until its rebirth in our land.
Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander in chief role and his head of government role to maximize the power people are eager to give those who promise to defend them against active threats. But as he does so, we are witnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a healthy democracy in America.
In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel case in the 1950s, the single most important Supreme Court case on the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time of war, he wrote, "The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and the description of its evils in the declaration of independence leads me to doubt that they created their new Executive in their image ... and if we seek instruction from our own times, we can match it only from the Executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian."
I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Our current president has gone to war and has come back into "the city" and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.
We must surrender some of our traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient power to protect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains at an unusually high level almost three years after we were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were harbored and planned their assault. But just as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade another country that, according to the best evidence compiled in a new, exhaustive, bipartisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attack against us.
As the main body of our troops were redeployed for the new invasion, those who organized the attacks against us escaped and many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice, and the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the United States in those lands and, according to several studies, has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm.
A little over a year ago, when we launched the war against this second country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us, al-Qaida, and not only provided a geographic base for them but was also close to providing them weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. But now the extensive independent investigation by the bipartisan commission formed to study the 9/11 attacks has just reported that there was no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida of any kind. And, of course, over the course of this past year we had previously found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So now, the president and the vice president are arguing with this commission, and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are right, and that there actually was a working cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida.
The problem for the president is that he doesn't have any credible evidence to support his claim, and yet, in spite of that, he persists in making that claim vigorously. So I would like to pause for a moment to address the curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that most people know is wrong. And I think it's particularly important because it is closely connected to the questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech, and will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among our three branches of government.
To begin with, our founders wouldn't be the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us about why it's so important particularly for President Bush to keep the American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage between Iraq and al-Qaida isn't true. Among these Americans who still believe there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the president's decision to invade Iraq. But among those who accept the commission's detailed finding that there is no connection, support for the war in Iraq dries up pretty quickly.
And that's understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that attacked us, then that means the president took us to war when he didn't have to. Almost 900 of our soldiers have been killed, and almost 5,000 have been wounded.
Thus, for all these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there's a meaningful connection between Iraq and al-Qaida. They think that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they'll not only lose support for the controversial decision to go to war, but also lose some of the new power they've picked up from the Congress and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
If he is not lying, if they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in battle with al-Qaida. If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.
But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the president's determined dissembling. Listen, for example, to this editorial from the Financial Times: "There was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD fears, or ignoble about the opposition to Saddam's tyranny -- however late Washington developed this. The purported link between Baghdad and al-Qaida, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and is nonsense."
Of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from tyranny, but our troops were not greeted with the promised flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92 percent of Iraqis, while only 2 percent see them as liberators.
But right from the start, beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind. He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording. Indeed, Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie -- visibly circumnavigating the truth over and over again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth. But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also sometimes departed from their tricky wording and resorted to statements were clearly outright falsehoods. In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that fully 70 percent of the American people had gotten the message he wanted them to get, and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
The myth that Iraq and al-Qaida were working together was no accident -- the president and vice president deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services, the CIA, and their own Pentagon that the claim was false. Europe's top terrorism investigator said in 2002, "We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever." A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al-Qaida claim. Top officials in the Pentagon told reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was "an exaggeration."
And at least some honest voices within the president's own party admitted as such. Sen. Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, "Saddam is not in league with al-Qaida ... I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al-Qaida."
But those voices did not stop the deliberate campaign to mislead America. Over the course of a year, the president and vice president used carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing there was an imminent threat from an Iraq-armed al-Qaida.
In the fall of 2002, the President told the country "You can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam" and that the "true threat facing our country is an al-Qaida-type network trained and armed by Saddam." At the same time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that "there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government."
By the Spring, Secretary of State Powell was in front of the United Nations claiming a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network."
But after the invasion, no ties were found. In June of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al-Qaida monitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the Iraqi regime to al-Qaida. By August, three former Bush administration national security and intelligence officials admitted that the evidence used to make the Iraq-al-Qaida claim was "tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies." And earlier this year, Knight-Ridder newspapers reported "Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence" of a connection.
So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report finding "no credible evidence" of an Iraq-al-Qaida connection, it should not have caught the White House off guard. Yet instead of the candor Americans need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more insistence without evidence. Vice President Cheney insisted even this week that "there clearly was a relationship" and that there is "overwhelming evidence." Even more shocking, Cheney offered this disgraceful question: "Was Iraq involved with al-Qaida in the attack on 9/11? We don't know." He then claimed that he "probably" had more information than the commission, but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more insults.
The President was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions about his statements by saying "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida." He provided no evidence.
Friends of the administration tried mightily to rehabilitate their cherished but shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on the commission, offered what sounded like new evidence that a Saddam henchman had attended an al-Qaida meeting. But within hours, the commissions files yielded definitive evidence that it was another man with a similar name -- ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush's entire symbolic argument.
They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to misallocation of military economic political resources. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy, and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government.
That creates a need for control over the flood of bad news, bad policies and bad decisions also explains their striking attempts to control news coverage.
To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly ready to do battle with the news media when he went on CNBC earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Iraq did not work with al-Qaida. He lashed out at the New York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11 commission "finds no Qaeda-Iraq Tie" -- a clear statement of the obvious -- and said there is no "fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said." He tried to deny that he had personally been responsible for helping to create the false impression of linkage between al-Qaida and Iraq.
Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart froze Cheney's image and played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed directly claimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie. At that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the television screen, "It's my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire."
Dan Rather says that post-9/11 patriotism has stifled journalists from asking government officials "the toughest of the tough questions." Rather went so far as to compare administration efforts to intimidate the press to "necklacing" in apartheid South Africa, while acknowledging it as "an obscene comparison." "The fear is that you will be necklaced here (in the U.S.), you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck," Rather explained. It was CBS, remember, that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush administration.
Donald Rumsfeld has said that criticism of the administration's policy "makes it complicated and more difficult" to fight the war. CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on CNBC last September, "I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say but certainly television, and perhaps to a certain extent my station, was intimidated by the Administration."
The administration works closely with a network of "rapid response" digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for "undermining support for our troops." Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the president's consistent distortions of the facts. Krugman writes, "Let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President ... you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation.
Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusion while punishing reporters who stand in the way. It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist this pressure, which, in the case of individual journalists, threatens their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because without a press able to report "without fear or favor" our democracy will disappear.
Recently, the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media, to never let this happen again. We must help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake, or we risk other wrong-headed decisions based upon false and misleading impressions.
We are left with an unprecedented, high-intensity conflict every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this administration's policies have been based and the reality of the world in which the American people live their lives.
When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it is actually fairly simple: he adopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of a spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all-too-painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been several other collisions between President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war.
But there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this President's policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation's conscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbing pictures that document strange forms of physical and sexual abuse -- and even torture and murder -- by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shock came just last week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration, which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for bizarre and sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American people, which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as war crimes. In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the President, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above and immune from the "rule of law." At least we don't have to guess what our founders would have to say about this bizarre and un-American theory.
By the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, "irrelevant and overbroad." But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand by the tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysis regarding the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. And the view of the memo -- that it was within commander-in-chief's power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information -- most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. We also know that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Bush, meanwhile, continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.
I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.
The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison. The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant in the constitutional system. Our founders understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his aphorism that power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power. Ironically, all of their didactic messages about how democracies don't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the bush administration to ignore the United nations, do serious damage to our alliances in the world, violate international law and risk the hatred of the rest of the world. The seductive exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of our framers.
And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fool's gold in any case. Just as its pursuit in Mesopotamia has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers, the Iraqi people, our alliances, everything we think is important, in the same way the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that weakens the Congress, courts and civil society is not good for either the presidency or the rest of the nation.
If the Congress becomes an enfeebled enabler to the executive, and the courts become known for political calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers. The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged, in order to aggrandize power, have included censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, silencing dissent, and ignoring intelligence. Although there have been other efforts by other presidents to encroach on the legitimate prerogatives of Congress and courts, there has never been this kind of systematic abuse of the truth and institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.
Two hundred and twenty years ago, John Adams wrote, in describing one of America's most basic founding principles, "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them ... to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men."
The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard Nixon told an interviewer, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal ... If the president, for example, approves something, approves an action because of national security, or, in this case, because of a threat to internal peace and order, of significant order, then the president's decision in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating the law."
Fortunately for our country, Nixon was forced to resign as president before he could implement his outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis.
The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity, and even though they were loyal Republicans, they were more loyal to the Constitution and resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. Then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon's abuse of power and launched impeachment proceedings.
In some ways, our current president is actually claiming significantly more extra-constitutional power, vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than Nixon did. For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime and without letting them see a lawyer or notify their families. And this time, the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an abuse of power. In fact, whenever there is an opportunity to abuse power in this administration, Ashcroft seems to be leading the charge. And it is Ashcroft who picked the staff lawyers at Justice responsible for the embarrassing memos justifying and enabling torture.
Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress that saved the country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the current Congress has virtually abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal branch of government.
Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for the most part, to take orders from the president on what they vote for and what they don't vote for. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee meetings, where legislation takes its final form, and instead, they let the president's staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for them. (Come to think of it, the decline and lack of independence shown by this Congress would shock our founders more than anything else, because they believed that the power of the Congress was the most important check and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by the Executive branch.)
This administration has not been content just to reduce the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy, denying the American people access to crucial information with which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions, and a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image of the administration to the American people.
Listen to what U.S. News and World Report has to say about their secrecy: "The Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government -- cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters."
Here are just a few examples, and for each one, you have to ask, what are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?
More than 6,000 documents have been removed by the Bush administration from governmental Web sites. To cite only one example, a document on the EPA Web site giving citizens crucial information on how to identify chemical hazards to their families. Some have speculated that the principle threat to the Bush administration is a threat by the chemical hazards if the information remains available to American citizens.
To head off complaints from our nation's governors over how much they receive under federal programs, the Bush administration simply stopped printing the primary state budget report.
To muddy the clear consensus of the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major changes and deletions to an EPA report that were so egregious that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language.
They've kept hidden from view Cheney's ultra-secret energy task force. They have fought a pitched battle in the courts for more than three years to continue denying the American people the ability to know which special interests and lobbyists advised with Vice President Cheney on the design of the new laws.
And when mass layoffs became too embarrassing they simply stopped publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been receiving for decades. For this administration, the truth hurts, when the truth is available to the American people. They find bliss in the ignorance of the people. What are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?
In the end, for this administration, it is all about power. This lie about the invented connection between al-Qaida and Iraq was and is the key to justifying the current ongoing constitutional power grab by the president. So long as their big flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public's mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim. He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil liberties -- again on his personal discretion -- and he will continue to intimidate the press and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the American people during his bid for re-election.
War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules. We know that in our wars there have been descents from these standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the president, nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by directives signed by the secretary of defense, as it is alleged, and supported by the national security advisor.
Always before, we could look to the chief executive as the point from which redress would come and law be upheld. That was one of the great prides of our country: humane leadership, faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a president and an administration for whom the best law is NO law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction, and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.
In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an aroused Congress whose bipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of history. We cannot depend upon a debased Department of Justice given over to the hands of zealots. "Congressional oversight" and "special prosecution" are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns: it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves. Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people: it came from the belief that in the end, this was a country which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that although we might deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what we must now do.
Al Gore is truly offering his "life, fortune and sacred honor." Al Gore is the Voice crying out in the Wilderness of the Republic, and the campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Meking Delta) promises to be the Redemption of the Republic...
There is an Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004...
Al Gore, Associated Press: Al Gore on Thursday accused President Bush of lying about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein and said the president refuses to back down from that position to avoid political fallout.
"They dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever," Gore, the former vice president who lost the presidency to Bush in 2000, said during a speech at Georgetown University Law Center...
Gore accused Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of deliberately ignoring warnings from international intelligence services, the CIA and the Pentagon before the Iraq war that their claim of a link between al-Qaida and Saddam was false.
With a smirk, Gore then added: "So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report finding 'no credible evidence' of an Iraq-al-Qaida connection, it should not have come as a surprise. It should not have caught the White House off guard."
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/06/24/politics1653EDT0703.DTL
www.sfgate.com Return to regular view
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Gore accuses Bush, Cheney of lying about link between al-Qaida and Iraq
- LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004
(06-24) 14:59 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
Al Gore on Thursday accused President Bush of lying about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein and said the president refuses to back down from that position to avoid political fallout.
"They dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever," Gore, the former vice president who lost the presidency to Bush in 2000, said during a speech at Georgetown University Law Center.
Republicans responded that the Democrat's assertions were false and out of touch.
Ken Mehlman, Bush's re-election campaign chairman, admonished Gore for delivering "another gravely false attack" and the Republican National Committee contended he was out of touch.
"Al Gore's history of denial of the threat of terrorism is no less dangerous today in his role as John Kerry's surrogate than it was in the 1990s in his role as vice president, a time when Osama bin Laden was declaring war on the United States five different times," RNC spokesman Jim Dyke said in a statement.
Mostly sidelined from the presidential race, Gore emerges every few months with another stinging review of the Bush administration. The former vice president, who has grown irate and bellowed in previous appearances, took a more tempered but highly sarcastic tone on Thursday.
Gore accused Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of deliberately ignoring warnings from international intelligence services, the CIA and the Pentagon before the Iraq war that their claim of a link between al-Qaida and Saddam was false.
With a smirk, Gore then added: "So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report finding 'no credible evidence' of an Iraq-al-Qaida connection, it should not have come as a surprise. It should not have caught the White House off guard."
The independent, bipartisan commission looking into the terrorist attacks found "no credible evidence" of a link between the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and Iraq. As to an Iraq-al-Qaida connection, the commission found there was no apparent "collaborative relationship."
Gore said Bush and Cheney won't acknowledge what he called their fabrication because of the "harsh political consequences" of admitting there's no evidence of a link. "If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick," Gore said.
Gore also accused Bush of abusing his presidential powers by invading Iraq without a war declaration from Congress, allowing Americans deemed "unlawful enemy combatants" to be held without being charges, and authorizing "what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners."
He also called on the administration to disclose all of its interrogation policies -- including those used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the CIA -- and analyses about them.
"We deserve to know what and why it's being done in our name," Gore said to applause.
Still popular among Democrats, Gore is an important ally for Kerry because he can criticize Bush in harsher terms than Kerry, this year's Democratic presidential candidate. Aides said Kerry must temper his critiques of Bush to avoid alienating the independent and swing voters who will influence the outcome on Nov. 2.
Gore's staff, in a typical heads-up, told Kerry's campaign a few days ago that he would be giving a speech on Iraq. The campaign did not know the details until Gore's staff released its media advisory this week.
The former vice president does not clear his speeches or schedule through Kerry's staff, but Kerry's aides welcome his attacks on Bush. They say Gore's red-meat rhetoric helps fire up the Democratic base and underscores criticisms Kerry makes in a more muted fashion.
Gore's speech was sponsored by the American Constitution Society, a liberal group of lawyers, law students, law professors and others.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/06/24/politics1653EDT0703.DTL
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©2004 Associated Press
The LNS has often spoken about the utter lack of CONTEXT and
CONTINUITY that the "US mainstream news media" provides in
regard to the Bush abomination. We know it is disarming for you to see the major network news organizations covering individual aspects of the Bush
abomination, for example, Abu Ghraib or Plame or Chalabi (hey, what happened to this outrageous story of Chalabi's betrayal of US intel secrets to the Iranians and who was it that spilled those secrets to him after too many drinks?) or Niger cake and the otherWMD lies. BUT it is the overall CONTEXT itself and the CONTINUITY over four years that tell the real story of the Bush abomination. The major network news organizations (e.g., SeeNotNews, SeeBS, NotBeSeen, AnythingButSee and PrettyBlandStuff) and the major
city newspapers (e.g., WASHPS and NYTwits) have been slapping themselves on the back for "independent reporting" lately on Abu Ghraib in particular, BUT
they wholly disregard the CONTEXT and CONTINUITY demanded in this current state of national emergency...Forced by an event-driven unraveling, the
"US mainstream news media" is still trying to avoid the real story, and along with it the most vital responsibility of a free press in a democratic
society...Abu Ghraib, Plame, Chalabi, the WMD lies, Hallburton, Enron and California's phoney energy crisis, Fraudida itself, Medifraud, the prostitution of the EPA, the missing pages of the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident's "service records" for the Alabama National Guard, the Bush cabal's pre-9/11 negligence and especially the post-9/11 blunders articulated by Richard Clarke, etc., taken together bring the real story into focus -- i.e., the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHRACTER of the
increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident and the Bush abomination in particular his "national security team." Furthermore, the "US
mainstream news media" has failed to provide CONTEXT
and CONTINUITY by aggregating the UNPRECENDENTED
opposition of the Bush abomination, led by Republicans
and former officials of both his father's
administration and his own's abomination (i.e. Paul
O'Neill, Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson) as well as
numerous others, Roger Cressy and Greg Thielman
notably, and in the military, including Zinni, Crowe,
Shinseki and others, as well as "Diplomats and
Military Commanders for Change," as well as 450 law
professors and 48 Noble prize winning scientists, as
well as the families of the 9/11 victims, well as Pope
John Paul and radio shock jocks Don Imus and Howard
Stern. This UNPRECEDENTED, BROAD-BASED, BI-PARTISAN
opposition constitues a resounding REBUKE of an
utterly failed regime...
Sydney Blumenthal, Guardian: The urgency of Bush's
credibility crisis surfaced in the latest Washington
Post-ABC News poll showing the collapse of Bush's
standing on terrorism, losing 13 points since April,
putting Kerry even on the issue and one point ahead in
the contest. But even more worrying was Bush's rating
on trust. By a margin of 52% to 39%, Kerry is seen as
more honest and trustworthy.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1245877,00.html
Reality is unravelling for Bush
Even negative attacks on Kerry no longer seem to be
working
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday June 24, 2004
The Guardian
At the Pentagon, on June 10, while business in
Washington had officially halted as the body of Ronald
Reagan lay in state, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld
convened an emergency meeting on the Abu Ghraib
scandal, according to a reliable source privy to its
proceedings. Rumsfeld began the extraordinary session
by saying that certain documents needed to "get out"
that would show that there was no policy approving of
torture and that what had happened in Iraq and
Afghanistan was aberrant.
The Senate armed services committee had been
conducting hearings whose corrosive impact needed to
be countered. Rumsfeld complained about "serial
requests" for information from Congress. Yet he was
even more upset by subpoenas of defence officials
issued by the special prosecutor in the case of
Valerie Plame. The Pentagon, Rumsfeld said, was nearly
"at a stop" because of them. Rumsfeld admitted he was
startled by the uproar over Abu Ghraib: "There are so
many international organisations."
On June 22, the White House released documents on
policy on torture, including a directive signed on
February 7 2002 by Bush stating that he has "the
authority under the constitution" to abrogate the
Geneva conventions, that the Taliban and al-Qaida as
non-signatories were not covered by them, and that
consequently Bush "declines to exercise that authority
at this time". Rumsfeld's damage control was simply
one front in the expanding Bush administration war for
credibility.
Vice-president Dick Cheney staged a preemptive strike
last week by reiterating that Saddam Hussein and
al-Qaida had a relationship and insinuating that they
were in league. His intended target was the 9/11
commission, which is dangerously independent. Its
Republican co-chairman, Thomas Kean, replied that
there was "no credible evidence" that Saddam and
al-Qaida had collaborated. Bush entered the battle,
repeating that there was indeed a "relationship". Then
the Democratic co-chairman of the commission, Lee
Hamilton, explained that al-Qaida had in fact
approached Saddam seeking his help, but that it had
been rebuffed. The rejection was the relationship. But
Bush and Cheney's affirmative assertions made it seem
that the "relationship" was affirmative.
The urgency of Bush's credibility crisis surfaced in
the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll showing the
collapse of Bush's standing on terrorism, losing 13
points since April, putting Kerry even on the issue
and one point ahead in the contest. But even more
worrying was Bush's rating on trust. By a margin of
52% to 39%, Kerry is seen as more honest and
trustworthy.
Since March 3, the Bush-Cheney campaign has spent an
estimated $80m on mostly negative advertising, to
eliminate Kerry at the starting gate. The strategy was
the acceleration of the lesson of Bush's father's
victorious effort in the 1988 campaign when, 17 points
behind in mid-summer, he shattered Michael Dukakis
with a withering negative attack.
Now, Bush's opponent is not only moving ahead, but the
failed assault may insulate Kerry against future
offensives. Bush had every reason to believe that his
attack on Kerry's image would succeed. After September
11, he was able to impose his explanations on the
public almost without resistance and to taint anyone
who contradicted them as somehow unpatriotic.
With Congress in Republican hands, checks and balances
were effectively removed. Most of the media was on the
bandwagon or intimidated. Cheney himself called the
president of the corporation that owned one of the
networks to complain about an errant commentator.
Political aides directed by Karl Rove ceaselessly
called editors and producers with veiled threats about
access that was not granted in any case. The press
would not bite the hand that would not feed it.
But Bush's projection of images can only faintly be
seen on the screen, which is overwhelmed with Bush's
past images of triumph unreeling in reverse. The
majority of the people had supported the war in Iraq
because they believed that Saddam was involved in the
terrorist attacks of September 11. Bush envisioned the
Iraqi war unfolding into a new world order: the
liberation of Iraq resembling the liberation of
France, democracy flowering throughout the Middle
East, and the Palestinians submitting quietly to
Sharon's fait accompli .
But the neoconservative prophesies had been advanced
by suppressing the scepticism of the US intelligence
agencies, the military and the state department.
Without deranging and dismissing the professionalism
of the basic institutions of national security, Bush
would not have been able to sustain his reasons.
Bush's battle is not with image, but with the
unravelling of his reality.
· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to
President Clinton and Washington bureau chief of
salon.com
sidney _ blumenthal @yahoo.com
The Emperor has no uniform...
Associated Press: The Associated Press sued the Pentagon and the Air Force on Tuesday, seeking access to all records of George W. Bush's military service during the Vietnam War.
Filed in federal court in New York, where The AP
is headquartered, the lawsuit seeks access to a copy
of Bush's microfilmed personnel file from the Texas
State Library and Archives Commission in Austin...
Controversy surrounds Bush's time in the Texas Air
National Guard because it is unclear from the record
what duties he performed for the military when he was
working on the political campaign of a U.S. Senate
candidate in Alabama.
There are questions as to whether the file
provided to the news media earlier this year is
complete, says the lawsuit, adding that these
questions could possibly be answered by reviewing a
copy of the microfilm of Bush's personnel file in the
Texas archives.
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Defeat Bush (again!)
AP Sues for Access to Bush Guard Records
By The Associated Press
Tuesday 22 June 2004
Washington - The Associated Press sued the
Pentagon and the Air Force on Tuesday, seeking access
to all records of George W. Bush's military service
during the Vietnam War.
Filed in federal court in New York, where The AP
is headquartered, the lawsuit seeks access to a copy
of Bush's microfilmed personnel file from the Texas
State Library and Archives Commission in Austin.
The White House says the government has already
released all the records of Bush's military service.
Controversy surrounds Bush's time in the Texas Air
National Guard because it is unclear from the record
what duties he performed for the military when he was
working on the political campaign of a U.S. Senate
candidate in Alabama.
There are questions as to whether the file
provided to the news media earlier this year is
complete, says the lawsuit, adding that these
questions could possibly be answered by reviewing a
copy of the microfilm of Bush's personnel file in the
Texas archives.
The Air National Guard of the United States, a
federal entity, has control of the microfilm, which
should be disclosed in its entirety under the Freedom
of Information Act, the lawsuit says.
The White House has yet to respond to a request by
the AP in April asking the president to sign a written
waiver of his right to keep records of his military
service confidential. Bush gave an oral waiver in a TV
appearance that preceded the White House's release
this year of materials concerning his National Guard
service.
The government "did not expedite their response
... they did not produce the file within the time
required by law, and they will not now estimate when
the file might be produced or even confirm that an
effort has been initiated to retrieve a copy from the
microfilm at the Texas archives," the lawsuit says.
In the absence of any privacy objection by the
president and in light of the importance of the file's
release in advance of the November election, says the
lawsuit, AP seeks a court order to compel the release
of records "that are being unlawfully withheld from
the public."
The released records were from the Texas Air
National Guard at Camp Mabry and the Defense Financing
Accounting Service in Denver.
Under Texas law, a copy of military personnel
files of those serving in the Texas Air National Guard
must be retained on microfilm at the Texas archives.
The lawsuit says that no one has looked at any of
the Texas Air National Guard records maintained at the
state archives since 1996.
Responding to AP's request, the Texas Air National
Guard concluded that Bush's file was a federal record
under control of the U.S. Air National Guard.
When the government did not produce the documents,
AP appealed to the Pentagon, saying that by law, the
microfilm copy should have been produced within 20
days. The Pentagon said it could not respond within
the legally required period.
-------
Yes, but tell it with CONTEXT and CONTINUITY...The LNS
pointed out at the time of the testimony of Pickard
and Ashcroft that somebody had just committed
perjury...CONTEXT and CONTINUITY...Remember Richard
Clarke's CONDEMNATION of the Bush abomination's
approach to the "war on terrorism." His view, sworn to
under oath, is being proven over and over, day after
day. When did the "US mainstream news media" last
mention his name or his testimony? Remember, the Bush
abomination fought the creation of the 9/11 Commission
and has resisted its reasonable requests every step of
the way. Remember, these are the people who wanted to
exploit 9/11 for the 2004 campaign. Remember John
O'Neill and "Forebidden Truth." Remember the 28 pages
of the Congressional 9/11 report that they refuse to
release...Remember the struggle of the 9/11
families...Remember Ashcroft's outrageous, sliming
attacks on 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick...
Lisa Myers, NBC: The 9/11 commission is busy writing
its final report, but is still investigating critical
facts, including the conduct of U.S. Attorney General
John Ashcroft. NBC News has learned that the
commission has interviewed two FBI officials who
contradict sworn testimony by Ashcroft, about whether
he brushed off terrorism warnings in the summer of
2001.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5271234/
Did Ashcroft brush off terror warnings? NBC exclusive: 9/11 commission interviews FBI officials who contradict Ashcroft testimony
By Lisa Myers
Senior investigative correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 7:32 p.m. ET June 22, 2004WASHINGTON - The
9/11 commission is busy writing its final report, but
is still investigating critical facts, including the
conduct of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. NBC
News has learned that the commission has interviewed
two FBI officials who contradict sworn testimony by
Ashcroft, about whether he brushed off terrorism
warnings in the summer of 2001.
In the critical months before Sept. 11, did Ashcroft
dismiss threats of an al-Qaida attack in this country?
At issue is a July 5, 2001, meeting between Ashcroft
and acting FBI Director Tom Pickard. That month, the
threat of an al-Qaida attack was so high, the White
House summoned the FBI and domestic agencies, and
warned them to be on alert.
Yet, Pickard testified to the 9/11 commission that
when he tried to brief Ashcroft just a week later, on
July 12, about the terror threat inside the United
States, he got the brush-off.
"Mr. Ashcroft told you that he did not want to hear
about this anymore," Democratic commission member
Richard Ben-Veniste asked on April 13. "Is that
correct?"
"That is correct," Pickard replied.
Testifying under oath the same day, Ashcroft
categorically denied the allegation, saying, "I did
never speak to him saying that I didn't want to hear
about terrorism."
However, another senior FBI official tells NBC News he
vividly recalls Pickard returning from the meeting
that day furious that Ashcroft had cut short the
terrorism briefing. This official, now retired, has
talked to the 9/11 commission.
Full coverage
9/11 commission
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States wrapped up its public hearings with a
two-day session on June 16 and 17.
• No Iraq-al-Qaida link: Story | Statement
• Al-Qaida's plan: Story | Statement
• Day of attack: Story | Statement
• Commission Web site
NBC News has learned that commission investigators
also tracked down another FBI witness at the meeting
that day, Ruben Garcia, head of the Criminal Division
at that time. Several sources familiar with the
investigation say Garcia confirmed to the commission
that Ashcroft did indeed dismiss Pickard's warnings
about al-Qaida.
"When you get two people coming forth and basically
challenging a sworn statement by the attorney general
regarding a critical meeting in the history of the
9/11 event, you raise serious questions about the
Attorney General's truthfulness," says Paul Light, a
government reform expert and New York University
professor.
Ashcroft's version of events is supported by his top
aide, who attended the meeting. But another Justice
official also there — who Ashcroft's office claimed
would dispute Pickard's account — says he doesn't
remember.
"I do not recall the conversation that interim
director Pickard referred to," says former Deputy
Attorney General Larry Thompson.
Experts say that in the context of Sept. 11, the issue
is not trivial.
"Was there a communications breakdown between the FBI
and the Department of Justice, at the highest levels
of each agency?" asks former Justice Department
Inspector General Michael Bromwich.
Ashcroft's spokesman dismissed the allegations
Tuesday, saying, "The suggestion that the attorney
general wasn't concerned about terrorism is absurd."
He says if Ashcroft was ever short with FBI officials,
it was because "he was unhappy with the quality of
information he was getting."
Pickard did brief Ashcroft on terrorism four more
times that summer, but sources say the acting FBI
director never mentioned the word al-Qaida again in
Ashcroft's presence — until after Sept. 11.
© 2004 MSNBC Interactive
Another US soldier has died in Iraq. For what? Oh yes, SECURITY is the central issue of this national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident: National Security, Economic Security and Environmental Security. Are you safer than you were four years ago? The botched, bungled "war on terrorism" is NOT the strength of the Bush Abomination, it is the SHAME of the Bush abomination.
Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor: Anonymous, who published an analysis of Al Qaeda last year, called Through Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. "I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now," he said. "One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0621/dailyUpdate.html
World > Terrorism & Security
posted June 21, 2004, updated 11:21 a.m.
Senior intel officer: Al Qaeda will attack US to ensure Bush win
His new book, others, also highlight intelligence, administration failures in war on terror.
by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
In the past few months several books have been published that attack the US intelligence community, and the White House, for their alleged mistakes and misstatements about Iraq and the war on terror. Most of these books, the Guardian reports, have been written by "embittered" former officials.
But now, the newspaper reports, a senior US intelligence official is "about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the West is losing the war against Al Qaeda and that an 'avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked' war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands." This senior intelligence official, who writes as "Anonymous," also says that "Osama bin Laden may attack the US before the November election to ensure the re-election of President George Bush."
Anonymous, who published an analysis of Al Qaeda last year, called Through Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. "I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now," he said. "One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."
"Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" will be released in July. The Guardian notes that the fact that this author has been allowed to publish this work, and yet still remain a senior member of the US intelligence community, may "reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken."
Find out more.
"Anonymous" is not the only writer to put the intelligence community and the administration under a microsope. The New York Times reports that James Bamford, the author of two respected books on American intelligence (The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, both about the National Security Agency), has written a new book called "Pretext for War." (The San Jose Mercury News calls him "one of the most talented but unsung investigative reporters of the past 25 years.")
His book is a "damning portrait" of the intelligence community (which he alleges was not ready to deal with the end of the cold war), as well as a "scathing picture" of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, according to the Times. Mr. Bamford also has harsh words for both President Bill Clinton and President Bush. He alleges that neither man did a very good job at dealing with terrorism before 9/11.
In addition Bamford suggests that the CIA caved to pressure from administration hard-liners. He quotes a CIA case officer who says that in January of 2003, one of the agency's higher-ups called a meeting and said, "You know what – if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so."
Last week, in an oped article for the New York Times, Bamford wrote about the practice of "rent-a-spy," which costs the American taxpayers millions of dollars.
Desperate to fill their contracts, the [private] companies frequently offer to double a federal employee's salary. Because the recruiters have security clearances, they often make their recruiting pitches at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. And many of those who do sign on end up going right back to their old office – only now working for a private company. Thus, after spending millions of dollars training people to be clandestine officers, taxpayers are having to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies.
But Bamford's most controversial charges in his new book, according to a review in The Houston Chronicle, involve certain individuals in the US administration, and an idea they once pitched to the government of Israel.
According to Bamford, the basic blueprint for the administration's Middle East policy had been drawn up in the mid-1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, three neoconservatives who would be named to influential positions in the Bush administration. Described as a kind of "American privy council" to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the three proposed what they called a "Clean Break" plan, which involved getting the United States to pull out of the peace negotiations in order to let "Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit." Under the "Clean Break" plan, Israel would launch preemptive attacks against its major Arab enemies and replace Saddam Hussein with a puppet leader friendly to Israel. Bamford records that Netanyahu wisely rejected the plan but that the Perle group found a more receptive audience for their recommendations inside the Bush administration. The fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the Iraqi war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country raises "the most troubling conflict of interest questions," he writes.
Bamford, however, has also come in for criticism about his decision to divulge the "secret location" used by Vice President Dick Cheney in his new book.
The Los Angeles Times reported last Thursday on more alleged intelligence failures. The paper cites current and former US intelligence officials as saying that two British-recruited Iraqi spies who had tales-to-tell about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (their reports were rushed to the White House just before the war) were "never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable."
The Times also says that US intelligence erred in its analysis of high-altitude satellite photos before the war, often mistaking chicken coops for Scud missle silos. The UN team then in Iraq grew so tired of running down these false reports, according to one former UN inspector, that they started to wear T-shirts that read "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team."
The 9/11 commission is preparing to release a report that many experts say will be a severe indictment of the US intelligence community and the way it operated under the Clinton and Bush administrations before 9/11. The New York Times reports that John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member, said the intelligence community was "dysfunctional" and that the commission would make recommendations for improvements. "They could not distinguish between a bicycle crash and a train wreck," he said.
The name of another brave American is scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall of Heroes...
Josh Gerstein, New York Sun: A prominent federal judge has told a conference of liberal lawyers that President Bush’s rise to power was similar to the accession of dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler.
“In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States…somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power.That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power,” said Guido Calabresi, a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Manhattan.
“The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy,” Judge Calabresi continued, as the allusion drew audible gasps from some in the luncheon crowd Saturday at the annual convention of the American Constitution Society.
“The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in. I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual,” the judge said.
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Go To The New York Sun Home Page
Publication:The New York Sun; Date:Jun 21, 2004; Section:Front page; Page:1
AUDIENCE GASPS AS JUDGE LIKENS ELECTION OF BUSH TO RISE OF IL DUCE
2nd Circuit’s Calabresi Also Compares Bush’s Rise to That of Hitler
By JOSH GERSTEIN Staff Reporter of the Sun
WASHINGTON — A prominent federal judge has told a conference of liberal lawyers that President Bush’s rise to power was similar to the accession of dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler.
“In a way that occurred before but is rare in the United States…somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to put somebody in power.That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus Gore. It put somebody in power,” said Guido Calabresi, a judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Manhattan.
“The reason I emphasize that is because that is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy,” Judge Calabresi continued, as the allusion drew audible gasps from some in the luncheon crowd Saturday at the annual convention of the American Constitution Society.
“The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in. I am not suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler. I want to be clear on that, but it is a situation which is extremely unusual,” the judge said.
Judge Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School, said Mr. Bush has asserted the full prerogatives of his office, despite his lack of a compelling electoral mandate from the public.
“When somebody has come in that way, they sometimes have tried not to exercise much power. In this case, like Mussolini, he has exercised extraordinary power. He has exercised power, claimed power for himself; that has not occurred since Franklin Roosevelt who, after all, was elected big and who did some of the same things with respect to assertions of power in times of crisis that this president is doing,” he said.
The 71-year-old judge declared that members of the public should, without regard to their political views, expel Mr. Bush from office in order to cleanse the democratic system.
“That’s got nothing to do with the politics of it.It’s got to do with the structural reassertion of democracy,” Judge Calabresi said.
His remarks were met with rousing applause from the hundreds of lawyers and law students in attendance.
Judge Calabresi was born in Milan. His family fled Mussolini in 1939 and settled in America. In 1994, President Clinton appointed the law professor to the federal appeals court that hears cases from the states of New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.
An opinion written by Judge Calabresi in 2000 rebuked Mayor Giuliani’s administration for failing to respect First Amendment rights.
“We would be ostriches if we failed to take judicial notice of the heavy stream of First Amendment litigation generated by New York in recent years,” the judge wrote. Allies of the mayor denounced the opinion as a thinly veiled political attack on Mr. Giuliani, who was then a candidate for the Senate.
Judge Calabresi made his comments from the floor during a question-andanswer period that was part of a panel discussion on the impact of the upcoming election on law and policy.
“I’m a judge and so I’m not allowed to talk politics. So I’m not going to talk about some of the issues that were mentioned or what some have said is the extraordinary record of incompetence of this administration,” he said.
Two Republicans on the panel politely rejected Judge Calabresi’s contention that Mr. Bush has overstepped his bounds.
A White House counsel under President George H.W. Bush said Judge Calabresi suggested the war in Iraq was a bold and inappropriate use of power without noting that the president’s policy initially enjoyed broad bipartisan support.
“It was approved with a pretty solid vote from Congress,” C. Boyden Gray said. Mr. Gray said conservatives believe Mr. Bush has been too cautious on issues like Medicare reform.
“If anything, he’s been too shy of doing things,” the attorney said.
A top Supreme Court litigator, Jay Sekulow,said it would be unwise to place limits on Mr. Bush’s authority simply because he did not win the popular vote.
“To say that a person who comes in under an Electoral College vote but not a majority of the popular vote and they’re somehow relegated to president-minus,I think is a very dangerous precedent,” said Mr.Sekulow,who is chief counsel for a conservative legal group,the American Center for Law and Justice.
One of the Democrats on stage endorsed Judge Calabresi’s comments.
“I absolutely obviously agree with what Judge Calabresi was trying to get at,” said a former chief of staff to Vice President Gore, Ronald Klain.
On Friday evening, Justice Breyer addressed the group. His presentation was more restrained. He detailed his thinking on the affirmative action cases the court recently decided. However, most of his remarks consisted of a celebration of the respect that most Americans show for the high court’s rulings.
“Ignoring the court isn’t done in this family,” the justice said.
During a session on corporate crime, a prominent class-action lawyer, Melvyn Weiss of Manhattan, warned that tort reform and similar measures could wipe out the plaintiffs’ bar.
Brandishing a copy of a Manhattan Institute report on trial lawyers, Mr. Weiss said, “This is what we’re up against, ladies and gentlemen, and if we don’t fight it, we’re dead meat.”
Another panelist said stockholders who said little about corporate governance in the 1990s share some of the blame for the recent corporate scandals.
“We were all making money. We weren’t out there saying, ‘Get ‘em Mel. Go get ‘em, Mel,” said a former attorney general of Massachusetts and a former president of Common Cause, Scott Harshbarger. He praised New York’s attorney general for his investigations.
“Elliott Spitzer has not drilled a dry hole yet,” Mr. Harshbarger said.
At another discussion, liberal lawyers said it was hypocritical for Republicans to push federal caps on damages in state tort cases while maintaining that they favor limited federal government.
There is an Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004.
Reuters: A New York concert promoter has mounted an online campaign to "draft" Bruce Springsteen to headline a rock 'n roll show to upstage the Republican National Convention on the night it nominates President Bush to run for another term.
The "Concert for Change," would be held Sept. 1 at Giants Stadium, across the Hudson River from the Republicans' meeting at Madison Square Garden, said promoter and Democratic activist Andrew Rasiej, who has reserved the date at Springsteen's New Jersey home venue that he routinely sells out when he tours...The New Jersey rocker has typically stayed out of politics, but in May posted the text of an anti-war speech by former Vice President Al Gore on his official Web site, calling it "one of the most important speeches I've heard in a long time."
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0622-04.htm
Published on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 by Reuters
NY Promoter Wants Springsteen to Upstage Bush
NEW YORK - A New York concert promoter has mounted an online campaign to "draft" Bruce Springsteen to headline a rock 'n roll show to upstage the Republican National Convention on the night it nominates President Bush to run for another term.
The "Concert for Change," would be held Sept. 1 at Giants Stadium, across the Hudson River from the Republicans' meeting at Madison Square Garden, said promoter and Democratic activist Andrew Rasiej, who has reserved the date at Springsteen's New Jersey home venue that he routinely sells out when he tours.
"This is a simple idea that captures the imagination of Americans opposed to George Bush," Rasiej told Reuters.
An online petition at www.draftbruce.com has been signed by about 50,000 people in 10 days since it was launched, Rasiej said, adding he had also reached out to acts such as REM, The Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan and Carlos Santana.
"When it gets to half a million or so I would formally try to deliver the petition to Bruce's people directly," he said.
"I've spoken to the manager of REM, to Bon Jovi's people and the rest of the names I've mentioned and they all said, 'if you build it, we will be there."'
Rasiej said he envisions drawing a big TV audience, but only if he can get a star of the magnitude of Springsteen to get on board and encourage other big acts to take part.
Springsteen's publicist was not available for comment.
Republicans and Democrats both asked to use his 1984 hit "Born in the U.S.A." -- a song about how unwelcoming America was to returning Vietnam veterans but often mistaken for a patriotic anthem -- for use in political campaigns. Springsteen declined the requests.
The New Jersey rocker has typically stayed out of politics, but in May posted the text of an anti-war speech by former Vice President Al Gore on his official Web site, calling it "one of the most important speeches I've heard in a long time."
Rasiej, founder of popular New York rock club Irving Plaza, said a "VoteAid" show could win a large TV audience, raise money to support voter registration and deliver a message that could affect the November presidential election.
© Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd
###
Five more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? How
many more will die as a result of the Bush cabal's
neo-con wet dream? There is a profound revulsion and
revolt in the US military, the US intelligence
community, the US foreign policy establishment, and
across the entire political spectrum (center, left AND
right)...There is one simple way to guarantee that the
Bush abomination ends in DEFEAT this November. BUT
will the 9/11 Commissioners wimp out? Their
questioning, at least in public hearings, has been too
often painfully chummy, facile, non-confrontational
and off-the-mark? And if, by some miracle of American
spirit, the 9/11 Commission's final report does tell
the truth about the Bush abomination, will the "US
mainstream news media" provide appropriate CONTEXT and
CONTINUITY? Or will they just blurt out some ugly
truths in half-truth packings and then run and hide?
Or will perhaps the 9/11 Commission itself explode --
with some staff member and even one or two
commissioners resigning and speaking out publicly? IF
the 9/11 Commission, or a sufficient number of
individuals associated with it as staffers or
commissioners, decides to speak the truth about pre-9/11
criminal negligence, they will succeed in
finishing off the Bush cabal -- politically...The
future of this Republic is very bleak for many years
to come if we fail...
Ray McGovern, www.tompaine.com: Will the Sept. 11
Commission follow the example set by Congress and the
Intelligence Community and let itself be intimidated
by Vice President Dick Cheney?
Now that the commission’s staff report has pulled the
rug out from under the notion so successfully fostered
by the administration that Iraq played a role in the
attacks of 9/11, no one should be surprised if the
commissioners pull the rug out from under the staff.
There are disquieting signs that this has already
begun to happen.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
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http://www.tompaine.com/print/will_the_commissioners_cave.php
Will The Commissioners Cave?
by Ray McGovern
June 21, 2004
Amid the feeding frenzy over last week’s staff report
of the 9/11 commission, the press downplayed an
important fact: the report was produced by the staff
and not the commissioners themselves. This matters
greatly as we approach the July 26 deadline for the
commission’s final report. The Democratic
commissioners are saying the staff report reflects the
commission’s findings, while the Republican
commissioners disagree. McGovern, a former CIA
analyst, explains the partisan wrangling we can expect
during the next month.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, is
co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
Will the Sept. 11 Commission follow the example set by
Congress and the Intelligence Community and let itself
be intimidated by Vice President Dick Cheney?
Now that the commission’s staff report has pulled the
rug out from under the notion so successfully fostered
by the administration that Iraq played a role in the
attacks of 9/11, no one should be surprised if the
commissioners pull the rug out from under the staff.
There are disquieting signs that this has already
begun to happen.
The stakes could not be higher for the president and
vice president. Arguably, the commission is in
position to play in 2004 a role analogous to that
played by the Supreme Court in 2000 in ensuring the
election of George W. Bush and Cheney. This, I
believe, accounts for the dyspeptic reaction of the
two to the staff report and the press play accorded it
last week.
New York Times pundit William Safire is also outraged.
In his column today he lashes out at the commission
chairman, Republican Tom Kean, and the vice chairman,
Democrat Lee Hamilton, for letting themselves be
“jerked around by a manipulative staff.” Safire
drives home the point that the staff conclusion
concerning Iraq and 9/11 was “not a judgment of the
panel of commissioners,” but rather “an interim report
of the commission’s runaway staff.”
Republican Commissioners Fall Into Line
Appearing Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Sept. 11
commission chairman Kean fell in line, saying
repeatedly that the staff report is only an “interim
report.” Not only did he note it is “not finished,”
the commissioners themselves have not been involved in
it so far and the final report will include whatever
“new information” becomes available.
It is not hard to see what is coming. On Thursday
Cheney told the press that he “probably” had more
intelligence information than had been made available
to the commission. Commissioner John Lehman, another
Republican stalwart, told Meet the Press Sunday “the
vice president was right when he said that he may have
things that we don’t have. And we are now in the
process of getting the latest intelligence.”
Flash back, if you dare, to other “intelligence”
promoted by Cheney: the aluminum tubes that turned
out not to be suitable for fashioning nuclear
materials after all; the mobile “biological warfare
labs” that produced nothing more lethal than hydrogen
for weather balloons; the infamous report, based on
forged documents, alleging that Iraq was seeking
uranium in Africa.
The Perils Of Partisanship
What is clear is that Washington is in for a month of
partisan wrangling among the commissioners and staff
before the July 26 deadline for the
report—partisanship of the kind demonstrated at the
grilling of former counter-terrorism chief Richard
Clark. This time it will all take place behind closed
doors. Lehman conceded on Meet the Press, “We’re
under tremendous political pressure…in this election
year.”
Indeed, the commission was highly politicized from the
get-go, with its work carefully choreographed.
Subpoena power, for example, requires a majority vote
among the five Republican and five Democrat
commissioners. And, as the public hearings have
already shown, the White House can count on seasoned
protection from heavy hitters like Fred Fielding,
legal counsel to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, as well
as from Lehman and the other Republican commissioners.
Once again, “intelligence” will be front and center,
with Cheney in the background as super-analyst. CIA
Director George Tenet is packing his bags for his July
11 departure, and there is zero chance his
well-mannered deputy, John McLaughlin, will depart
from what has become customary practice—at the CIA and
elsewhere— and stand up to the vice president.
The Neuralgic Point
When Meet the Press’ Tim Russert quoted The New York
Times’ contention that the commission staff report
“directly contradicts public statements by Bush and
Cheney regarding Iraq and 9/11,” Lehman, borrowing
from Cheney’s lexicon, branded the Times report
“outrageously irresponsible journalism.” Echoing
Kean’s remarks, Lehman added parenthetically, “And,
again, this is a staff statement; the commissioners
have not yet addressed this issue.”
Democrat Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste had just
told Russert, “There was no Iraqi involvement in 9/11.
That’s what our commission found. That’s what our
staff, which included former high-ranking CIA
officials, who know what to look for (found).”
Interesting. Ben-Veniste saying it is what the
commission found; Kean and Lehman saying the
commissioners have not yet addressed the issue. A
harbinger of the wrangling to come.
That Troublesome Constitution Again
Most observers are familiar with the rhetorical
landscape with which Bush and Cheney persuaded a large
majority of Americans that Iraq played a role in the
attacks of 9/11, and many shrug this off as familiar
spin by politicians inclined to take liberties with
the facts. So far little attention has been given to
the fact that a constitutional issue is involved.
On March 19, 2002, the day the war began, President
Bush sent a letter to Congress in which he said that
the war was permitted under legislation authorizing
force against those who “planned, authorized,
committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that
occurred on September 11, 2001.” If the staff’s
finding that there is “no credible evidence that Iraq
and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United
States” is allowed to stand, the Bush administration
will be shown to have gone afoul of the Constitution
yet again.
Watch For New “Intelligence”
So expect new “intelligence” (and hope against hope
that there is time to give it the smell test).
Lehman’s assurance that the commission report will be
updated with new intelligence “right up until we go to
press” is by no means reassuring. If it is the truth
that is sought, there should by now be widespread
awareness of the pitfalls of cherry-picking
unevaluated, uncorroborated, “this-just-in” pieces of
intelligence.
Also watch for administration attempts to change the
final draft report, if the Republican commissioners do
not succeed in neutralizing offending passages.
Tim Russert called attention Sunday to reports that
the White House had been allowed to review the staff
reports just made public, and asked if that was
appropriate. Ben-Veniste indicated that the purpose
of reviewing the reports is supposed to be to find and
eliminate any classified information. He also said,
though, that the White House “went somewhat beyond
that and took issue with some of what the staff had
concluded.”
Indeed, an early draft of one draft report was
changed, according to Newsweek. A passage expressing
skepticism about the account of Cheney getting Bush’s
approval for the shoot-down order was reportedly
removed after the White House objected.
Ben-Veniste told Russert that the White House will
review the final report before it is made public.
Thus, there will be considerable opportunity for the
manufacture of “insurmountable” classification
problems, for delay and for other mischief—given the
potential political explosiveness of the commission’s
final report.
It will not be surprising if the final report is not
made public until well after the target date of July
26 (the same day the Democratic Convention opens in
Boston). If the report does meet that target, it is
likely that it will appear in significantly truncated
form.
There is an Electoral Uprising is coming in November
to re-affirm the reality that 2+2=4, not only in
science but in government and media.
Associated Press: Democrat John Kerry, touting the endorsement of 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, has criticized President Bush for relying on ideology rather than fact in the pursuit of science and
repeated his pledge to overturn the ban on federal
funding of research on new stem cell lines.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/21/kerry.science.ap/index.html
Kerry: Bush puts ideology ahead of research
Bush camp says president is commited to the sciences
Monday, June 21, 2004 Posted: 1:43 PM EDT (1743 GMT)
NANTUCKET, Massachusetts (AP) -- Democrat John Kerry,
touting the endorsement of 48 Nobel Prize-winning
scientists, has criticized President Bush for relying
on ideology rather than fact in the pursuit of science
and repeated his pledge to overturn the ban on federal
funding of research on new stem cell lines..
"We need a president who will once again embrace our
tradition of looking toward the future and new
discoveries with hope based on scientific facts, not
fear," the presidential candidate said in a speech
prepared for a Monday afternoon appearance in Denver.
Kerry is making his first public campaign trip to
Colorado, a traditionally Republican-leaning state.
It has voted Democratic before, choosing Bill Clinton
in 1992, and Kerry's advisers say it could do so again
this year because of the growing Hispanic population
and jobs losses under Bush.
The Massachusetts senator also hopes to have special
appeal because he was born at Fitzsimmons Army
Hospital near Denver and can relate with his military
background to the many veterans who live there.
Kerry has visited Colorado for private fund-raisers
and planned to fly from a weekend on this vacation
island to the ski haven of Aspen to raise money at a
private home before his speech in Denver.
In those remarks, Kerry said Bush's anti-science
initiatives included limiting stem cell research;
removing information about the global warming threat
from a 2003 Environmental Protection Agency report;
ordering changes to a report that described damage
that would be caused by oil-drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge and deleting information
about condoms from government Web sites.
A Kerry campaign statement said Bush's proposed budget
cuts in the National Science Foundation, the EPA and
Veterans Affairs Department would "stymie important
scientific discoveries."
Kerry also pointed to a report by the Union of
Concerned Scientists that the administration distorts
scientific findings and tries to manipulate experts'
advice to avoid information that runs counter to its
political beliefs.
Bush's top science adviser said the report was
inaccurate and flawed in its methodology.
Kerry pledged to listen to the country's scientists
and make decisions based on their advice.
He also repeated his pledge to fund new stem cell
lines. Aides said he would announce proposed increases
in federal spending on science Tuesday.
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said the
president has made an unprecedented commitment to the
sciences and funding levels are at record highs.
"President Bush has an enormous investment in the
National Institutes of Health and other areas of
scientific research," he said.
Harold Varmus, a former head of the NIH and a Kerry
supporter, said Bush continued President Clinton's
plan to double the agency's budget over five years.
But, he said, White House documents show the
administration is prepared to cut the NIH budget by
2.1 percent in 2006.
Other scientific budgets have increased, but under the
rate of inflation, Varmus said.
"I, like many scientists, feel like the country needs
stronger leadership on scientific research," said
Varmus, one of the Nobel Prize-winning scientists who
announced their endorsement of Kerry in an open letter
Monday.
The other signers include winners from 1957-2003 in
chemistry, physics and medicine.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved.This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/21/kerry.science.ap/index.html
There is a national sense of REVULSION, and it is
growing, it will result in an Electoral Uprising in
November 2004...Drip, drip, drip...Chalabi, Plame, the
WMD lies, the pre-9/11 negligence, Halliburton, Enron
and the phoney "California energy crisis," the
prostitution of the EPA, Abu Ghraib...
Harvard University Law School: A group of more than 450 professors of law, international relations, and public policy--led by Harvard Law School faculty members--today sent a letter calling on Congress to hold accountable, through impeachment and removal if appropriate, civilian officials from the top of the Executive Branch on down for policies developed at high levels that have facilitated the recent abuses at Abu Ghraib. The letter also calls on Congress to take primary responsibility for any policy on coercive
interrogation employed by the United States.
In asking Congress to assess Executive Branch
accountability, the letter says: "a growing body of
evidence indicates that the abuses practiced on
detainees under American control are the consequence
of policies developed at the highest levels in the
months and years immediately preceding the scandal."
It argues that prosecution of lower level personnel
"while necessary, is clearly insufficient."
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2004/06/16_congressletter.php
Harvard Law Professors Urge Congress to Review
Interrogation Policy and Hold Executive Branch
Accountable
Post Date: June 16, 2004
A group of more than 450 professors of law,
international relations, and public policy--led by
Harvard Law School faculty members--today sent a
letter calling on Congress to hold accountable,
through impeachment and removal if appropriate,
civilian officials from the top of the Executive
Branch on down for policies developed at high levels
that have facilitated the recent abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The letter also calls on Congress to take primary
responsibility for any policy on coercive
interrogation employed by the United States.
In asking Congress to assess Executive Branch
accountability, the letter says: "a growing body of
evidence indicates that the abuses practiced on
detainees under American control are the consequence
of policies developed at the highest levels in the
months and years immediately preceding the scandal."
It argues that prosecution of lower level personnel
"while necessary, is clearly insufficient."
In asking Congress to take responsibility for
reviewing coercive interrogation policies and
practices, the letter notes that "official U.S. policy
now involves use of coercive methods that are morally
questionable and that may violate international and
domestic law." It further states: "....any decision to
adopt a coercive interrogation policy and the
definition of any such policy, if adopted, should be
made within the strict confines of a democratic
process.... [B]asic principles and policies regarding
human rights must be defined by a representative and
accountable body acting in transparent and
deliberative fashion."
Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the Harvard Law professors
organizing the letter effort, stated: "The letter
arose out of our concern that some of the most
fundamental issues raised by these abuses were getting
lost in the debate. The use of torture and related
extreme coercive techniques goes to the heart of our
understanding of our nation, its culture and values.
If we take seriously our democratic system, any
decision to use such techniques must be made by
Congress as the representative body, rather than by
Executive Branch officials working in secrecy."
Christine Desan, another organizer, stated: "As the
letter emphasizes, there can be no doubt that the acts
of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison constitute violations of
both the domestic and international legal obligations
of the U.S. and its agents. Executive Branch officials
have admitted as much."
Henry Steiner, director of Harvard Law School's Human
Rights Program, said: "The policies adopted and the
abuses to which they led have hurt not only the
immediate victims in terrible ways but also the
credibility and effectiveness of our country's efforts
in Iraq and elsewhere."
U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy will hold a press
conference in Washington, D.C. today to demonstrate
his support for its demands.
"The soldiers responsible for these atrocities need to
be held accountable. But they were not responsible for
setting the policy," said Kennedy. "We need to know
what orders and guidelines they were given, and where
those policies originated. No one should be immune to
questions, including the President."
The letter has been signed by 56 law teachers at
Harvard Law School, including former Dean Robert C.
Clark, and Professors Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz,
Lani Guinier, Detlev Vagts and Frank Michelman. It has
also been signed by leading experts on international
relations, public policy and constitutional law across
the nation, including Yale University Professor Bruce
Ackerman; Professor Philip Alston, director of NYU's
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice; Jose
Alvarez, director of the Center on Global Legal
Problems at Columbia Law School; Duke Law School
Professor Paul Carrington; Georgetown Law School
Professor David Cole; Princeton Professor Richard
Falk; Columbia Law School Professor Jack Greenberg;
Kennedy School of Government Professor Christopher
Jencks; UCLA Law School Professor Kenneth Karst;
Juliette Kayyem of the Kennedy School of Government;
University of Texas Law School Professor Sanford
Levinson; David Scheffer, former U.S. ambassador at
large for war crimes issues; and Harvard University
Professor William Julius Wilson.
The letter has also been signed by members of the
Faculty of the Tufts University Fletcher School. It
has been signed by a total of 481 members of
university faculties across the nation, from more than
110 schools in 40 different states. It has been sent
to all members of Congress and of the relevant
Congressional committees.
The letter and the list of signers as of June 14 is
available at www.iraq-letter.com.
For additional information please contact Harvard Law
School Professors Christine Desan (617-495-4613 or
desan@law.harvard.edu), Henry Steiner (617-495-3107 or
hsteiner@law.harvard.edu), Martha Minow
(minow@law.harvard.edu) or Elizabeth Bartholet
(617-495-3128 or ebarthol@law.harvard.edu). Please
note: Professor Bartholet will be unavailable from
June 15-20.
The signifigance of this story is not that a NYTwits
reporter found Fahrenheit 911 accurate. Who are they to arbitrate accuracy?
The NYTwits have not gotten many facts straight, including simple arithmetic in regard to who "won" in Fraudida, for a painfully long time...No, the signifigance of this story is that a NYTwits reporter DIDN'T twist facts to imply inaccuracies in Fahrenheit 911, as they did to Al Gore and are doing to Sen. John F. Kerry (D - Mekong Delta)...
Greg Mitchell, Editors and Publishers: The author of
the piece, reporter Philip Shenon (who has covered the
federal 9/11 commission for the past year) predicts
that Moore “may face an onslaught of fact-checking”
unlike any a documentary film-maker has faced before.
Shenon’s verdict: “It seems safe to say that central
assertions of fact in ‘Fahrenherit 9/11’ are supported
by the public record….”
He also quotes Moore telling him, “without an ounce of
humor,” that attempts to libel him “will be met by
force.” He reveals that Moore has readied a “war room”
to offer instant rebuttal to conservative critics;
hired Democratic activist Chris Lehane; and has a team
of lawyers ready to bring defamation suits.
Shenon says Moore “is on firm ground” in arguing that
the Bushes have profited handsomely from their
relationships with the Saudis, including the bin Laden
family and the Saudi rulers. He also notes that Moore
is safe in charging that Bush paid too little
attention to terrorism before 9/11, and suggests he is
accurate when he claims that during Bush’s first eight
months in office he spent 42% of his time on vacation
(the source being The Washington Post.
And he predicts that perhaps more “damaging to the
White House” than any statistics in the film is its
unedited replaying of the seven minutes Bush spent
reading the book “My Pet Goat” to schoolchildren in
Florida after hearing the news of the second attack on
the World Trade Center.
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000536074
'NY Times' 9/11 Reporter Reviews Facts in Michael Moore Film
By Greg Mitchell
Published: June 19, 2004
NEW YORK We had Ronald Reagan Week in the press, and
Bill Clinton Week will pass in a few days, and then
Michael Moore Week will surely arrive. The New York
Times gets a jump on it in tomorrow’s Arts & Leisure
section with a lengthy appraisal of the facts and
opinions in Moore’s controversial film “Fahrenheit
9/11” which will be released on Friday.
The author of the piece, reporter Philip Shenon (who
has covered the federal 9/11 commission for the past
year) predicts that Moore “may face an onslaught of
fact-checking” unlike any a documentary film-maker has
faced before. Shenon’s verdict: “It seems safe to say
that central assertions of fact in ‘Fahrenherit 9/11’
are supported by the public record….”
He also quotes Moore telling him, “without an ounce of
humor,” that attempts to libel him “will be met by
force.” He reveals that Moore has readied a “war room”
to offer instant rebuttal to conservative critics;
hired Democratic activist Chris Lehane; and has a team
of lawyers ready to bring defamation suits.
Shenon says Moore “is on firm ground” in arguing that
the Bushes have profited handsomely from their
relationships with the Saudis, including the bin Laden
family and the Saudi rulers. He also notes that Moore
is safe in charging that Bush paid too little
attention to terrorism before 9/11, and suggests he is
accurate when he claims that during Bush’s first eight
months in office he spent 42% of his time on vacation
(the source being The Washington Post.
And he predicts that perhaps more “damaging to the
White House” than any statistics in the film is its
unedited replaying of the seven minutes Bush spent
reading the book “My Pet Goat” to schoolchildren in
Florida after hearing the news of the second attack on
the World Trade Center.
But Shenon adds: “The most valid criticism of the film
are likely to involve the artful way that Mr. Moore
connects the facts, and whether has had left out
others that might undermine his scalding attack.”
Shenon cites one unproven assertion that Saudis own 6
to 7 percent of the United States. Despite criticism,
he reveals, Moore has left in the film dark claims
that the bin Laden family was allowed to fly out of
the U.S. before air space was open to anyone else.
Shenon also reveals, however, that Moore has deleted
his claims that Attorney General Ashcroft did not take
any commercial flights in the summer before 9/11,
after finding that he had done so “at least twice.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is
editor of E & P
Drip, drip, drip...Abu Ghraib, Chalabi, the WMD lies,
Halliburton, Enron and the phoney "Calfornia energy
crisis," Medifraud, Plame...drip, drip, drip...
Associated Press: White House counsel Alberto Gonzales
underwent questioning at the federal courthouse. He
was the latest in a string of administration officials
to be asked about the unauthorized disclosure of the
name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to the news media...Vice
President Dick Cheney was recently questioned by
investigators, and President Bush has indicated that
he, too, expects to be questioned. Bush has consulted
with a private attorney about the case, since the
White House counsel can represent him only on official
matters.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/062104B.shtml
White House Counsel Questioned in Leak Probe
Associated Press
Saturday 19 June 2004
Grand jury investigates outing of covert CIA operative: The White House’s top lawyer was questioned by a federal grand jury Friday in the criminal investigation of who in the Bush administration leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year.
White House counsel Alberto Gonzales underwent
questioning at the federal courthouse. He was the
latest in a string of administration officials to be
asked about the unauthorized disclosure of the name of
CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador
Joseph Wilson, to the news media.
"The president directed the White House to
cooperate fully, and Judge Gonzales was just doing his
part to cooperate," said White House press secretary
Scott McClellan, who also has gone before the grand
jury.
Vice President Dick Cheney was recently questioned
by investigators, and President Bush has indicated
that he, too, expects to be questioned. Bush has
consulted with a private attorney about the case,
since the White House counsel can represent him only
on official matters.
Disclosure of an undercover officer’s identity can
be a federal crime.
Syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame’s
work for the CIA a week after Wilson publicly
criticized Bush’s claim that Iraq had tried to obtain
uranium from the African nation of Niger.
Wilson had earlier been sent to Niger by the CIA
to check out the allegation and concluded it was
unfounded. Bush stated subsequently in his State of
the Union address that Iraq had sought to buy uranium
in Africa.
Wilson has said that revealing his wife’s name was
an attempt to discredit him. In printing Plame’s name,
Novak wrote that two administration officials said
Wilson’s wife suggested sending him on the Niger trip.
Wilson has suggested in a book that the leaker was
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.
The White House denies the claim and accuses
Wilson of seeking to bolster the campaign of Democrat
John Kerry, for whom he has acted as a foreign policy
adviser.
-------
Drip, drip, drip...Abu Ghraib, Chalabi, the WMD lies,
Halliburton, Medifraud, Plame, the prostitution of the
EPA, Enron and the phoney "Calfornia energy crisis,"
and Enron itself (i.e. "Kenny Boy" Lay -- confidant
and financier of the increasingly unhinged and
incredibly shrinking _resident)...drip, drip, drip...
Mary Flood, Houston Chronicle: Federal prosecutors
plan to ask a grand jury to indict Ken Lay on charges
relating to the last few months he was at the helm of
Enron as the company spiraled into its stunning 2001
collapse.
The indictments are expected within two weeks,
according to lawyers close to the case...
Free Martha Stewart, Prosecute the Real Corporate
Criminals, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/062104F.shtml
Prosecutors Seeking Lay Indictment
By Mary Flood
Houston Chronicle
Saturday 19 June 2004
Federal prosecutors plan to ask a grand jury to
indict Ken Lay on charges relating to the last few
months he was at the helm of Enron as the company
spiraled into its stunning 2001 collapse.
The indictments are expected within two weeks,
according to lawyers close to the case.
For the past 2 1/2 years, the Justice Department's
Enron Task Force has been investigating Lay - the
company's former chairman - and recently the probe has
picked up steam.
Over the past few weeks, witnesses about Lay have
appeared before the Enron grand jury in increasing
numbers. At the same time, prosecutors have been
separately interviewing other witnesses and shoring up
details about Lay.
Government lawyers have been playing their cards
close to their vests, and lawyers for witnesses
acknowledge that prosecutors could postpone the final
presentation of the case.
Prosecutors are barred from speaking publicly
about grand jury business, and Enron Task Force
Director Andrew Weissmann would not comment for this
story.
But the Houston-based grand jury has already heard
five days of testimony this month, all focused on Lay.
Enron Task Force prosecutors John Hemann and John
Hueston, who are investigating Lay, have taken in
witness after witness, including Lay's Chief of Staff
Steven Kean and ex-Enron General Counsel Jim Derrick.
Topics that prosecutors have been quizzing
witnesses about include:
Lay's receipt of three memos or e-mails warning of
financial trouble and fraud at the company within
weeks of Jeff Skilling's abrupt August 2001 departure
as CEO.
His public statements to investors and analysts.
Lay's attempt to find an alternative to having to
substantially write down the "goodwill" or excess
price paid for assets.
His trades of company stock for millions of dollars in
company cash in those last months.
Lay's Houston-based lawyer, Mike Ramsey, said
Friday that while he knows there is an active
investigation into his client, he will be surprised if
there's an indictment.
"Indict him for what?" Ramsey said Friday. "I
don't know what they could charge him with."
Lay's lawyers have noted Lay has a good defense to
insider trading charges because he held on to much of
his Enron stock even as the company went bankrupt. And
they said most of the millions in cash he borrowed
from the company and paid back with stock was used to
pay off other debt created by the fall of the price of
Enron stock.
In classic prosecutorial fashion, the Enron Task
Force has charged underlings and worked their way up
the employee food chain. Twenty-one former Enron
employees have been charged along with eight other
people from banks, financial firms or accounting firms
that did business with Enron.
The most recent indictment was against Lay's
second in command - ex-CEO Jeff Skilling, who pleaded
not guilty to 35 felony charges in February.
Though it's possible the government has no
"smoking gun" witness against Lay, prosecutors will
likely use a plethora of witnesses to accuse the
62-year-old.
Among the witnesses the government might use
against Lay are the company's ex-Chief Financial
Officer Andrew Fastow, who pleaded guilty to two
charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors; the
company's former treasurer Ben Glisan, serving a
five-year prison term but who testified before the
grand jury in February and March; and Paula Rieker, a
former executive in investor relations who has pleaded
guilty. She traveled to New York with Lay in October
2001, a trip when the Enron entourage is alleged to
have made false statements to analysts about Enron's
troubles.
Prosecutors now have the cooperation of 10 people
who have pleaded guilty, some of whom have been
re-interviewed in recent weeks, focusing on Lay and
others, including ex-Chief Accounting Officer Rick
Causey.
Lay is likely to be charged with some type of
fraud, possibly similar to the charges against
Skilling and Causey. They are charged with insider
trading, securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and
lying on Enron financial statements.
Several of the lawyers representing witnesses in
the case speculate that rather than indict Lay
separately, prosecutors will add Lay to the case
against Skilling and Causey, meaning the three would
be tried together.
This could be done for two main reasons: The
government likes the efficiency of U.S. District Judge
Sim Lake, who is overseeing the existing case, and it
might pressure Causey to consider a plea bargain. But
Causey has pleaded not guilty to 31 charges and has
shown no signs of interest in a plea bargain.
Prosecutors seem to be focusing on Lay's behavior
from August 2001 to the company's bankruptcy in
December 2001 and seem to be especially interested in
what Lay saw, heard or said regarding events
including:
Aug. 13, 2001 - Lay's internal credit line, where
he could trade Enron stock for company cash, was
expanded from a $4 million cap to a $7.5 million cap.
The evidence of this largesse is a handwritten note on
meeting minutes saying : "$7.5 million per Dr.
LeMaistre." In January 2003, Dr. Charles LeMaistre,
the retired head of University of Texas M.D. Anderson
Cancer Center who ran the board's compensation
committee, appeared before the Enron grand jury.
In August, September and October of 2001, Lay
borrowed more than $15 million through this revolving
credit line, paying it back with stock and leaving a
debt of some $7 million when the company declared
bankruptcy.
Aug. 14 - Skilling abruptly resigned, leaving Lay
as both CEO and board chairman and unable to claim he
was letting someone else run the company. Lay told
people Skilling left for personal reasons but if he
knew otherwise, even those representations might work
against him.
Aug. 15 - Vice President Sherron Watkins sent her
now-famous memo to Lay warning of impending accounting
scandal and citing several problematic deals including
the four accounting partnerships, called the Raptors;
and Fastow's involvement in side deals.
Lay had the Vinson & Elkins law firm do a review,
though Watkins suggested that firm has a conflict and
outside accountants should take a look.
Aug. 17 - Lay's Chief of Staff Steven Kean
e-mailed Lay warning about problems with accounting,
overhyping of stock and a mercenary culture at Enron.
E-mail was almost schizophrenic, simultaneously
lauding the company while listing severe problems.
Last week of August - Recently laid-off employee
Margaret Ceconi sent e-mail addressed to Lay and the
board secretary warning of fraud in hiding Enron
Energy Services losses of at least $500 million by
moving them to another sector of Enron to make EES
appear profitable.
In this last quarter, Lay sought to find ways
around new accounting rules that would require the
company to acknowledge debt from the "goodwill"
payments for assets over their market value
Prosecutors are interested in whether Lay
specifically sought to improperly lessen the financial
hit from Enron's Azurix asset purchases, including its
overpriced acquisition of Wessex Water in the United
Kingdom.
Prosecutors will also want evidence of the
positive statements Lay made to employees, analysts,
and investors from August until the bankruptcy.
In September 2001, for example, Lay told Enron
employees that the stock is "incredibly cheap" and
said "talk up the stock and talk positively about
Enron to your family and friends. ... There have been
all kinds of reckless and unfounded rumors about Enron
and the financial condition of Enron.
-------
CREDIBILITY? COMPETENCY? CHARACTER? The action of the
"Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change" is
UNPRECEDENTED, and provides compelling bi-partisan and
expert testimony to the failures of the Bush
abomination...At least one wire service is providing
worthy CONTEXT and continuity for this story...
Bloomberg News: The statement by 27 former diplomats
and military officers on Wednesday calling for the
defeat of U.S. President George W. Bush may be
unprecedented.
``Their prominence and seniority and influence when in
their diplomatic or military posts, and their number,
is really remarkable,'' said Richard Kohn, the
Pentagon's chief Air Force historian from 1981-1991
and chairman of the University of North Carolina's
peace, war and defense curriculum in Chapel Hill.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=alMjDzShgJkQ&refer=us
U.S.
Bush Censure by Envoys May Be a First, Historians Say
(Update2)
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- The statement by 27 former
diplomats and military officers on Wednesday calling
for the defeat of U.S. President George W. Bush may be
unprecedented.
``Their prominence and seniority and influence when in
their diplomatic or military posts, and their number,
is really remarkable,'' said Richard Kohn, the
Pentagon's chief Air Force historian from 1981-1991
and chairman of the University of North Carolina's
peace, war and defense curriculum in Chapel Hill.
The group, which includes Democrats and Republicans,
said Bush's foreign policy and the war in Iraq have
damaged U.S. security. Its statement may sway voters
already concerned by reports of abuse of Iraqi
prisoners by U.S. soldiers and the conclusion by a
bipartisan commission that Saddam Hussein had no
connection to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The investigative commission, appointed by the
president, found no evidence that Hussein's regime
worked with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization to
plan the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York
and the Pentagon in Washington. Bush, 57, responded
that Hussein and al-Qaeda had ``numerous contacts''
outside of the attacks that justified the U.S. war in
Iraq.
``Bush's credibility has been damaged by Iraq,'' said
Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Schwab
Soundview Capital Markets in Washington. Democratic
presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator John
Kerry ``has greater potential to get traction on
issues like this,'' Valliere said.
Group's Statement
``From the outset, George W. Bush adopted an
overbearing approach to America's role in the world,
relying upon military might and righteousness,
insensitive to the concerns of traditional friends and
allies, and disdainful of the United Nations,'' said
the group, Diplomats and Military Commanders for
Change, in a statement Wednesday. They said Bush
should be defeated, without explicitly endorsing
Kerry, 60.
The group included Jack Matlock Jr., President Ronald
Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union; retired
Admiral William Crowe, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman
under Reagan; Charles Freeman, President George H.W.
Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia; and retired Air
Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak, who is advising
Kerry's campaign.
``I can't remember anything comparable to that,'' said
historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 86, who was an
adviser to President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat. ``I
can't remember a precedent.'' Schlesinger won the
Pulitzer Prize for his 1965 book, ``A Thousand Days:
John F. Kennedy in the White House.''
`Questionable Entries'
The Bush campaign said at least 20 of the signatories
have been active politically before and at least 13
have contributed to Democrats, making the group a
partisan one.
``There are some questionable entries'' who can't
claim to be neutral, said Larry Sabato, director of
the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
Crowe, for example, endorsed Democrat Bill Clinton for
president in 1992, he said.
``There's always some naysayers that get rounded up by
the opposition,'' said Edwin Meese, 72, who served as
attorney general under Reagan. ``I don't think it'll
have much effect at all in the election, in as much as
their statements seem inconsistent with their past
positions.''
Bush's approval rating among adults in the U.S.
climbed in the last month as more Americans said the
military effort in Iraq was going well, a poll from
the Pew Research Center found.
Bush Gains
The survey, conducted June 3-13, found the president's
overall approval rating rose to 48 percent, from 44
percent in May. He also gained in the presidential
race against Kerry, pulling into a statistical tie
after trailing by 5 percentage points, according to
the Washington-based Pew Center.
Professors such as Michael Munger, chairman of the
political science department at Duke University, as
well as former diplomats and military officials said
the group's charges won't resonate with most voters.
The people paying the most attention are the so-called
swing voters, who may go either way, they said.
``These are people who don't get their crank turned by
the main issues,'' Munger said. ``Iraq bears no
resemblance to Vietnam militarily, but it may start to
resemble Vietnam politically. What is the mission?
When will it end?''
In the latest Los Angeles Times poll, Kerry led Bush
by a margin of 51 percent to 44 percent. Fifty-five
percent of voters said they disapproved of Bush's
handling of the war in Iraq, up from 46 percent in
March. The June 5-8 poll of 1,230 registered voters
nationwide had a margin of error of 3 percentage
points.
Open Season?
Crowe laid the groundwork for such a group when he
endorsed Clinton, said Thomas Keaney, executive
director of the foreign policy institute at Johns
Hopkins University's School of Advanced International
Studies in Washington. At the time, it was rare even
for a retired military officer to speak out, he said.
``Today that is more and more prevalent,'' said
Keaney, a retired Air Force Colonel who has also been
a professor at the National War College. For diplomats
and ex-military officials, political acts ``ought to
remain extraordinary,'' Keaney said. ``It will hurt if
the code changes, if it becomes open season.''
In the Vietnam War era, the types of people speaking
out were lower-ranked officers or soldiers without
commissions, said Phyllis Bennis, a fellow with the
Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington research
group that promotes democracy and human rights. Kerry,
a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam who earned three Purple
Hearts for injuries, a Silver Star for gallantry in
action and a Bronze Star for valor, was one of those
protesters.
The War Issue
``I don't remember a group of this stature before this
war,'' Bennis said. ``The war is a crucial issue for
every voting bloc -- those that are uncertain where
they stand will take this as a very serious
consideration.''
In the late 1950s, high-ranking retired military
officials publicly denounced President Dwight
Eisenhower's military strategy against the Soviet
Union, said Christopher Preble, director of foreign
policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington
public policy group that advocates limited government
and libertarian issues. They acted as individuals, he
said.
``We have seen this on specific issues at times,
expressing some unhappiness, but not a broad blast at
the administration like this,'' said Casimir Yost,
director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy
at Georgetown University.
The U.S. group may have been following counterparts in
the U.K. In an open letter released April 26, 52
former U.K. ambassadors and international officials
criticized Prime Minister Tony Blair for his support
of the U.S. administration's policies in Iraq and in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Powell Response
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday said
the U.S. group's statement was politically motivated.
``I disagree with their point of view,'' Powell, 67,
said in an interview with the Arab television channel
Al-Jazeera. ``They wish to see President Bush not
reelected. I do not believe that will be the judgment
of the American people.''
The Bush campaign has more than 80,000 veteran and
military volunteers and 49 Medal of Honor recipients
who support the president, spokesman Scott Stanzel
said. There are just 130 living recipients of the
highest U.S. military award, according to the Web site
http://www.medalofhonor.com .
``We are not surprised that John Kerry has the support
of people who share his belief that the threat of
terror is exaggerated,'' Stanzel said. ``This is a
group of partisan individuals who have been previously
active in politics. They certainly have a right to
express their Democratic views, but we're not
concerned with their activity.''
Veterans' Role
Military issues have gained more attention in the 2004
election because of Iraq and Kerry's efforts to
organize 1 million veterans to help him.
``To be involved in an act that will be seen by many
as political if not partisan is for many of us a new
experience,'' said Phyllis Oakley, a career diplomat
who served as assistant secretary of state for
intelligence and research under Clinton and signed the
statement. ``As career government officials, we have
served loyally both Republican and Democratic
administrations.''
Bush, commenting yesterday on the Sept. 11 commission
report, said ``there was a relationship'' with
al-Qaeda. ``This administration never said that the
9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and
al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts
between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,'' he said.
That nuance may be lost on voters, said Ted Carpenter,
an analyst at the Cato Institute. ``The Bush message
that Iraq was in league with terrorists is fairly
simple to understand, but he will not get the
distinction between his message and the commission's
message,'' Carpenter said. ``The commission report
will have an impact; it will resonate with undecided
voters.''
Vice President Dick Cheney, 63, reiterated the
administration's position in a CNBC television
interview last night, calling the evidence of a
connection between the terrorists and Iraq
``overwhelming.''
To contact the reporter on this story:
Kristin Jensen in Washington at
or kjensen@Bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Joe Winski in Washington at
or jwinski@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: June 18, 2004 10:23 EDT
Drip, drip, drip...Plame, Chalabi, Abu Ghraib,
Halliburton...drip, drip, drip...
Antony Barnett and Martin Bright, Guardian: A British
lawyer is emerging as a key witness in a $180 million
bribery investigation that could lead to the
indictment of US vice president Dick Cheney.
Last week, US oil corporation Halliburton cut all ties
with a former senior executive, Albert Stanley, after
it emerged he had received as much as $5m in 'improper
personal benefits' as part of a $4bn gas project in
Nigeria. Halliburton also sacked a second
'consultant', William Chaudan in connection with the
bribery allegations. At the time of these alleged
payments, Cheney was chief executive of the
corporation.
French investigating magistrate Renaud van Ruymbeke is
examining a stream of payments surrounding the
controversial project which was built during the
regime of the late dictator Sani Abacha. The judge has
uncovered a $180m web of payments channeled through
offshore companies and bank accounts.
Cleanse the White House of the Chickenhawk Coup and
Its War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0620-01.htm
Published on Sunday, June 20, 2004 by the Observer/UK
Cheney in Firing Line over Nigerian Bribery Claims
by Antony Barnett and Martin Bright
A British lawyer is emerging as a key witness in a
$180 million bribery investigation that could lead to
the indictment of US vice president Dick Cheney.
Last week, US oil corporation Halliburton cut all ties
with a former senior executive, Albert Stanley, after
it emerged he had received as much as $5m in 'improper
personal benefits' as part of a $4bn gas project in
Nigeria. Halliburton also sacked a second
'consultant', William Chaudan in connection with the
bribery allegations. At the time of these alleged
payments, Cheney was chief executive of the
corporation.
French investigating magistrate Renaud van Ruymbeke is
examining a stream of payments surrounding the
controversial project which was built during the
regime of the late dictator Sani Abacha. The judge has
uncovered a $180m web of payments channeled through
offshore companies and bank accounts.
The Nigerian project to build a huge gas plant was
signed with an international consortium that included
Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. Cheney
retired from the chief executive post in 2000.
The French judge is considering summoning Cheney to
give evidence in his probe to ascertain whether the US
vice president knew about the alleged commission
payments.
Van Ruymbeke has been investigating why the
consortium, which built the gas plant, paid up to
$180m to a Gibraltan company set up by British
solicitor Jeffrey Tesler, a partner in law firm Kaye
Tesler & Co, based in Tottenham, north London. Van
Ruymbeke wants to know whether the Gibraltar firm,
TriStar Investments, was used to distribute bribes to
win the contracts. Tesler has declined to answer media
questions about his role in the project.
The Nigerian deal to build a $4bn liquefied natural
gas plant is already subject to a formal investigation
by both the US department of justice and the
Securities and Exchange Commission.
Halliburton's decision to sever ties with Stanley and
Chaudan recognizes the firm's difficulty with the
corruption allegations. When the claims initially
arose in France the firm denied any improper
activities. A spokesman for Halliburton said the two
executives were dismissed because they had broken the
firm's 'code of business conduct'.
A statement added: 'While we do not know all of the
facts related to the issue we are taking these actions
in response to the facts that we do have and to
protect our investors, employees, customers and
vendors as several investigations proceed.'
The acknowledgement that Stanley was receiving
payments as part of the Nigeria deal brings the
allegations uncomfortably close to Cheney. Stanley was
chairman of Kellogg Brown & Root - one of
Halliburton's most important subsidiaries. The company
denied that Stanley - who retired as chairman in
December but remained a consultant - would have
reported directly to Cheney.
Neither Stanley, Chaudan or their lawyers have made
any comments on the allegations and the two US
directors do not currently face any legal action.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
Yes, as the LNS has stated over and over again, Bin Laden could not have hoped for better from the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident if he had written the script himself...The botched, bungled "war on terrorism" is NOT the strength of the Bush abomination, it is the SHAME of the Bush abomination...
Julain Borger, Guardian: A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them...
Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1242638,00.html
Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands: Al-Qaida may 'reward' American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday June 19, 2004
The Guardian
A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.
He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of al-Qaida's protectors in Waziristan.
But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez Musharraf cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt. "He walks a very fine line," he said yesterday.
Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.
The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken.
Peter Bergen, the author of two books on Bin Laden and al-Qaida, said: "His views represent an amped-up version of what is emerging as a consensus among intelligence counter-terrorist professionals."
Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House and its policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage.
"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."
In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable.
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"For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous said.
Yesterday President Bush repeated his assertion that Bin Laden was cornered and that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American justice".
Anonymous said: "I think we overestimate significantly the stress [Bin Laden's] under. Our media and sometimes our policymakers suggest he's hiding from rock to rock and hill to hill and cave to cave. My own hunch is that he's fairly comfortable where he is."
The death and arrest of experienced operatives might have set back Bin Laden's plans to some degree but when it came to his long-term capacity to threaten the US, he said, "I don't think we've laid a glove on him".
"What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation," he said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional group.
"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they're much less prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They're just much more careful across the board in the way they operate."
As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.
The most likely source of a nuclear device would be the former Soviet Union, he believes. Dirty bombs, chemical and biological weapons, could be home-made by al-Qaida's own experts, many of them trained in the US and Britain.
Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.
"I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now," he said.
"One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."
The White House has yet to comment publicly on Imperial Hubris, which is due to be published on July 4, but intelligence experts say it may try to portray him as a professionally embittered maverick.
The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the stridency of his warnings about al-Qaida led him to be moved from a highly sensitive job in the late 90s.
But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."
Anonymous believes Mr Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy.
He said: "It's going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before we say to ourselves: 'What is going on'?"
Drip, drip, drip...Chalabi, Plame, WMD lies, pre-9/11, post-9/11, the 28 pages, the Bush-Bath-Bin Laden-Saud family business ties, the Alabama National Guard, Medifraud, Enron and the phoney "California energy crisis," Halliburton...drip, drip, drip...Vive le France!
Doug Ireland, The Nation: The Securities and Exchange Commission has finally opened a formal investigation into allegations that Halliburton (in partnership with French petro-engineering company Technip) funneled $180 million into a slush fund to pay bribes in the construction of a $6 billion Nigerian gas refinery--a scandal that French authorities have been probing for a year (for background, see Doug Ireland, "Will the French Indict Cheney?" December 29, 2003)...Although the US media have shown little interest in the story, the investigation of the Halliburton Nigeria scandal by France's most celebrated investigating magistrate, Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, has continued making headlines in Paris--where the latest revelations bring the scandal right to the front door of Halliburton's Houston headquarters.
Cleanse the White House of the Chickenhaw Coup and their War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040705&s=ireland
Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dick Cheney and the $5 Million Man
by DOUG IRELAND
[posted online on June 18, 2004]
The Securities and Exchange Commission has finally opened a formal investigation into allegations that Halliburton (in partnership with French petro-engineering company Technip) funneled $180 million into a slush fund to pay bribes in the construction of a $6 billion Nigerian gas refinery--a scandal that French authorities have been probing for a year (for background, see Doug Ireland, "Will the French Indict Cheney?" December 29, 2003).
The energy conglomerate formerly headed by Dick Cheney disclosed the SEC probe (as it was required to do by law for any legal action potentially affecting the company's stock) on June 11. The timing of the disclosure was no accident--it was a Friday, the last day of the interminable Reagan funeral ceremonies, and Wall Street was thus closed. The national press corps focused on little else but the burial, so the SEC investigation got scant attention in the weekend papers (even the New York Times ran only a brief AP dispatch on its website).
Although the US media have shown little interest in the story, the investigation of the Halliburton Nigeria scandal by France's most celebrated investigating magistrate, Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, has continued making headlines in Paris--where the latest revelations bring the scandal right to the front door of Halliburton's Houston headquarters.
The Journal du Dimanche (JDD, a large Sunday paper) revealed on June 13 that Judge Van Ruymbeke's investigation has uncovered how Albert "Jack" Stanley, the president of huge Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) at the time of the alleged bribery, received so-called "commissions" of 3 percent of the deal from the slush fund. The total amount Stanley received is some $5 million, according to reports in the International Herald Tribune and elsewhere. The Nigerian oil minister at the time, Dan Entete, got $2.5 million, reported the JDD. The slush fund was set up with Halliburton money by a London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler--who worked for Halliburton at the same time he was financial adviser to the notoriously corrupt late Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha--as a shell-company front called TriStar, which Tesler established in the British tax haven of Gibraltar. Stanley, the 5 Million Dollar Man, is a close friend and associate of Dick Cheney.
In mid-May, after Judge Van Ruymbeke threatened to issue an international warrant to bring Tesler to France to testify, Tesler "voluntarily" came to Paris for two days of testimony under oath. Confronted by Van Ruymbeke with documents obtained through international search warrants targeting banks in Switzerland, Monaco, Madeira and elsewhere, Tesler admitted having made the highly unusual payments from the slush fund to then-KBR president Stanley, which Stanley had sent to a numbered bank account in Zurich baptized "Amal" (according to the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné). Another huge payment of $350,000 was made to a top KBR executive, William Chaudran, which Chaudran had routed to an anonymous bank account in the island fiscal paradise of Jersey, Tesler testified. (Stanley, who is retired from KBR but maintains an office and secretary in Halliburton-KBR's Houston headquarters, did not return calls requesting comment, and neither did Halliburton-KBR's flack, Wendy Hall.)
The obvious question is: If the payments to the KBR execs were legitimate, why route them through secret foreign bank accounts? And where did the rest of the $180 million go? To the dictator Abacha, whose money adviser Tesler was, and other Abacha cronies?
Statements given by Halliburton to Le Figaro and other French papers covering the scandal claim the conglomerate had no knowledge of the payments to the KBR execs--and appear to be setting up Stanley as the fall guy. Is this to keep the scandal from touching Cheney?
The final contract for construction of the Nigeria refinery, one of the world's largest, was signed in 1999, on Cheney's watch (Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000). Bribes of the sort under investigation by the SEC and the French are illegal under statutes of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of whose international conventions both the United States and France are signatories-members; and under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In disclosing the SEC investigation, Halliburton said it did not believe it had violated the FCPA, while adding, "There can be no assurance that government authorities would not conclude otherwise."
Indeed.
Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence? Well, Putin
is a very *intelligent* man. He is much wilier than
either the increasingly unhinged and incredibly
shrinking _resident or the VICE _resident that punches
his trifecta tickets for him. But, of course, as
Dunston Woods, LNS foreign correspondent observes,
even Chalabi and Iranian intelligence outsmarted the
Three Stooges Reich...Yes, I think they both have us
right where they want us...bleeding and squandering
treasure in the desolation of Iraq...Do not be
distracted. Do not be dismayed. Do not allow the
weak-minded around you to be misled. There is an
Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004...
Patrick Sabatier, Liberation: In France, George W. Bush's calamitous policy produces three reactions with regard to America against which we must be on guard...Despair, the third common reaction, makes Bush the craftsman of a slide from democracy to a form of "fascism". That viewpoint
ignores Congressional hearings and reports that one
after the other demonstrate the administration's
pre-war lies: after weapons of mass destruction, links
between Saddam and bin Laden have been acknowledged to
be non-existent. That also eclipses the success of the
uncompromising and devastating best-sellers by men who
have left power, as well as the fact that Michael
Moore's anti-Bush conflagration, far from being
censured, is being distributed in hundreds of theaters
in the United States. These are so many proofs that
the American people are not idiots, that opposing
forces function, and that American democracy is far
from being moribund. "The times they are a-changin,"
Dylan sang. There is no impunity for Bush, even if his
defeat in November is not assured.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061904H.shtml
Opposing Force
By Patrick Sabatier
Libération
Friday 18 June 2004
In France, George W. Bush's calamitous policy produces three reactions with regard to America against which we must be on guard.
First of all, demonization: anti-Americanism
contests with Islamophobia and anti-Semitism for the
top spot on the Internet's Hatred Hit-parade. Some of
Bush's critics easily give in to a paranoid vision of
history that explains American policy through
conspiracies hatched in Jerusalem or Riyadh between
the CIA and plutocrats.
Then, idealization, which often extends
demonization by making believe that the 43rd United
States president does not personify the American
people and that "Bushism" boils down to the
maneuverings of a clique that came to power almost by
accident. In fact, "W." was well and truly elected
(however badly) and his policy has responded to the
trauma of a country at war since September 11. It is
anchored in recurrent aspects of the American psyche
and history: imperial arrogance, religiosity, and
authoritarian temptations.
Despair, the third common reaction, makes Bush the
craftsman of a slide from democracy to a form of
"fascism". That viewpoint ignores Congressional
hearings and reports that one after the other
demonstrate the administration's pre-war lies: after
weapons of mass destruction, links between Saddam and
bin Laden have been acknowledged to be non-existent.
That also eclipses the success of the uncompromising
and devastating best-sellers by men who have left
power, as well as the fact that Michael Moore's
anti-Bush conflagration, far from being censured, is
being distributed in hundreds of theaters in the
United States. These are so many proofs that the
American people are not idiots, that opposing forces
function, and that American democracy is far from
being moribund. "The times they are a-changin," Dylan
sang. There is no impunity for Bush, even if his
defeat in November is not assured.
What Putin, Chalabi, et al are really up to...I do not
think these people would mind another four years of
the Bush abomination shooting itself in the foot,
draining America's resources, sapping the elan of its
military and fracturing its alliances...The Bin Laden
family is not the only bad influence at work...
Sergei Blagov, Asia Times: While refraining from
overt criticism of the United States, an emerging
organization that embraces Russia, China, and Central
Asian states has indicated its concern over American
unilateralism in the region.
When the presidents of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) - a six-member group that comprises
Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan - met in Tashkent on Thursday, they pledged
to address regional security concerns. The SCO also
vowed to become a full-fledged international
organization. In fact, its efforts can be seen as
aimed at countering US clout in the region.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FF19Ag01.html
Russian President Vladimir Putin made no secret of the fact that Moscow has been keen to use a variety of groups to exert its influence across the region. "The voice of Russia will be heard here," Putin told reporters after the summit.
Central Asia
Shanghai group aims to keep US in check
By Sergei Blagov
MOSCOW - While refraining from overt criticism of the
United States, an emerging organization that embraces
Russia, China, and Central Asian states has indicated
its concern over American unilateralism in the region.
When the presidents of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) - a six-member group that comprises
Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan - met in Tashkent on Thursday, they pledged
to address regional security concerns. The SCO also
vowed to become a full-fledged international
organization. In fact, its efforts can be seen as
aimed at countering US clout in the region.
Russian President Vladimir Putin made no secret of the
fact that Moscow has been keen to use a variety of
groups to exert its influence across the region. "The
voice of Russia will be heard here," Putin told
reporters after the summit.
To ensure its voice is heard, Moscow relies on
economic incentives. Russia is to continue providing
economic aid, including low cost energy supplies, to
the former Soviet states, notably members of the SCO,
Putin said in Tashkent.
Before the SCO summit, Putin and Uzbek President Islam
Karimov signed a partnership agreement and a US$1
billion 35-year production-sharing agreement (PSA) to
develop Uzbek natural gas deposits. Under the PSA, top
Russian oil producer LUKoil is to develop the Kandym,
Khauzak and Shady gas fields in the south of the
country, which have 280 billion cubic meters of proven
reserves. LUKoil will have a 90% share in the project,
with Uzbekistan's Uzbekneftegaz holding the remaining
10%.
Russia's natural gas monopoly Gazprom is also to
invest $1 billion in Uzbekistan, Putin announced.
Gazprom's investment will boost Russian involvement in
Uzbekistan to $2.5 billion, Karimov said.
China came up with its own economic carrot . President
Hu Jintao reportedly offered nearly $1 billion in
credit to the SCO Central Asian states to boost
economic cooperation.
The SCO leaders were joined by Afghan President Hamid
Karzai. Karzai attended the talks as a guest, while
the SCO granted Mongolia observer status. However, the
SCO approved creation of the SCO-Afghanistan contact
group.
Putin said the SCO was open to other states, but it
was too early to discuss Afghanistan's membership. "We
are all interested in normalization in Afghanistan,
but any state should fit certain parameters to become
a member of the SCO," Putin said without elaborating
further.
"We should not rush with accepting new SCO members,"
Uzbek President Islam Karimov said, adding that he
expressed Russia's and China's opinion as well.
It was not said in public, of course, but Russian
commentators explained the SCO's reservations over
Afghanistan's membership as being due to Karzai's
largely pro-American stance. Russia's Kommersant daily
commented that an ultimate goal of the "certain
parameters" argument was to limit growing US influence
in the region.
The presidents signed the Tashkent Declaration, which
calls for enhanced cooperation with Asia-Pacific
forums, as well as urging the creation of a
"cooperative system of regional security" in the
Asia-Pacific. In the declaration, the leaders also
called for close cooperation with the United Nations,
yet another implicit criticism of American
unilateralism.
The leaders also launched the SCO anti-terror center
in Tashkent, a think tank and information exchange
center for member states.
China has been seen as increasing its security ties in
Central Asia through the SCO. Notably, China has
committed itself for the first time to a regional
collective security agreement. The SCO anti-terrorist
rapid deployment forces could be used to help enforce
border security along with other members of the
Shanghai group.
Nonetheless, the SCO still seeks to be a geopolitical
player in Central Asian security developments, a trend
also reflected in bilateral defense ties between
Russia and China. Last December, Moscow and Beijing
clinched a deal under which China would procure $2
billion worth of Russian military hardware and
technologies in 2004.
When in June 2001 the informal Shanghai Five group of
states became the SCO, member states envisioned the
organization as a counterweight to growing US economic
and political influence. In June 2002, the leaders of
the five states plus Uzbekistan agreed to base the SCO
secretariat in Beijing and to establish the joint
anti-terrorism center.
Russia and China have reluctantly tolerated the US
strategic presence in Central Asia. They are concerned
that permanent American bases in the region would be
primarily designed to limit Beijing and Moscow's
influence in Central Asia.
Meanwhile, the US has made moves toward establishing a
long-term presence in Central Asia, in Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. During a visit to
Uzbekistan last February, US Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld indicated that the US wanted to establish
operating facilities and not permanent bases. In
pledging that a potential US presence does not mean a
large-scale military deployment, US officials hope to
limit Russian and Chinese opposition to these plans
for Central Asia.
Moscow has been insisting that the US military
presence in the region is temporary and should be
ended after anti-terrorism action in Afghanistan.
Russia would accept US bases in Central Asia no longer
than the anti-terrorism operation in Afghanistan,
Moscow has repeatedly reiterated. It is understood
that Karimov has drifted towards Russia after being
targeted by Western criticism over human rights
violations.
In the meantime, Russia has been keen to rely on any
post-Soviet grouping in order to push its agenda in
Central Eurasia. Last month, Russia moved to join a
purely Central Asian grouping, the Central Asian
Cooperation Organization, which includes Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Moreover, on June 18-19, two Russia-dominated
post-Soviet groupings, the Eurasian Economic
Commonwealth (EEC) and Collective Security
Organization Treaty (CSTO), hold their summits in the
Kazakhstan capital, Astana. The EEC summit is to
discuss multilateral economic integration, while the
CSTO is to address regional security concerns.
Russia's - and presumably China's - perceived
strategic purpose remains to counterweigh American and
Western influence in Central Eurasia. However, the SCO
and other groupings are yet to prove their viability
as vehicles to check US unilateralism in the region.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
Three more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? Drip, drip, drip...Abu Ghraib, Plame, the WMDs lies, the Iraq-Al Qaeda lie, Halliburton, pre-9/11, post-9/11..,drip, drip, drip...
CBS/AP: In a sworn statement to Army investigators
obtained by USA Today, Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib when abuses occurred, said he was under intense pressure from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last
fall to get better information from
detainees...Jordan's statement said he was reminded of
the need to improve intelligence "many, many, many
times" and the pressure included a visit to the prison
by an aide to White House national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice, the paper reported.
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/30/iraq/main614905.shtml
Prison Officer Says He Felt Heat
WASHINGTON, June 18, 2004
(CBS/AP) An Army intelligence officer claims the
abuses at Abu Ghraib took place after interrogators
came under pressure from Bush administration
officials.
In a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by
USA Today, Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the top
military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib when
abuses occurred, said he was under intense pressure
from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to
get better information from detainees.
He also said he had worked out a procedure with CIA
interrogators to hide five or six inmates from Red
Cross inspectors in October, the newspaper reported in
Friday editions.
Jordan's statement said he was reminded of the need to
improve intelligence "many, many, many times" and the
pressure included a visit to the prison by an aide to
White House national security adviser Condoleezza
Rice, the paper reported.
To rebut Jordan's account, the White House arranged an
interview with White House homeland security adviser
Fran Townsend before, but in anticipation of, the
newspaper's publication.
Townsend, who last fall was Rice's deputy for
combating terrorism, told The Associated Press she
visited Abu Ghraib and even walked through a cellblock
but "we never discussed interrogation. We never
discussed interrogation techniques. That wasn't the
focus."
"I did not go there to pressure them to do anything
they weren't doing," Townsend added. "I really wanted
to understand how they were taking the information
they had and what they were doing with it so that I
could ^=… think through how we could make that
dissemination of information most effective."
In other developments:
Jack Goldsmith, the Assistant Attorney General for the
Office of Legal Counsel, announced on Thursday that he
was resigning at the end of July. The Office of Legal
Counsel is embroiled in a dispute over Bush
administration memos that contend neither the
president, nor anyone acting on his orders as a
wartime commander-in-chief, can be held liable under
anti-torture laws. Goldsmith was a Pentagon adviser
when a similar memo was drafted there. Goldsmith said
he was resigning to return to academia.
A former Army ranger hired by the CIA to conduct
interrogations was charged Thursday with assaulting an
Afghan detainee who died after two days of beatings,
the first time civilian charges have been brought in
the investigation of prisoner abuse in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters he
ordered an alleged member of an Iraqi militant group
held without notifying international authorities in a
timely fashion, as required under the Geneva
Conventions. He did so at the request of CIA Director
George Tenet. The defense secretary said such a
decision would be made to prevent the prisoner's
interrogation from being interrupted.
The Bush administration has been stung by harsh
criticism at home and abroad over mistreatment of
prisoners, most notably at the Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq. The Defense Department and other agencies are
investigating abuse allegations.
No civilians have been charged in connection with Abu
Ghraib, though Ashcroft said the Defense Department
had referred one case to the Justice Department for
investigation. Seven soldiers were charged by the
military.
A four-count grand jury indictment was handed up in
Raleigh, N.C., against David A. Passaro, 38, for the
June 21, 2003, death of Abdul Wali. Attorney General
John Ashcroft said Passaro was accused of "brutally
assaulting" Wali at a U.S. base in Asadabad,
Afghanistan.
Wali, the prisoner who died last year in Afghanistan,
was described as having participated in rocket attacks
against a U.S. base in mountainous northeast
Afghanistan about five miles (eight kilometers) from
the border with Pakistan. Al Qaeda and Taliban
fighters are active in the region, Ashcroft said.
U.S. officials wanted to talk to Wali, and on June 18,
2003, he came to the base gate to surrender, according
to court documents. Wali died in a cell at the base
after two days of beatings by Passaro, who used "his
hands and feet and a large flashlight," the indictment
alleged.
Passaro is charged with two counts each of assault and
assault with a dangerous weapon — the flashlight. He
faces a total of up to 40 years in prison, if
convicted, and up to a $1 million fine. Federal law
allows civilian charges to be brought against U.S.
citizens for crimes overseas.
Passaro was arrested Thursday and ordered held without
bond after a brief initial appearance before a federal
magistrate in Raleigh. Passaro, who was shackled
around his wrists and legs in the courtroom, will have
a detention hearing Tuesday.
"We were stunned today when he was picked up," said
Passaro's attorney, Gerald Beaver. "We've been in
consultation with the government since March and it
was my understanding that he would be allowed to
surrender if there were any indictments."
Wali's case initially was referred to the Justice
Department by the CIA in November.
Ashcroft said the indictment sends a message that "the
United States will not tolerate criminal acts of
brutality" against detainees.
U.S. officials said Passaro's contract with the CIA
began in December 2002 and that he arrived at the
Afghan base in mid-May 2003, only a few weeks before
the alleged abuse occurred.
In a statement, the U.S. Army Special Operations
Command at Fort Bragg said Passaro was arrested at the
post Thursday morning. Passaro, a former Special
Forces medic, was on leave from a civilian Army
medical job at Fort Bragg while doing the contract
work for the CIA, it said.
Wali's is among three detainee deaths being
investigated by the Justice Department and CIA's
inspector general in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice
Department declined to bring charges in a fourth
death.
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield noted that the
allegations were promptly reported after the death
occurred. Ashcroft said Passaro was returned to the
United States shortly after Wali died.
©MMIV CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,
or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to
this report.
The November 2004 election is a national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident. The central issue is SECURITY: National Security, Economic Security AND *Environmental Security*
David Adam, Guardian (UK): The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him "really very worried for the planet".
In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.
"Sequestration is difficult, but if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world," said Lord Oxburgh. "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."
His comments will enrage many in the oil industry, which is targeted by climate change campaigners because the use of its products spews out huge quantities of carbon dioxide, most visibly from vehicle exhausts.
Save the Environment, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0617-01.htm
Published on Thursday, June 17, 2004 by the Guardian/UK
Oil Chief: My Fears for Planet, Shell Boss's 'Confession' Shocks Industry
by David Adam
The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him "really very worried for the planet".
In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.
"Sequestration is difficult, but if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world," said Lord Oxburgh. "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."
His comments will enrage many in the oil industry, which is targeted by climate change campaigners because the use of its products spews out huge quantities of carbon dioxide, most visibly from vehicle exhausts.
His words follow those of the government's chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.
"You can't slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position," said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.
Companies including Shell and BP have previously acknowledged the problem of climate change and pledged to reduce their own emissions, but the issue remains sensitive, and carefully worded public statements often emphasize uncertainties over risks.
Robin Oakley, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace, said: "This is an important statement to make but it does have to come with a commitment to follow through, and that means making the case to his peers in the oil industry who are still skeptical of climate change."
Mr Oakley said a gulf was opening between more progressive oil companies such as Shell, which invests in alternative energy sources including wind and solar power, and ExxonMobil, the biggest and most influential producer, particularly in the US.
In June 2002 ExxonMobil's chairman, Lee Raymond, said: "We in ExxonMobil do not believe that the science required to establish this linkage between fossil fuels and warming has been demonstrated."
Lord Oxburgh's words will also fuel arguments over sequestration. Supporters say it will allow a smoother transition to reduced emissions by allowing us to burn coal, oil and gas for longer. Critics argue that the idea is an expensive and probably unworkable smokescreen for continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Last year the Guardian revealed that ministers were considering plans for a national network of pipelines to carry millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from power stations to be buried under the North sea.
"You probably have to put it under the sea but there are other possibilities. You may be able to trap it in solids or something like that," said Lord Oxburgh, who claimed even vehicle emissions could be trapped and disposed of. "The timescale might be impossible, in which case I'm really very worried for the planet because I don't see any other approach."
According to a 3,000m (about 10,000ft) ice core from Antarctica revealing the Earth's climate history, carbon dioxide levels are the highest for at least 440,000 years.
Lord Oxburgh said the situation is particularly urgent because many developing countries, including India and China, are sitting on huge untapped stocks of coal, probably the most polluting fossil fuel.
"If they choose to burn their coal, we in the west are not in a very good position to tell them not to, because it's exactly what we did in our industrial revolution."
Bryony Worthington, a climate campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: "It isn't a responsible attitude to say we're going to pledge to do sequestration but if the plans don't work out then the world's messed up. He's done quite a clever job by making it clear he's concerned but at the same time not pledging to do anything about it."
She called for tougher emission standards for new vehicles, as well as greater investment in energy efficiency measures and renewable sources.
A former non-executive director with Shell, Lord Oxburgh was catapulted into the chairman's role after the company was forced to reveal it had overstated the extent of its reserves. He was widely viewed as a safe pair of hands.
He followed his long-standing academic career with spells as chief science adviser to the Ministry of Defense and rector of Imperial College, London. A crossbench life peer, he still chairs the Lords science and technology select committee, although he must retire from Shell next year.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
###
It's the Media, Stupid.
Jonathan E. Kaplan, The Hill: Stern’s vast audience includes 17 percent of likely voters, and they back Kerry 53 to 43 percent over Bush according to the poll. In so-called “battleground” states, Kerry beats Bush by 59 to 37 percent. The New Democrat Network (NDN), a centrist Democratic fundraising organization, commissioned Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, a Democratic firm, to conduct the poll.
On his website, Stern says that he is more influential than conservative radio hosts Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh because he claims his listeners are undecided voters and Hannity and Limbaugh’s listeners are Republicans.
Don Imus, a New York-based political talk show host, has said on his program that he also supports Kerry.
Nevertheless, the poll shows that voters whose main source of news is radio support Bush 52 to 46 percent, perhaps reflecting the dominance of conservative talk radio.
Break the Bush Caba Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Defeat BUSH (again!)
http://www.thehill.com/news/061504/stern.aspx
Howard Stern says he can deliver swing votes to Kerry
New poll: Stern’s listeners favor Kerry over Bush by a 10-point margin
By Jonathan E. Kaplan
Radio shock jock Howard Stern is predicting that he will help deliver the heavily sought-after swing voters to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry this November.
On air yesterday, Stern told The Hill: “I’m both pro-Kerry and anti-Bush. More anti-Bush. I encourage people on the air and personally [to vote for him]. Here’s the deal, dude. It turns out the show has a lot of influence among swing voters, voters who are not Republican or Democrat, but intelligent enough to vote for the good candidate.”
Stern said he has never met Kerry but considers him a “good guy.”
Stern’s listeners support Kerry over President Bush by a 10-point margin, according to a poll released last week.
In recent months, Stern has repeatedly lambasted the Bush administration for its crackdown on “indecent material” and called on his listeners to vote the president out of office.
Stern himself is a swing voter. Besides a brief run for governor as a Libertarian, Stern used his position to back two Republican gubernatorial candidates in New York and New Jersey. Both George Pataki and Christie Todd Whitman beat Democratic incumbents. Whitman even promised to name a highway oasis after Stern, and put a plaque with his name in a bathroom along the New Jersey turnpike.
Stern’s vast audience includes 17 percent of likely voters, and they back Kerry 53 to 43 percent over Bush according to the poll. In so-called “battleground” states, Kerry beats Bush by 59 to 37 percent. The New Democrat Network (NDN), a centrist Democratic fundraising organization, commissioned Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, a Democratic firm, to conduct the poll.
On his website, Stern says that he is more influential than conservative radio hosts Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh because he claims his listeners are undecided voters and Hannity and Limbaugh’s listeners are Republicans.
Don Imus, a New York-based political talk show host, has said on his program that he also supports Kerry.
Nevertheless, the poll shows that voters whose main source of news is radio support Bush 52 to 46 percent, perhaps reflecting the dominance of conservative talk radio.
Scott Stanzel, a Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman, dismissed the poll’s results. “It’s a partisan Democratic poll from a partisan group that’s just one of the shadowy soft-money groups assisting the Kerry campaign,” he said.
Simon Rosenberg, the NDN’s executive director, responded, “Every poll they don’t like they trash.”
Allison Dobson, a Kerry spokeswoman, said: “I think the bottom line is that George Bush has disappointed a lot of people and his policies are taking the country in the wrong direction.”
The NDN poll also reports that Stern’s likely voters are overwhelmingly male and 40 percent are Democrats, 26 percent are Republicans and 34 percent are independents. His listeners are more liberal and younger than the average voter – 40 percent are under 35 years old. They are more diverse and more driven by economic issues than other voters as well.
Stern is best known for testing the limits of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decency standards; strippers and dirty jokes are staples of his morning drive-time radio program.
When pop star Janet Jackson experienced a “wardrobe malfunction” in which she exposed her breast on national television during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, lawmakers clamored to score political advantage by making indecency on television and radio an issue.
Executives from CBS and MTV’s parent company, Viacom, were hauled before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In March, Congress passed legislation that raised fines for indecency over the public airwaves, and Clear Channel Communications, which aired Stern’s show on six of its stations, banned the show in April. Last week, Clear Channel agreed to pay $1.7 million in fines to the FCC to settle charges of indecency.
Since then, Stern has been lampooning the FCC, the Bush administration and Clear Channel.
Stern continues to antagonize Clear Channel and the FCC. While on air yesterday, he promoted an anti-Bush book, “Banana Republicans,” and complained that it is commonplace for Republicans to use intimidation tactics against their opponents.
In 1996, Stern hosted a debate between ex-Rep. Richard Zimmer (R-N.J.) and Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.).
Yes, one day soon in America, we're going to have a "Boston TV Party." Here's Jim Hightower on what the LNS calls the "Information Rebellion."
Jim Hightower, www.commondreams.org: A handful of self-serving corporate fiefdoms now controls practically all of America's mass-market sources of news and information. GE now owns NBC, Disney owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS, News Corp. owns Fox, and Time Warner owns CNN; these five have a lock on TV news. Of the 1,500 daily newspapers, only 281 are independently owned - three companies control 25 percent of the daily news circulated in the entire world.
These aloof giants openly assert that meeting their own profit needs is the media's reason for existence - as opposed to meeting the larger public's need for a vigorous, democratic discourse. Lowry Mays, honcho of Clear Channel Inc. (which owns more than 1,200 radio stations - a third of all the stations in America), opines that: "We're not in the business of providing news and information We're simply in the business of selling our customers' products."
The web gives us the means to bypass the corporate media, creating our own low-cost, decentralized network of news that, say, The New York Times does not consider "fit to print."
In addition to hundreds of specialized news sites, there are "aggregators" that amount to news services for progressive content - credible outfits like Alternet.org, TomPaine.com, Buzzflash.com, and CommonDreams.org.
This single-minded mercenary focus combines with general corporate arrogance to bloat the egos of media chieftains, leading them to think that they really are the infallible gods of our daily newsfeed, with no need to be accountable to the public: "We paid $3 billion for these television stations," said an executive with a Fox affiliate in Tampa; "We decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."
Crude, corporate censorship of our news by these boardroom types is less common than the subtle, internal self-censorship done by general managers, top editors, and some reporters who avoid topics and dilute stories that the corporate hierarchy might find offensive or simply not comprehend. A 2000 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that a third of local reporters admit softening a news story on behalf of the interests of their media organizations. A fourth say they have been told by superiors to ignore a story because it was dull, but the reporters suspected that the real motivation was that the story could harm the media company's financial interests. And that's only the reporters who confess!
If you detect a corporate bias in your news, don't feel lonely. Two-thirds of Americans told pollsters last September that they believe special interests or a self-serving corporate-political agenda infect news coverage. We can all wring our hands and wail about this corporate, monopolistic grasp on our news sources, but here's a better idea: Let's do something about it. A grassroots flowering
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0615-14.htm
Published on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The People's Media Reaches More People Than FOX Does
by Jim Hightower
While Big Media is "simply in the business of selling products, the people's media reaches more people than FOX does.
Democratic reformer Henry Adams, who decried the decline in democracy as the robber barons rose to power in the nineteenth century, did not mince words about the failure of the news media of his day: "The press is the hired agent of a monied system," he wrote, "and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved."
Imagine the verbal scorching Henry would give to today's media barons, who are not merely hired agents of monied interests‹they have become the interests, fully corporatized, conglomerated and well-practiced in the art of journalistic lying to perpetuate the power and profits of the elites.
A handful of self-serving corporate fiefdoms now controls practically all of America's mass-market sources of news and information. GE now owns NBC, Disney owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS, News Corp. owns Fox, and Time Warner owns CNN; these five have a lock on TV news. Of the 1,500 daily newspapers, only 281 are independently owned - three companies control 25 percent of the daily news circulated in the entire world.
These aloof giants openly assert that meeting their own profit needs is the media's reason for existence - as opposed to meeting the larger public's need for a vigorous, democratic discourse. Lowry Mays, honcho of Clear Channel Inc. (which owns more than 1,200 radio stations - a third of all the stations in America), opines that: "We're not in the business of providing news and information We're simply in the business of selling our customers' products."
The web gives us the means to bypass the corporate media, creating our own low-cost, decentralized network of news that, say, The New York Times does not consider "fit to print."
In addition to hundreds of specialized news sites, there are "aggregators" that amount to news services for progressive content - credible outfits like Alternet.org, TomPaine.com, Buzzflash.com, and CommonDreams.org.
This single-minded mercenary focus combines with general corporate arrogance to bloat the egos of media chieftains, leading them to think that they really are the infallible gods of our daily newsfeed, with no need to be accountable to the public: "We paid $3 billion for these television stations," said an executive with a Fox affiliate in Tampa; "We decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."
Crude, corporate censorship of our news by these boardroom types is less common than the subtle, internal self-censorship done by general managers, top editors, and some reporters who avoid topics and dilute stories that the corporate hierarchy might find offensive or simply not comprehend. A 2000 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that a third of local reporters admit softening a news story on behalf of the interests of their media organizations. A fourth say they have been told by superiors to ignore a story because it was dull, but the reporters suspected that the real motivation was that the story could harm the media company's financial interests. And that's only the reporters who confess!
If you detect a corporate bias in your news, don't feel lonely. Two-thirds of Americans told pollsters last September that they believe special interests or a self-serving corporate-political agenda infect news coverage. We can all wring our hands and wail about this corporate, monopolistic grasp on our news sources, but here's a better idea: Let's do something about it. A grassroots flowering
A grassroots flowering
The Austin Motel is a refurbished, New Deal-era business on South Congress Avenue near my home. It has an old brightly-lit marquee out front that proudly boasts the credo of the current owners: "No additives, No preservatives, Corporate-free since 1938."
Wouldn't that make a fine slogan for a new democratic media for America?
Oh, you say, Hightower, don't toy with us. It would take billions and billions of dollars to build a broad-based media network outside the established TV, radio, and newspaper conglomerates, so that's just a pipe dream. Well, yes, it would take those impossible billions if we set out merely to duplicate the media Goliaths. But what if we wanted to develop a David a sprightly, nimble network of media outlets that are not capital-intensive and not burdened with either multimillion-dollar salaries or voracious conglomerate bureaucracies?
I have good news for you: This is already happening! Thousands of hardy, grassroots people have been working steadily and creatively over the years in every area of media, and the result of their combined efforts is that a new media force is now flowering coast to coast a force of hundreds of media outlets that is unabashedly progressive, fiercely independent, diverse, dispersed, and democratic. Some of these outlets are nationally known, others only locally known; some are brand new, others have been plugging away for decades. But the significant thing is that, collectively, they are a force to be reckoned with, celebrated, strategically deployed and deliberately expanded.
I've known and worked closely with many of these varied outlets my entire political life, but it was only last year that I realized what can happen if we learn to connect the various components and tap into the full power that they offer.
The occasion was a most modest one: The launch of my book, Thieves in High Places. In addition to being about the monied kleptocracy that has seized our people's democratic power, the heart of this book is about the deeply-encouraging rise of you grassroots Americans out there who're battling the thieves - and often beating them. These are inspiring stories of democratic activism that the media establishment largely ignores, and I wanted as many people as possible to know about the stories, so that others might take heart and battle on.
Call me cynical, but I knew from experience that the barons of media power were not likely to rush forward to embrace and disseminate my antiestablishment message. I was right none of the morning TV shows ("Today," "Good Morning America," etc.) allowed me to talk about it; no evening newsmagazine show ("20/20," "Dateline," etc.) would touch it; there were no reviews in the mass-market newspapers and magazines (New York Times, Newsweek, etc.) and even NPR and public television gave it the cold shoulder. It was a case of libra non grata. Yet, a funny (and fun) thing happened: Thieves rose into the top 10 of nearly every best-seller list across the country, including the New York Times list. You could almost hear the incredulous compilers of sales data asking: "How the hell did this thing get on our list?"
It got there, quickly reaching a mass-market audience, by way of your and my very own rag-tag, patchwork media network, which most of us don't even know we have. I stumbled on the breadth and depth of this network because Sean Doles and Laura Ehrlich in my office had organized a guerrilla campaign to get the word out about the book. Working with community-radio stations, alternative newsweeklies, independent bookstores, web-active organizations, progressive (and aggressive) magazines, websites and publications of grassroots organizations, local organizing groups, some upstart television rebels - and, of course, you scrappy Lowdowners - we found that progressives are not voiceless in a corporate-media wasteland after all if only we recognize that we have powerful media assets of our own.
My book doesn't matter, but the concept of connecting this patchwork of assets does matter greatly. Any particular piece of this progressive media patchwork is small (and too often scoffed at by progressives themselves as "insignificant"). But add the pieces together and we have a far-flung network of outlets that - each and every day - is reaching tens of millions of people.
Also, the people who are tuning in to our progressive outlets are not just cumulative numbers to be sold to advertisers; mostly they're readers, listeners, online clickers, and viewers who give a damn and are looking for action. We saw an example last year of what can happen when even some of these components connect. The FCC, led by laissez-faire nutball Michael Powell, was ramming through a rules change that effectively would allow one or two media conglomerates to control the TV, radio, and newspaper outlets in every U.S. city.
Essentially, this unregulation of media ownership would lead to the full-scale monopolization of our news sources. Corporate lobbyists and government lawyers had holed up in a dark back room to whisper sweet legalese to each other, and we Joe and Joline Schmoes would have known nothing about it until after the fact, when we would've heard that wet, smoooooooching sound coming from Washington that tells us - uh-oh - another dirty deed has been done to us.
This time, though, was different. Several public-interest organizations picked up on the FCC's back-room move and alerted such grassroots groups as Common Cause, which sent up red flares to engage its 200,000 members. Then, like the pamphleteers of old, dozens of community- radio stations plastered on-air broadsheets all across the country, translating the FCC's regulatory gobbledygook into straightforward rallying cries. They pounded the issue day after day. Next came the Web-active group MoveOn.org, which gave this growing grassroots opposition the mechanism it needed for a targeted response - and some 170,000 emails poured into Washington.
The result was that, last July, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 400 to 21 in favor of an amendment by Rep. David Obey to stop the FCC's media-monopolization rule. The decisive 400 House votes were from Congress critters (Democrats as well as Republicans) who had taken buckets full of campaign cash from the very media barons they suddenly decided they had to vote against.
The battle is not over, but the fact that this arcane issue of media-ownership regulations could, in such a short time, ignite a prairie fire of popular rebellion is a testament to the power at our disposal.
Radio
As I've learned from the past dozen years of on-air experience, radio can be a very democratic little box‹in part because it's ubiquitous (in our bedrooms, cars, showers, etc.), and also because people tend to hear what's said on radio, as opposed to TV, where they get an image but don't much follow the story being told. The bad news is that the radio dial is fast being bought up by Clear Channel and a couple of other conglomerates. The good news, however, is that we still have hundreds of extremely important stations in our hands, beaming out a steady progressive message to millions every day.
Since 1993, my own two-minute radio commentaries ("little pops of populism," we call them) have aired every weekday, now being heard on a mix of 130 commercial and community stations coast to coast, plus Alaska, Hawaii, and - get this - Armed Forces Radio, as well as on the web (www.jimhightower.com). But I'm the least of it. From Amy Goodman's sassy Democracy Now to Working Assets Radio with Laura Flanders, from New Dimensions to Latino USA, from Counterspin to RadioNation, from ACORN Radio to Alternative Radio with David Barsamian, from Media Matters with Bob McChesney to The World - there's a wealth of national and local broadcasters putting forth progressive issues and insights every day.
Because of the corporate bias of its owners, commercial radio is the hardest nut to crack, but we have such voices as Enid Goldstein at KNRC in Denver, Sly Sylvester on WTDY in Madison, and Mitch Albom on WJR in Detroit. And now, Air America is making a bold play to bring 17 hours a day of progressive talk radio through its burgeoning network, broadcasting such live-wire hosts as Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Randi Rhodes, Chuck D, and Rachel Maddow. This brand-new upstart is already in 15 cities, and is drawing millions more listeners each day on the web (www.airamericaradio.com).
Then there are our community owned stations. Many people assume that these are little one-watt nothings, but that's nonsense. Indeed, some are powerhouse blasters in big cities, such as the Pacifica Network's five flagship stations in Berkeley, New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Houston. Pacifica's KPFK in LA, for example, is 110,000 watts, reaching from San Diego to Santa Barbara and stretching inland to San Bernardino. Likewise, the independent community station WMNF in Tampa is a 70,000- watt treasure that reaches from Sarasota on the Gulf Coast almost to Orlando in the middle of the state.
Even the small-town community broadcasters pack a punch. WERU in Blue Hill, Maine (pop. 700), for example, reaches clear to the state capital in Augusta and is a beloved rallying point for the whole Penobscot Bay area ("We-are-you" is how the station pronounces its call letters). The same with KAOS in Olympia, KBOO in Portland, KGNU in Boulder, and so many more‹people don't just tune in, they count on these stations, trust them in a way no one would trust Clear Channel, and are willing to act on the information they receive.
The web
A democratic tool that Jefferson, Madison, and the other Bill of Righters could not have imagined, but would gleefully embrace today, is the world wide web. This computerized architecture of interconnected hubs and spokes allows us to link our thoughts and actions instantly in virtual space and produce tangible political results that would have taken months before.
Every progressive group (even Luddites like me) now has lively, interactive web sites through which we can share a gold mine of information, forge coalitions, hold "meetings," and mobilize mass actions (from local to global).
The growth of the net is explosive - 68 billion emails per day, for example, and 10 million daily blogs by everyone from the kid next-door to famous pundits to me! MoveOn.org, TrueMajority.org, and the Howard Dean campaign have shown the phenomenal potential of the web, not only for fund-raising and blitzing Congress with citizen opinion, but especially for organizing people for action (a breakthrough that you'll hear more about as the Lowdown itself develops a web-active program to link all of us Lowdowners into more grassroots civil action).
The web gives us the means to bypass the corporate media, creating our own low-cost, decentralized network of news that, say, The New York Times does not consider "fit to print."
In addition to hundreds of specialized news sites, there are "aggregators" that amount to news services for progressive content - credible outfits like Alternet.org, TomPaine.com, Buzzflash.com, and CommonDreams.org
Some are creating their own virtual newspapers. Check out iBrattleboro.com. For more than a year now, this Vermont website lets the readers be the reporters on what's really going on in town. Anyone can contribute, and anyone can comment on the contributions. In a town of 12,000, the virtual pages of iBrattleboro are getting 260,000 viewers a year.
Alternatives galore
If reading the daily press depresses you, get a lift by going beyond your "Daily Blather" newspaper to such spunky journals as The Nation, Mother Jones, The Progressive, In These Times, American Prospect, Ms., Harper's, and The Progressive Populist. Also, Utne rounds up articles every month from more than 2,000 alternative media sources. And two groups, the Independent Press Association (indypress.org) and the Alternative Press Center (altpress.org), give you access to magazines, newsletters, and 'zines that cover every political and cultural issue imaginable.
Chances are your own town has one or more independent weekly newspapers offering detailed coverage of progressive issues and events that the monopoly dailies miss or avoid. The Association of Alternative Weeklies (aan.org) plugs you into 120 of these local voices that, collectively, reach 17 million readers a week. Even television, the feeblest member of our democracy's media mob, is perking up a bit. PBS's Now with Bill Moyers has been a blast of fresh air (though its direction is uncertain now that he has announced his retirement), and C-SPAN continues to do a great public service by simply clicking on its cameras and letting us see events without edits or editorializing. And you can forget the network news and go directly to The Daily Show for Jon Stewart's irreverent, on-target satires, broadcast on Comedy Central.
Especially encouraging in TV-land are the insurgents of the air, including Free Speech TV and WorldLink TV, reaching a combined 20 million homes. Grassroots rebels are also making their own TV, thanks to Cable Access Television, available on some 600 public-access channels, as well as a feisty group of Independent Media Centers (indymedia.org) that are particularly good at streaming raw footage of protests and other actions, with their media activists taking their web-driven videocams right into the center of things, bringing you news as it happens.
Finally, don't discount the power of face-to-face networks. On any given day, thousands of people are gathered in various-sized groupings to listen, learn, discuss, interact, strategize, and organize. These forums include the nation's 2,200 independent bookstores, which are not merely book peddlers, but also community meeting places and informal bulletin boards (go to booksense.com to find ones near you). Public libraries, progressive speakers' series, pot-luck suppers, conversation cafes and progressive festivals (Greenfest, Bioneers, Rolling Thunder, etc.) are also part of this vibrant, high-touch outreach that goes on daily in practically every city and neighborhood.
Years ago, my momma taught me that two wrongs don't make a right - but I soon figured out that three left turns do. We must apply that same kind of street savvy if we're ever to find our way around the media blockages that the corporate interests have put in place to shut out our voices.
###
It's the Media, Stupid.
Center for American Progress: Speaking at the Take Back America conference on June 3, American Progress CEO John Podesta said, "I think when you get so distant from the facts as -- as guys like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity do, yeah, I think that tends to -- it kind of -- it tends to corrupt the dialogue." Apparently he struck a nerve with Fox News' Sean Hannity. Hannity challenged Podesta to "defend and explain one example where I -- where I said something that was so false." Since choosing just one of Hannity's distortions is too difficult, here are fifteen examples...
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=91585
The Document Sean Hannity Doesn't Want You To Read
June 16, 2004
Speaking at the Take Back America conference on June 3, American Progress CEO John Podesta said, "I think when you get so distant from the facts as -- as guys like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity do, yeah, I think that tends to -- it kind of -- it tends to corrupt the dialogue." Apparently he struck a nerve with Fox News' Sean Hannity. Hannity challenged Podesta to "defend and explain one example where I -- where I said something that was so false." Since choosing just one of Hannity's distortions is too difficult, here are fifteen examples:
All Hannity quotes from Hannity and Colmes unless otherwise noted.
1. WMD
HANNITY: "You're not listening, Susan. You've got to learn something. He had weapons of mass destruction. He promised to disclose them. And he didn't do it. You would have let him go free; we decided to hold him accountable." (4/13/04)
FACT: Hannity's assertion comes more than six months after Bush Administration weapons inspector David Kay testified his inspection team had "not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material" and had not discovered any chemical or biological weapons. (Bush Administration Weapons Inspector David Kay, 10/2/03)
2. Colin Powell on Iraq
HANNITY: "Colin Powell just had a great piece that he had in the paper today. He was there [in Iraq]. He said things couldn't have been better." (9/19/03)
FACT: "Iraq has come very far, but serious problems remain, starting with security. American commanders and troops told me of the many threats they face--from leftover loyalists who want to return Iraq to the dark days of Saddam, from criminals who were set loose on Iraqi society when Saddam emptied the jails and, increasingly, from outside terrorists who have come to Iraq to open a new front in their campaign against the civilized world." (Colin Powell, 9/19/03)
3. Saddam/Al-Qaeda Connection
HANNITY: "And in northern Iraq today, this very day, al Qaeda is operating camps there, and they are attacking the Kurds in the north, and this has been well-documented and well chronicled. Now, if you're going to go after al Qaeda in every aspect, and obviously they have the support of Saddam, or we're not." (12/9/02)
FACT: David Kay was on the ground for months investigating the activities of Hussein's regime. He concluded "But we simply did not find any evidence of extensive links with Al Qaeda, or for that matter any real links at all." He called a speech where Cheney made the claim there was a link "evidence free." (Boston Globe, 6/16/04)
4. 9/11 Investigation
HANNITY: "[After 9-11], liberal Democrats at first showed little interest in the investigation of the roots of this massive intelligence failure...[Bush and his team] made it clear that determining the causes of America's security failures and finding and remedying its weak points would be central to their mission." (Let Freedom Ring, by Sean Hannity)
TRUTH: Bush Opposed the creation of a special commission to probe the causes of 9/11 for over a year. On 5/23/02 CBS New Reported "President Bush took a few minutes during his trip to Europe Thursday to voice his opposition to establishing a special commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before Sept. 11." Bush didn't relent to pressure to create a commission, mostly from those Hannity would consider "liberal" until September 2002. (CBS News, 5/23/02; ABC News, 9/20/02)
5. The Recession
HANNITY: "First of all, this president -- you know and I know and everybody knows -- inherited a recession...it was by every definition a recession" (11/6/02)
HANNITY: "Now here's where we are. The inherited Clinton/Gore recession. That's a fact." (5/6/03)
HANNITY: "The president inherited a recession." (7/10/03)
HANNITY: "He got us out of the Clinton-Gore recession." (10/23/03)
HANNITY: "They did inherit the recession. They did inherit the recession. We got out of the recession." (12/12/03)
HANNITY: "And this is the whole point behind this ad, because the president did inherit a recession." (1/6/04)
HANNITY: "Historically in every recovery, because the president rightly did inherit a recession. But historically, the lagging indicator always deals with employment." (1/15/04)
HANNITY: "Congressman Deutsch, maybe you forgot but I'll be glad to remind you, the president did inherit that recession." (1/20/04)
HANNITY: "He did inherit a recession, and we're out of the recession." (2/2/04)
HANNITY: "The president inherited a recession." (2/23/04)
HANNITY: "The president inherited a recession." (3/3/04)
HANNITY: "Well, you know, we're going to show ads, as a matter of fact, in the next segment, Congressman. Thanks for promoting our next segment. What I like about them is everything I've been saying the president ought to do: is focusing in on his positions, on keeping the nation secure in very difficult times, what he's been able to do to the economy after inheriting a very difficult recession, and of course, the economic impact of 9/11." (3/3/04)
HANNITY: "All right. So this is where I view the economic scenario as we head into this election. The president inherited a recession." (3/16/04)
HANNITY: "First of all, we've got to put it into perspective, is that the president inherited a recession." (3/26/04)
HANNITY: "Clearly, we're out of the recession that President Bush inherited." (4/2/04)
HANNITY: "Stop me where I'm wrong. The president inherited a recession, the economic impact of 9/11 was tremendous on the economy, correct?" (4/6/04)
HANNITY: "[President George W. Bush] did inherit a recession." (5/3/04)
HANNITY: "[W]e got [the weak U.S. economy] out of the Clinton-Gore recession." (5/18/04)
HANNITY: "We got out of the Clinton-Gore recession." (5/27/04)
HANNITY: "We got out of the Clinton-Gore recession." (6/4/04)
FACT: "The recession officially began in March of 2001 -- two months after Bush was sworn in -- according to the universally acknowledged arbiter of such things, the National Bureau of Economic Research. And the president, at other times, has said so himself." (Washington Post, 7/1/03)
6. The Hispanic Vote
HANNITY: "The Hispanic community got to know him in Texas. They went almost overwhelming for him. He more than quadrupled the Hispanic vote that he got in that state." (9/16/03)
FACT: Exit polls varied in 1998 governors race, but under best scenario he increased his Hispanic vote from 24 to 49 percent – a doubling not a quadrupling. He lost Texas Hispanics to Gore in 2000, 54-43 percent. (Source: NCLR , NHCSL)
7. White House Vandalism
HANNITY: "Look, we've had these reports, very disturbing reports -- and I have actually spoken to people that have confirmed a lot of the reports -- about the trashing of the White House. Pornographic materials left in the printers. They cut the phone lines. Lewd and crude messages on phone machines. Stripping of anything that was not bolted down on Air Force One. $200,000 in furniture taken out." (1/26/01)
TRUTH: According to statements from the General Services Administration that were reported on May 17, little if anything out of the ordinary occurred during the transition, and "the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." (FAIR)
8. Patriotism
HANNITY: "I never questioned anyone's patriotism." (9/18/03)
FACT:
HANNITY: (to attorney Stanley Cohen) "Is it you hate this president or that you hate America?" (4/30/03)
HANNITY: "Governor, why wouldn't anyone want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, unless they detested their own country or were ignorant of its greatness?" (6/12/03)
HANNITY: "You could explain something about your magazine, [the Nation]. Lisa Featherstone writing about the hate America march, the [anti-war] march that took place over the weekend..." (1/22/03)
HANNITY: "'I hate America.' This is the extreme left. There is a portion of the left -- not everybody who's left -- that does hate this country and blame this country for the ills of the world..." (1/23/02)
HANNITY: (speaking to Sara Flounders co-director of the International Action Center) "You don't like this country, do you? You don't -- you think this is an evil country. By your description of it right here, you think it's a bad country." (9/25/01)
9. Separation of Church and State
HANNITY: "It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state." (8/25/03)
FACT: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." (1st Amendment)
"The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (Article VI)
10. James Madison
HANNITY: "You want to refer to some liberal activist judge..., that's fine, but I'm going to go directly to the source. The author of the Bill of Rights [James Madison] hired the first chaplain in 1789, and I gotta' tell ya' somethin', I think the author of the Bill of Rights knows more about the original intent--no offense to you and your liberal atheist activism--knows more about it than you do." (9/4/02)
TRUTH: The first congressional chaplains weren't hired by James Madison--they were appointed by a committee of the Senate and House in, respectively, April and May, 1789, before the First Amendment even existed. James Madison's view: "Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative." (James Madison)
11. Alabama Constitution
HANNITY: "But the Alabama Constitution, which Chief Justice Roy Moore is sworn to uphold, clearly it says, as a matter of fact that the recognition of God is the foundation of that state's Constitution." (8/21/03)
FACT: While the preamble of the Alabama Constitution does reference "the Almighty," section three provides: "That no religion shall be established by law; that no preference shall be given by law to any religious sect, society, denomination, or mode of worship; that no one shall be compelled by law to attend any place of worship; nor to pay any tithes, taxes, or other rate for building or repairing any place of worship, or for maintaining any minister or ministry; that no religious test shall be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under this state; and that the civil rights, privileges, and capacities of any citizen shall not be in any manner affected by his religious principles." (Alabama Constitution, Section 3)
12. Rent for Public Housing
HANNITY: Betsy, they're not going to lose it [public housing], because if you work less than 30 hours a week -- if you work more than 30 hours a week, you don't have to do it. If you're between the ages of 18 and 62 and you're not legally disabled and you have free housing -- in other words...
BETSY MCCAUGHEY: No. Wait a second, Sean. Let me correct you. Most people in public housing are not receiving free housing. Many of them are paying almost market rates.
HANNITY: Betsy, that is so ridiculous and so false, it's hardly even worth spending the time. (10/23/03)
FACT: Residents of public housing pay rent scaled to their household's anticipated gross annual income, less deductions for dependents and disabilities. The basic formula for rent is 30 percent of this monthly adjusted income. There are exceptions for extremely low incomes, but the minimum rent is $25 per month. No one lives in public housing for free. (Department of Housing and Urban Development)
13. Kerry Tax Plan
HANNITY: "The Kerry campaign wants to cut taxes on people who make two hundred thousand dollars. She [Teresa Heinz Kerry] only paid 14.7 percent of her income in taxes, because their plan doesn't go to dividends, only income. So they don't want to tax themselves." (5/12/04)
FACT: Kerry's plan would "Restore the capital gains and dividend rates for families making over $200,000 on income earned above $200,000 to their levels under President Clinton. (Kerry Press Release, 4/7/04)
14. Kerry and Weapons Systems
HANNITY: "He's [Kerry's] flip-flopped all over the place... on the issue of Iraq. All the munitions that we have built up, most of them wouldn't be there." (1/30/04)
HANNITY: "But he wanted to cancel…every major weapons system. Specific votes that he would have canceled the weapons systems we now use." (2/26/04)
FACT: "In 1991, Kerry opposed an amendment to impose an arbitrary 2 percent cut in the military budget. In 1992, he opposed an amendment to cut Pentagon intelligence programs by $1 billion. In 1994, he voted against a motion to cut $30.5 billion from the defense budget over the next five years and to redistribute the money to programs for education and the disabled. That same year, he opposed an amendment to postpone construction of a new aircraft carrier. In 1996, he opposed a motion to cut six F-18 jet fighters from the budget. In 1999, he voted against a motion to terminate the Trident II missile." (Slate, 2/25/04)
15. Kerry and the CIA
HANNITY: "If he (Kerry) had his way and the CIA would almost be nonexistent." (1/30/04)
FACT: John Kerry has supported $200 billion in intelligence funding over the past seven years - a 50 percent increase since 1996.
Kerry votes supporting intelligence funding:
FY03 Intel Authorization $39.3-$41.3 Billion
[2002, Unanimous Senate Voice Vote 9/25/02]
FY02 Intel Authorization $33 Billion
[2001, Unanimous Senate Voice Vote 12/13/01]
FY01 Intel Authorization $29.5-$31.5 Billion
[2000, Unanimous Senate Voice Vote 12/6/00]
FY00 Intel Authorization $29-$30 Billion
[1999, Unanimous Senate Voice Vote 11/19/1999]
FY99 Intel Authorization $29.0 Billion
[1998, Unanimous Senate Voice Vote 10/8/98]
FY98 Intel Authorization $26.7 Billion
[1997, Senate Roll Call Vote #109]
FY97 Intel Authorization $26.6 Billion
[1996, Unanimous Senate Voice Vote 9/25/96]
(Source: CDI)
It's the Media, Stupid.
Mimir, Daily Kos: Scarborough did not appreciate Moore's explanation to an NBC reporter as to why he would not appear on Scarborough's show. Moore rehashed the facts concerning Lori Klausutis, a young intern found dead in Scarborough's Florida office, around the time Scarborough announced he would not seek reelection. Scarborough says Moore accused him of being a murderer:
SCARBOROUGH: You going to talk to Michael?
GOLDBERG: When he has time for me.
SCARBOROUGH: When he has time for you, just tell him to stop going around calling me a murderer or I`m going to have to call my lawyers. Will you do that for me?
Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/15/203432/052
Joe Scarborough threatens to sue Michael Moore
by Mimir
Tue Jun 15th, 2004 at 20:34:32 EDT
Scarborough did not appreciate Moore's explanation to an NBC reporter as to why he would not appear on Scarborough's show. Moore rehashed the facts concerning Lori Klausutis, a young intern found dead in Scarborough's Florida office, around the time Scarborough announced he would not seek reelection. Scarborough says Moore accused him of being a murderer:
SCARBOROUGH: You going to talk to Michael?
GOLDBERG: When he has time for me.
SCARBOROUGH: When he has time for you, just tell him to stop going around calling me a murderer or I`m going to have to call my lawyers. Will you do that for me?
GOLDBERG: Well, I`m sure you can get to him yourself, Joe, but I appreciate you having me on. I really do.
Once again, Moore is casually commenting on facts that he reasonably assumes the media already knew about. Scarborough will come out with egg on his face, as Peter Jennings did for challenging Moore's apt description of Bush as a deserter. If Scarborough is serious about his threat, then he will suffer a worse defeat than Bill O'Reilly (in going after Franken).
These guys never learn. I hope Scarborough makes Moore's day!
The botched, bungled, so-called "war on terrorism" is NOT the strength of the Bush White House, it is the SHAME of the Bush White House...
Independent (UK): Mr Clarke believes Mr Bush's decision to invade Iraq undoubtedly damaged the hunt for al-Qa'ida. He also believes it has diverted much-needed resources from Homeland Security, leaving the country unnecessarily vulnerable. "[Iraq] is a fiasco," he said. "We can only hope there is a way of minimising the losses and getting out in a way that allows us to leave behind some sort of stable government. If [it stays as it is] now there is a high risk that what we leave behind will be worse than what was there before ... Iraq could easily be much more of a problem for us than it would have been if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power."
The whistleblower highlights three ways in which the invasion of Iraq diverted resources from the real "war on terror". Money is not available for the Department of Homeland Security to protect potential targets such as trains and chemical plants adequately, funds are not available to help countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, which could do more to counter terrorism.
Finally, the war was a great propaganda coup for the jihadist movement. "It probably greatly increased its recruitment," he said. "There was a period of time as well ... where resources in the hunt for Bin Laden were pulled away, satellite resources, special forces, Predator [drones] were sent to Iraq, rather than sent to Afghanistan. That has been somewhat rectified but not entirely. If Bin Laden had written the scenario it would have been identical to what happened."
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=531365
Richard Clarke: 'Iraq could be much more of a problem for America than if Saddam had stayed in power'
The Monday Interview: Former White House security chief
By Andrew Buncombe, in Washington
14 June 2004
Richard Clarke is the man who put the cat among the pigeons. This year, in the same week as the former counter-terrorism chief was giving evidence to an independent commission investigating the attacks of 11 September, Mr Clarke's scathing account of the failure to deal with al-Qa'ida was published.
In his tell-all memoir, Against all Enemies, and in his public testimony, Mr Clarke could barely have been more provocative. Much of the blame for failing to stop the attacks of 11 September, he said, could be laid at the feet of the Bush administration. They ignored his warnings about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and - after al-Qa'ida had wreaked havoc and death in New York and Washington - President George Bush was distracted from taking on the terror network by his groundless wish to invade Iraq.
"Your government failed you," Mr Clarke told the hearing, turning to the relatives of those who died and who had come to Washington to hear his testimony. "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter, because we failed."
Not surprisingly, the administration hit back immediately. Mr Clarke was wrong, said officials. He was out of the loop, said Vice-President Dick Cheney. The White House now considered Mr Clarke an outcast.
He is a blunt, plain-spoken man, accused by some former colleagues of arrogance and even rudeness. But does he regret speaking out. "No, not at all," he said. "I always thought, particularly in a White House job if you placed a high value on being liked by the bureaucracy, if that was one of your primary goals, then you probably should not be in that job.
"The job of a White House NSC [National Security Council] staff person is to be an enforcer of presidential policy. The bureaucracy does not naturally do what the President tells it to do."
But Mr Clarke's complaint is that the President and his senior staff, in the spring and summer of 2001, failed to listen to what he advised them about the dangers posed by al-Qa'ida "when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11". The day after the attacks, Mr Bush was already focusing on Iraq. "Look into Iraq, Saddam," Mr Clarke says he was told angrily as his officials briefed him on al-Qa'ida being almost certainly responsible for the attacks.
Mr Clarke, who now has a consultancy firm in Arlington, Virginia, remains uncertain whether al-Qa'ida could have been stopped. "I don't think we know. It's very facile to say it could have been or could not have been. There is absolutely no way of knowing. What I do believe is that had we known about the two al-Qa'ida individuals who were among the hijackers ... Had we known they were in the country, which the FBI at some level knew and which the CIA at some level knew, had my counterparts at the FBI and CIA known, had I known, then I firmly believe we could have caught those two.
"Now, you can draw all sorts of conclusions from that. One, is that, simply, there would have been 17 hijackers. Another conclusion is that we might have been able to pull strings on those two and find more of the 19. But even if we had rounded up all 19 there would have been another 19. There would have been another major attack. The point is that al-Qa'ida was on a march to have a major terrorist attack ... They would not stop until they succeeded in having one. So yes, we might have been able to stop a particular attack."
Apart from the missed opportunities he highlights, what might be of potentially greater concern is Mr Clarke's belief that al-Qa'ida could easily attack again, and America and Britain remain exceedingly vulnerable. Another attack is not inevitable ("I think almost nothing is inevitable," he said) but possible.
He added: "I think it is harder but I can think of ways of them doing it and I'm sure they can imagine ways of doing it. It's entirely possible there will be another major attack." A dirty bomb, he believes, is probably in the "too hard" category. It is more likely terrorists would use suicide-bombs to attack softer targets, such as casinos or shopping malls. "Those are the two scenarios I use all the time when discussing it," he said. "If you do eight guys in eight shopping malls you have an enormous effect on the economy ... so much of the US economy is tied up with retail sales.
"If you did four casinos with four guys you could destroy the economy of Las Vegas. There are lots of low-end ways of doing things. And the reason they have not done some of the low-end threats, I think, is because they set the barrier for themselves very high with the 9-11 attacks. They may want another major attack; they may feel that if they do less than a major attack [they] will look like a lesser force."
Richard Clarke has made a career out of telling uncomfortable truths. He was born in Boston, his mother a nurse and his father a worker in a chocolate factory. In 1961, aged 12, he won a chance to attend the prestigious Boston Latin School, whose famous former pupils include Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams. From there, Mr Clarke - an active opponent of the Vietnam War - went to the University of Pennsylvania to study for a career in national security. "I wanted to get involved in national security in 1973 as a career to make sure that Vietnam did not happen again." He spent five years in the Pentagon and then moved to the State Department. In 1992, he was taken on by the White House as a national security staffer. One of the first things he did there was to exert greater influence on the Counter-terrorism Security Group. Though his career stretched over four presidencies - Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr - it is the last for whom he reserves his most outspoken criticism. The American people were duped, he believes, by Mr Bush who came to office with a plan to invade Iraq but hid it during the election campaign. "It was very clear on 9/11, on the days immediately following when we had been attacked, that attention turned to Iraq, even as the smoke was still coming out of the World Trade Centre."
Mr Clarke believes Mr Bush's decision to invade Iraq undoubtedly damaged the hunt for al-Qa'ida. He also believes it has diverted much-needed resources from Homeland Security, leaving the country unnecessarily vulnerable. "[Iraq] is a fiasco," he said. "We can only hope there is a way of minimising the losses and getting out in a way that allows us to leave behind some sort of stable government. If [it stays as it is] now there is a high risk that what we leave behind will be worse than what was there before ... Iraq could easily be much more of a problem for us than it would have been if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power."
The whistleblower highlights three ways in which the invasion of Iraq diverted resources from the real "war on terror". Money is not available for the Department of Homeland Security to protect potential targets such as trains and chemical plants adequately, funds are not available to help countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, which could do more to counter terrorism.
Finally, the war was a great propaganda coup for the jihadist movement. "It probably greatly increased its recruitment," he said. "There was a period of time as well ... where resources in the hunt for Bin Laden were pulled away, satellite resources, special forces, Predator [drones] were sent to Iraq, rather than sent to Afghanistan. That has been somewhat rectified but not entirely. If Bin Laden had written the scenario it would have been identical to what happened."
One of Mr Clarke's friends from the national security council, is foreign policy adviser to the Democrat presidential nominee John Kerry. Mr Clarke has refused to endorse Mr Kerry in his bid for the presidency. "I do not want to be seen simply as a politically partisan commentator," he said. "I was a career civil servant. We don't have as much a tradition of career civil servants as you do [in Britain] but we have senior executive service and I was a member of that for a long time. I have a lot of Republican friends and they agree with me on most of what I say.
"So I don't want to lose the support of large numbers of Americans by my choosing sides, by choosing parties. I think this issue should be non-partisan. A large number of Republicans agree with me and I want them to speak out."
THE CV
Age: 53
Education: Boston Latin School and University of Pennsylvania
Career: 1985-88: Deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence
1985-92: State Department
1989-92: Assistant secretary for politico-military affairs
1998-2000: National co-ordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counter-terrorism
1992-03: Chair of the counter-terrorism group, National Security Council
March 2004: Testified to national commission on terrorist attacks
Author of 'Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror - What Really Happened'
The botched, bungled, so-called "war on terrorism" is NOT the strength of the Bush White House, it is the SHAME of the Bush White House...
Hope Yen, Associated Press: Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was ``no credible evidence'' that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaida target the United States.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War ies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0616-01.htm
Published on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 by the Associated Press
9/11 Commission: No Link Between Al-Qaida and Saddam
by Hope Yen
WASHINGTON - Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was ``no credible evidence'' that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaida target the United States.
In a chilling report that sketched the history of Osama bin Laden's network, the commission said his far-flung training camps were ``apparently quite good.'' Terrorists-to-be were encouraged to ``think creatively about ways to commit mass murder,'' it added.
Bin Laden made overtures to Saddam for assistance, the commission said in the staff report, as he did with leaders in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere as he sought to build an Islamic army.
Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States (9-11 Commission) Gov. Thomas Kean looks on at the beginning of their final two-day hearing at the National Transportation Security Board conference center in Washington, June 16, 2004. The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks began its final hearings on Wednesday before delivering its findings at the end of next month. REUTERS/Larry Downing
While Saddam dispatched a senior Iraqi intelligence official to Sudan to meet with bin Laden in 1994, the commission said it had not turned up evidence of a ``collaborative relationship.''
The Bush administration has long claimed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, and cited them as one reason for last year's invasion of Iraq.
On Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator ``had long established ties with al-Qaida.''
The bipartisan commission issued its findings as it embarked on two days of public hearings into the worst terrorist attacks in American history.
The panel intends to issue a final report in July on the hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000, destroyed the World Trade Centers in New York and damaged the Pentagon outside Washington. A fourth plane commandeered by terrorists crashed in the countryside in Pennsylvania.
The staff report pieced together information on the development of bin Laden's network, from the far-flung training camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere, to funding from ``well-placed financial facilitators and diversions of funds from Islamic charities.''
Reports that bin Laden had a huge personal fortune to finance acts of terror are overstated, the report said.
The description of the training camp operations contained elements of faint, grudging praise.
``A worldwide jihad needed terrorists who could bomb embassies or hijack airliners, but it also needed foot soldiers for the Taliban in its war against the Northern Alliance, and guerrillas who could shoot down Russian helicopters in Chechnya or ambush Indian units in Kashmir,'' it said.
According to one unnamed senior al-Qaida associate, various ideas were floated by mujahadeen in Afghanistan, the commission said. The options included taking over a launcher and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear missile at the United States, mounting mustard gas or cyanide attacks against Jewish areas in Iraq or releasing poison gas into the air conditioning system of a targeted building.
``Last but not least, hijacking an aircraft and crashing it into an airport or nearby city,'' it said.
The Iraq connection long suggested by administration officials gained no currency in the report.
``Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded,'' the report said. ``There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida also occurred'' after bin Laden moved his operations to Afghanistan in 1996, ``but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship,'' it said.
``Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq,'' the report said.
In a separate report, the commission staff said that senior al-Qaida planner Khalid Shaihk Mohammed initially proposed a Sept. 11 attack involving 10 planes. An expanded target list included the CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear plants and tall buildings in California and Washington state.
That ambitious plan was rejected by bin Laden, who ultimately approved a scaled-back mission involving four planes, the report said. Mohammed wanted more hijackers for those planes - 25 or 26, instead of 19.
The commission has identified at least 10 al-Qaida operatives who were to participate but could not take part for reasons including visa problems and suspicion by officials at airports in the United States and overseas.
From a seamless operation, the report portrays a plot riven by internal dissent, including disagreement over whether to target the White House or the Capitol that was apparently never resolved prior to the attacks. Bin Laden also had to overcome opposition to attacking the United States from Mullah Omar, leader of the former Taliban regime, who was under pressure from Pakistan to keep al-Qaida confined.
The United States toppled the regime in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, but Omar has eluded capture, as has al-Qaida.
© Copyright 2004 Associated Press
###
As the LNS has chronicled for the long, painful years since 9/11, there is "something rotten in the state of..." and significant elements of the intelligence establishment, the military establishment, and the foreign policy establishment (and hopefully, the law enforcement establishment) are struggling against the Bush abomination. This struggle -- from John O'Neill to Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson, and beyond -- has been recorded here, and elsewhere, thanks to the Internet-based Information Rebellion (and the free press of our European allies)...Yes, the Halliburton scandals (there are several) are heating`up. Even the WASHPS and the NYTwits have noticed. Although if you want the truth of it stick to the Financial Times and the press releases of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA.) And yes, the LNS's suspicions about the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident's father distancing himself from Junior on the war in Iraq has been corrborated in Capitol Hill Blue, but we are going to stay focused and disciplined...So many "high crimes and misdemeanors," so little time...
Mark Follman, Salon, interviews Thomas Powers: Author
Thomas Powers says the White House's corruption of
intelligence has caused the greatest foreign policy
catastrophe in modern U.S. history - and sparked a
civil war with the nation's intel agencies.
The U.S. is now waging three wars, says
intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The
second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in
Washington - an all-out war between the White House
and the nation's own intelligence agencies.
Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American
Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that
the Bush administration is responsible for what is
perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S.
intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to
pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for
war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting
the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House,
the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they
corrupted, coerced or ignored have made
extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our
national security for years. By manipulating
intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an
extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set
spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's
intelligence capabilities.
"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into
Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the
right thing to do. But everything since then has been
a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is
politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of
the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an
unresolved political crisis - what really amounts to a
constitutional crisis."
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061504E.shtml
A Temporary Coup
By Mark Follman
Salon.com
Monday 14 June 2004
Author Thomas Powers says the White House's corruption
of intelligence has caused the greatest foreign policy
catastrophe in modern U.S. history - and sparked a
civil war with the nation's intel agencies.
The U.S. is now waging three wars, says
intelligence expert Thomas Powers. One is in Iraq. The
second is in Afghanistan. And the third is in
Washington - an all-out war between the White House
and the nation's own intelligence agencies.
Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American
Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that
the Bush administration is responsible for what is
perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S.
intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to
pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for
war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting
the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House,
the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they
corrupted, coerced or ignored have made
extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our
national security for years. By manipulating
intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an
extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set
spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's
intelligence capabilities.
"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into
Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the
right thing to do. But everything since then has been
a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is
politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of
the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an
unresolved political crisis - what really amounts to a
constitutional crisis."
The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is
between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret
intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans,
aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing
CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush
administration - a fact which Powers says reveals the
urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief
- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which
put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored
to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The
simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its
troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and
file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the
White House trashed the career of veteran CIA
operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity. The
move was a crude retaliation against Plame's husband,
former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had exposed
the Bush administration's specious claim that Saddam
had sought "yellowcake" from Africa to build a nuclear
bomb.
The struggle between the CIA and the Defense
Department reached a bizarre climax a few weeks ago
when Ahmed Chalabi's office was very publicly
ransacked by officers working under the command of the
CIA; the Iraqi exile leader was later accused of
leaking vital information to Iran, among other
allegations. The abrupt fall from grace of the man
hand-picked by neoconservative policymakers to lead
post-Saddam Iraq, says Powers, lays bare the brutal
turf war between the two sides.
"It reveals an extraordinary level of bitter
combat between the CIA and the Pentagon. It's
astonishing that the CIA actually oversaw a team of
people who broke into Chalabi's headquarters - which
was paid for by the Pentagon - and ransacked the
place. The CIA single-handedly destroyed him."
The collapse of U.S. intelligence and the
arrogance and extremism at the top of the Bush
administration are also at the root of the torture
scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, Powers says. With U.S.
troops facing a mounting insurgency from an enemy they
couldn't find, Powers believes Bush officials signed
off on a systematic policy of hardcore interrogation
in a frantic attempt to deal with the problem. He says
that while it's unlikely Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
gave specific orders as to what type of abuse should
be meted out to the Iraqi prisoners, there is strong
reason to believe Rumsfeld "issued blanket permission
for them to turn up the heat."
In an explosive conjecture, Powers also speculates
that the Israelis, "who've had the most experience,"
cooperated with the U.S. on the techniques used to
humiliate and break Arabs, including sexual
degradation.
As for the dubiously timed Tenet resignation -
with its fairy-tale like cover story of "I'll be
spending more time with my family" - Powers thinks one
possibility is that the CIA director may have been
forced out after Pentagon officials, enraged by the
Chalabi debacle, pressured Bush to get rid of him.
But what troubles Powers the most, he says, is
that the Bush administration completely subverted
American democracy, browbeating Congress and the
national security agencies to launch a war. "They
correctly read how the various institutions of our
government could be used to stage a kind of temporary
coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war
with Iraq."
Salon reached Powers by phone at his office in
Vermont.
Let's start with the problems inside Iraq itself.
We know there was a dearth of intelligence assets on
the ground for years before the war. What's your
assessment of the situation now?
This is one of the most closely guarded secrets of
the agency, and I don't know anybody outside of it who
really has a sense of the assets they had inside the
country then, or what they have there now. But I don't
think that was the biggest problem.
The biggest problem has to do with the decision at
very high levels to look at things in a certain way.
There was no shortage of warnings in the U.S.
government from various branches and offices that the
postwar period was going to be complicated and
difficult. In that respect there was no failure of
intelligence. But for institutional reasons -
political reasons - the White House and the Defense
Department didn't want to hear it. The Defense
Department was very explicit that they weren't going
to pay attention to those studies, that they wouldn't
seriously consider increasing their estimate of how
much money and troops would be required - because once
that went down on a piece of paper Congress would want
to see it.
There is already ample evidence that the abusive
treatment of Iraqi prisoners proceeded from systematic
policy at some level. With U.S. forces facing a rising
insurgency and a severe lack of intelligence
infrastructure there, do you think Bush policymakers
decided that the situation required a kind of dragnet
interrogation system? That in order to deal with the
problem they had to round up anybody remotely
suspicious and "take the gloves off" - as Rumsfeld
ordered done with American Taliban John Walker Lindh -
in order to figure out who and where the enemy was?
Well, we know Gen. [Geoffrey D.] Miller went from
Guantanamo to Iraq [last August] in order to beef up
the whole intelligence gathering apparatus so that we
could try to begin to understand who we were fighting
there. For a long time the administration had been
claiming we were fighting Baathists and dead-enders,
or foreign terrorists pouring in across Iraq's
borders. Part of the reason for those claims was that
politically that's what was needed to explain the
continuing resistance. It was also clear that we
didn't really know who we were fighting.
Fallujah is a good example: The administration has
never given a clear answer as to who we've been
fighting there. Our behavior suggests that when we
finally decided to back off, we had concluded that
whoever it was didn't pose a direct threat to us. It
was a resistance to us - but we were perfectly
prepared to live with it. We turned it over to an
Iraqi officer and said, "Hey, you deal with this."
They didn't have to shoot all the Iraqi insurgents,
they reached an agreement and the fighting appeared
suddenly to just stop.
How would you connect that to the administration's
broader interrogation policy?
I think the attempts at Abu Ghraib - and in many
other places, I'm sure - to extract information about
what was happening on the ground were based on a real
need. But the military had at least one success that
suggested how they might do it correctly: tracking
down Saddam Hussein. As far as I understand it, that
was essentially a bookkeeping success. They really
paid attention to detail, kept very good files and
eventually identified and located everybody who was
connected to Saddam, to 10 degrees of separation. They
realized that somebody would tell somebody else in
that network where he was. So that kind of complete
encompassing of the subject appears to have been
effective.
But the notion that Abu Ghraib prison was chaotic
and out of control, that's what people say who don't
want to take responsibility for it. I don't believe
that for a second. Rumsfeld wouldn't sit down and say,
"The best way is to photograph these guys pretending
to masturbate," but I think he did create the
circumstances and the pressure for that kind of thing
- in effect issued blanket permission for them to turn
up the heat.
Then you have to ask who actually instructed U.S.
interrogators in Arab psychology and suggested this
would be a good way to get Arabs to feel powerless and
vulnerable and tell you what you want to know. My
guess is the people who've had the most experience in
that, namely the Israelis, who've been at war with
Arabs for decades, must've cooperated with us on a
method. Of course, that's pure speculation on my part.
Clearly this kind of treatment shatters the U.S.
relationship to the Geneva Accords, not to mention the
professed morality of our mission. What do you make of
the latest Pentagon memo to come to light, which said
the president could ignore the anti-torture laws?
The answer seems pretty clear to me. The U.S.
government has people who specialize in interrogation,
and they have a long list of things they can't do. But
when you're feeling desperate, you simply take some of
the things from list B, what you're not allowed to do,
and you move them over to list A, the things you are
allowed to do.
What do you make of the Byzantine twists of the
Ahmed Chalabi story? By the time photos of his
ransacked Baghdad compound filled the newspapers, the
tale of his rise and fall seemed almost unbelievable,
the stuff of a spy novel.
I think it reveals an extraordinary level of
bitter combat between the CIA and the Pentagon. It's
astonishing that things would get to such a level,
where the CIA actually oversaw a team of people who
broke into Chalabi's headquarters - which was paid for
by the Pentagon - and ransacked the place and carried
away his computers. Who do you think bought those
computers? Those are your American tax dollars at
work.
That level of internal animosity is amazing. Look
at the chronology: First you have a moment when the
Pentagon announces that it's cutting off the funds to
Chalabi's intelligence operation. A few days later
this raid takes place. Well, it looks pretty clear
that somebody warned the Pentagon this was going to
happen, so that they could at least cut off his
funding and not be caught with their pants down.
Chalabi was the Pentagon's candidate to run Iraq.
Richard Perle [the influential neoconservative advisor
to the Pentagon] still says that the single greatest
mistake we've made so far was not putting Chalabi in
power as soon we got there.
And who has actually gone into power now? The
CIA's man: Iyad Allawi [the interim Iraqi prime
minister]. That's a dramatic shift. As it was, Chalabi
didn't appear to be the candidate that [U.N. envoy]
Lakhdar Brahimi was going to choose, but that invasion
of Chalabi's office made it an impossibility. The CIA
single-handedly destroyed him by doing that.
Chalabi is clearly a shady figure, but given the
timing and chronology here, do you find the recent
charges that he could be working for the Iranians
believable? Or is it ultimately a smear campaign?
What's at the center of all this?
Who knows! [Laughs]. We can only try to follow the
logic of where the information about the leaked
Iranian code would've come from. The conversation
between Chalabi and the Iranian intelligence office
was likely collected by the National Security Agency,
which is normally in charge of that kind of data, who
would've then passed it on to counterintelligence in
the CIA. Or, the CIA might have actually sent a team
into Chalabi's office to plant bugs or broadcasting
devices, they might have conducted that type of
black-bag operation in order to get access to that
communication traffic. It's also conceivable the
[Pentagon's] Defense Intelligence Agency was involved.
The information about Chalabi could certainly be
real, but meanwhile, the CIA's guy Allawi apparently
benefits by the removal from the scene of a principle
rival - right before Brahimi gets to choose the new
government.
So this is ultimately the CIA fighting back
against the Pentagon?
I think so - can it really be a coincidence that
this happens right before Brahimi announces the new
government? U.S. intelligence knew about the
compromised Iranian code about six weeks before the
raid. So why wait till just before Brahimi's
announcement? And why the large team of people and the
very public display of trashing Chalabi headquarters
and carting everything away? Regardless of the truth,
when something like this happens, Brahimi is incapable
of sorting it out. He just has to step away. It's one
of those things you can't touch with a 10-foot pole.
I don't know exactly what it all represents, but
I'm certain that it involves bad blood between the CIA
and the Pentagon. It puzzled me at first why Tenet
would be resigning after this apparent CIA triumph. I
did wonder if the Pentagon had mustered enough
high-level fury to reach the president.
How else do you view Tenet's resignation? The
innocuous framing of it accompanies perhaps the
biggest series of intelligence disasters in U.S.
history.
There is no question that over the last couple of
years it's become clear that the various U.S.
intelligence agencies have numerous weaknesses and
institutional deficiencies. But the biggest problem is
really the politicization of intelligence under Bush.
It's happened in two ways. First, because of the
politics surrounding 9/11, the intelligence agencies
have not been able to speak about it honestly and
directly. Iraq is the other big issue: The
intelligence agencies have not been able to speak
about that honestly and directly either, because
they've been pressured by the White House, especially
before the war, to take a certain view.
That's where all this internal trouble with the
intelligence system comes from. It's not as if they're
all Keystone Kops who can't figure out where their
left shoes are. It's all about the politics of it.
And that's only further complicated by the long
history of turf wars between the agencies, between the
FBI and CIA, and now apparently between the State
Department and the Pentagon intelligence operations.
Exactly, and now they're all fighting over a
policy which represents perhaps the single most
aggressive and resolute endeavor in the history of
U.S. foreign relations. It's astonishing, not just
that President Bush got a bee in his bonnet that he
had to invade another country and establish a major
new American military presence in the Middle East, but
that he would do it in this way.
Do you think Tenet essentially was pushed out by
the White House?
Tenet was pushed out by the accumulating
circumstances, not because he failed to do what Bush
wanted him to do, which was essentially two things:
The first was to not speak too clearly about the
warnings that he'd given the White House before 9/11.
You can be certain that it was not easy for Tenet to
do that. Tenet has never spoken out clearly and said,
"I told the president everything he needed to know to
at least start responding to the threat."
Secondly, Tenet hasn't spoken clearly on the
reason why they got Iraqi WMD wrong. And it's not
because people in the bowels of the agency had it all
balled up, it's because in the process of writing
finished intelligence - which was required to extract
a vote for war from congress - it got turned on its
head at the upper levels of the CIA. They found
certainty where there wasn't any; the evidence for WMD
stockpiles and programs was extremely thin. Who else
could have created this situation besides the
policymakers themselves?
What about the timing of Tenet's departure? It
comes in tandem with more alerts about terrorist
attacks this summer, and right around the June 30
transition of power in Iraq. Do you think Tenet was
explicitly asked to leave?
I think he was definitely asked to leave. He
showed every sign of extreme distress.
And there's been plenty of speculation that has to
do with the forthcoming congressional reports on 9/11
and Iraq intelligence, which won't look good for him.
The obvious answer is probably the correct one.
Tenet would spend all his time defending himself
against the reports. Everybody knows that another guy
could run the agency just as well and could run it the
same way. Bush has even made sure it'll be run the
same way by keeping the same leadership, with [Deputy
Director] John McLaughlin taking over. Bush would end
up spending a lot of political capital fighting for
Tenet; it's much simpler just to get him off the stage
- just like they did with Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in
Iraq. Once somebody made clear that Sanchez knew about
Abu Ghraib, they didn't argue about it. They got rid
of him.
What does Tenet's departure say about the state of
the agency at a critical time for U.S. national
security operations?
The agency is politicized to an extreme. It is
under the control of the Bush White House. Tenet is
leaving in the middle of an unresolved political
crisis - what really amounts to a constitutional
crisis. It's somewhat like Iran-Contra, though on a
totally different scale. The president wanted to go to
war. He's supposed to have the support of the
Congress. How did he get it? Well, his administration
made up a scary story about imminent dangers.
Doesn't Tenet's departure make him the fall guy
implicitly, even if President Bush delivered him
cordially?
Of course the implicit blame is there, and that's
one of the reasons why he looked and sounded so
distressed. He had plenty reason to be; there was a
cumulative insistence that the CIA had to be at fault.
He could change that picture dramatically by standing
up and saying, "Look, you want to know what I really
told the president before 9/11? Here it is." Obviously
that would be quite a bombshell and you can be sure
the president would never speak to him again.
I think the truth about what happened at the
policy level will eventually come out. We know,
because it was on paper, that on Aug. 6, 2001 the CIA
gave the president a very explicit warning. When 9/11
actually occurred, you would expect to look back and
see, once the distress light was on, various U.S.
intelligence and police organizations scurrying around
frantically responding to the warning. But what do you
find? Nothing.
While Tenet appears to have equivocated about
Iraqi WMD in some instances, we also know that the CIA
expressed significant doubt about specific
intelligence on Iraq long before the war - the bogus
Niger-uranium report, for example - that the Bush
administration still used to make its case. How can
the administration possibly continue to promote the
idea that the CIA got it all wrong?
Well, who else is the administration going to
blame? If they don't say that, then they would have to
ask, "Why did the CIA write a report that went in
certitude beyond the evidence?" The answer is very
likely to be, "Because that's what the president
wanted, and he made sure that was understood."
Is the war inside the U.S. intelligence system
completely off the charts historically? Is there any
precedent for this?
I can't think of any. It's not uncommon for the
various secret branches of the U.S. government to be
at odds with each other. The CIA quarreled with the
Defense Department for years over Soviet missiles, but
I don't remember anything like this. The CIA was
present when that team of Iraqi police went in and
ransacked Chalabi's compound. I mean, that's amazing.
The only thing that would've made it more amazing was
if it had happened in Washington.
In a way it reminds me of the "Night of the long
knives" in 1934, the night when Hitler got rid of the
Brown Shirts, the street fighting organization that
had helped the Nazi Party come to power. It was a
highly organized institution bitterly hated by the
army. It was run by a bunch of people who were
politically ambitious and were direct rivals of the
group that came into power with Hitler. Literally in
one night the offices and headquarters of this group
were raided and many of them were killed in their
beds. Immediately all kinds of propaganda came out
about their low behavior and betrayal. It was an
internal government bloodletting where one faction
just simply swept the other off the scene.
What the CIA did to Chalabi isn't exactly the
same, but it makes me worry even more about the level
of covert fighting inside our own government.
Just last week the New York Times reported that
the CIA is still struggling with a "major flaw" in its
operations. A senior agency official, Jami Miscik,
described conditions still ripe for the distortion of
information, and similar problems reportedly plague
the Defense Intelligence Agency. What's your view of
the rising chorus within Congress to overhaul the
intelligence system?
I think it's a good idea, and I never thought that
before. It ought to be set up with a devoted Cabinet
post, a secretary of intelligence who would have a
wide range of powers and authority to oversee the
whole system. But that person can't run everything;
each of the agencies is distinct for good reasons, and
each one has to be run by its own chief.
Separating intelligence and police operations is
absolutely essential. If you put it all under a single
authority it would represent the greatest threat by
far to American democracy. Other countries have proven
that. A single intelligence organization will abuse
the power of secrecy to protect itself - all
intelligence organizations routinely abuse the power
of secrecy to protect themselves.
Just look back at the way we got into this war:
There was nobody in the public who had the capacity to
seriously question the CIA's evidence and arguments.
We just had to take it on trust.
And that's a dangerous prospect when you have a
White House with an inflexible agenda that's in
control of the system.
I think so. I don't know how else to explain
getting it completely wrong. If you go back and look
at Powell's speech at the U.N., he makes dozens of
claims and not one of them was ever robustly confirmed
- in fact, almost all of them were completely false. I
mean, how could he get it that wrong?
The most important thing to do now is to alter the
chain of command. I think it makes sense to have the
secretary of intelligence serve for a four-year term
that overlaps presidential terms, an appointment that
begins at the end of the first year of every
presidential term. In other words, each president
coming into office inherits the previous intelligence
leader for at least a year. That provides continuity
and avoids election year politics.
How do you view the Bush administration in terms
of dealing with this whole series of intelligence
problems that have come to light?
It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into
Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the
right thing to do. But everything since then has been
a horrible mistake, one that has made it more
difficult to fight the war on terror, has driven away
allies and diminished the degree of cooperation from a
number of intelligence services and governments in the
Arab world. And it promises to get worse. This was a
completely unnecessary, distracting, expensive war
that has isolated the United States.
It seems like there has almost never been direct
acknowledgement by the White House of any policy
problems.
Yes, but they've done something else which
troubles me more than anything. They correctly read
how the various institutions of our government could
be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single
issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.
President Bush used the intelligence system as a
blunt instrument, and they forced Congress to go along
- the Congress was in an almost impossible position.
When the president uses the maximum power of his own
office and says, "I am soberly telling you that this
is necessary for the safety of the country," you gotta
listen to the guy. At least once.
-------
The Lynndie Englands and Jessica Lynchs of this
country are going to lead the sacking of the Bush
abomination...There is an Electoral Uprising coming in
November 2004...
Cindi Lash and Michael A. Fuoco, Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette: By putting top government officials like
Vice President Dick Cheney on their witness list,
England's attorneys are serving notice that in
defending their client, they will attempt to put on
trial the Bush administration's policies on
intelligence gathering from detainees. Like most other
military police reservists charged in the abuse
scandal, England has claimed military intelligence
officers ordered the MPs to "soften up" the detainees
prior to interrogations.
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04165/331166.stm
Soldier's defense team wants 100 witnesses from Cheney on down for Abu Ghraib case
Sunday, June 13, 2004
By Cindi Lash and Michael A. Fuoco, Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
Defense attorneys preparing for Pfc. Lynndie England's
upcoming hearing on charges she abused detainees at
Abu Ghraib prison have compiled a list of 100
potential witnesses stretching from the halls of power
in Washington, D.C., to the sand-swept vistas of Iraq.
KCNC-TV via AP
Army Pfc. Lynndie England during an interview with
KCNC-TV on May 11.
By putting top government officials like Vice
President Dick Cheney on their witness list, England's
attorneys are serving notice that in defending their
client, they will attempt to put on trial the Bush
administration's policies on intelligence gathering
from detainees. Like most other military police
reservists charged in the abuse scandal, England has
claimed military intelligence officers ordered the MPs
to "soften up" the detainees prior to interrogations.
However, just because her attorneys want those
witnesses doesn't mean that many of them will be on
the stand later this month at England's Article 32
hearing in Fort Bragg, N.C. That's because a military
investigating officer, the presiding authority at the
Article 32 hearing, will decide which witnesses are
most relevant.
The goal at this stage of the military justice system
is to determine whether there is sufficient probable
cause to believe a crime was committed and whether
England committed it. If the investigating officer
determines there is enough evidence to proceed to a
court-martial, he will make that recommendation to a
higher-ranking officer, who will make the final
determination.
Given that, it would seem highly unlikely that the
most prominent names listed will be asked to take the
witness stand at England's hearing, tentatively
scheduled for June 22.
Related article
Top general approved tough grilling tactics
The wished-for witness list, obtained by the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, includes, in addition to
Cheney, other high-ranking officials such as Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Undersecretary for
Intelligence Stephen Cambone; Lt. Gen. Ricardo
Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and other
high-ranking Army officers; White House General
Counsel Alberto Gonzales; and Justice Department
officials.
An Army spokeswoman said last week that any military
personnel chosen as witnesses by the investigating
officer will be ordered to appear. Spokesmen for
Cheney and the Defense Department did not return calls
seeking comment.
England, 21, of Fort Ashby, W.Va., has become perhaps
the most recognized of the seven soldiers from the
372nd MP Company who were charged in the prison abuse
scandal. She provoked international ire for her
exuberant smile and thumbs-up sign while posing with
naked, hooded prisoners in widely published
photographs. In one, she holds a leash attached to the
neck of a naked Iraqi who is on the ground.
The witness list includes 16 members of the 372nd,
headquartered in Cresaptown, Md., many of whose names
will be familiar to those who have followed the abuse
scandal.
Among the group are Spc. Joseph M. Darby, the Somerset
County native who turned in the others and is not
facing charges, and Spc. Jeremy Sivits of Hyndman,
Bedford County, who pleaded guilty May 19 at a special
court-martial in a plea bargain with prosecutors in
which he promised to testify against England and the
six other MPs charged thus far.
The five other charged MPs -- Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip"
Frederick II, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Spc. Charles Graner
Jr., Spc. Sabrina Harman and Spc. Megan Ambuhl --
remain in Iraq where they are performing tasks other
than jail guard duty. They are not expected to be
ordered to testify because they almost certainly would
invoke their Fifth Amendment right against
self-incrimination if ordered to do so.
Frederick, Davis and Graner have already had their
Article 32 hearings and have had charges referred to
general court-martial. A military judge set June 21
for pre-trial hearings in their cases, where pleas and
motions must be entered.
Ambuhl has had her Article 32 hearing, at which two of
four charges lodged against her were dropped. A
decision is expected by early summer on whether she
should face a court-martial.
Harman's Article 32 hearing is scheduled for June 24.
An Army spokesman in Iraq said the hearing is
tentatively set to be held at the Victory Base
Courthouse outside of Baghdad but it may be moved to
the Green Zone, the heavily guarded area in central
Baghdad, to provide for additional seating.
Unlike the other charged MPs, England was transferred
to the United States because she is pregnant. She told
investigators that Graner is the father.
At this stage, prosecutors are likely to draw much of
their case against England from her own words, found
in the signed, sworn statement she gave agents from
the Army's Criminal Investigation Division at Fort
Bragg on May 5. Her attorneys, who did not return
calls last week, have in the past argued that England
was pressured into giving that statement and they will
try to have it suppressed.
In that statement, obtained by the Post-Gazette,
England implicates herself and five other members of
the 372nd in varying types of abuse at Abu Ghraib. She
maintains they committed no crimes because they were
following orders from superior officers and that what
occurred there was widely known and, in some cases,
"funny."
England acknowledged in her statement that the MPs
were not given specific orders on how to "break''
detainees for interrogation by military intelligence
officers or other government agents. But she said
those officers praised the MPs and told them to "keep
it up'' with their treatment of detainees.
England's witness list also includes White House
counsel Gonzales and Justice Department officials who
were involved in a controversial Bush administration
decision two years ago to deny Geneva Conventions
protections to captured Taliban and Al-Qaida
combatants detained in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo,
Cuba. That paved the way for U.S. agents to employ a
new, more aggressive set of interrogation rules that
included stress and duress while they attempted to
extract information from detainees at Guantanamo and
other sites.
Attorneys for England and other charged MPs, as well
as administration critics, contend that policy was
gradually expanded to also cover Iraqi detainees,
creating conditions where military and civilian
intelligence officers used MP guards at Abu Ghraib to
intimidate detainees before interrogations.
Also on the witness list are 12 Abu Ghraib detainees,
although what assistance they could provide in
England's defense is unclear, other than if they would
say she wasn't involved in any incidents involving
them.
One of them, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, is identified
in CID documents obtained by the Post-Gazette as the
inmate in the iconic photo of the abuse scandal --
hooded, standing on a box and with wires attached to
his fingers, toes and penis -- after MPs told him he
would be electrocuted if he stepped off.
Another detainee on the witness list, Abd Alwhab
Youss, told CID investigators that after he was
mistakenly identified as the owner of a broken
toothbrush that could be used as a weapon, he was
stripped and six unnamed guards poured cold water on
him and "forced me to put my head in someone's urine,"
beat him with a broom, stepped on his head, spit on
him and yelled at him with a loudspeaker for three
hours.
The witness list also includes:
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who supervised
operations at the U.S. Detention Center in Guantanamo
before he was sent to Iraq to improve intelligence
gathering in summer 2003. In November, Sanchez
transferred control of Abu Ghraib to military
intelligence and other agencies.
Maj Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who headed a military
investigation that produced a report detailing abuses
at Abu Ghraib. His report includes MPs' contentions
that their controversial treatment of prisoners was
directed by military intelligence and other government
officials.
Maj. Gen. George Fay, the Army's deputy chief of
staff for intelligence, who was appointed after
Taguba's report to investigate the conduct of military
intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib. Fay, however, may
be replaced by a higher-ranking general because, as a
two-star general, he lacks authority to question
officers of greater rank.
Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who as commander of
the 800th Military Police Brigade oversaw military
prisons in Iraq, and other Army officials who worked
in the prison. Karpinski and other officers have been
reprimanded.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who as commander of the 205th
Military Intelligence Brigade oversaw interrogations
at Abu Ghraib.
Other soldiers who were witnesses to abuse, according
to CID documents obtained by the Post-Gazette.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Cindi Lash can be reached at clash@post-gazette.com
or 412-263-1973. Michael A. Fuoco can be reached at
mfuoco@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1968.)
Drip, drip, drip...The stench of Abu Ghraib is on the
Bush White House, and the stench of the Bush White
House is on Abu Ghraib...Note, of course, that Brig.
Gen. Karpinski was given a forum by the BBC, not by
SeeNotNews, or AnythingButSee, or NotBeSeen, or even
by SeeBS (yet)...
BBC: Brig Gen Janis Karpinski told the BBC she was
being made a "convenient scapegoat" for abuse ordered
by others.
Top US commander for Iraq, Gen Ricardo Sanchez, should
be asked what he knew about the abuse, she told BBC
Radio 4's On The Ropes programme...
Gen Karpinski said more damaging information was
likely to emerge at those trials...
Karpinski fears she has been made a scapegoat
A US general who has investigated the abuse has blamed
the soldiers - and found no evidence "of a policy or a
direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what
they did".
But Gen Karpinski believes the soldiers had not taken
the pictures of their own accord.
"I know that the MP [military police] unit that these
soldiers belonged to hadn't been in Abu Ghraib long
enough to be so confident that one night or early
morning they were going to take detainees out of their
cells, pile them up and photograph themselves in
various positions with these detainees."
"How it happened or why those photographs came to the
Criminal Investigation Division's attention in January
I think will probably come out very clearly at each
individual's court martial."
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3806713.stm
Last Updated: Tuesday, 15 June, 2004, 11:10 GMT 12:10
UK
E-mail this to a friend Printable version
Iraq abuse 'ordered from the top'
Images of the abuse have shocked the world
The US commander at the centre of the Iraqi prisoner
scandal says she was told to treat detainees like
dogs.
Brig Gen Janis Karpinski told the BBC she was being
made a "convenient scapegoat" for abuse ordered by
others.
Top US commander for Iraq, Gen Ricardo Sanchez, should
be asked what he knew about the abuse, she told BBC
Radio 4's On The Ropes programme.
One soldier has been sentenced and six others are
awaiting courts martial for abuses committed at Abu
Ghraib jail.
Gen Karpinski said more damaging information was
likely to emerge at those trials.
Gen Karpinski was in charge of the military police
unit that ran Abu Ghraib and other prisons when the
abuses were committed. She has been suspended but not
charged.
More details awaited
Photographs showing naked Iraqi detainees being
humiliated and maltreated first started to surface in
April, sparking shock and anger across the world.
Gen Karpinski said military intelligence took over
part of the Abu Ghraib jail to "Gitmoize" their
interrogations - make them more like what was
happening in the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, which is nicknamed "Gitmo".
He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to
believe at any point that they are more than a dog
then you've lost control of them
General Karpinski
In pictures: Prisoner abuse
She said current Iraqi prisons chief Maj Gen Geoffrey
Miller - who was in charge at Guantanamo Bay - visited
her in Baghdad and said: "At Guantanamo Bay we learned
that the prisoners have to earn every single thing
that they have."
"He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to
believe at any point that they are more than a dog
then you've lost control of them."
Gen Karpinski repeated that she knew nothing of the
humiliation and torture of Iraq prisoners that was
going on inside Abu Ghraib - she was made a scapegoat.
Top commander Ricardo Sanchez must be asked serious
questions about what he knew about the abuse and when,
she said.
Gen Sanchez said in May that he took a personal
responsibility for the abuse by soldiers at Abu Ghraib
jail. But he denied authorising interrogation
techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions
or sensory deprivation.
Last week, he asked to be excused from any role in
reviewing the results of an investigation into the
abuses. He requested that a higher-ranking general
take on that task, Pentagon officials said.
Karpinski fears she has been made a scapegoat
A US general who has investigated the abuse has blamed
the soldiers - and found no evidence "of a policy or a
direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what
they did".
But Gen Karpinski believes the soldiers had not taken
the pictures of their own accord.
"I know that the MP [military police] unit that these
soldiers belonged to hadn't been in Abu Ghraib long
enough to be so confident that one night or early
morning they were going to take detainees out of their
cells, pile them up and photograph themselves in
various positions with these detainees."
"How it happened or why those photographs came to the
Criminal Investigation Division's attention in January
I think will probably come out very clearly at each
individual's court martial."
On The Ropes can be heard on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 15
June at 0900 and 2100 BST.
The November 2004 election is a national referendum on
the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the
increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking
_resident. The issues of CREDIBILITY and COMPTENCE
have been brought to the public eye, and now, finally,
the issue of CHARACTER is being brought to the public
eye...
Capitol Hill Blue: Dr. Justin Frank, writing in Bush
on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, also
says the President has a ""lifelong streak of sadism,
ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to
explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over
state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully
before the bombing of Baghdad."
Even worse, Dr. Frank concludes, the President's years
of heavy drinking ""may have affected his brain
function - and his decision to quit drinking without
the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher
risk of relapse."
Dr. Frank's revelations comes on the heels of last
week's Capitol Hill Blue exclusive that revealed
increasing concern by White House aides over Bush's
emotional stability.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4687.shtml
From Capitol Hill Blue
Bush Leagues
Washington Shrink Calls Bush a Paranoid, Sadistic Meglomaniac
By Staff and Wire Reports
Jun 14, 2004, 00:22
A new book by a prominent Washington psychoanalyst
says President George W. Bush is a "paranoid
meglomaniac" as well as a sadist and "untreated
alcoholic." The doctor's analysis appears to confirm
earlier reports the President may be emotionally
unstable.
Dr. Justin Frank, writing in Bush on the Couch: Inside
the Mind of the President, also says the President has
a ""lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood
pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to
insulting journalists, gloating over state executions
... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the
bombing of Baghdad."
Even worse, Dr. Frank concludes, the President's years
of heavy drinking ""may have affected his brain
function - and his decision to quit drinking without
the help of a 12-step program [puts] him at far higher
risk of relapse."
Dr. Frank's revelations comes on the heels of last
week's Capitol Hill Blue exclusive that revealed
increasing concern by White House aides over Bush's
emotional stability.
Aides, who spoke only on condition that their names be
withheld, told stories of wide mood swings by the
President who would go from quoting the Bible one
minute to obscenity-filled outbursts the next.
Bush shows an inability to grieve - dating back to age
7, when his sister died. "The family's reaction - no
funeral and no mourning - set in motion his life-long
pattern of turning away from pain [and hiding] behind
antic behavior," says Frank, who says Bush may suffer
from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Other findings by Dr. Frank:
His mother, Barbara Bush - tabbed by some family
friends as "the one who instills fear" - had trouble
connecting emotionally with her son, Frank argues.
George H.W. Bush's "emotional and physical absence
during his son's youth triggered feelings of both
adoration and revenge in George W."
The President suffers from "character pathology,"
including "grandiosity" and "megalomania" -- viewing
himself, America and God as interchangeable.
Dr. Frank has been a psychiatrist for 35 years and is
director of psychiatry at George Washington
University. A Democrat, he once headed the Washington
Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
In an interview with The Washington Post's Richard
Leiby, Dr. Frank said he began to be concerned about
Bush's behavior in 2002.
"I was really very unsettled by him and I started
watching everything he did and reading what he wrote,
and watching him on videotape. I felt he was
disturbed," Dr. Frank told Leiby. Bush, he said, "fits
the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has
been arrested but not treated."
Dr. Frank's expert recommendation? ""Our sole
treatment option -- for his benefit and for ours -- is
to remove President Bush from office . . . before it
is too late."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to
comment on the specifics of Dr. Frank's book or the
earlier story by Capitol Hill Blue.
"I don't do book reviews," McClellan said, even though
he last week recommended the latest book by the
Washington Post's Bob Woodward to reporters at the
daily press briefing.
© Copyright 2004 Capitol Hill Blue
The November 2004 election is a national referendum on
the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the
increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking
_resident. The issues of CREDIBILITY and COMPTENCE
have been brought to the public eye, and now, finaly,
the issue of CHARACTER is being brought to the public
eye...
Richard Leiby, Washington Post: In the book, to be released Tuesday, Justin A. Frank, a clinical professor at George Washington University Medical Center, claims President Bush exhibits "sadistic tendencies" and suffers from "character pathology," including "grandiosity" and "megalomania" -- viewing himself, America and God as interchangeable.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30085-2004Jun10?language=printer
Rx for W: Electoral Surgery
By Richard Leiby
Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page C03
We can assure you nobody will be caught perusing this
book in the White House. "Bush on the Couch," authored
by a longtime Washington psychiatrist who has never
met or treated the president, offers "an exploration
of Bush's psyche" that delves into such touchy topics
as his baby sister's death, his relationship with his
mother and father and his drinking history.
In the book, to be released Tuesday, Justin A. Frank,
a clinical professor at George Washington University
Medical Center, claims President Bush exhibits
"sadistic tendencies" and suffers from "character
pathology," including "grandiosity" and "megalomania"
-- viewing himself, America and God as
interchangeable. Frank told us yesterday that his
opinions are based on publicly available materials,
adding, "I've never met the president or any members
of his family."
A Democrat who once headed the Washington chapter of
Physicians for Social Responsibility, Frank concludes
in the book: "Our sole treatment option -- for his
benefit and for ours -- is to remove President Bush
from office . . . before it is too late."
Frank, who has practiced for 35 years, told us he
began noting Bush's mannerisms in the fall of 2002. "I
was really very unsettled by him and I started
watching everything he did and reading what he wrote,
and watching him on videotape. I felt he was
disturbed." In the book, he writes that Bush "fits the
profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been
arrested but not treated."
A White House spokeswoman would not comment yesterday
on "Bush on the Couch," reiterating a statement from
communications director Scott McClellan: "I don't do
book reviews." (Although the White House has
recommended Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack.")
Hard to believe this straight, unskewed, unstilted
news story was printed in the Union Leader...There is
an Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004...
Riley Yates, Union Leader: In a fiery 40 minute
speech, the former vice president knocked the Bush
administration for using wrong information to justify
the invasion, in particular for relying on Iraqi
dissident Ahmed Chalabi, who has since been reportedly
linked to Iran.
“Which means that for 3½ years, he’s been doping the
President of the United States,” Gore said. “Does that
inspire confidence?”
Gore also accused Bush and his administration of
breaking with rules governing the treatment of
prisoners of war, implicating them in the prisoner
abuse scandals.
“The paper trail shows very clearly that these privates and corporals weren’t the ones who suggested pulling out of the Geneva Convention,” Gore said.
Later in the speech, he added: “The President of the
United States ordered the withdrawal from the Geneva
Convention and the secretary of defense said take off
the gloves, get tough with them.”
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showfast.html?article=39180
Gore tells NH Democrats Bush
changed meaning of America
By RILEY YATES
Union Leader Staff
Former Vice President Al Gore is greeted by guests at
the Manchester City Democrats annual Flag Day Dinner
at the Chateau in Manchester last night. (TOM
THIBEAULT/UNION LEADER)
MANCHESTER — Al Gore last night charged President Bush
has endangered America’s position in the world with a
mistaken invasion of Iraq and by flaunting
international convention.
“This was done in our name. This changes for many in
the world the meaning of America, the image of
America,” Gore told 300 Democrat powerbrokers at a
fundraiser for the city party.
In a fiery 40 minute speech, the former vice president
knocked the Bush administration for using wrong
information to justify the invasion, in particular for
relying on Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi, who has
since been reportedly linked to Iran.
“Which means that for 3½ years, he’s been doping the
President of the United States,” Gore said. “Does that
inspire confidence?”
Gore also accused Bush and his administration of
breaking with rules governing the treatment of
prisoners of war, implicating them in the prisoner
abuse scandals.
“The paper trail shows very clearly that these
privates and corporals weren’t the ones who suggested
pulling out of the Geneva Convention,” Gore said.
Later in the speech, he added: “The President of the
United States ordered the withdrawal from the Geneva
Convention and the secretary of defense said take off
the gloves, get tough with them.”
The annual Flag Day dinner featured a roast of Kathy
Sullivan, the state party chairman. Held at the
Chateau Restaurant on Hanover Street, it included four
hours of speeches from candidates for governor, the
U.S. House and the Executive Council.
Gore’s criticism of Bush spanned to the environment,
the Patriot Act and Attorney General John Ashcroft,
and the federal budget deficit. He stuck mostly to
Iraq and foreign affairs, however, as he stumped in
what’s considered a swing state for prospective
Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry of
Massachusetts.
“Now in so many places in the world so many people
holding out the American flag of freedom will be met
with catcalls and cynicism,” Gore said.
Gore also said the war has led to a “backdoor draft”
with people in the service “being ordered to stay in
the military even though they don’t want to.” He said
the Bush administration overruled its own military
estimates in invading Iraq without enough forces.
The speech was in direct contrast to Gore’s opening
remarks, which saw light humor, as the former vice
president poked fun at getting used to being just a
citizen and the closeness of the 2000 Presidential
election.
“I am Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the
United States,” Gore introduced himself to laughter,
quipping: “I don’t believe that’s particularly funny.”
Compelling evidence to be offered in the upcoming national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident. A powerful, significant, UNPRECEDENTED move from the military and foreign policy establishment. Will you hear about it on the Sunday morning propapunditgandist shows? At least, the LA Times understands its signifigance (or unafraid to acknowledged it with suitable gravitas)...
LA Times: A group of 26 former senior diplomats and
military officials, several appointed to key positions
by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week
arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged
America's national security and should be defeated in
November.
The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military
Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's
foreign policy, according to several of those who
signed the document.
"It is clear that the statement calls for the defeat
of the administration," said William C. Harrop, the
ambassador to Israel under President Bush's father and
one of the group's principal organizers.
Those signing the document, which will be released in
Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S.
ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties,
to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union
and Saudi Arabia.
Others are senior State Department officials from the
Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former
military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph
P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the
Middle East under President Bush's father. Hoar is a
prominent critic of the war in Iraq...
It is unusual for so many former high-level military
officials and career diplomats to issue such an
overtly political message during a presidential
campaign.
Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-diplo13jun13,1,1142936.story?coll=la-home-headlines
THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Retired Officials Say Bush Must Go: The 26 ex-diplomats and military leaders say his foreign policy has harmed national security. Several served under Republicans.
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer
June 13, 2004
WASHINGTON — A group of 26 former senior diplomats and
military officials, several appointed to key positions
by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week
arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged
America's national security and should be defeated in
November.
The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military
Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's
foreign policy, according to several of those who
signed the document.
"It is clear that the statement calls for the defeat
of the administration," said William C. Harrop, the
ambassador to Israel under President Bush's father and
one of the group's principal organizers.
Those signing the document, which will be released in
Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S.
ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties,
to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union
and Saudi Arabia.
Others are senior State Department officials from the
Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former
military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph
P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the
Middle East under President Bush's father. Hoar is a
prominent critic of the war in Iraq.
Some of those signing the document — such as Hoar and
former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak —
have identified themselves as supporters of Sen. John
F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential
nominee. But most have not endorsed any candidate,
members of the group said.
It is unusual for so many former high-level military
officials and career diplomats to issue such an
overtly political message during a presidential
campaign.
A senior official at the Bush reelection campaign said
he did not wish to comment on the statement until it
was released.
But in the past, administration officials have
rejected charges that Bush has isolated America in the
world, pointing to countries contributing troops to
the coalition in Iraq and the unanimous passage last
week of the U.N. resolution authorizing the interim
Iraqi government.
One senior Republican strategist familiar with White
House thinking said he did not think the group was
sufficiently well-known to create significant
political problems for the president.
The strategist, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, also said the signatories were making an
argument growing increasingly obsolete as Bush leans
more on the international community for help in Iraq.
"Their timing is a little off, particularly in the
aftermath of the most recent U.N. resolution," the
strategist said. "It seems to me this is a collection
of resentments that have built up, but it would have
been much more powerful months ago than now when even
the president's most disinterested critics would say
we have taken a much more multilateral approach" in
Iraq.
But those signing the document say the recent signs of
cooperation do not reverse a basic trend toward
increasing isolation for the U.S.
"We just felt things were so serious, that America's
leadership role in the world has been attenuated to
such a terrible degree by both the style and the
substance of the administration's approach," said
Harrop, who served as ambassador to four African
countries under Carter and Reagan.
"A lot of people felt the work they had done over
their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which
the United States was respected and could lead the
rest of the world was now undermined by this
administration — by the arrogance, by the refusal to
listen to others, the scorn for multilateral
organizations," Harrop said.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was appointed by Reagan as
ambassador to the Soviet Union and retained in the
post by President Bush's father during the final years
of the Cold War, expressed similar views.
"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. has built up
alliances in order to amplify its own power," he said.
"But now we have alienated many of our closest allies,
we have alienated their populations. We've all been
increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we
worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered
by the current administration in the method it has
gone about things."
The GOP strategist noted that many of those involved
in the document claimed their primary expertise in the
Middle East and suggested a principal motivation for
the statement might be frustration over Bush's effort
to fundamentally reorient policy toward the region.
"For 60 years we believed in quote-unquote stability
at the price of liberty, and what we got is neither
liberty nor stability," the strategist said. "So we
are taking a fundamentally different approach toward
the Middle East. That is a huge doctrinal shift, and
the people who have given their lives, careers to
building the previous foreign policy consensus, see
this as a direct intellectual assault on what they
have devoted their lives to. And it is. We think what
a lot of people came up with was a failure — or at
least, in the present world in which we live, it is no
longer sustainable."
Sponsors of the effort counter that several in the
group have been involved in developing policy
affecting almost all regions of the globe.
The document will echo a statement released in April
by a group of high-level former British diplomats
condemning Prime Minister Tony Blair for being too
closely aligned to U.S. policy in Iraq and Israel.
Those involved with the new group said their effort
was already underway when the British statement was
released.
The signatories said Kerry's campaign played no role
in the formation of their group. Phyllis E. Oakley,
the deputy State Department spokesman during Reagan's
second term and an assistant secretary of state under
Clinton, said she suspected "some of them [in the
Kerry campaign] may have been aware of it," but that
"the campaign had no role" in organizing the group.
Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's communications director,
also said that the Kerry campaign had not been
involved in devising the group's statement.
The document does not explicitly endorse Kerry,
according to those familiar with it. But some
individual signers plan to back the Democrat, and
others acknowledge that by calling for Bush's removal,
the group effectively is urging Americans to elect
Kerry.
"The core of the message is that we are so deeply
concerned about the current direction of American
foreign policy … that we think it is essential for the
future security of the United States that a new
foreign policy team come in," said Oakley.
Much of the debate over the document in the days ahead
may pivot on the extent to which it is seen as a
partisan document.
A Bush administration ally said that the group failed
to recognize how the Sept. 11 attacks required
significant changes in American foreign policy.
"There's no question those who were responsible for
policies pre-9/11 are denying what seems as the
obvious — that those policies were inadequate," said
Cliff May, president of the conservative advocacy
group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
"This seems like a statement from 9/10 people [who
don't see] the importance of 9/11 and the way that
should have changed our thinking."
Along with Hoar and McPeak, others who have signed it
are identified with the Democratic Party.
Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., though named chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan, supported
Clinton in 1992. Crowe has endorsed Kerry. Retired
Adm. Stansfield Turner served as Carter's director of
central intelligence and has also endorsed Kerry.
Matlock said he was a registered Democrat during most
of his foreign service career, though he voted for
Reagan in 1984 and the elder Bush twice and now is
registered as an independent.
Several on the group's list were appointed to their
most important posts under Reagan and the elder Bush.
These include Matlock and Harrop, as well as Arthur A.
Hartman, who served as Reagan's ambassador to the
Soviet Union from 1981 through 1987; H. Allen Holmes,
an assistant secretary of state under Reagan; and
Charles Freeman, ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the
elder Bush.
Many on the list have not been previously identified
with any political cause or party. Several "are the
kind who have never spoken out before," said James
Daniel Phillips, former ambassador to Burundi and the
Congo.
Oakley, Harrop and Matlock said the effort began this
year. Matlock said it was sparked by conversations
among "colleagues who had served in senior positions
around the same time, most of them for the Reagan
administration and for the first Bush administration."
Oakley said frustration over the Iraq war was "a large
part" of the impetus for the statement, but the
criticism of President Bush "goes much deeper."
The group's complaint about Bush's approach largely
tracks Kerry's contention that the administration has
weakened American security by straining traditional
alliances and shifting resources from the war against
Al Qaeda to the invasion of Iraq.
Oakley said the statement would argue that,
"Unfortunately the tough stands [Bush] has taken have
made us less secure. He has neglected the war on
terrorism for the war in Iraq. And while we agree that
we are in unprecedented times and we face challenges
we didn't even know about before, these challenges
require the cooperation of other countries. We cannot
do it by ourselves."
If you want other stories on this topic, search the
Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) is ahead in
Fraudida. Be vigilant, be vocal, be vociferous. This
election is perhaps our last hope, for a long time, to
save the Republic...
Associated Press: Touchscreen voting machines in 11
counties have a software flaw that could make manual
recounts impossible in November's presidential
election, state officials said. A spokeswoman for the
secretary of state called the problems "minor
technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics
allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting
system they knew had a bug.
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040612/ap_on_el_pr/florida_voting_machines_1
Fla. Voting Machines Have Recount Flaw
1 hour, 54 minutes ago
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the
problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be
resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly
certified a voting system they knew had a bug.
The electronic voting machines are a response to
Florida's 2000 presidential election fiasco, where
thousands of punchcard ballots were improperly marked.
But the new machines have brought concerns that errors
could go unchecked without paper records of the
electronic voting.
The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of
Omaha, Neb., fail to provide a consistent electronic
"event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce
what happened during the election, state officials
said.
Officials with the company and the state Division of
Elections said they believe they can fix the problem
by linking the voting equipment with laptop computers.
Florida's two largest counties — Miami-Dade and
Broward — are among those affected by the flaws.
Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., has asked state Attorney
General Charlie Crist to investigate whether the head
of the state elections division lied under oath when
he denied knowing of the computer problem before
reading about it in the media. A spokeswoman for Crist
said he was reviewing the request.
The elections chief, Ed Kast, abruptly resigned
Monday, saying he wanted a change of pace.
During a May 17 deposition for a lawsuit Wexler filed
seeking to require a paper trail for state voting
machines, Kast said he had recently heard of the
problem only days earlier. But in a letter to Crist,
Wexler said the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition,
a citizens' group, notified Kast and Secretary of
State Glenda Hood of the glitch in March.
Hood blamed Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections
Constance Kaplan for the delay, telling Kaplan in a
May 13 letter she should have notified state officials
when she learned of the problem in June 2003.
Nonetheless, state and county election officials
insist the problem can be resolved in the five months
before the November election.
"These are minor technical hiccups that happen," said
Hood spokeswoman Nicole DeLara. "No votes are lost, or
could be lost."
Wexler and coalition members said they want to know
how the state can be sure that glitches will not
prevent elections officials from even detecting
computer malfunctions.
"How do you know that any votes were lost if your
audit is wrong?" asked Lida Rodriguez-Taseff,
chairwoman of the Miami-Dade coalition.
State officials say there is no need for recounts, or
an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it
was designed to prevent people from voting in the same
race more than once — an overvote — and provide
multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are
skipping a race — an undervote.
They emph