Liberation News Service

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 36 Days to Go -- D-Voter Reg. Up 250% in OH, Jimmy Carter on Fraudida II, SeeBS CEO reveals pro-Bush BIAS, Big Media Lie on JFK's Iraq stand, MM launches "Slacker Uprising" barnstorm

There are only 36 days to go until the national
referendum on the CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY and
COMPETENCE of the _resident, the VICE _resident AND
their full partners, the shameless pollsters, craven
propapunditgandists, complicit news room editors,
mercenary producers, besotted anchormen and corporate
overlords of the US regimestream news media...Yes,
it's the Media, Stupid...The corporatist media
monopolies who beat the drums of war during the ramp-up to the invasion of Iraq, instead of asking why, how and for what, are now working as hard as they can to skew public opinion toward their protectors in the
White House, by under-reporting dismal economic news and the daily death tolls of US soldiers in Iraq, while deliberately distorting the public statements and policy positions of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta)...Over one thousand US soldiers have died in a foolish, ill-planned and unnecessary war in Iraq, the Bush national insecurity team is GUILTY of pre-9/11
negligence and post-9/11 incompetence.
The US federal budget surplus has been squandered on
TWO foolish, ill-timed and unnecessary tax cuts skewed
toward the wealthiest few. The Bush doodoo economics
team, as LNS Foreign Correspondent Dunston Woods has
dubbed them, has plunged us into hundreds of billions
of dollars in federal deficit and a multi-trillion
dollar national debt.
With unprecedented ferocity and frequency, FOUR
hurricanes have devasted Fraudida. Scientists studying
Global Warming predicted such severe weather three
years ago. But we have lost four years we did not have
to lose in the struggle to come to grips with its
impact, because the _resident has denied its reality
as vehemently as he has denied the true costs of his
foolish military adventure and his obscene tax cuts...
Forget about asking your fellow citizens if they are
safer or better off than they were four years ago (of
course, the answer is no), instead, ask them can we
afford four more years --strategically, militarily,
economically, environmentally, constitutionally?
The US regimestream news media, at least until this
point, has, in large part, been a full partner along
with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary
formerluy-known-as-the-Republican-Party
in a Triad of shared special interest (e.g. oil,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) Here
are five very important news items. They should
dominate the air waves and demand headlines above the
fold. But they won't. Please read them and share them
with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote.
Please remember that the US regimestream news media,
particularly the major network and cable news
organizations, does not want to inform you about this
presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you. It's
the Media, Stupid...There is an Electoral Uprising
coming on November 2nd at the Ballot Box...FRODO
LIVES!

Ford Fessenden, New York Times: A sweeping voter
registration campaign in heavily Democratic areas has
added tens of thousands of new voters to the rolls in
the swing states of Ohio and Florida, a surge that has
far exceeded the efforts of Republicans in both
states, a review of registration data shows.
The analysis by The New York Times of
county-by-county data shows that in Democratic areas
of Ohio - primarily low-income and minority
neighborhoods - new registrations since January have
risen 250 percent over the same period in 2000. In
comparison, new registrations have increased just 25
percent in Republican areas. A similar pattern is
apparent in Florida: in the strongest Democratic
areas, the pace of new registration is 60 percent
higher than in 2000, while it has risen just 12
percent in the heaviest Republican areas.

Jimmy Carter, Washington Post: Four years ago, the top
election official, Florida Secretary of State
Katherine Harris, was also the co-chair of the
Bush-Cheney state campaign committee. The same strong
bias has become evident in her successor, Glenda Hood,
who was a highly partisan elector for George W. Bush
in 2000. Several thousand ballots of African Americans
were thrown out on technicalities in 2000, and a
fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify
22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only
61 Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons.
The top election official has also played a leading
role in qualifying Ralph Nader as a candidate, knowing
that two-thirds of his votes in the previous election
came at the expense of Al Gore. She ordered Nader's
name be included on absentee ballots even before the
state Supreme Court ruled on the controversial issue.
Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, naturally a strong
supporter of his brother, has taken no steps to
correct these departures from principles of fair and
equal treatment or to prevent them in the future.
It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or
biased electoral practices in any nation. It is
especially objectionable among us Americans, who have
prided ourselves on setting a global example for pure
democracy. With reforms unlikely at this late stage of
the election, perhaps the only recourse will be to
focus maximum public scrutiny on the suspicious
process in Florida.

Asian Wall Street Journal: The chairman of the
entertainment giant Viacom [which owns CBS] said the
reason was simple: Republican values are what U.S.
companies need. Speaking to some of America's and
Asia's top executives gathered for Forbes magazine's
annual Global CEO Conference, Mr. Redstone declared:
"I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I
vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today,
Viacom.
"I don't want to denigrate Kerry," he went on, "but
from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican
administration is a better deal. Because the
Republican administration has stood for many things we
believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are
not bad people. . . . But from a Viacom standpoint, we
believe the election of a Republican administration is
better for our company."

www.dailyhowler.com: Hopeless. Quintanilla plays the
actual tape of Kerry saying he would have “voted for
the authority.” But even as he plays the actual tape
of this statement, Quintanilla describes a different
statement. Viewers are told that Kerry “admitted” that
he’d “still support the war.”
Here are the two statements in question. And no—they
aren’t the same thing:
KERRY: I would have voted for the authority.
QUINTANILLA: Kerry said he would still support the
war.
No, those two statements aren’t equivalent—especially
since Kerry immediately listed major things he didn’t
support about the way the war was conducted.
Quintanilla looks great on camera. But in a nation of
300 million souls, how can it be that important
players at our greatest news orgs have such weak
logical skills? More specifically, how hard can it be
for TV scribes to repeat basic things that a candidate
says? In this case, it should have been easy to start
with what Kerry said—that he would have voted for the
authority—and go from there to an account of what he
seems to have meant by his statement. But no! Kerry
said “authority” three separate times. But Quintanilla
had a better word—war.
But then, your hapless press corps has offered this
paraphrase ever since Kerry’s August 9 statement. Yes,
we think Kerry’s statement was somewhat inept. But it
isn’t hard to repeat what he said. Why can’t the
gorgeous lads and ladies of your national press corps
just do it?
Lazy; inept; uninvolved, unaware—your press corps
dozes its way toward election. They draw nice
salaries; have nice summer homes; and very much like
to get out to the Hamptons. Do they care about matters
that transform your lives? When it comes to events
which transformed this election,
third-time’s-the-charm seems to be the great rule that
prevails at the slumbering Times. Are you really
surprised that you have to come here for the dope on
John O’Neill’s kooky book?

Michael Moore, www.michaelmoore.com: Tomorrow I begin
a little 20-state, 60-city tour to try and convince
the fed-up, the burned-out, and the Nader-impaired to
leave the house for just a half-hour on November 2nd
and mark an "X" in a box (or punch a chad or touch a
screen) so that America and the world can be saved...
So, having nothing better to do for the next month
(and eager to visit such swinging states as Iowa!
Ohio! Arkansas!), I have decided to go to every
battleground state in the country and do whatever it
takes to get out the vote. I will do your laundry, I
will clean your house, I will give you a year's supply
of beer nuts if you will commit to me to go to the
polls on Tuesday, November 2.
I'm calling it "The Slacker Uprising Tour", a
coast-to-coast effort to bring the non-voting majority
out of hibernation and kick some political butt. My
goal is to get as many of the 100 million non-voters
in America as I can to give voting a try -- just this
once. I want at least 56% of all eligible voters to
vote and thus set a modern-day turnout record...
I, the original slacker -- I, who have endured all
sorts of attacks for my slacker demeanor -- yes I am
coming to an arena or stadium just outside your dorm
room (or that little space off the furnace room where
your parents still let you stay, rent-free). Why
arenas and stadiums? Because there are so many of us
-- AND they serve beer and chips. From the Sun Dome to
the Key Arena, from the Patriot Center to the Del Mar
Race Track, I will be there and I will bring prizes
and presents and clean underwear for all in need.
Before I arrive, I have arranged for free screenings
of "Fahrenheit 9/11" in each city. When I get there I
will have with me dozens of voter registrars who will
register new (or recently transplanted) voters (please
check here for voter registration deadlines -- they
are fast approaching in most states in the next 10
days!). Absentee ballot applications will also be
available. And the good people of Move-On, ACT and
other groups will be present at each of my appearances
to sign up volunteers to get out the vote on election
day.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092704K.shtml

A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States
By Ford Fessenden
The New York Times

Sunday 26 September 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A sweeping voter registration
campaign in heavily Democratic areas has added tens of
thousands of new voters to the rolls in the swing
states of Ohio and Florida, a surge that has far
exceeded the efforts of Republicans in both states, a
review of registration data shows.

The analysis by The New York Times of
county-by-county data shows that in Democratic areas
of Ohio - primarily low-income and minority
neighborhoods - new registrations since January have
risen 250 percent over the same period in 2000. In
comparison, new registrations have increased just 25
percent in Republican areas. A similar pattern is
apparent in Florida: in the strongest Democratic
areas, the pace of new registration is 60 percent
higher than in 2000, while it has risen just 12
percent in the heaviest Republican areas.

While comparable data could not be obtained for
other swing states, similar registration drives have
been mounted in them as well, and party officials on
both sides say record numbers of new voters are being
registered nationwide. This largely hidden but deadly
earnest battle is widely believed by campaign
professionals and political scientists to be
potentially decisive in the presidential election.

"We know it's going on, and it's a very encouraging
sign," said Steve Elmendorf, deputy campaign manager
for Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential
nominee. The new voters, Mr. Elmendorf said, "could
very much be the difference."

A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee,
Christine Iverson, declined to comment on The Times's
findings and said she did not believe Republicans were
lagging in the registration battle. "We're very
confident that we have a ground game that's as good as
the Democrats', and better," she said.

The precise impact of the swell in registration is
difficult to predict, as there is no reliable gauge of
how many of these new voters will actually vote. Some
experts, though, say that the spike has not been
accurately captured by political polls and could
confound prognostications in closely contested states.

What is clear is that each side has deployed huge
numbers of workers and devoted millions of dollars to
the effort. Much of it is being directed by civil
rights and community groups, as well as soft-money
organizations allied with the Democrats. One such
Democratic umbrella group, America Votes, says its
constituents - labor unions, trial lawyers,
environmental groups, community organizations - will
spend $300 million on registration and turnout in
swing states, a sum that dwarfs the $150 million in
public financing the two candidates together will
receive for the entire fall campaign.

The registration drives are just the first step in a
campaign by each side to get more Americans to vote by
using personal contact. As registration winds down,
with early October cutoffs in many states, efforts
will shift to staying in touch through Election Day
with repeated phone calls and visits, and, on Nov. 2,
ferrying people to the polls.

In Ohio - no Republican presidential candidate has
ever been elected without carrying the state - the
campaign has been especially exhaustive. Canvassers
ride public transportation, visit coin laundries, and
trudge the sidewalks and parking lots at the job
centers, housing agencies and community colleges.

In Columbus, Akume Green has haunted the Franklin
County Courthouse for months, working the sidewalk
between the entrance and the nearby bus stop. Ms.
Green says she has signed up more than 700 voters
since March here and elsewhere in the city. But it is
getting harder to do so, she said. On a recent day,
the first 12 people she asked said they had already
registered.

"I get about 30 new voters or changes of address in
six hours," said Ms. Green, who was hired by Project
Vote, the nonpartisan arm of the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn. "I
used to get 16 in 45 minutes, but now everyone's
registered."

Studies have shown that calling voters and showing
up at their houses before and on Election Day
substantially increases turnout - and is cheaper per
vote than buying a television advertisement.
Republicans used the strategy with great success in
the 2002 elections.

But Donald P. Green, a professor of political
science at Yale who has conducted many of those
studies, said there was no reliable way to tell how
many new voters would turn out at the polls,
especially those from lower-income areas.

"Do you get 30 percent, or do you get 70 percent?"
Professor Green said. "To the extent that these new
voters are on the radar screen of groups that have the
kind of resources these groups have at their disposal,
they might well turn out."

Steve Rosenthal, the chief executive of Americans
Coming Together, or ACT, a soft-money group that is
trying to register Democrats, said he believed they
would. "I think what's happening on the streets, below
the radar, is what's going to make the big difference
on Election Day," said Mr. Rosenthal, who said his
organization and the other groups would register two
and a half million new Democratic voters nationwide.

But Republican officials say they remain confident
that their voters will prove easier to get to the
polls. "It would scare me if we weren't doing our own
thing," said Joanne Davidson, the regional chairwoman
of the Bush campaign in four Midwestern states
including Ohio, of the wave of new Democrats. "We know
how to turn out voters."

Ms. Green is typical of the army of registrars who
have been working the streets here, some of them since
last September. Their persistence has produced
results. Franklin County had 650,000 registered voters
in the 2000 election. "Now we're over 800,000," said
Matt Damschroder, the director of the Board of
Elections. "If you look at the pure census numbers,
you'd think we are close to registering the entire
voting-age population."

Project Vote says it has registered 147,000 new
voters in Ohio. Americans Coming Together said that,
together with allied groups that are part of America
Votes, it had registered 300,000 new voters. America
Votes and ACT are openly Democratic, although they
cannot legally coordinate with the party or the Kerry
campaign.

Republican officials say they think the paid workers
who are registering low-income voters are sloppy, and
are skeptical of the number of voters they claim to
have registered, saying many are duplicates and
changes of address. Mr. Damschroder said he had to
throw out many of the cards he got because the voters
were already registered. "One woman had signed a card
three different times," with three different groups,
he said.

Prosecutors in Columbus have filed criminal charges
against an Acorn registrar, saying that he filed a
false registration form and forged a signature.
Officials for the group say they fired the worker and
instituted a quality checking system before the
prosecutors acted.

Nevertheless, an examination of county registration
records shows that the groups have added thousands of
new Democrats to the rolls and have far outnumbered
new registrations in Republican areas. In a
300-square-block area east of the courthouse in
downtown Columbus that voted nine to one against Mr.
Bush in 2000, for instance, 3,000 new voters have
registered this year. That is three times as many as
in each of the last two presidential election years.
The number of registered voters in the area is up 18
percent since January.

By comparison, in a prosperous area north of
downtown with a similar number of voters who are
overwhelmingly Republican, just 1,100 new voters have
been added this year, increasing registration rolls by
7 percent.

These numbers are similar across Ohio. The Times
examined registration from Jan. 1 to July 31 in a
sample of counties that included seven of the state's
nine largest, along with some smaller rural and
suburban counties. Voters do not give a party
affiliation when they register in Ohio, but The Times
looked at the voting history of ZIP codes to gauge the
political inclinations of the new voters.

In rock-ribbed Republican areas - 103 ZIP codes,
many of them rural and suburban areas, that voted by
two to one or better for George W. Bush in 2000 -
35,000 new voters have registered, a substantial
increase over the 28,000 that registered in those
areas in the first seven months of 2000. The Ohio
Republican party said it was pleased with the results.

"It's not easy work, but we go door to door in
strong Republican precincts, making sure everyone is
registered," said Chris McNulty, the state party
chairman.

But in heavily Democratic areas - 60 ZIP codes
mostly in the core of big cities like Cleveland,
Dayton, Columbus and Youngstown that voted two to one
or better against Mr. Bush - new registrations have
more than tripled over 2000, to 63,000 from 17,000.

In Florida, where The Times was able to analyze data
from 60 of the state's 67 counties, new registrations
this year also are running far ahead of the 2000 pace,
with Republican areas trailing Democratic ones. In the
150 ZIP codes that voted most heavily for Mr. Bush,
96,000 new voters have registered this year, up from
86,000 in 2000, an increase of about 12 percent.

But in the heaviest of Democratic areas, 110 ZIP
codes that gave two-thirds or more of their votes to
Al Gore, new registrations have increased to 125, 000
from 77,000, a jump of more than 60 percent.

In Duval County, where a confusing ballot design in
2000 helped disqualify thousands of ballots in black
precincts, new registrations by black voters are up
150 percent over the pace of 2000.

"We're using guerrilla tactics to get into the malls
and sign up voters before the security guards chase us
off," said Adam Broad, 40, an organizer in Duval
County with the Florida Consumer Action Network
Foundation, one of dozens of community groups
registering in Florida.

The groups are building nationwide databases of
voters and have committed millions of dollars for
continued contact with them before and on Election
Day.

"If every Democrat showed up at the polls, you'd
win, no question," said James Koehler, a precinct
organizer in Columbus working for MoveOn.org, another
soft-money group. Mr. Koehler said MoveOn hoped to
have a volunteer in every precinct to call neighbors
on Nov. 2.

But intensive voter contact and turnout are exactly
what the Republicans believe they do best. Their plan
calls for the same kind of sophisticated targeting,
and a last-minute push for turnout called a 72-hour
strategy, the plan Republicans used in 2002 to
overwhelm incumbent Democrats like former Senator Max
Cleland in Georgia.

Even before Election Day, the new voters may be
having an impact on the campaign, because they may not
be accurately reflected in the political polls.

"The people who are new voters are disengaged;
they're less likely to respond to a poll question,"
said Philip Klinkner, a government professor at
Hamilton College.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092804W.shtml

Still Seeking a Fair Florida Vote
By Jimmy Carter
The Washington Post

Monday 27 September 2004

After the debacle in Florida four years ago, former
president Gerald Ford and I were asked to lead a
blue-ribbon commission to recommend changes in the
American electoral process. After months of concerted
effort by a dedicated and bipartisan group of experts,
we presented unanimous recommendations to the
president and Congress. The government responded with
the Help America Vote Act of October 2002.
Unfortunately, however, many of the act's key
provisions have not been implemented because of
inadequate funding or political disputes.

The disturbing fact is that a repetition of the
problems of 2000 now seems likely, even as many other
nations are conducting elections that are
internationally certified to be transparent, honest
and fair.

The Carter Center has monitored more than 50
elections, all of them held under contentious,
troubled or dangerous conditions. When I describe
these activities, either in the United States or in
foreign forums, the almost inevitable questions are:
"Why don't you observe the election in Florida?" and
"How do you explain the serious problems with
elections there?"

The answer to the first question is that we can
monitor only about five elections each year, and
meeting crucial needs in other nations is our top
priority. (Our most recent ones were in Venezuela and
Indonesia, and the next will be in Mozambique.) A
partial answer to the other question is that some
basic international requirements for a fair election
are missing in Florida.

The most significant of these requirements are:

A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and
nonpartisan official who will be responsible for
organizing and conducting the electoral process
before, during and after the actual voting takes
place. Although rarely perfect in their objectivity,
such top administrators are at least subject to public
scrutiny and responsible for the integrity of their
decisions. Florida voting officials have proved to be
highly partisan, brazenly violating a basic need for
an unbiased and universally trusted authority to
manage all elements of the electoral process.

Uniformity in voting procedures, so that all citizens,
regardless of their social or financial status, have
equal assurance that their votes are cast in the same
way and will be tabulated with equal accuracy. Modern
technology is already in use that makes electronic
voting possible, with accurate and almost immediate
tabulation and with paper ballot printouts so all
voters can have confidence in the integrity of the
process. There is no reason these proven techniques,
used overseas and in some U.S. states, could not be
used in Florida.

It was obvious that in 2000 these basic standards
were not met in Florida, and there are disturbing
signs that once again, as we prepare for a
presidential election, some of the state's leading
officials hold strong political biases that prevent
necessary reforms.

Four years ago, the top election official, Florida
Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was also the
co-chair of the Bush-Cheney state campaign committee.
The same strong bias has become evident in her
successor, Glenda Hood, who was a highly partisan
elector for George W. Bush in 2000. Several thousand
ballots of African Americans were thrown out on
technicalities in 2000, and a fumbling attempt has
been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African
Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61 Hispanics
(likely Republicans), as alleged felons.

The top election official has also played a leading
role in qualifying Ralph Nader as a candidate, knowing
that two-thirds of his votes in the previous election
came at the expense of Al Gore. She ordered Nader's
name be included on absentee ballots even before the
state Supreme Court ruled on the controversial issue.

Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, naturally a strong
supporter of his brother, has taken no steps to
correct these departures from principles of fair and
equal treatment or to prevent them in the future.

It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or
biased electoral practices in any nation. It is
especially objectionable among us Americans, who have
prided ourselves on setting a global example for pure
democracy. With reforms unlikely at this late stage of
the election, perhaps the only recourse will be to
focus maximum public scrutiny on the suspicious
process in Florida.

-------

Former president Carter is chairman of the Carter
Center in Atlanta.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005669

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Guess Who's a GOP Booster?
The CEO of CBS's parent company endorses President
Bush.

Friday, September 24, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

From The Asian Wall Street Journal

With the scandal at CBS still festering, questions are
being raised about whether a felony was committed when
the network broadcast apparently forged memos in an
attempt to discredit George W. Bush. Yesterday, the
chairman of CBS's parent company chose Hong Kong as a
place to drop a little bomb. Sumner Redstone, who
calls himself a "liberal Democrat," said he's
supporting President Bush.

The chairman of the entertainment giant Viacom said
the reason was simple: Republican values are what U.S.
companies need. Speaking to some of America's and
Asia's top executives gathered for Forbes magazine's
annual Global CEO Conference, Mr. Redstone declared:
"I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I
vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today,
Viacom.

"I don't want to denigrate Kerry," he went on, "but
from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican
administration is a better deal. Because the
Republican administration has stood for many things we
believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are
not bad people. . . . But from a Viacom standpoint, we
believe the election of a Republican administration is
better for our company."

Sharing the stage with Mr. Redstone was Steve Forbes,
CEO, president and editor in chief of Forbes and a
former Republican presidential aspirant, who quipped:
"Obviously you're a very enlightened CEO."

Mr. Redstone's unexpected declaration came at a time
when an unwelcome spotlight is directed at him and his
board because of the CBS airing of what everyone now
believes was a fake memo alleging that Mr. Bush
shirked his duties three decades ago in the Texas Air
National Guard. On Tuesday, Republican National
Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie alleged a leftist bias
at Viacom. While it was well known that Mary Mapes,
the producer who did most of the reporting on the
memos, is a liberal, and that anchorman Dan Rather,
has always been much tougher on Republicans, the
Viacom board had heretofore remained in the
background.
Mr. Gillespie said, "This demonstrates a serious lack
of judgment separate and apart from the lack of
judgment demonstrated in running a report based on
discredited documents. Did this producer's own
political viewpoint cloud her judgment? Is CBS News's
decision to neither suspend nor release the producer
in question a result of judgment clouded by Viacom and
CBS owner Sumner Redstone's role as a Kerry
fundraiser, or Viacom President Tom Freston's public
support of John Kerry for President?"

Mr. Redstone's office immediately went into overdrive,
denying on Wednesday that he's a raised funds for the
Democratic presidential nominee. Then came yesterday's
"I vote Republican" vow in Hong Kong.

It was all the more surprising because the Boston-born
Mr. Redstone was co-chairman of Edmund Muskie's
presidential campaign in 1972. He's also a close
friend of the other Massachusetts senator, Ted
Kennedy. Monday's New York Sun, quoting the Federal
Election Commission, said that since 1998 Mr. Redstone
had given $50,000 to the Democratic Party. He's also
donated the maximum $2,000 to the Kerry campaign,
after supporting Al Gore in 2000.

In his book, "A Passion to Win," Mr. Redstone wrote,
"From my early days I have considered myself a liberal
Democrat. . . . I had no respect for Nixon. . . . My
efforts on Senator Muskie's behalf apparently landed
me on Nixon's notorious 'enemies list.' I took that as
a badge of honor."
Of his 13-member board, two are former cabinet members
for Democratic presidents. It is this board that will
ponder what to do about the Rather-Mapes-CBS mess. The
bombshell from Hong Kong will not come as welcome news
to those responsible for "memogate."

http://www.dailyhowler.com

REPEAT AFTER KERRY: How weak are the press corps’
analytical skills? If Kerry loses, his August 9
statement about Iraq will likely be seen as a campaign
turning-point. That was the statement Kerry made at
the Grand Canyon, when he said that—well, let’s put
the Q-and-A on the record. On the September 12 Meet
the Press, Tim Russert finally provided the actual
text of the question Kerry was asked. (In real time,
the text of the question was missing in action. See
THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/12/04). We can now present the
full Q-and-A. This exchange has hurt Kerry badly:

QUESTION (8/9/04): The president last week challenged
you to answer yes or no to the question of whether if,
knowing what you know now, you would still have voted
to go to war? Are you going to take that challenge up?
KERRY: I’m ready for any challenge, and I'll answer it
directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I
believe it is the right authority for a president to
have, but I would have used that authority, as I have
said throughout this campaign, effectively. I would
have done this very differently from the way President
Bush has. And my question to President Bush is, Why
did he rush to war without a plan to win the peace?
Why did he rush to war on faulty intelligence and not
do the hard work necessary to give America the truth?
Why did he mislead America about how he would go to
war? Why has he not brought other countries to the
table in order to support American troops in the way
that we deserve and relieve a pressure from the
American people?

To this day, that’s the fullest transcript of this
exchange available in the Nexis records. We don’t know
if Kerry’s response ended there. We don’t know what
the next question was.
But what did Kerry say that day? He said that, knowing
what he knows now, he “would have voted for the
authority”—for the authorization to go to war if
necessary. But he “would have done this very
differently from the way President Bush has,” he said.
Specifically, he implied that Bush “rushed to war
without a plan to win the peace” and failed to “bring
other countries to the table in order to support
American troops in the way that we deserve.”

We think that’s a slightly odd statement, although
Kerry has fleshed it out since then. He has said that
it was good for Bush to have “the authority” because
that gave him the clout to go to the UN and force Iraq
to allow inspections. Of course, if Kerry knew then
what he knows now, it’s unclear why those inspections
would have been necessary. If our country actually had
books about public logic, this Q-and-A would go in the
chapter that explains why pols shouldn’t answer
hypothetical questions.

But if Kerry’s answer was slightly odd, it shouldn’t
be hard to relate. It shouldn’t be hard to repeat what
Kerry said. But then, of course, we have to deal with
handsome members of the national press corps! NBC’s
Carl Quintanilla is quite telegenic. But he made a
hopeless (if typical) presentation last night about
this crucial statement by Kerry. On Hardball,
Quintanilla described relations between the two
hopefuls and the press:

QUINTANILLA (9/24/04): Candidates try to forge a bond
with their traveling press, but Kerry's been more
distant since his last press conference in August,
when he was challenged and admitted he'd still support
the war even knowing there were no weapons of mass
destruction.
KERRY (videotape from August 9): Yes, I would have
voted for the authority.
QUINTANILLA: The president has given fewer than half
the number of campaign trail Q and A’s as his father,
because reporters questions can be tough, even
hostile, and throw candidates off message.

Hopeless. Quintanilla plays the actual tape of Kerry
saying he would have “voted for the authority.” But
even as he plays the actual tape of this statement,
Quintanilla describes a different statement. Viewers
are told that Kerry “admitted” that he’d “still
support the war.”
Here are the two statements in question. And no—they
aren’t the same thing:

KERRY: I would have voted for the authority.
QUINTANILLA: Kerry said he would still support the
war.
No, those two statements aren’t equivalent—especially
since Kerry immediately listed major things he didn’t
support about the way the war was conducted.
Quintanilla looks great on camera. But in a nation of
300 million souls, how can it be that important
players at our greatest news orgs have such weak
logical skills? More specifically, how hard can it be
for TV scribes to repeat basic things that a candidate
says? In this case, it should have been easy to start
with what Kerry said—that he would have voted for the
authority—and go from there to an account of what he
seems to have meant by his statement. But no! Kerry
said “authority” three separate times. But Quintanilla
had a better word—war.

But then, your hapless press corps has offered this
paraphrase ever since Kerry’s August 9 statement. Yes,
we think Kerry’s statement was somewhat inept. But it
isn’t hard to repeat what he said. Why can’t the
gorgeous lads and ladies of your national press corps
just do it?

BUT WHO WILL CORRECT THE CORRECTIONS: In this
morning’s column, Nicholas Kristof corrects a
correction from last Wednesday’s column. It concerns a
matter we noted this week—the error he made in last
Saturday’s column about Kerry’s Bronze Star award:

KRISTOF (9/25/04): Aargh. My last column ended with a
jet-lagged correction that repeated the error it was
meant to fix. William Rood saw John Kerry's Silver
Star incident, not the Bronze Star episode. Mea culpa
squared.
So you can keep track of all the action, here is
Kristof’s original text, and his first failed attempt
at correction:

KRISTOF (9/18/04): Did Mr. Kerry deserve his Bronze
Star? Yes. The Swift Boat Veterans claim that he was
not facing enemy fire when he rescued a Green Beret,
Jim Rassmann, but that is contradicted by those who
were there, like William Rood and Mr. Rassmann (a
Republican). In fact, Mr. Rassmann recommended Mr.
Kerry for a Silver Star.
KRISTOF (9/22/04): In the spirit of taking a tough
look at one's own shortcomings: on Saturday, I
referred to William Rood as a witness for Mr. Kerry's
Silver Star incident. It was the Bronze Star episode
that he saw. Mea culpa.

Kristof’s original column was wrong about Rood, as was
his first attempt at correction. Third time apparently
being the charm, the Times gets this fact right today.

We say that “the Times” gets the fact right today
because we want to move beyond Kristof. Anyone can
compose a mistaken correction the way he did on
Wednesday. But might we note an obvious fact?
Presumably, someone other than Kristof himself reads
the text of his twice-weekly columns. With that in
mind, let’s note the terminal laziness the Times seems
to have brought to the crucial matters involved in
this piece.

Last Saturday, Kristof was writing, a month too late,
about matters that may have decided this election. And
since the Swift Boat Vets have actually challenged a
very small number of medal awards—only three events
are in real dispute—it was unimpressive when Kristof
bungled the facts about two of those incidents (link
below). But it wasn’t just Kristof who seemed to be
dozing when it came to these crucial matters.
Kristof’s editor also failed to notice that he had
this basic fact wrong about Rood. And that editor also
failed to notice the bungling of the gentleman’s first
correction.

As noted, Kristof’s problems went beyond Rood. As
we’ve noted, he bungled another aspect of the Bronze
Star matter and he bungled the first Purple Heart
event too (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/22/04). But we
think it’s instructive that neither he nor his editor
noticed the gentleman’s two-time bungling RE Rood. The
Swift Boat Veterans have transformed this race; the
charges they lodged have been deeply important. But
does your celebrity press corps really care? Even when
he was trying to challenge the Vets, Chris Matthews
was plainly unaware of the simplest facts, and no one
at the New York Times seems to give a big enough damn
to get clear on these simple facts either.

Lazy; inept; uninvolved, unaware—your press corps
dozes its way toward election. They draw nice
salaries; have nice summer homes; and very much like
to get out to the Hamptons. Do they care about matters
that transform your lives? When it comes to events
which transformed this election,
third-time’s-the-charm seems to be the great rule that
prevails at the slumbering Times. Are you really
surprised that you have to come here for the dope on
John O’Neill’s kooky book?

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=2004-09-25

Saturday, September 25th, 2004
Michael Moore On Tour; Slackers of the World, Unite!

9/25/04

Dear Friends,

Tomorrow I begin a little 20-state, 60-city tour to
try and convince the fed-up, the burned-out, and the
Nader-impaired to leave the house for just a half-hour
on November 2nd and mark an "X" in a box (or punch a
chad or touch a screen) so that America and the world
can be saved. (I don't mean "saved" as in all workers
will henceforth control the means of production.
That's, um, going to take a few more years.)

What I'm asking is that our fellow Americans, as the
collective landlord of a public housing project at
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., take just a few minutes to
evict the tenant who is currently wrecking the place
(not to mention what he's doing to the rest of the
neighborhood). After all, isn't this one of the
coolest things about a democracy, getting to give some
payback to those in power? "YOU'RE FIRED!" Oooh, that
feels good -- especially if the recipient of the pink
slip is someone who wants to send your kid off to war.

So, having nothing better to do for the next month
(and eager to visit such swinging states as Iowa!
Ohio! Arkansas!), I have decided to go to every
battleground state in the country and do whatever it
takes to get out the vote. I will do your laundry, I
will clean your house, I will give you a year's supply
of beer nuts if you will commit to me to go to the
polls on Tuesday, November 2.

I'm calling it "The Slacker Uprising Tour", a
coast-to-coast effort to bring the non-voting majority
out of hibernation and kick some political butt. My
goal is to get as many of the 100 million non-voters
in America as I can to give voting a try -- just this
once. I want at least 56% of all eligible voters to
vote and thus set a modern-day turnout record.

I'm putting out the red alert call to slackers
everywhere to help me lead this revolt. I want
everyone in their teens and twenties who exist from
one packet of Ramen noodles to the next bag of
Tostitos to take your fully-justified cynicism and
toss it like a Molotov right into the middle of this
election. As "non-voters" you have been written off.
But if only a few thousand of you vote, it could make
all the difference. You literally hold all the power
in your hands. That's even cooler than holding a TV
remote.

I, the original slacker -- I, who have endured all
sorts of attacks for my slacker demeanor -- yes I am
coming to an arena or stadium just outside your dorm
room (or that little space off the furnace room where
your parents still let you stay, rent-free). Why
arenas and stadiums? Because there are so many of us
-- AND they serve beer and chips. From the Sun Dome to
the Key Arena, from the Patriot Center to the Del Mar
Race Track, I will be there and I will bring prizes
and presents and clean underwear for all in need.

Before I arrive, I have arranged for free screenings
of "Fahrenheit 9/11" in each city. When I get there I
will have with me dozens of voter registrars who will
register new (or recently transplanted) voters (please
check here for voter registration deadlines -- they
are fast approaching in most states in the next 10
days!). Absentee ballot applications will also be
available. And the good people of Move-On, ACT and
other groups will be present at each of my appearances
to sign up volunteers to get out the vote on election
day.

Details of where I will be appearing will be available
in your local media. Many venues, due to advance word
already out there, have "sold out" (at most stops,
students get in for free and community people pay a
nominal fee -- usually $5 -- to cover costs). Again,
check your local media to find out the times and dates
and how to get advance tickets.

A partial list of the cities I'm visiting includes:
Seattle, Big Rapids (MI), Mt. Pleasant (MI), Tucson,
Dearborn, Phoenix, East Lansing, Detroit, Ann Arbor,
Albuquerque, Toledo, Columbus (OH), Ames (IA),
Cleveland, Fairmont (WV), Pittsburgh, Philadelphia,
Bethlehem (PA), Fairfax (VA), Carlyle (PA), State
College (PA), Minneapolis, Gainesville, Nashville,
Miami, Memphis, Orlando, Salem (OR), Jacksonville,
Tampa, Kansas City, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Madison,
Green Bay, Las Vegas, Reno, Denver, and, of course,
Tallahassee, Florida. Others will be posted later.

While on the road, I will try to keep my blog
up-to-date and post some pictures we take in each
city. The three campuses on the tour which register
the most students to vote (or who have the most
non-voters committing to me to vote) will receive a
special scholarship from us at the end of the tour.

Thanks, in advance, to everyone out there who is
working hard during this election. I know it will make
a difference.

Let's leave no non-voter behind.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com
www.michaelmoore.com/takeaction/vote/

P.S. Good news! This current weekend our distributor
has added an astounding 600+ new theaters to the list
of those still showing "Fahrenheit 9/11." This is
highly unusual for a film entering it's fourth month
of release, but the demand has been strong to bring it
back in many areas and our wonderful distributors have
responded. This is a perfect time to either see it
again on the big screen or take a friend who hasn't
seen it, as it won't be around in theaters for long.
The DVD and home video come out October 5!

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 37 Days to Go -- Nixon EPA Chief Blast Bush, MM on Bush's Iraq Flip-Flops, SeeBS limps off into the weeds, E.L. Doctorow on Bush's Moral Bankruptcy

Five more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what? The
neo-con wet dream of a Three Stooges Reich. There are
only 37 days to go until the national referendum on
the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the
_resident and the VICE _resident.
Over one thousand US soldiers have died in a foolish,
ill-planned and unnecessary war in Iraq, the Bush
national insecurity team is GUILTY of pre-9/11
negligence and post-9/11 incompetence.
The US federal budget surplus has been squandered on
TWO foolish, ill-timed and unnecessary tax cuts skewed
toward the wealthiest few. The Bush doodoo economics
team, as LNS Foreign Correspondent Dunston Woods has
dubbed them, has plunged us into hundreds of billions
of dollars in federal deficit and a multi-trillion
dollar national debt.
With unprecedented ferocity and frequency, FOUR hurricanes have devasted Fraudida. Scientists studying Global Warming predicted such severe weather three years ago. But we have lost four years we did not have to lose in the struggle to come to grips with its impact, because the _resident has denied its reality as vehemently as he has denied the true costs of his foolish military adventure and his obscene tax cuts...
Forget about asking your fellow citizens if they are
safer or better off than they were four years ago (of
course, the answer is no), instead, ask them can we
afford four more years --strategically, militarily,
economically, environmentally, constitutionally?
The US regimestream news media, at least until this
point, has, in large part, been a full partner along
with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary
formerluy-known-as-the-Republican-Party
in a Triad of shared special interest (e.g. oil,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) Here
are four very important news items. They should
dominate the air waves and demand headlines above the
fold. But they won't. Please read them and share them
with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote.
Please remember that the US regimestream news media,
particularly the major network and cable news
organizations, does not want to inform you about this
presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you. It's
the Media, Stupid...

Bill Novak, Capitol Times: Russell Train is so
disappointed in President Bush's environmental record
that the staunch Republican, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency's second leader 30 years ago, is
casting his vote in November for Democrat John Kerry.
Train, 84, EPA administrator under Presidents Nixon
and Ford from 1973 to 77, was in Madison Tuesday in
support of Environment2004, an organization trying to
end what it calls the anti-environmental agenda of the
Bush administration.
A Washington insider for more than half a century,
Train said the Bush administration's performance is a
radical rollback of environmental rules to benefit
special interests.

Michael Moore, www.michaelmoore.com: Dear Mr. Bush,
I am so confused. Where exactly do you stand on the
issue of Iraq? You, your Dad, Rummy, Condi, Colin, and
Wolfie -- you have all changed your minds so many
times, I am out of breath just trying to keep up with
you!
Which of these 10 positions that you, your family and
your cabinet have taken over the years represents your
CURRENT thinking...
I know you hate the words "flip" and "flop," so I
won't use them both on you. In fact, I'll use just
one: Flop. That is what you are. A huge, colossal
flop. The war is a flop, your advisors and the
"intelligence" they gave you is a flop, and now we are
all a flop to the rest of the world. Flop. Flop. Flop.
And you have the audacity to criticize John Kerry with
what you call the "many positions" he has taken on
Iraq. By my count, he has taken only one: He believed
you. That was his position. You told him and the rest
of congress that Saddam had WMDs. So he -- and the
vast majority of Americans, even those who didn't vote
for you -- believed you. You see, Americans, like John
Kerry, want to live in a country where they can
believe their president.
That was the one, single position John Kerry took. He
didn't support the war, he supported YOU. And YOU let
him and this great country down. And that is why tens
of millions can't wait to get to the polls on Election
Day -- to remove a major, catastrophic flop from our
dear, beloved White House -- to stop all the flipping
you and your men have done, flipping us and the rest
of the world off.
We can't take another minute of it.

Associated Press: CBS News has shelved a "60 Minutes"
report on the rationale for war in Iraq (news - web
sites) because it would be "inappropriate" to air it
so close to the presidential election, the network
said on Saturday.
The report on weapons of mass destruction was set to
air on Sept. 8 but was put off in favor of a story on
President Bush (news - web sites)'s National Guard
service. The Guard story was discredited because it
relied on documents impugning Bush's service that were
apparently fake.
CBS News spokeswoman Kelli Edwards would not elaborate
on why the timing of the Iraq report was considered
inappropriate.

E.L. Doctorow, East Hampton Star: The president we get
is the country we get. With each president the nation
is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our
malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws
but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and
invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast
in his image. The trouble they get into and get us
into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally, the media amplify his character into our
moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky,
the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain
ourselves as the United States of America given the
stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally
insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of
this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of
such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/images/index.php?ntid=10685&ntpid=1

EPA's chief under Nixon rips Bush on environment
Says he will vote for Kerry
By Bill Novak
September 23, 2004

Russell Train is so disappointed in President Bush's
environmental record that the staunch Republican, the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's second leader
30 years ago, is casting his vote in November for
Democrat John Kerry.

Train, 84, EPA administrator under Presidents Nixon
and Ford from 1973 to 77, was in Madison Tuesday in
support of Environment2004, an organization trying to
end what it calls the anti-environmental agenda of the
Bush administration.

A Washington insider for more than half a century,
Train said the Bush administration's performance is a
radical rollback of environmental rules to benefit
special interests.

The administration's reversal of a finding that
mercury is a hazardous pollutant is one of 400
rollbacks of environmental protections cited by
Enviroment2004, and Train said the reversal is the
reason he's switched parties this presidential
election.

"Almost anybody's policy would be better than George
Bush," Train said in an interview with The Capital
Times Wednesday. "Kerry's environmental record in
Congress is extremely good."

Ironically, Train was awarded the presidential Medal
of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in America,
from the first President George Bush in 1991.

A major issue for environmentalists in the 2004
presidential campaign is to get the candidates and the
public to think about the environment in a time when
other issues, such as Iraq, terrorism and the economy,
are on the front burners, relegating clean air and
water policies to the back pages.

"The environment ought to be front and center, but
neither candidate has raised this as an issue," Train
said. "The administration has gotten away with an
awful lot because public attention is somewhere else."

Train ran the EPA during the golden age of
environmental policy. Nixon signed the National
Environmental Policy Act in January of 1970, then
devoted a good third of his State of the Union address
two weeks later to the environment.

"He (Nixon) said the environmental cause is as
fundamental as life itself," Train said.

Nixon's sentiments have apparently fallen on deaf ears
in the current Republican administration.

"One thing that's troubled me about this
administration is with the process involving
appointments," he said. "The undersecretary for
forestry policy came from the lobbying group for the
timber industry - that's just unconscionable."

Also troubling Train is the administration's meddling
into the rules and regulations of the EPA, an
independent agency in the executive branch of the
federal government.

"This White House has never hesitated to inject itself
into the regulatory rule-making by the EPA," Train
said. "That is very improper. When I was EPA
administrator for four years, I can recall not one
example of the White House telling me how a rule
should be. It just didn't happen."

In visits to New Hampshire, Washington state,
Pittsburgh and Minnesota on behalf of Environment2004,
Train was dismayed by the lack of interest in the
environment today. Why isn't the public paying
attention anymore?

"In the '60s and '70s people really felt threatened
with the big oil spills and pollution," he siad.
"Those issues were pretty well taken care of, the air
is pretty good, the water is pretty good, so people
feel relaxed about the environment.

"Also, we have a new generation that hasn't grown up
with a sense of environmental threat, and third,
there's so damned much else on the agenda, Iraq,
terrorism, jobs, the public is beset with."

E-mail: bnovak@madison.com

Published: 10:56 AM 9/23/04

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=2004-09-22

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004
Mr. Bush and His 10 Ever-Changing Different Positions
on Iraq: "A flip and a flop and now just a flop."

9/22/04

Dear Mr. Bush,

I am so confused. Where exactly do you stand on the
issue of Iraq? You, your Dad, Rummy, Condi, Colin, and
Wolfie -- you have all changed your minds so many
times, I am out of breath just trying to keep up with
you!

Which of these 10 positions that you, your family and
your cabinet have taken over the years represents your
CURRENT thinking:

1983-88: WE LOVE SADDAM. On December 19, 1983, Donald
Rumsfeld was sent by your dad and Mr. Reagan to go and
have a friendly meeting with Saddam Hussein, the
dictator of Iraq. Rummy looked so happy in the
picture. Just twelve days after this visit, Saddam
gassed thousands of Iranian troops. Your dad and Rummy
seemed pretty happy with the results because ‘The
Donald R.’ went back to have another chummy hang-out
with Saddam’s right-hand man, Tariq Aziz, just four
months later. All of this resulted in the U.S.
providing credits and loans to Iraq that enabled
Saddam to buy billions of dollars worth of weapons and
chemical agents. The Washington Post reported that
your dad and Reagan let it be known to their Arab
allies that the Reagan/Bush administration wanted Iraq
to win its war with Iran and anyone who helped Saddam
accomplish this was a friend of ours.

1990: WE HATE SADDAM. In 1990, when Saddam invaded
Kuwait, your dad and his defense secretary, Dick
Cheney, decided they didn't like Saddam anymore so
they attacked Iraq and returned Kuwait to its rightful
dictators.

1991: WE WANT SADDAM TO LIVE. After the war, your dad
and Cheney and Colin Powell told the Shiites to rise
up against Saddam and we would support them. So they
rose up. But then we changed our minds. When the
Shiites rose up against Saddam, the Bush inner circle
changed its mind and decided NOT to help the Shiites.
Thus, they were massacred by Saddam.

1998: WE WANT SADDAM TO DIE. In 1998, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz and others, as part of the Project for the
New American Century, wrote an open letter to
President Clinton insisting he invade and topple
Saddam Hussein.

2000: WE DON'T BELIEVE IN WAR AND NATION BUILDING.
Just three years later, during your debate with Al
Gore in the 2000 election, when asked by the moderator
Jim Lehrer where you stood when it came to using force
for regime change, you turned out to be a downright
pacifist:

“I--I would take the use of force very seriously. I
would be guarded in my approach. I don't think we can
be all things to all people in the world. I think
we've got to be very careful when we commit our
troops. The vice president [Al Gore] and I have a
disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in
nation building. I--I would be very careful about
using our troops as nation builders. I believe the
role of the military is to fight and win war and,
therefore, prevent war from happening in the first
place. And so I take my--I take my--my responsibility
seriously.” --October 3, 2000

2001 (early): WE DON'T BELIEVE SADDAM IS A THREAT.
When you took office in 2001, you sent your Secretary
of State, Colin Powell, and your National Security
Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, in front of the cameras to
assure the American people they need not worry about
Saddam Hussein. Here is what they said:

Powell: “We should constantly be reviewing our
policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to
make sure that they have directed that purpose. That
purpose is every bit as important now as it was 10
years ago when we began it. And frankly, they have
worked. He has not developed any significant
capability with respect to weapons of mass
destruction. He is unable to project conventional
power against his neighbors.” --February 24, 2001

Rice: “But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there,
let's remember that his country is divided, in effect.
He does not control the northern part of his country.
We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces
have not been rebuilt.” --July 29, 2001

2001 (late): WE BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US!
Just a few months later, in the hours and days after
the 9/11 tragedy, you had no interest in going after
Osama bin Laden. You wanted only to bomb Iraq and kill
Saddam and you then told all of America we were under
imminent threat because weapons of mass destruction
were coming our way. You led the American people to
believe that Saddam had something to do with Osama and
9/11. Without the UN's sanction, you broke
international law and invaded Iraq.

2003: WE DON’T BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US.
After no WMDs were found, you changed your mind about
why you said we needed to invade, coming up with a
brand new after-the-fact reason -- we started this war
so we could have regime change, liberate Iraq and give
the Iraqis democracy!

2003: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!” Yes, everyone saw you
say it -- in costume, no less!

2004: OOPS. MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED! Now you call the
Iraq invasion a "catastrophic success." That's what
you called it this month. Over a thousand U.S.
soldiers have died, Iraq is in a state of total chaos
where no one is safe, and you have no clue how to get
us out of there.

Mr. Bush, please tell us -- when will you change your
mind again?

I know you hate the words "flip" and "flop," so I
won't use them both on you. In fact, I'll use just
one: Flop. That is what you are. A huge, colossal
flop. The war is a flop, your advisors and the
"intelligence" they gave you is a flop, and now we are
all a flop to the rest of the world. Flop. Flop. Flop.

And you have the audacity to criticize John Kerry with
what you call the "many positions" he has taken on
Iraq. By my count, he has taken only one: He believed
you. That was his position. You told him and the rest
of congress that Saddam had WMDs. So he -- and the
vast majority of Americans, even those who didn't vote
for you -- believed you. You see, Americans, like John
Kerry, want to live in a country where they can
believe their president.

That was the one, single position John Kerry took. He
didn't support the war, he supported YOU. And YOU let
him and this great country down. And that is why tens
of millions can't wait to get to the polls on Election
Day -- to remove a major, catastrophic flop from our
dear, beloved White House -- to stop all the flipping
you and your men have done, flipping us and the rest
of the world off.

We can't take another minute of it.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CBS_BUSH?SITE=NYSTA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

CBS Nixes '60 Minutes' Story on Iraq War

Sat Sep 25, 7:42 PM ET

NEW YORK - CBS News has shelved a "60 Minutes" report
on the rationale for war in Iraq (news - web sites)
because it would be "inappropriate" to air it so close
to the presidential election, the network said on
Saturday.
The report on weapons of mass destruction was set to
air on Sept. 8 but was put off in favor of a story on
President Bush (news - web sites)'s National Guard
service. The Guard story was discredited because it
relied on documents impugning Bush's service that were
apparently fake.
CBS News spokeswoman Kelli Edwards would not elaborate
on why the timing of the Iraq report was considered
inappropriate.
The report, with Ed Bradley as the correspondent, has
long been in the works. Originally scheduled for June,
it was first put off because of new developments,
Edwards said.
CBS said no other reports on the presidential election
have been affected.
The network last week appointed former U.S. Attorney
General Dick Thornburgh and retired Associated Press
chief executive Louis Boccardi to investigate what
went wrong with the National Guard report and
recommend changes.
The controversy has put CBS News officials squarely on
the fire line, particularly anchor Dan Rather, who
narrated the National Guard report.
Meanwhile, the network announced that Rather would
anchor the network's coverage of all three
presidential debates, starting Sept. 30.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GUESTWORDS: By E.L. Doctorow

The Unfeeling President
I fault this president for not knowing what death is.
He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who
wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day
in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives
of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He
knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war
not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the
cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He
hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the
press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass
destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at
rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to
the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and
waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should
mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech
written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak
of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate
sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he
dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the
depths of his being because he has no capacity for it.
He does not feel a personal responsibility for the
1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what
they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers
and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to
the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of
familial relationships and the inconsolable
remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his
desk as a political liability, which is why the press
is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their
coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret
and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his
reason for going to war was, as he knew,
unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that
his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of
his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not
regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his
war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for
the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this
war of his choice.

He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind
to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those
who knew those costs. He did not understand that you
do not go to war when it is one of the options but
when it is the only option; you go not because you
want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for
Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign
dictator. He knew that much. This president and his
supporters would seem to have a mind for only one
thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use
that power for the sake of themselves and their
friends.

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a
wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent
becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his
knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the
church with the grieving parents and wives and
children. He is the president who does not feel. He
does not feel for the families of the dead, he does
not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty,
he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford
health insurance, he does not feel for the miners
whose lungs are turning black or for the working
people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime
at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing
for how many people in this country this president
does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all
sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of
the population of their tax burden for the sake of the
rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we
breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is
decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save
the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving
workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime
because this is actually a way to honor them by
raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with
reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when
just what he and his party are doing to our democracy
is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of
this. I remember the millions of people here and
around the world who marched against the war. It was
extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of
alarm and protest that transcended national borders.
Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only
war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars
all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding
of millions of people that America was ceding its role
as the last best hope of mankind. It was their
perception that the classic archetype of democracy was
morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic
republic in history was turning its back on the
future, using its extraordinary power and standing not
to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations
but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that
originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now
extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by
no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each
president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is
the artificer of our malleable national soul. He
proposes not only the laws but the kinds of
lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our
responses. The people he appoints are cast in his
image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is
his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our
moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky,
the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain
ourselves as the United States of America given the
stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally
insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of
this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of
such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

The novelist E.L. Doctorow has a house in Sag Harbor.

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LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 38 Days to Go -- JFK rips Bush again, SeeBS and Niger Green Cake, US Military Families fight Bush, 9/11 and the Media, Global Warming

There are only 38 days to go until the national
referendum on the CHARACTER, COMPETENCE and
CREDIBILITY of the _resident and the VICE _resident.
Over one thousand US soldiers have died in a foolish,
ill-planned and unnecessary war in Iraq, the Bush
national insecurity team is GUILTY of pre-9/11
negligence and post-9/11 incompetence, the US federal
budget surplus has been squandered on TWO foolish,
ill-timed and unnecessary tax cuts skewed toward the
wealthiest few, the Bush vodoo economics team has
plunged us into hundreds of billions of dollars in
federal deficit and a multi-trillion dollar nationa
debt, forget about asking your fellow citizens if they
are safer or better off than they were four years ago
(of course, the answer is no), instead, ask them can
we afford four more years --strategically militarily
economically environmentally constitutionally?
The US regimestream news media, at least until this
point, has, in large part, been a full partner along
with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary
formerluy-known-as-the-Republican-Party
in a Triad of shared special interest (e.g. oil,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) Here
are five very important news items. They should
dominate the air waves and demand headlines above the
fold. But they won't. Please read them and share them
with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote.
Please remember that the US regimestream news media,
particularly the major network and cable news
organizations, does not want to inform you about this
presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you...

Lois Romano, Washington Post: "The invasion of Iraq
was a profound diversion from the battle against our
greatest enemy -- al Qaeda," Kerry said. "The
president's misjudgment, miscalculation and
mismanagement . . . all make the war on terror harder
to win. George Bush made Saddam Hussein the priority.
I would have made Osama bin Laden the priority."
Kerry's comments at Temple, reinforced later at a
rally of 20,000 at the University of Pennsylvania,
included a six-point plan that campaign officials said
is designed to contrast his proposals with those of
the president's and to demonstrate that foreign policy
is a strength of Kerry's.
The Democratic nominee promised to destroy terrorist
networks by going after their arms and financing; to
revamp and enhance the intelligence apparatus to
ferret them out; to build up an overstretched military
by 40,000 troops; to support Middle Eastern
democracies; and to increase funding for homeland
security and for more intense cargo inspections at
ports and other points of entry.
"The Bush administration is spending more in Iraq in
four days than they've spent protecting our ports for
all of the last three years," Kerry charged.
Kerry assailed Bush for alienating longtime U.S.
allies, pledging as he has before to rebuild global
relationships. "I have news for President Bush: Just
because you can't do something doesn't mean it can't
be done," Kerry said. "It can be. My friends, it's not
George Bush's style that keeps our allies from
helping. It's his judgment."

Michael Ishikoff, Mark Hosenball, Newsweek: In its
rush to air its now discredited story about President
George W. Bush's National Guard service, CBS bumped
another sensitive piece slated for the same "60
Minutes" broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the
U.S. government was snookered by forged documents
purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium
from Niger...
A team of "60 Minutes" correspondents and consulting
reporters spent more than six months investigating the
Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS sources tell
Newsweek. The group landed the first ever on-camera
interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian
journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as
well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a
mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to
European intelligence agencies.
Although the edited piece never ended up identifying
Martino by name, the story, narrated by "60 Minutes"
correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough questions about
how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent
documents and why administration officials chose to
include a 16-word reference to the questionable
uranium purchase in President Bush's 2003 State of the
Union speech.
But just hours before the piece was set to air on the
evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on the
CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being
scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational
story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a
direct order to take a flight physical while serving
in the National Guard more than 30 years ago...
"This is like living in a Kafka novel," said Joshua
Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing
writer and a Web blogger who had been collaborating
with "60 Minutes" producers on the uranium story.
"Here we had a very important, well-reported story
about forged documents that helped lead the country to
war. And then it gets bumped by another story that
relied on forged documents."

Hank Kalet, Dispatches, South Brunswick Post: She
never expected to be speaking at Rutgers and elsewhere
about her views, never expected to find herself being
forcibly removed from a Republican Party political
rally in Hamilton after shouting a question at first
lady Laura Bush.
And she certainly never expected the kind of
insensitive treatment she received from the crowd.
But, then again, she never expected her son to die
in a dubious foreign war.
Yes. I said dubious. The war in Iraq was a war of
choice, not a war of necessity, a war sold to the
American public with a mixture of bad intelligence and
bad faith. And 1,000 Americans and tens of thousands
of Iraqis have paid the ultimate price.
Ms. Niederer's 24-year-old son Army 1st Lt. Seth
Dvorin, a graduate of South Brunswick High School, was
among those killed. Lt. Dvorin was serving in Iraq
with the 10th Mountain Division, Battery B, 3rd
Battalion, 62nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment when a
makeshift bomb exploded as he was conducting a
counter-explosive mission, Army officials said after
his death in February.
Ms. Niederer, who now lives in Hopewell, believes
her son did not have to die, that he and the
1,030-plus American soldiers who have died in Iraq
since the war began a year and a half ago were victims
of bad faith on the part of the Bush administration.
She has become active in the anti-war group Military
Families Speak Out and has made numerous speeches
around the area — including at Rutgers, her son's alma
mater — criticizing President George W. Bush and the
war in Iraq.

www.mediamatters.org: While the media has focused in
recent months on issues such as whether Senator John
Kerry took fire while saving the life of a fellow
swift boat crew member more than 30 years ago and
whether President George W. Bush's commanding officer
wrote memos bearing his name, an issue of at least
equal importance -- whether the Bush administration
lied to the 9-11 Commission and to the American people
about the events of September 11 -- has been almost
completely ignored. *
In fact, were reporters to devote anything approaching
the time and energy consumed by the disputed CBS memos
to the 9-11 Commission's conclusions, they would find
strong evidence that the administration has misled the
country regarding one of the most catastrophic days in
our country's history. In a review of the 9-11
Commission report in The New York Review of Books,
regular contributor Elizabeth Drew noted several
examples of Bush administration distortions and
apparent lies, of which the report provides strong
evidence. Following are two of the most flagrant.
Bush administration officials said no one could
predict terrorists would use airplanes as missiles
As Slate.com has reported, several prominent Bush
administration officials have asserted that there was
no way the government could have known that terrorists
would attempt to hijack airplanes and crash them into
buildings, as they did at the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In May 2002,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said: "I
don't think anyone could have predicted that these
people would take an airplane and slam it into the
World Trade Center"; then-White House Press Secretary
Ari Fleischer echoed Rice's remarks: "Never did we
imagine what would take place on September 11 where
people use those airplanes as missiles and weapons."
In her testimony before the 9-11 Commission, though,
Rice retreated from her remarks, stating, "I probably
should have said, 'I could not have imagined'" such an
occurrence, but she only conceded that she couldn't
promise that there "might not have been a report here
or a report there that reached somebody in our midst."
USA Today reported a similar remark by President Bush
on April 18: "Nobody in our government, at least, and
I don't think the prior government, could envision
flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive
scale." CNN noted on March 24 that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Commission: "I knew
of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading
up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack
commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into
the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers."
However, as the 9-11 Commission report documented,
such a "possibility was imaginable, and imagined,"
citing an August 1999 Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) Civil Aviation Security intelligence office
report that warned on the potential of a "suicide
hijacking operation," and that the North American
Aerospace Defense Command had "developed exercises to
counter such a threat." The commission reported that
an August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing
entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,"
which was received by Bush, stated that although the
FBI had "not been able to corroborate" a 1998 report
that Osama bin Laden was seeking to "hijack a US
aircraft," "FBI information since that time
indicate[d] patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or
other types of attacks, including recent surveillance
of federal buildings in New York."
Just weeks before 9-11, the Commission report also
noted, the Central Intelligence Agency warned British
and French officials of "'subjects involved in
suspicious 747 flight training' that described [Al
Qaeda operative Zacarias] Moussaoui as a possible
'suicide hijacker.'" And the week before the terrorist
attacks, a Minneapolis FBI agent told the FAA that
Moussaoui was "an Islamic extremist preparing for some
future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist
goals" related to flight training he had received. The
commission also documented that on August 23, 2001,
then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet
"was briefed about the Moussaoui case in a briefing
titled 'Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.'"

Reuters: Some of Antarctica's glaciers are melting
faster than snow can replace them, enough to raise sea
levels measurably, scientists reported on Friday.
Measurements of glaciers flowing into the Amundsen
Sea, on the Pacific Ocean side of Antarctica, show
they are melting much faster than in recent years and
could break up.
And they contain more ice than was previously
estimated, meaning they could raise sea level by more
than predicted, the international team of researchers
writes in the journal Science.
"The ... Amundsen Sea glaciers contain enough ice to
raise sea level by 1.3 meters (4 feet)," the
researchers wrote in their report.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092504I.shtml

The Story that Didn't Run
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek

Wednesday 22 September 2004

Here's the piece that '60 Minutes' killed for its
report on the Bush Guard documents.
In its rush to air its now discredited story about
President George W. Bush's National Guard service, CBS
bumped another sensitive piece slated for the same "60
Minutes" broadcast: a half-hour segment about how the
U.S. government was snookered by forged documents
purporting to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium
from Niger.

The journalistic juggling at CBS provides an
ironic counterpoint to the furor over apparently bogus
documents involving Bush's National Guard service. One
unexpected consequence of the network's decision was
to wipe out a chance-at least for the moment-for
greater public scrutiny of a more consequential
forgery that played a role in building the Bush
administration's case to invade Iraq.

A team of "60 Minutes" correspondents and
consulting reporters spent more than six months
investigating the Niger uranium documents fraud, CBS
sources tell Newsweek. The group landed the first ever
on-camera interview with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian
journalist who first obtained the phony documents, as
well as her elusive source, Rocco Martino, a
mysterious Roman businessman with longstanding ties to
European intelligence agencies.

Although the edited piece never ended up
identifying Martino by name, the story, narrated by
"60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley, asked tough
questions about how the White House came to embrace
the fraudulent documents and why administration
officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the
questionable uranium purchase in President Bush's 2003
State of the Union speech.

But just hours before the piece was set to air on
the evening of Sept. 8, the reporters and producers on
the CBS team were stunned to learn the story was being
scrapped to make room for a seemingly sensational
story about new documents showing that Bush ignored a
direct order to take a flight physical while serving
in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.

The story has since created a journalistic and
political firestorm, resulting in a colossal
embarrassment for CBS. This week, the network
concluded that its principle source for the documents,
a disgruntled former Guard official and Democratic
partisan named Bill Burkett, had lied about where he
got the material. CBS anchor Dan Rather publicly
apologized for broadcasting the faulty report. Today,
CBS named a two-person team comprised of former U.S.
Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Associated
Press chief Louis Boccardi to investigate the
network's handling of the story. .

"This is like living in a Kafka novel," said
Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly
contributing writer and a Web blogger who had been
collaborating with "60 Minutes" producers on the
uranium story. "Here we had a very important,
well-reported story about forged documents that helped
lead the country to war. And then it gets bumped by
another story that relied on forged documents."

Some CBS reporters, as well as one of the
network's key sources, fear that the Niger uranium
story may never run, at least not any time soon, on
the grounds that the network can now not credibly air
a report questioning how the Bush administration could
have gotten taken in by phony documents. The network
would "be a laughingstock," said one source intimately
familiar with the story.

Although acknowledging that it was "frustrating"
to have his story bounced, David Gelber, the lead CBS
producer on the Niger piece, said he has been told the
segment will still air some time soon, perhaps as
early as next week. "Obviously, everybody at CBS is
holding their breath these days. I'm assuming the
story is going to run until I'm told differently."

The delay of the CBS report comes at a time when
there have been significant new developments in the
case-although virtually none of them have been
reported in the United States. According to Italian
and British press reports, Martino-the Rome middleman
at the center of the case-was questioned last week by
an Italian investigating magistrate for two hours
about the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of
the documents. Martino could not be reached for
comment, but his lawyer is reportedly planning a press
conference in the next few days.

Burba, the Italian journalist, confirmed to
Newsweek this week that Martino is the previously
mysterious "Mr. X" who contacted her with the
potentially explosive documents in early October
2002-just as Congress was debating whether to
authorize President Bush to wage war against Iraq. The
documents, consisting of telexes, letters and
contracts, purported to show that Iraq had negotiated
an agreement to purchase 500 tons of "yellowcake
uranium from Niger, material that could be used to
make a nuclear bomb. (A U.S. intelligence official
told Newsweek that Martino is in fact believed to have
been the distributor of the documents.)

Burba-under instructions from her editor at
Panarama, a newsmagazine owned by Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi-then provided the documents
to the U.S. Embassy in Rome in an effort to
authenticate them. The embassy soon passed the
material on to Washington where some Bush
administration officials viewed it as hard evidence to
support its case that Saddam Hussein's regime was
actively engaged in a program to assemble nuclear
weapons.

But the Niger component of the White House case
for war quickly imploded. Asked for evidence to
support President Bush's contention in his State of
the Union speech that Iraq was seeking uranium from
Africa, the administration turned over the Niger
documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Within two hours, using the Google search engine, IAEA
officials in Vienna determined the documents to be a
crude forgery. At the urging of Sen. Jay Rockefeller,
vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
the FBI launched an investigation into the Niger
documents in an effort to determine if the United
States government had been duped by a deliberate
"disinformation" campaign organized by a foreign
intelligence agency or others with a political agenda
relating to Iraq.

So far, the bureau appears to have made little
progress in unraveling the case. "The senator is
frustrated by the slow pace of the investigation,"
said Wendy Morigi, the press secretary for Senator
Rockefeller, who was recently briefed on the status of
the FBI probe.

One striking aspect of the FBI's investigation is
that, at least as of this week, Martino has told
associates he has never even been interviewed by the
bureau-despite the fact that he was publicly
identified by the Financial Times of London as the
source of the documents more than six weeks ago and
was subsequently flown to New York City by CBS to be
interviewed for the "60 Minutes" report.

A U.S. law-enforcement official said the FBI is
seeking to interview Martino, but has not yet received
permission to do so from the Italian government. The
official declined to comment on other aspects of the
investigation.

The case has taken on additional intrigue because
of mounting indications that Martino has longstanding
relationships with European intelligence agencies.
Martino recently told the Sunday Times of London that
he had previously worked for SISMI, the Italian
military-intelligence agency, a potentially noteworthy
part of his resume given that the conservative Italian
government of Berlasconi was a strong supporter of the
Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. A French
government official told Newsweek that Martino also
had a relationship with French intelligence agencies.
But the French official rejected suggestions from U.S.
and British officials that French intelligence may
have played a role in creating the documents in order
to embarrass Bush and British Prime Minister Tony
Blair. The French never disseminated the documents
because they could not establish their authenticity,
the French official said.

Martino has told Burba and others that he obtained
the phony documents from an Italian woman who worked
in the Niger Embassy in Rome. He was in turn put in
touch with the woman by yet another middleman who,
according to Burba's account, had directed Martino to
provide the documents to "the Egyptians." Some press
reports have suggested the still unidentified
middleman who put Martino in touch with his Niger
Embassy source was in fact a SISMI officer himself.

Burba, who has twice been interviewed by the FBI
but never gave up Martino's name, said she had been
cooperating with the CBS team on the story in hopes of
getting to the bottom of the matter. But now, with the
"60 Minutes" broadcast postponed, she is no longer
confident that can ever happen. Meanwhile, she said
she is fed up with Martino who has "lied" to her and
provided contradictory accounts to other journalists.

"I'm disappointed," she told Newsweek. "In this
story, you don't know who's lying and who's telling
the truth. The sources have been both discredited and
discredited themselves."

-------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48716-2004Sep24.html?referrer=email


washingtonpost.com
Kerry Blasts Iraq 'Diversion'
Challenger Says War Has Hurt the Fight Against Al
Qaeda
By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 25, 2004; Page A01

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 24 -- John F. Kerry detailed his
plan for combating terrorism Friday and insisted that
the nation is no safer after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks because President Bush took his "eye off the
ball."

In a harsh assessment of his rival's policies, Kerry
told an audience at Temple University that Iraq has
become a haven for terrorists, and he drew a sharp
distinction between the war on terrorism and the war
in Iraq to differentiate his policies from those of
the president.

"The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from
the battle against our greatest enemy -- al Qaeda,"
Kerry said. "The president's misjudgment,
miscalculation and mismanagement . . . all make the
war on terror harder to win. George Bush made Saddam
Hussein the priority. I would have made Osama bin
Laden the priority."

Kerry's comments at Temple, reinforced later at a
rally of 20,000 at the University of Pennsylvania,
included a six-point plan that campaign officials said
is designed to contrast his proposals with those of
the president's and to demonstrate that foreign policy
is a strength of Kerry's.

The Democratic nominee promised to destroy terrorist
networks by going after their arms and financing; to
revamp and enhance the intelligence apparatus to
ferret them out; to build up an overstretched military
by 40,000 troops; to support Middle Eastern
democracies; and to increase funding for homeland
security and for more intense cargo inspections at
ports and other points of entry.

"The Bush administration is spending more in Iraq in
four days than they've spent protecting our ports for
all of the last three years," Kerry charged.

Kerry assailed Bush for alienating longtime U.S.
allies, pledging as he has before to rebuild global
relationships. "I have news for President Bush: Just
because you can't do something doesn't mean it can't
be done," Kerry said. "It can be. My friends, it's not
George Bush's style that keeps our allies from
helping. It's his judgment."

Before Kerry even finished his speech Friday morning,
the Bush-Cheney campaign sent out e-mails accusing him
of both copying Bush's policies and of distorting his
record.

"John Kerry's repackaged proposals embrace initiatives
that the President is already implementing, even as he
cynically attacks the President," campaign spokesman
Steve Schmidt said in a statement. "John Kerry called
Saddam Hussein a 'terrorist' before, but now he is
taking the opposite position and claiming that the
removal of Saddam Hussein has left the world 'less
secure.' "

Vice President Cheney weighed in from Lafayette, La.,
telling supporters: "John Kerry is trying to tear down
and trash all the good that has been accomplished."

Kerry's comments came at the end of a week when his
campaign switched its strategy of focusing heavily on
domestic issues and aggressively attacked Bush's Iraq
policies, portraying them as arrogant, misplaced and
extremist.

"Drawing these sharp contrasts with Bush on Iraq is
very important, because this is a fundamentally
important issue," senior adviser Mike McCurry said.
"It is the heart of the question about George Bush: Is
he capable of seeing mistakes and fixing them so we
can get them right?" Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.
(D-Del.), who accompanied Kerry on Friday, told
reporters that Kerry felt "liberated" to make the case
against Bush on foreign policy.

Kerry's campaign Friday unveiled a second ad on Iraq
in two days, this one turning Bush's words on him. The
30-second spot, to air during Sunday talk shows, shows
Bush during a Rose Garden news conference saying, "I
saw a poll that said the 'right-track, wrong-track' in
Iraq was better than here in America."

"The right track?" the narrator asks. "Americans are
being kidnapped, held hostage, even beheaded. Over a
thousand American soldiers have died. And George Bush
has no plan to get us out of Iraq."

Although Kerry had previously made many of the points
in Friday's speech, it was the first time he presented
an anti-terrorism plan in such a comprehensive way.

Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior national security
analyst at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, who said he is not endorsing either
candidate's approach, said Kerry's speech amounted to
"a wish list of any measure that anybody has proposed
without seeing whether they are cost-effective."

He gave Kerry credit for addressing the growing Muslim
resentment of the United States and the need for debt
relief in Middle East countries. But he said the Bush
administration has already been undertaking many of
Kerry's proposals, such as expanding the CIA's
clandestine service and the military's Special Forces
units.

"I have the impression," Cordesman said, "that
somebody assembled all the possibilities that would
have a rhetoric impact and crammed them into a
speech."

One area in which Kerry worked to set himself apart
from Bush was on Saudi Arabia, saying the
administration has not held it accountable for
financing al Qaeda terrorism.

"As president, I will do what President Bush has not:
I will hold the Saudis accountable. Since 9/11, there
have been no public prosecutions in Saudi Arabia, and
few elsewhere, of terrorist financiers," Kerry said.

Bush and others in the administration say that they
have put significant pressure on the Saudis, and that
the Saudis have become more aggressive in arresting al
Qaeda members living in the country and in closing
down religious-based contributions to the organization
and its affiliates.

Kerry also said that at U.S. ports, he would increase
the budgets for "the most promising cargo inspection
programs" by 600 percent. A spokesman said Kerry was
referring to two widely applauded programs run by the
Department of Homeland Security to increase
surveillance of incoming containers in foreign ports
such as Hong Kong, and to work with U.S. importers to
tighten their security. Both programs have been
severely understaffed, experts said.

Stephen E. Flynn, a retired Coast Guard official and
author of a homeland security book called "America the
Vulnerable," said Kerry's proposal makes sense because
it would result in tighter security without delaying
the flow of goods: "I applaud any effort to bolster
the resources going to these two important programs."

Staff writers Dana Priest and John Mintz in Washington
contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=12988666&BRD=1091&PAG=461&dept_id=

DISPATCHES: Unlikely activist takes on war in Iraq




By: Hank Kalet , Managing Editor 09/23/2004




DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet: Mother of soldier killed in
Iraq speaks out against President Bush and dubious
war.

Sue Niederer never expected to find herself on the
nightly news.
She never expected to be speaking at Rutgers and
elsewhere about her views, never expected to find
herself being forcibly removed from a Republican Party
political rally in Hamilton after shouting a question
at first lady Laura Bush.
And she certainly never expected the kind of
insensitive treatment she received from the crowd.
But, then again, she never expected her son to die
in a dubious foreign war.
Yes. I said dubious. The war in Iraq was a war of
choice, not a war of necessity, a war sold to the
American public with a mixture of bad intelligence and
bad faith. And 1,000 Americans and tens of thousands
of Iraqis have paid the ultimate price.
Ms. Niederer's 24-year-old son Army 1st Lt. Seth
Dvorin, a graduate of South Brunswick High School, was
among those killed. Lt. Dvorin was serving in Iraq
with the 10th Mountain Division, Battery B, 3rd
Battalion, 62nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment when a
makeshift bomb exploded as he was conducting a
counter-explosive mission, Army officials said after
his death in February.
Ms. Niederer, who now lives in Hopewell, believes
her son did not have to die, that he and the
1,030-plus American soldiers who have died in Iraq
since the war began a year and a half ago were victims
of bad faith on the part of the Bush administration.
She has become active in the anti-war group Military
Families Speak Out and has made numerous speeches
around the area — including at Rutgers, her son's alma
mater — criticizing President George W. Bush and the
war in Iraq.
Reading the letters on the Military Families Speak
Out Web site (www.mfso.org) is a painful experience.
They tell of dislocation and alienation, of extreme
worry verging on terror, of not being able to watch
the news or read the newspaper because each time they
hear of an American casualty they fear it will be a
son, a daughter, a cousin, a husband, wife, brother or
sister. The letters are bitter and angry and demand
the president be brought to account.
Ms. Niederer joined Military Families Speak Out as
a way of connecting with others who are feeling the
same things she has been feeling, and to speak out
against the war.
"I don't have any vendetta," she said by phone on
Tuesday night. "I just want these kids back."
Ms. Niederer sees her activism as a mission, as a
way of carrying out her son's commitment to the men
with whom he served.
"It was my son's last words before he went back to
Iraq," she said. "I asked him if he wanted to go back
to Iraq and he said he didn't. He said he thought it
was useless. We weren't going to win a war on
terrorism or war on religion. It was just a guerilla
war."
So she asked him why he felt he had to go.
"He said he had 18 men under him and he must bring
them home safely," she said.
Of those original 18 soldiers, three have died and
two were badly wounded.
"I'm just carrying out his wishes and his memory by
trying to bring the men home safely and alive," she
said. "It was his wish."
That sense of mission brought her to Hamilton on
Sept. 16, where Mrs. Bush was speaking at a rally and
fund-raiser on behalf of the president's re-election
campaign.
According to reports from several news
organizations, Ms. Niederer sat silently at the speech
until Mrs. Bush began talking of the troops abroad.
That's when she stood up and confronted the first
lady. She was wearing a T-shirt with her son's photo
and the words "President Bush, you killed my son"
across the front.
She came with a simple question: "When are yours
going to serve?" referring to the Bush twins. She got
no answer.
That should not be surprising, since the American
public has yet to get a straight answer from the
president or his minions as to why we are fighting and
why our young men are dying half way around the globe.
Each rationale has melted under real scrutiny, only to
be replaced with another. The elusive weapons of mass
destruction gave way to fictional links to al-Qaida,
which in turn gave way to the noble-sounding goal of
liberating the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein. Now the
Iraqis are fighting to liberate themselves from us and
our soldiers are dying with increasing frequency.
According to CNN.com, 58 Americans have died so far
this month and 181 have died since Iraqis were handed
back autonomy.
"It has ... become increasingly clear that
America's military presence continues to serve as a
catalyst and rallying cry for a growing number of
disaffected Iraqi citizens," The Nation wrote in a
recent editorial.
And yet the president continues to view this crisis
with rose-colored glasses, extolling a growing
democracy that just does not seem to exist, continues
to blame outside influences for what nearly every
observer inside Iraq agrees is a homegrown resistance.
It is time that someone in authority admitted that
this war has been a terrible, deadly mistake and made
real plans to bring our troops home so other mothers
do not have to feel the pain that Sue Niederer has
felt.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick
Post and The Cranbury Press. E-mail him by clicking
here.

©PACKETONLINE News Classifieds Entertainment Business
- Princeton and Central New Jersey 2004

http://mediamatters.org/items/200409240007

Media looked past 9-11 Commission documentation of
Bush administration fabrications

While the media has focused in recent months on issues
such as whether Senator John Kerry took fire while
saving the life of a fellow swift boat crew member
more than 30 years ago and whether President George W.
Bush's commanding officer wrote memos bearing his
name, an issue of at least equal importance -- whether
the Bush administration lied to the 9-11 Commission
and to the American people about the events of
September 11 -- has been almost completely ignored. *

In fact, were reporters to devote anything approaching
the time and energy consumed by the disputed CBS memos
to the 9-11 Commission's conclusions, they would find
strong evidence that the administration has misled the
country regarding one of the most catastrophic days in
our country's history. In a review of the 9-11
Commission report in The New York Review of Books,
regular contributor Elizabeth Drew noted several
examples of Bush administration distortions and
apparent lies, of which the report provides strong
evidence. Following are two of the most flagrant.

Bush administration officials said no one could
predict terrorists would use airplanes as missiles

As Slate.com has reported, several prominent Bush
administration officials have asserted that there was
no way the government could have known that terrorists
would attempt to hijack airplanes and crash them into
buildings, as they did at the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In May 2002,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said: "I
don't think anyone could have predicted that these
people would take an airplane and slam it into the
World Trade Center"; then-White House Press Secretary
Ari Fleischer echoed Rice's remarks: "Never did we
imagine what would take place on September 11 where
people use those airplanes as missiles and weapons."

In her testimony before the 9-11 Commission, though,
Rice retreated from her remarks, stating, "I probably
should have said, 'I could not have imagined'" such an
occurrence, but she only conceded that she couldn't
promise that there "might not have been a report here
or a report there that reached somebody in our midst."
USA Today reported a similar remark by President Bush
on April 18: "Nobody in our government, at least, and
I don't think the prior government, could envision
flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive
scale." CNN noted on March 24 that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Commission: "I knew
of no intelligence during the six-plus months leading
up to September 11 to indicate terrorists would hijack
commercial airlines, use them as missiles to fly into
the Pentagon or the World Trade Center towers."

However, as the 9-11 Commission report documented,
such a "possibility was imaginable, and imagined,"
citing an August 1999 Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) Civil Aviation Security intelligence office
report that warned on the potential of a "suicide
hijacking operation," and that the North American
Aerospace Defense Command had "developed exercises to
counter such a threat." The commission reported that
an August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing
entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,"
which was received by Bush, stated that although the
FBI had "not been able to corroborate" a 1998 report
that Osama bin Laden was seeking to "hijack a US
aircraft," "FBI information since that time
indicate[d] patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or
other types of attacks, including recent surveillance
of federal buildings in New York."

Just weeks before 9-11, the Commission report also
noted, the Central Intelligence Agency warned British
and French officials of "'subjects involved in
suspicious 747 flight training' that described [Al
Qaeda operative Zacarias] Moussaoui as a possible
'suicide hijacker.'" And the week before the terrorist
attacks, a Minneapolis FBI agent told the FAA that
Moussaoui was "an Islamic extremist preparing for some
future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist
goals" related to flight training he had received. The
commission also documented that on August 23, 2001,
then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet
"was briefed about the Moussaoui case in a briefing
titled 'Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.'"

The Bush administration's claims of ignorance are cast
into even greater doubt by a report that a
hypothetical event resembling the actual events of
September 11 was the subject of a military training
exercise less than a year before 9-11. As United Press
International documented, on October 24, 2000, the
Pentagon ran a "mass casualty exercise, which
simulated crisis response in a scenario where a
hijacked aircraft crashed into the Pentagon."

Cheney and Bush claimed Cheney received Bush's
approval to shoot down hijacked planes on 9-11

Both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
have maintained, and testified to the 9-11 Commission,
that the order to shoot down airplanes hijacked by Al
Qaeda on the morning of September 11 was authorized by
the president himself. But the commission's report
indicated that the commission found no evidence to
support such a claim based on the review of an array
of documentary sources from that day.

The report noted Bush and Cheney's account of the
events in question: Cheney "stated that he called the
President to discuss the rules of engagement" for
shooting down the hijacked airplanes if they would not
divert their path on the morning of September 11,
Cheney "said the President signed off on that
concept," and "[t]he President said he remembered such
a conversation."

But the commission found "no documentary evidence for
this call." The report includes a caveat that "the
relevant sources are incomplete," but does not say
specifically what information the commission lacked.
The commission cited the following sources in reaching
its conclusion that there was no evidence for Bush and
Cheney's claim: "(1) phone logs of the White House
switchboard; (2) notes of Lewis Libby [Cheney's chief
of staff], Mrs. [Lynne] Cheney, and Ari Fleischer; (3)
the tape (and then transcript) of the air threat
conference call; and (4) Secret Service and White
House Situation Room logs, as well as four separate
White House Military Office logs (the PEOC Watch Log,
the PEOC Shelter Log, the Communications Log, and the
9-11 Log)."

The report then noted that after Cheney twice ordered
the "authorization to engage," he called President
Bush to obtain authorization at the behest of White
House deputy chief of staff Joshua Bolten. According
to the report, Bolten wanted Cheney to "confirm the
engage order" and "make sure the President was told"
Cheney had executed it, and Bolten "said he had not
heard any prior discussion on the subject with the
President." The hijacked planes crashed before the
authorization order was put into effect.

Drew, in her New York Review of Books review, noted
that in response to the commission's suggestion that
Cheney made the order without Bush's authorization,
"the White House reacted in a lengthy letter to the
commission ... propos[ing] substitute language that
portrayed the President's performance that morning in
a more positive light." And, she wrote that Cheney
"made a vehement phone call to the chairman, Thomas
Kean, and vice-chairman, Lee Hamilton, protesting the
staff report's implication that he had taken charge
and ordered the planes shot down." Despite the
protests by the White House, Drew noted, the
commission's report maintained an account of the
events that suggests Cheney, not Bush, made the order.

* An MMFA LexisNexis database search on September 24
of the "All News" directory for media coverage --
after the 9-11 Commission report's July 22 release --
of Bush administration assertions that were
contradicted by the evidence amassed in the report
produced minimal results. Relevant results were
defined as articles that note the inconsistencies
between the Bush administration accounts and the 9-11
Commission report findings:

A search for "rice and predict! and airplane and slam
and world trade center and date is after July 20,
2004" produced six relevant results.

A search for "Fleischer and imagine and airplanes as
missiles and date is after July 20, 2004" produced
zero relevant results.

A search for "rice and I could not have imagined and
date is after July 20, 2004" produced zero relevant
results.

A search for "Bush and envision flying airplanes into
buildings and date is after July 20, 2004" produced
zero relevant results.

A search for "9/11 Commission and imaginable and
imagined and date is after July 20, 2004" produced
zero relevant results.

A search for "cheney and (shoot /20 plane or airplane)
or (rules of engagement) or (9/11 commission and
documentary evidence and call) and date is after july
20, 2004" produced two relevant results.

— A.S. & M.K.

Posted to the web on Friday September 24, 2004 at 3:09
PM EST

Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.
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http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/09/24/environment.glaciers.reut/index.html

Report: Antarctica glaciers are thinning

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Some of Antarctica's glaciers
are melting faster than snow can replace them, enough
to raise sea levels measurably, scientists reported on
Friday.

Measurements of glaciers flowing into the Amundsen
Sea, on the Pacific Ocean side of Antarctica, show
they are melting much faster than in recent years and
could break up.

And they contain more ice than was previously
estimated, meaning they could raise sea level by more
than predicted, the international team of researchers
writes in the journal Science.

"The ... Amundsen Sea glaciers contain enough ice to
raise sea level by 1.3 meters (4 feet)," the
researchers wrote in their report.

"Our measurements show them collectively to be 60
percent out of balance, sufficient to raise sea level
by 0.24 mm (nearly 0.01 inch) per year," they added.

And as the surrounding ice shelves melt -- which they
are doing -- this process will speed up, the
researchers said.

"The ice shelves act like a cork and slow down the
flow of the glacier," said Bob Thomas of the NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility
in Virginia.

Theirs is the second report this week to warn of
rapidly melting glaciers in Antarctica.

On Tuesday a team at NASA and the University of
Colorado reported that the 2002 breakup of the Larsen
B ice shelf on the other side of the continent had
accelerated the breakup of glaciers into the Weddell
Sea.

Many teams of researchers are keeping a close eye on
parts of Antarctica that are steadily melting.

Large ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula
disintegrated in 1995 and 2002 as a result of climate
warming. But these floating ice shelves did not affect
sea level as they melted.

Glaciers, however, are another story. They rest on
land and when they slide off into the water they
instantly affect sea level.

"The rates of glacier change remain relatively small
at present," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who worked on
Friday's study.

"But the potential exists for these glaciers to
increase global sea level by more than one meter (3
feet). The time scale over which this will take place
depends on how much faster the glaciers can flow,
which we do not know at present."

The measurements also show the glaciers are thicker
than once believed. This means more melting and more
rapid melting, Thomas said.

"Our measurements show an increase in glacier thinning
rates that affects not only the mouth of the glacier,
but also 60 miles (100 km) to 190 miles (300 km)
inland," Thomas said in a statement.

The researchers from NASA, the Centro de Estudios
Cientificos in Chile, the University of Kansas and
Ohio State University wrote their estimates based on
satellite data and measurements from a Chilean P-3
aircraft equipped with NASA sensors.

Experts say that overall sea levels around the world
are going up by about 1.8 mm or 0.07 inch a year.
About half of this comes from melting ice in glaciers.

The melting into the Amundsen sea is now more than the
previous amount from all of Antarctica and more than
the estimated contribution from Greenland, the
researchers said.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2004 Reuters. All rights reserved.This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,
or redistributed.

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Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 39 Days to Go -- JFK hits hard on Bush terrror blunders, DeLay scandal HIDDEN by Corporatist Media, Theresa expect Osama's "capture, " Klinghoffer's murder, Pentagon vote supression foiled

There are only 39 days to go until the national
referendum on the COMPETENCE, CHARACTER and
CREDIBILITY of the _resident and the VICE
_resident...The botched, bungled, mis-named "war on
terrorism" is not the strength of the Bush
abomination, it is the SHAME of the Bush
abomination...There is an Electoral Uprising
coming...Do not be disceived, discouraged or confused
by the US regimestream news media, with its cooked
polls and craven propapunditgandists...There is an
Electoral Uprising coming in November 2004. It will
include many life-long Reublicans from US military
families in Red States, it will include many patrios
of diverse political view points...The US regimestream
news media, at least until this point, has, in large
part, been a full partner along with the Bush Cabal
and its wholly-owned-subsidiary
formerluy-known-as-the-Republican-Party
in a Triad of shared special interest (e.g. oil,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) Here
are five very important news items. They should
dominate the air waves and demand headlines above the
fold. But they won't. Please read them and share them
with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote.
Please remember that the US regimestream news media
does not want to inform you about this presidential
campaign, it wants to DISinform you...

Mary Dalrymple, Associated Press: "The invasion of
Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against
our greatest enemy, al-Qaida," Kerry said in a speech
at Temple University. "There's just no question about
it. The president's misjudgment, miscalculation and
mismanagement of the war in Iraq all make the war on
terror harder to win."
Kerry said Iraq has become a haven for terrorists
since the war, and he offered a detailed strategy to
contain terrorism while drawing a sharp distinction
between his and the president's views on national
security.
"George Bush made Saddam Hussein the priority. I
would have made Osama bin Laden the priority," Kerry
said. "I will finish the job in Iraq and I will
refocus our energies on the real war on terror."

www.democrats.com: SPEAK UP AMERICA! Networks Black
Out Story of Tom Delay Group Fraud Case
The networks spend DAYS giving big chunks of news time
to unsubstantiated, often "anonymous" slams against
Kerry or to dubious documents that could hurt Bush.
But they did not give ONE SINGLE MINUTE to a fraud
case involving one of the most powerful men in
Washington, Tom Delay. As Media Matters reports: "On
September 21, three top aides to U.S. House Majority
Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) were indicted on charges of
illegally raising political funds from corporations in
2002. Major newspapers carried the story, some of them
on the front page....Yet ABC World News Tonight, CBS
Evening News, and NBC Nightly News failed to report
the indictments on September 21 and on September 22."
Once again, the Networks are deceiving the public,
hiding info about the Republican Party, while
systematically seeking to undermine the Democrats.
This amounts to attempted subversion of the American
political process. Contact these corporations and
DEMAND JUSTICE

Mike Sunnucks, Business Journal of Phoenix: In regard
to the hunt for terror leader Osama Bin Laden, Heinz
Kerry said she could see the al-Qaida chief being
caught before the November election.
"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next
month," said Heinz Kerry, alluding to a possible
capture by United States and allied forces before
election day.
The spouse of Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry also hit President Bush on Iraq, saying it
should not be equated with anti-terrorism efforts and
that the current administration chose to create a
"hotbed for terrorism" in Iraq when dictator Saddam
Hussein did not pose an immediate threat. Heinz Kerry
also said she agrees with her husband that a military
draft may be reinstated under Bush.
She said she was embarrassed to receive tax cuts
advocated by Bush and supports her husband's efforts
to roll them back for higher incomes and use those
funds for education, health care and deficit
reduction.

Sidney Blumenthal, Salon: In his stump speech,
repeated word for word across the country, Bush says
that he invaded Iraq because of "the lesson of
September the 11th." WMD go unmentioned; now the only
reason Bush offers is Saddam Hussein as an agent of
terrorism. "He was a sworn enemy of the United States
of America; he had ties to terrorist networks. Do you
remember Abu Nidal? He's the guy that killed Leon
Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer was murdered because of
his religion. Abu Nidal was in Baghdad, as was his
organization."
The period of Klinghoffer's murder in 1985 on the
Achille Lauro by Abu Abbas, in fact, coincided with
the period of U.S. courtship of Saddam, marked by the
celebrated visits of Donald Rumsfeld, then Middle East
envoy. The United States actively collaborated with
Iraq in intelligence exchanges and materially
supported Saddam in his decade-long war with Iran
(which ended in 1988), including authorizing the sale
of biological agents for Saddam's laboratories, a
diversification of his WMD capability.

Jennifer Joan Lee, International Herald Tribune: The
U.S. Defense Department changed its explanation
Wednesday for problems faced by certain overseas
Americans attempting to access the government Web site
for voters abroad, saying that an Internet security
block imposed several years ago had been left in place
inadvertently.
The block, which had prevented some U.S. citizens
abroad from accessing www.fvap.gov, the site of the
Federal Voting Assistance Program, as the Nov. 2
election nears, has now been lifted, a Pentagon
spokesman said.
Tim Madden, spokesman for the Defense Department task
force that oversees the Pentagon's computer networks,
declined to specify the reason for the block.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=3&u=/ap/20040924/ap_on_el_pr/kerry

Kerry Faults Bush for Pursuing Saddam

2 hours, 50 minutes ago

By MARY DALRYMPLE, Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA - Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry (news - web sites) faulted President Bush (news
- web sites) on Friday for pursuing Saddam Hussein
(news - web sites) instead of Sept. 11 mastermind
Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), a choice Kerry
contended had made defeating terrorism more difficult.

"The invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) was a
profound diversion from the battle against our
greatest enemy, al-Qaida," Kerry said in a speech at
Temple University. "There's just no question about it.
The president's misjudgment, miscalculation and
mismanagement of the war in Iraq all make the war on
terror harder to win."

Kerry said Iraq has become a haven for terrorists
since the war, and he offered a detailed strategy to
contain terrorism while drawing a sharp distinction
between his and the president's views on national
security.

"George Bush (news - web sites) made Saddam Hussein
the priority. I would have made Osama bin Laden the
priority," Kerry said. "I will finish the job in Iraq
and I will refocus our energies on the real war on
terror."

The Democrat's campaign also rolled out a new ad in
which it uses Bush's words to criticize the incumbent.
The spot shows Bush during a Rose Garden news
conference saying, "I saw a poll that said the 'right
track-wrong track' in Iraq was better than here in
America."

The ad continues: "The right track? Americans are
being kidnapped, held hostage, even beheaded. Over a
thousand American soldiers have died. And George Bush
has no plan to get us out of Iraq."

While campaigning Friday in Lafayette, La., Vice
President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) countered the
Democratic criticism, telling supporters, "John Kerry
is trying to tear down and trash all the good that has
been accomplished."

A day earlier, Kerry told The Columbus Dispatch that
the president's actions in Iraq and elsewhere show
Bush masquerading as a mainstream conservative while
pursuing extremist policies.

"I don't view these people as conservatives," Kerry
said. "I actually view them as extreme, and I think
their policies have been extreme, and that extends all
the way to Iraq, where this president, in my judgment,
diverted the real war on terror — which was Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaida — and almost obsessively moved to
deal with Iraq in a way that weakened our nation,
overextended our armed forces, cost us $200 billion
and created a breach in our oldest alliances."

Kerry also mentioned a blurring line between the
separation of church and state and the growth of
federal budget deficits.

To douse the spread of terrorism, Kerry proposed
policies aimed at denying individuals and groups the
ability to organize and attack. Kerry said he would
build a better military and intelligence apparatus to
go after enemies, deny terrorists weapons and
financing, move against worldwide terrorist havens and
recruitment centers, and promote freedom and democracy
in Muslim nations.

The Bush-Cheney campaign said the president is already
following that course. "He is copying the president's
plan at the same time he is attacking the president,"
said spokesman Steve Schmidt.

Kerry has repeatedly argued that the war in Iraq has
distracted attention and resources from the pursuit of
terrorists, including bin Laden.

The Bush-Cheney campaign said Kerry has held
conflicting positions on that point. They point to
instances where Kerry said the former Iraqi leader
acted like a terrorist and said that the war on
terrorism should be seen as an operation bigger than
the conflict in Afghanistan (news - web sites).

Kerry visited the Pennsylvania battleground before a
quick trip home to Boston and then several days spent
preparing for the presidential debates. Kerry told the
Dispatch that he has to present himself "clearly,
forcefully to the American people with a clear set of
priorities."

"I think a lot of people will tune in," he said.
"There are undecideds. A lot of folks will try to
measure our character and our vision, so I think it's
an important moment."

___

SPEAK UP AMERICA! Networks Black Out Story of Tom
Delay Group Fraud Case
The networks spend DAYS giving big chunks of news time
to unsubstantiated, often "anonymous" slams against
Kerry or to dubious documents that could hurt Bush.
But they did not give ONE SINGLE MINUTE to a fraud
case involving one of the most powerful men in
Washington, Tom Delay. As Media Matters reports: "On
September 21, three top aides to U.S. House Majority
Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) were indicted on charges of
illegally raising political funds from corporations in
2002. Major newspapers carried the story, some of them
on the front page....Yet ABC World News Tonight, CBS
Evening News, and NBC Nightly News failed to report
the indictments on September 21 and on September 22."
Once again, the Networks are deceiving the public,
hiding info about the Republican Party, while
systematically seeking to undermine the Democrats.
This amounts to attempted subversion of the American
political process. Contact these corporations and
DEMAND JUSTICE

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=36732

Ethics Coalition: Texas Indictments Make DeLay Ethics
Investigation More Urgent

9/22/2004 3:47:00 PM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To: National Desk

Contact: Mark Glaze, 202-271-0982, Melanie Sloan,
202-588-5565, both of the Congressional Ethics
Coalition

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The
Congressional Ethics Coalition, an ideologically
diverse coalition of eight leading government reform
organizations, released the following statement
regarding the indictment of several top aides to House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The Coalition is working
for meaningful reform of congressional ethics
oversight rules.

The coalition members are the Campaign Legal Center,
the Center for Responsive Politics, Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Government, Common Cause,
Democracy 21, Judicial Watch, Public Campaign and
Public Citizen.

---

"The indictment of three top aides to House Majority
Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) makes it even more urgent
for the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether
Mr. DeLay played a role in allegedly illegal
fundraising by committees he directly controlled.

"The Ethics Committee has a clear responsibility to
investigate whether Mr. DeLay violated ethics rules in
the course of his leadership of TRMPAC and ARMPAC,
both of which are the subject of the criminal
indictments announced yesterday in Texas.

"The aides charged included the director of Texans for
a Republican Majority and two key fundraisers for the
committee, which Mr. DeLay helped create and on whose
advisory board he served. The executive director of
Mr. DeLays own PAC, Americans for a Republican
Majority, was also charged.

"If these charges do not persuade the Ethics Committee
that there is sufficient evidence to at least open an
investigation into the pending DeLay matter, it is
almost impossible to imagine what would.

"If the Ethics Committee chooses to ignore the
indictment of three individuals serving at the
pleasure of Mr. DeLay and directly reporting to him,
then it is clear that the Committee has abdicated its
constitutional responsibility to enforce ethical
standards in the House.

"Earlier this week, Ethics Committee Chairman Joel
Hefley (R- Colo.) and ranking member Rep. Alan
Mollohan (D-W.V.) -- apparently unable to agree on how
to address allegations of improper fundraising by Mr.
DeLay -- said that they would ask the full committee
to decide whether to open an investigation. Pushing
that decision off to the 10-member committee sets up
the likelihood the members will deadlock on a 5-to-5
vote, which would result in the matter being dropped
entirely.

"Once again, we strongly urge the House Ethics
Committee to open an inquiry into the allegations in
the complaint brought by Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas)
against Mr. DeLay. Anything else would be
irresponsible conduct by the Committee and would
require the full House to take action to override the
Committee."

http://www.usnewswire.com/

-0-

/© 2004 U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/

http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2004/09/20/daily58.html?page=2

The Business Journal of Phoenix - September 23, 2004
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2004/09/20/daily58.html

LATEST NEWS
1:48 PM MST Thursday
Heinz Kerry helps Democrats raise $1M at Phoenix event
Mike Sunnucks
The Business Journal
Arizona Democrats raked in more than $1 million
Wednesday night at a fund-raiser headlined by Teresa
Heinz Kerry.

Heinz Kerry criticized the Bush administration on tax
cuts, Iraq and the war on terrorism at the event,
which was held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa.

In regard to the hunt for terror leader Osama Bin
Laden, Heinz Kerry said she could see the al-Qaida
chief being caught before the November election.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next
month," said Heinz Kerry, alluding to a possible
capture by United States and allied forces before
election day.

The spouse of Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry also hit President Bush on Iraq, saying it
should not be equated with anti-terrorism efforts and
that the current administration chose to create a
"hotbed for terrorism" in Iraq when dictator Saddam
Hussein did not pose an immediate threat. Heinz Kerry
also said she agrees with her husband that a military
draft may be reinstated under Bush.

She said she was embarrassed to receive tax cuts
advocated by Bush and supports her husband's efforts
to roll them back for higher incomes and use those
funds for education, health care and deficit
reduction.

Bush Southwestern campaign spokesman Danny Diaz hit
the Kerry campaign on both the Iraq and draft issues.
Diaz said the Kerry camp is "irresponsible" for
bringing up the draft issue and contends the Democrat
is doing it for political gain.

Diaz also criticized Kerry for shifting positions on
Iraq on the campaign trail after voting to authorize
military action in 2002.

"Arizonans need a president they can count on, a
leader who knows what he believes, and after reading
the morning's paper, doesn't shift his stance to
accommodate the opposition," Diaz said.

The Biltmore event was the largest single fund-raising
event by state Democrats, displaying the prowess on
that front by state party chairman Jim Pederson and
Gov. Janet Napolitano.

Several of the main sponsors of the fund-raiser
included groups that often clash with business
interests.

That list includes the Arizona Trial Lawyers
Association, Arizona AFL-CIO, United Food and
Commercial Workers Union and the American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Business interests view litigation reforms to reduce
class action and frivolous lawsuits as a top issue in
Bush's favor.

Groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and
National Federation of Independent Business are not
pleased with Kerry's pick of North Carolina Sen. John
Edwards, a former trial lawyer and opponent of
business-backed tort reform, as his running mate.

Kerry also has not backed business efforts on
litigation reforms. Bush supports tort reforms.

Pederson, a Valley shopping center developer, has made
fund-raising a top priority as Democratic state
chairman. That includes making significant
contributions himself and reaching out with Napolitano
to moderate business executives.

Democratic spokeswoman Sarah Rosen said none of the
money for the $1 million Wednesday event came from
Pederson.

Pederson is expected to challenge GOP U.S. Sen. Jon
Kyl in 2006.

There were some business lobbyists at the Heinz Kerry
event, including officials and lobbyists from Pinnacle
West Capital Corp., Wells Fargo Bank and the Home
Builders Association of Arizona.

The event was held the same day it was announced the
Kerry campaign was nixing plans to run homestretch ads
in Arizona. Kerry's team had planned to begin running
ads again on local stations in Phoenix and Tucson but
has opted not to, bolstering GOP confidence.

Recent Arizona polls show Bush leading Kerry in the
state by 6 to 11 percentage points.

Kerry Arizona campaign spokeswoman Sue Walitsky said
Arizona voters still will see national cable ads, and
the state still is a priority in terms of grassroots
efforts.

"There is no surrender here," Walitsky said.

Arizona Republican Party Chairman Bob Fannin said the
Biltmore fund-raiser will end up going to other
battleground states and not Arizona.

"The Arizona Democratic Party has become little more
than an ATM for the national Democrats," said Fannin.
"Democrats have realized that Napolitano's election
and Jim Pederson's soft money are not enough to save
the Kerry campaign in Arizona."

© 2004 American City Business Journals Inc.

Web reprint information

All contents of this site © American City Business
Journals Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092404J.shtml

The Bubble Boy
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com

Thursday 23 September 2004

Bush lives in a world immune from the realities of
Iraq.
The news is grim, but the president is
"optimistic." The intelligence is sobering, but he
tosses aside "pessimistic predictions." His opponent
says he has "no credibility," but the president
replies that it is his rival who is "twisting in the
wind." The secretary general of the United Nations
speaks of the "rule of law," but Bush talks before a
mute General Assembly of "a new definition of
security." Between the rhetoric and the reality lies
the campaign.

A reliable source who has just returned after
assessing the facts on the ground for U.S.
intelligence services told me that in Iraq, U.S.
commanders have plans for this week and the next, but
that there is "no overarching strategy." The New York
Times reports an offensive is in the works to capture
the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah - after the
election. In the meantime, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and
other al-Qaida-linked terrorists operate from there at
will, as they have for more than a year. The president
speaks of new Iraqi security forces, but not even half
of the U.S. personnel have been assigned to the
headquarters of the Multinational Security Transition
Command.

Bush's vision of the liberation of Iraq as the
restaging of the liberation of France - justified by
his unearthing of Saddam Hussein's fearful weapons of
mass destruction; paid for by the flow of cheap oil;
and leading to the establishment of democracy, regime
change in Iran and Syria, and the quiescence of
stunned Palestinians - has melted before harsh facts.
But reality cannot be permitted to obscure the image.
The liberation is "succeeding," he insists, and only
pessimists cannot see it.

In July, the CIA delivered to the president a new
National Intelligence Estimate that details three
gloomy scenarios of the future of Iraq ranging up to
civil war. Perhaps it was his reading of the NIE that
prompted Bush to remark in August that the war on
terrorism could not be won, a judgment he swiftly
reversed. But at the United Nations, Bush held a press
conference at which he rebuffed the latest
intelligence: "The CIA laid out a - several scenarios
that said life could be lousy, life could be OK, life
could be better. And they were just guessing as to
what the conditions might be like."

With that, Bush explained that for him
intelligence is not to be used to inform decision
making but to be accepted or rejected to advance an
ideological and political agenda. His dismissal is an
affirmation of the politicization and corruption of
intelligence that rationalized the war.

In his stump speech, repeated word for word across
the country, Bush says that he invaded Iraq because of
"the lesson of September the 11th." WMD go
unmentioned; now the only reason Bush offers is Saddam
Hussein as an agent of terrorism. "He was a sworn
enemy of the United States of America; he had ties to
terrorist networks. Do you remember Abu Nidal? He's
the guy that killed Leon Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer
was murdered because of his religion. Abu Nidal was in
Baghdad, as was his organization."

The period of Klinghoffer's murder in 1985 on the
Achille Lauro by Abu Abbas, in fact, coincided with
the period of U.S. courtship of Saddam, marked by the
celebrated visits of Donald Rumsfeld, then Middle East
envoy. The United States actively collaborated with
Iraq in intelligence exchanges and materially
supported Saddam in his decade-long war with Iran
(which ended in 1988), including authorizing the sale
of biological agents for Saddam's laboratories, a
diversification of his WMD capability.

The reason was not out of idealism but necessity:
the threat of an expansive, Iranian-controlled Shiite
fundamentalism to the entire Gulf.

The policy of courting Saddam continued until his
invasion of Kuwait. But the policy of realpolitik
prevailed when U.S. forces held back from capturing
Baghdad for larger geostrategic reasons. The first
Bush administration grasped that in potential future
wars after the Cold War, the United States required ad
hoc coalitions to share the military burden and
financial cost. Going to Baghdad would have violated
the U.N.-sanctioning resolution that gave legitimacy
to the first Gulf War as well as created a nightmare
of "Lebanonization," as then-Secretary of State James
Baker called it.

Realism prevailed; Saddam's power was subdued and
drastically reduced. It was the greatest
accomplishment of the first President Bush. When he
honored the U.N. resolution, the credibility of the
United States in the region was enormously enhanced,
enabling serious movement on the languishing Middle
East peace process. Now the second President Bush has
undone the foundation of his father's work, which was
built upon by President Clinton.

The success of Bush's campaign depends on the
containment of any contrary perception of reality. He
must evade, deny and suppress it. His true opponent is
not his Democratic foe - called unpatriotic and the
candidate of al-Qaida by the vice president - but
events. Bush's latest vision is his shield against
them. He invokes the power of positive thinking, as
taught by Emile Coue, guru of cheerful auto-suggestion
in the giddy 1920s, before the crash, who urged mental
improvement through the constant repetition of "Every
day in every way I am getting better and better."

It was during this era of illusion that T.S. Eliot
wrote "The Hollow Men": Between the idea / And the
reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the
Shadow."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior
advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The
Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the
Guardian of London.


http://www.iht.com/articles/540149.html

Pentagon lifts block on voter site
Jennifer Joan Lee/IHT IHT
Thursday, September 23, 2004

PARIS The U.S. Defense Department changed its
explanation Wednesday for problems faced by certain
overseas Americans attempting to access the government
Web site for voters abroad, saying that an Internet
security block imposed several years ago had been left
in place inadvertently.

The block, which had prevented some U.S. citizens
abroad from accessing www.fvap.gov, the site of the
Federal Voting Assistance Program, as the Nov. 2
election nears, has now been lifted, a Pentagon
spokesman said.

Tim Madden, spokesman for the Defense Department task
force that oversees the Pentagon's computer networks,
declined to specify the reason for the block.

Earlier, a Pentagon official indicated that the block
had been imposed to thwart hackers, but Madden would
not comment on this.

He insisted, however, that the Pentagon had not been
not blocking the Federal Voting Assistance Program's
site.

Earlier Wednesday, three members of Congress wrote to
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that the
block could result in "the potential
disenfranchisement of millions of overseas Americans"
and urging him to restore access to the site.

News that access to the voting assistance site was
restricted, first reported in the International Herald
Tribune on Monday, infuriated both Democrats and
Republicans.

Both parties want to see a maximum number of voters
abroad register in time to vote in November.

"We've sent a man to the moon, so we should also be
able to safeguard our voter assistance Web sites
without disenfranchising patriotic, tax-paying,
law-abiding Americans," said Representative Carolyn
Maloney, Democrat of New York, one of the three who
wrote to Rumsfeld.

The chairman of Republicans Abroad Europe, Robert
Pingeon, said he did not believe the block had been
politically motivated.

"But I certainly think they could have done a better
job explaining the situation," he said. "The blocks
may have a legitimate reason, but they also complicate
the lives of people trying to register to vote."

According to overseas voter advocates, the block
prevented users of major Internet service providers in
many countries, including Australia, Britain Canada,
China, Czech Republic, France India and Japan, from
accessing www.fvap.gov.

Some users of Wanadoo.fr, a French provider that had
been blocked, said Wednesday that they were now able
to access the site.

Madden, the spokesman for the Pentagon's Joint Task
Force-Global Network Operations, said that the block
had been left in place "inadvertently."

"That block should not have continued past a certain
date," he said. "For technical reasons, that block was
not lifted when it was directed to be lifted." He
declined to elaborate.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program, which was set
up to help American servicemen and civilians overseas
take part in elections, is under the aegis of the
Defense Department.

Madden said the Pentagon computer task force employed
a strategy known as "defense in depth" - "layering
network defenses so that they complement, support and
validate each other.

Blocks, firewalls and antivirus software are only some
of those measures."

He said that "one device within the Department of
Defense" had maintained the block that prevented
certain Internet service providers from accessing the
voting assistance site.

The department's Global Information Grid involves
13,000 different networks and 3.5 million individual
computers, he said.

Madden declined to say when the block was originally
imposed. But Maloney, the Democratic congresswoman,
indicated that it may have been in place when the last
presidential election took place, in 2000.

"It's my understanding that this was a problem four
years ago, they knew it was a problem, and they still
haven't managed to fix it so that Americans overseas
can access the Web site," she said, before the
Pentagon indicated that the block had been lifted.

International Herald Tribune

Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune |
www.iht.com

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 40 Days to Go -- Vote Fraud in Ohio, Draft, US military families against Bush, Contra drug figure smears JFK, 9/11

At least three more US soldiers died in Iraq today.
For what? The neo-con wet dream of a Three Stooges
Reich...There are only 40 days to go until the
national referendum on the CHARACTER, COMPETENCE and
CREDIBILITY of the _resident and the VICE
_resident...Do not be deceived by the US regimestream
news media's cooked polls and craven
propapunditgandists. There is an Electoral Uprising
coming in November 2004. The US regimestream news
media, at least until this point, has, in large part,
been a full partner along with the Bush Cabal and its
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerluy-known-as-the-Republican-Party
in a Triad of shared special interest (e.g. oil,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) Here
are five very important news items from Ohio, West
Virginia and Fraudida. They should dominate the air
waves and demand headlines above the fold. But they
won't. Please read them and share them with others.
Please vote and encourage others to vote. Please
remember that the US regimestream news media does not
want to inform you about this presidential campaign,
it wants to DISinform you...

Bob Fitrakis, Free Press: Whether Kerry or Bush wins
in Ohio may well depend on how many voters are
disenfranchised in the state’s three largest counties:
Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton. Respectively these
three counties contain the Democratically rich big
three-C cities Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. The
voter rolls are under unprecedented scrutiny and
irregularities abound.
In Hamilton County, home of the Republican Taft family
dynasty, the Board of Elections moved some 105,000
voters from active to inactive status within the last
four years. By contrast, Franklin County has not moved
any voters to inactive status, and doesn’t intend to
until 2006 because a computer transfer glitch wiped
out federal election voting histories. Matthew
Damschroder, Director of the Franklin County Board of
Elections, told the Free Press that under law a county
“may” cancel a person’s voter registration if that
person hasn’t voted in the last two federal elections.
But, the counties are not required to do so.

Charleston Gazette Editorial: Alarm is spreading that
President Bush may seek a military draft, or mobilize
more of the National Guard and Army Reserve, to obtain
enough combat troops to wage his bogged-down Iraq war.

Two bills pending in Congress would launch a new
draft for all young Americans ages 18 to 26, both male
and female, with no college exemption. Also, a new
border agreement with Canada is designed to prevent
young Americans from fleeing northward to elude the
draft.
When Democratic vice presidential nominee John
Edwards spoke in Parkersburg last week, he vowed:
“There will be no draft when John Kerry is president.”
His declaration drew a standing ovation from the
crowd...
Amid all this wrangling, it’s overwhelmingly clear
that Bush’s war is draining America of thousands of
young people and billions of dollars — and the nation
is forced to meet both needs.
Tragically, the war is a waste. There never was a
necessity for it. Bush’s far-right political clique
planned to attack Iraq, even before he attained the
White House. The 9/11 terrorist strike provided a
“cover” — a surge of patriotism that Bush manipulated
into justification for war against Iraq. All his
pretexts for the invasion turned out to be false.

Agence France Press: Democratic challenger John Kerry
(news - web sites) has gained new foot soldiers in his
battle to unseat Republican President George W. Bush
(news - web sites): eight mothers and wives of US
soldiers who will campaign for Kerry in seven
battleground states.
The women, whose husbands or sons have been deployed
in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web
sites), will march across 5,600 kilometers (3,480
miles) in less than 10 days, starting off in Wisconsin
and West Virginia on Tuesday, six weeks before the
November 2 election.

Bob Norman, Miami New Times: It's a familiar -- and
absolutely untenable -- refrain from the Reagan and
Bush administrations that continues to this day: The
narcotics ties to the contra operation were a
politically motivated myth. Vice President Dick
Cheney, who was then a congressman, played a key role
in the disinformation campaign. He led the effort to
squelch various Iran-contra investigations, especially
when it came to drug allegations. And George W. Bush?
Well, he seems to have no qualms about Iran-contra,
since he has hired several of the scandal's central
figures -- including Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, and
John Negroponte -- to serve under him.
Though it has been largely ignored, this historic
battle between Kerry and the Bush family not only
provides a revelatory subtext to this election but
also indicates how much the two men running for
president dislike each other.
History clearly favors Kerry's side -- and he may even
have been right about that $10 million in cartel
money. Rodriguez, at the time, was the government's
key man in El Salvador, where he was conducting
counterinsurgency missions against leftist rebels. But
his main job was the contra operation. He claims to
this day that he wasn't paid for his efforts, a
contention about as shaky as H.W.'s famous excuse that
he was "out of the loop" on the contra affair.
Rodriguez also worked in Honduras, where the contras
trained in the mountains, and at another shipping
point in Costa Rica (which has been repeatedly tied to
the drug trade).

Chris Gardner, University of South Florida Oracle: Former CIA agent Ray McGovern went over what he considers the failures of the intelligence community and current administration over the past few years. He
has 27 years of experience as a CIA analyst to draw
upon and has dealt with every administration from
Kennedy to Bush Sr...
He also criticized the 9/11 Commission's final report,
saying the committee was comprised of political
extremists who couldn't reach a consensus.
"It wasn't a bipartisan commission; it was more like a
bipolar commission," McGovern said. "To say that no
one could prevent 9/11 was a bold-faced lie. It
basically let the president and everyone responsible
off the hook."
He went on to talk about the faulty intelligence
attorney general John Ashcroft used when he announced
that terrorist attacks may occur before or around
election time, saying that elections might have to be
postponed if the United States is attacked.
"There might be a real or staged terrorist attack in
order to postpone the elections," McGovern said. "This
might seem outlandish; I hope it is."
He mentioned how the Bush administration wanted to
involve the country with the war in Iraq for certain
reasons other than fear of weapons of mass
destruction, which was just a more media-friendly
explanation for the war.
"I have initials for why I think we went to war in
Iraq," McGovern said. "O.I.L. O-I-L, O is for oil, I
is for Israel and L is for logistics, as in when we
have Iraq we have a foothold and a number of bases
strategically placed in the Middle East so we can be
in control over there and also to protect Israel."
Next he brought up civil liberties in the United
States and how they have declined in the past few
years.
"I used to say when I was a kid growing up when
someone told me not to do something, 'It's a free
country,'" McGovern said. "I ask you to think about it
now."

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/953

Bob Fitrakis

Presidential Election at Risk: Ohio's electoral system
riddled with flaws
September 20, 2004

Whether Kerry or Bush wins in Ohio may well depend on
how many voters are disenfranchised in the state’s
three largest counties: Cuyahoga, Franklin and
Hamilton. Respectively these three counties contain
the Democratically rich big three-C cities Cleveland,
Columbus and Cincinnati. The voter rolls are under
unprecedented scrutiny and irregularities abound.

In Hamilton County, home of the Republican Taft family
dynasty, the Board of Elections moved some 105,000
voters from active to inactive status within the last
four years. By contrast, Franklin County has not moved
any voters to inactive status, and doesn’t intend to
until 2006 because a computer transfer glitch wiped
out federal election voting histories. Matthew
Damschroder, Director of the Franklin County Board of
Elections, told the Free Press that under law a county
“may” cancel a person’s voter registration if that
person hasn’t voted in the last two federal elections.
But, the counties are not required to do so.

“It’s a ‘may’ not a ‘shall.’ It’s up to the discretion
of the county Board of Elections. We have chosen not
to participate in widespread cancellations during this
presidential election,” Damschroder said. He concedes
that many Cincinnati voters may be unaware that their
voting status had been canceled, a surprising
admission from a conservative Republican. Unless these
Hamilton County voters re-register by October 4, many
in Cincinnati’s urban center, they will show up at the
polls and be barred from voting.

The Prison Reform Advocacy Center in Cincinnati issued
an August report entitled, “The Disenfranchisement of
the Re-Enfranchised” documenting in detail widespread
confusion over the voting rights of former felons.
Hamilton County again stands out as the key county for
eliminating eligible voters. The study found that the
Hamilton County Board of Elections erroneously
“requires felons who attempt to register by mail to
attach ‘documentation restoring voting rights.’”
Hamilton County practices are at odds with Ohio law,
which allows felons to vote as long they are not
incarcerated or in prison, even if they are on parole
or in a halfway house. There are more than 34,000
ex-offenders in Ohio who are currently under some form
of corrections supervision who are eligible to vote,
and many don’t know it. Political science studies
indicate that the vast majority of former felons tend
to vote Democratic.

Hamilton was one of twenty counties where Board of
Elections officials incorrectly stated the law in the
survey. The Prison Reform Advocacy Center report found
that only 44% of formerly incarcerated individuals in
the Cincinnati Adult Parole Authority Office knew they
had the right to vote. In Cleveland the rate was 77%
and in Columbus 71% knew they could register to vote.

Following the survey, Damschroder sent out 3500
letters to former felons in the Franklin County
stating, “The purpose of this letter is to notify you
that your voter registration status has been canceled
due to your conviction and incarceration, …” He
included people charged with felonies dating back to
the year 1998. Damschroder told the Free Press that he
normally only sends out between 2-300 such letters a
year, but he was following directives from Ohio’s
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Why Blackwell would issue such directives remains a
mystery.

Damschroder admitted that there were some problems
with the wording of the letter, and he never intended
to cancel re-registered or confused former felons. He
claims the letter was merely to advise the felons that
the voter registration deadline is October 4, 2004.

One registered voter who received Damschroder’s letter
was Mark A. Woodford, who has never been convicted of
a felony. Woodford was convicted of a misdemeanor in
1998. He voted Republican that November. In 2003,
while living in the conservative haven of Westerville,
Ohio, home of former Republican Congressman John
Kasich, Woodford cast his ballot for Republican
candidates. This year for the first time, Woodford
voted in the Democratic primary. He told the Free
Press, “I thought at the time, I wonder if they’ll
cancel my registration because I’m a Democrat now.”

Damschroder offers another explanation: “Back in the
late nineties when Virginia Barney was Clerk of the
Common Pleas Court, she forwarded felony arrest
records instead of just the convictions. So if
somebody plead to a misdemeanor often they were
incorrectly entered as a felon.”

Damschroder told the Free Press that Woodford, now
legally registered at a new Columbus address and no
longer residing at his parent’s address where he was
canceled, was “incorrectly sent a letter because
computers at the Board of Elections didn’t merge two
files.”

In Ohio’s dead even presidential election, something
as small as computer glitches at the major
metropolitan area’s Board of Elections could easily
swing the vote. To solve bureaucratic error and
computer mistakes, Ohio uses the provisional ballot.
Provisional ballots allow voters who are improperly
barred from voting due to a registration error, to
cast their ballot on Election Day while the Board of
Elections straightens out the problem.

On September 14, Project Vote announced that 150,555
new low-income and minority voters were registered in
Ohio. Many of these likely Democratic voters are in
the Cleveland area and an ongoing battle has developed
between Democratic Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones
and the politically ambitious Blackwell, both African
American. The same week Ohio newspapers headlined the
fact that the Ohio economy was the worst in the
nation, having lost nearly 12,000 jobs in August
alone.

Following Project Vote’s announcement, Blackwell
issued statewide directives severely restricting the
use of provisional ballots and instructing precinct
voting judges to give state or federal provisional
ballots only to persons who appear to have a voting
residence in that particular precinct. This narrow use
of the provisional ballot with over 150,000 new
minority and low-income voters, may well swing Ohio’s
election results for Bush.

Rep. Tubbs Jones immediately attacked Blackwell’s
orders as an attempt “to seek to disenfranchise the
people of the state of Ohio.”

The Congresswoman points out that with the re-drawing
of the Congressional districts following the 2000
census and the Republican Party’s elimination over the
past few years of many inner city precincts, many
voters will be showing up at the wrong precinct.

She said that “provisional ballot is a mechanism that
was put in place to take individual discretion out of
the voting process. Poll workers should not be put in
the position to determine who votes and who does not
vote.” Rep. Tubbs Jones argues that Blackwell’s
directives are contrary to the spirit in which the
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was enacted and contrary
to the position that he previously took in the Ohio
primary.

In the 2000 Florida election, investigative reporter
Gregory Palast reported that an estimated 600,000
voters who registered by the deadline were not
properly processed. An additional 58,000 non-felons
were barred from voting incorrectly because they had a
same or similar name as a felon or the same date of
birth as a felon. Gore supporters point out that these
registration errors disproportionately occur in
heavily Democratic urban areas.

The nonpartisan Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections
(CASE) posted a letter to its website addressed to
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell noting “with
great concern” Blackwell’s recent actions “regarding
the interpretation of provisional ballots.” The CASE
letter cites a recent Cleveland study indicating “that
up to 35,000 Ohio voters could be turned away from the
polls on November 2 because of registration errors.”
That same study found “that more than 1 in 20
registrations and changes of address were compromised
because of either clerical or voter errors.” This 5%
error factor could be lowered to less than 1% with
proper training of election officials.

CASE is demanding that the Secretary of State send out
new directives telling all newly registered voters and
re-registers that: “If you recently registered, filed
a name change or a change of address and you have NOT
yet received a confirmation notice in the mail, you
must act immediately. Call your County Board of
Elections to check that you are registered. If not,
you must re-register by October 4 at your local
library or Board of Elections office.”

The CASE letter calls any attempt to disenfranchise
Ohio voters “at the last minute … unethical and
cruel.”

With numerous voter registration organizations
canvassing Ohio and growing concern of voting
irregularities, various plans for poll watching are
emerging.

But Damschroder points out that Ohio’s law on poll
watching is “archaic,” with all challenges over voter
eligibility being decided on the spot at the local
voting precinct by election officials hired for
Election Day only. The only people allowed to
challenge under Ohio law are those certified eleven
days in advance by political parties or a slate of
five candidates. The certified challengers must
produce an ID and swear an oath, according to
Damschroder. Add to this the fact that the HAVA bill
allows for challenges to first-time voters to produce
state photo IDs.

The Free Press has learned that Franklin County
election officials are considering a wide contingent
of actions including arrests if the certified election
challengers attempt to challenge all new voters and
hold up the voting process. The election may rest on
how many Democratic election challengers show up to
advocate for urban center new voters versus how many
Republican election challengers show up to question
new voters.

The former state President of League of Women’s Voters
Sue Shidaker wrote the Secretary of State’s office
concerned that many newly registered voters in
Cuyahoga County have not as yet received their voter
registration cards. “…They are re-registering and
trying numerous phone calls to get help – taped
messages and no live help in many instances. …They’re
just beginning to learn how to be responsible, voting
citizens and need our help, not our hindrance,”
Shidaker said.

With Bush and Kerry in a virtual dead heat in Ohio,
and no Republican candidate having won the presidency
without winning Ohio’s electoral votes, the
disenfranchisement of more than 177,500 new voters,
ex-felons, canceled inactive voters and other victims
of bureaucratic bungling and election irregularities
may well decide who governs our nation, and the fate
of the Earth.

--
Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press
(freepress.org), a political science professor, an
attorney, and co-author with Harvey Wasserman of
George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace. He served
as an international observer for the national
elections in El Salvador.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092304Y.shtml

Draft?
The Charleston Gazette

Wednesday 22 September 2004

Bush’s war needs troops.
Alarm is spreading that President Bush may seek a
military draft, or mobilize more of the National Guard
and Army Reserve, to obtain enough combat troops to
wage his bogged-down Iraq war.

Two bills pending in Congress would launch a new
draft for all young Americans ages 18 to 26, both male
and female, with no college exemption. Also, a new
border agreement with Canada is designed to prevent
young Americans from fleeing northward to elude the
draft.

When Democratic vice presidential nominee John
Edwards spoke in Parkersburg last week, he vowed:
“There will be no draft when John Kerry is president.”
His declaration drew a standing ovation from the
crowd.

Meanwhile, President Bush, campaigning in
Missouri, promised that there will be no draft. He
said improving military pay, housing and medical care
will attract enough recruits to supply the needed
fighting forces.

However, Bush plans a sneaky “backdoor draft,”
Democrats Kerry and Edwards allege. Speaking Friday in
Albuquerque, Kerry said Bush secretly intends a major
Guard and Reserve mobilization just after the Nov. 2
election. Kerry charged:

“He won’t tell us what congressional leaders are
now saying: that this administration is planning yet
another substantial call-up of reservists and Guard
units immediately after the election. Hide it from the
people, then make the move.”

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a Marine veteran of
Vietnam, said Pentagon insiders told him of the
mobilization plan. A White House spokesman ridiculed
the allegation.

Amid all this wrangling, it’s overwhelmingly clear
that Bush’s war is draining America of thousands of
young people and billions of dollars — and the nation
is forced to meet both needs.

Tragically, the war is a waste. There never was a
necessity for it. Bush’s far-right political clique
planned to attack Iraq, even before he attained the
White House. The 9/11 terrorist strike provided a
“cover” — a surge of patriotism that Bush manipulated
into justification for war against Iraq. All his
pretexts for the invasion turned out to be false.

Although he declared “Mission Accomplished” last
year, the fighting grows constantly uglier and more
expensive. More than 1,000 young Americans have been
killed. Bush needs more and more replacements.

Before the Nov. 2 election, he should tell the
American people candidly how many more young soldiers
he plans to order into combat — and how he will obtain
them.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040920/ts_alt_afp/us_vote_iraq_military&cid=1506&ncid=1473

Group of US soldiers' wives to campaign for Kerry

Mon Sep 20, 4:52 PM ET Add U.S. National - AFP to My
Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democratic challenger John Kerry
(news - web sites) has gained new foot soldiers in his
battle to unseat Republican President George W. Bush
(news - web sites): eight mothers and wives of US
soldiers who will campaign for Kerry in seven
battleground states.

The women, whose husbands or sons have been deployed
in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web
sites), will march across 5,600 kilometers (3,480
miles) in less than 10 days, starting off in Wisconsin
and West Virginia on Tuesday, six weeks before the
November 2 election.

Laura Bertsch's husband just returned from Iraq, but
the 27-year-old recent university graduate will go on
her own mission before joining her husband in Ohio.

"He deserves the best leader," Bertsch told a news
conference in Washington.

Pat Heineman's 20-year-old son, her only child, had to
interrupt his university studies to spend one year in
Afghanistan.

"He joined the reserves to pay for college but also to
serve his country," the 49-year-old graphic designer
from Virginia said. "I trust John Kerry to take care
of our troops, I trust his judgment and his
integrity."

Nita Martin, a registered Republican from the
voter-rich state of Pennsylvania, will cross party
lines and vote for Kerry in November. Her two sons
were deployed to Iraq.

"My fear is there is no plan to complete the mission"
in Iraq, Martin said. "He got us in a quagmire."

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/issues/2004-09-23/metro.html

Contra Campaign
John Kerry once took a shot at Miami's Felix Rodriguez
for his part in the Iran-contra scandal. Now the Bush
family friend is shooting back.
BY BOB NORMAN
bob.norman@newtimesbpb.com

The life of Felix I. Rodriguez provides a tour through
the dark heart of America. From the Bay of Pigs fiasco
to Vietnam to the El Salvador death squads to the
Iran-contra scandal, the Cuban exile and
self-described "CIA hero" was there. His most famous
assassination mission came in 1967, when he led the
Bolivian army group that captured and summarily
executed leftist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
He's worked closely with right-wing terrorists, and
some of his associates were involved in the Watergate
break-in. Given his background, it's not surprising
his name has surfaced in numerous JFK conspiracy
theories as well.
Now retired in North Miami-Dade near Barry University,
Rodriguez, who says his CIA career was always fueled
by a hope to unseat Fidel Castro, also has special
relationships with both of this year's presidential
candidates. George W. Bush sends him a White House
Christmas card each year. The president's father
counts Rodriguez as an old friend; Bush Sr. worked
with him during the mid-Eighties, when Rodriguez ran
the operation to arm the Nicaraguan contras for the
Reagan administration.

Democratic nominee John Kerry, though, isn't so cozy
with Rodriguez. In 1986 the then-rookie senator formed
a committee to investigate Iran-contra. The so-called
Kerry Committee alleged that Rodriguez had helped
steer $10 million from the notorious Medellín cocaine
cartel to the contras. The committee concluded that
trafficking was rampant in the rebels' effort.

Rodriguez ,who now leads Brigade 2506, the Bayh of
Pigs veterans' group squared off with Kerry during a
closed congressional hearing. He told the
Massachusetts senator point-blank that the allegation
was a damned lie and, for good measure, added that he
had no respect for him.

That was some seventeen years ago, but Rodriguez's
hatred for Kerry -- and his closeness to the Bush
family -- has driven Rodriguez from the CIA shadows
onto the open political stage. He's railed against
Kerry on Cuban radio and in the October edition of
Soldier of Fortune magazine. He also jumped at the
chance to join the Vietnam Veterans for Truth, an
anti-Kerry group that invited Rodriguez to speak at a
nationally televised September 12 rally at the
Capitol.

At the sparsely attended event, the storied spook
began with some words on Vietnam, where he flew
assassination and assault missions (and flights with
CIA-backed Air America, which has been tied to the
heroin trade). He portrayed his time there as if he
were dropping food and medicine from his combat
helicopter. "I never saw any atrocities that Senator
Kerry claims we did in Vietnam," Rodriguez told the
gathering in his thick accent. "We helped the
Vietnamese people."

Then he turned his attention to Central America,
referring to Kerry's accusation and noting that his
nemesis ultimately backed off the allegation against
him. "That was one more lie from Senator Kerry," he
triumphantly said.

But who, really, is lying? Rodriguez maintains he saw
no hint of drug trafficking while he was helping to
run the contra operation in El Salvador and Honduras.
"I never saw any indication of that at all -- it was
all a great fabrication," he said during a telephone
interview last week. "That all came from Senator
Kerry's committee. It came from those people that
didn't want to help the Nicaraguan resistance, people
like Kerry, who wanted to hurt Vice President Bush,
who was going to win the presidency."

It's a familiar -- and absolutely untenable -- refrain
from the Reagan and Bush administrations that
continues to this day: The narcotics ties to the
contra operation were a politically motivated myth.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who was then a
congressman, played a key role in the disinformation
campaign. He led the effort to squelch various
Iran-contra investigations, especially when it came to
drug allegations. And George W. Bush? Well, he seems
to have no qualms about Iran-contra, since he has
hired several of the scandal's central figures --
including Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, and John
Negroponte -- to serve under him.

Though it has been largely ignored, this historic
battle between Kerry and the Bush family not only
provides a revelatory subtext to this election but
also indicates how much the two men running for
president dislike each other.

History clearly favors Kerry's side -- and he may even
have been right about that $10 million in cartel
money. Rodriguez, at the time, was the government's
key man in El Salvador, where he was conducting
counterinsurgency missions against leftist rebels. But
his main job was the contra operation. He claims to
this day that he wasn't paid for his efforts, a
contention about as shaky as H.W.'s famous excuse that
he was "out of the loop" on the contra affair.
Rodriguez also worked in Honduras, where the contras
trained in the mountains, and at another shipping
point in Costa Rica (which has been repeatedly tied to
the drug trade).

The allegation against Rodriguez came from Medellín
cartel accountant and convicted money launderer Ramon
Milian-Rodriguez, who met with Felix Rodriguez in 1985
while he was out on bail on federal drug charges in
Miami. Milian told the Kerry Committee that Rodriguez
solicited the cash from the cartel and that it was
later channeled to the contras. The cartel, he said,
hoped the contribution would bring it "good will" from
U.S. authorities. At the same time he was implicating
the CIA operative, Milian was adamant that Felix
Rodriguez had the American government's interest at
heart and never kept a dime of the proceeds.

Rodriguez admits the meeting took place but insists it
concerned only an offer from the money launderer to
help set up the Nicaraguan government in a cocaine
sting. In 1988 Milian failed a lie detector test on
the subject, and Kerry retracted the allegation.

Rodriguez then had every right to gloat, but in 1991
the accusation resurfaced. Medellín cartel cofounder
Carlos Lehder, while testifying for the U.S.
government against deposed Panamanian President Manuel
Noriega, admitted that his organization had indeed
given $10 million to the contras. Lehder, then a
federal witness working with U.S. prosecutors, had no
known motive to lie.

In light of that information, I asked Rodriguez if he
was absolutely sure the contra operation didn't
receive the drug money. "I don't think it did," he
said, losing his resolute tone. "They always say the
same shit. Where did the money go to if they did?
Every single penny that went into the contras was
accounted for."

While it's open to debate just how meticulously the
contras kept their ledgers, there have been other
indications that Rodriguez's operation may have been
involved in drug smuggling. In 1984 Rodriguez's
business partner, international arms dealer Gerald
Latchinian, was arrested in a conspiracy to smuggle
$10 million in cocaine to finance a plot to
assassinate Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova.
(He was later convicted.) While Rodriguez was never
tied to the crime, Latchinian argued that it was
connected to the CIA.

Rodriguez's agency-trained compatriot, fellow Cuban
exile Frank Castro, was deeply involved in both drug
smuggling and the contra effort, according to the CIA.
And in 1989 a drug pilot named Mike Tolliver alleged
on a CBS news show that he ran guns to Honduras for
the contras and that, while there, his plane was
loaded with marijuana for a return flight to Homestead
Air Force Base. He identified Rodriguez as his boss.

Perhaps the most damning allegation against Rodriguez
comes from former Drug Enforcement Administration
agent Celerino Castillo, a decorated Vietnam vet who
was stationed in Central America during Iran-contra.
While working for the DEA, Castillo says he became
aware of drug trafficking at San Salvador's Ilopango
air base, where Rodriguez was organizing the contra
supply effort. The DEA agent has testified in Congress
and recounted in his well-documented book,
Powderburns, how the airport hangars controlled by
Rodriguez and other government operatives were used by
drug traffickers. "The only reason Felix wasn't
arrested is because he knew where all the bodies were
buried in the Iran-contra operation," says Castillo,
who is now a substitute high school teacher living in
Texas.

Castillo recounts that in 1986 he met then-Vice
President Bush at an ambassador's party in Guatemala.
"I told him there was something funny going on at
Ilopango," he says. "And he just smiled and walked
away."

While Bush Sr. avoided the truth about Iran-contra,
Castillo has worked for years to expose it and, in so
doing, has researched Rodriguez's life -- from Cuba to
Vietnam to El Salvador. He's come to the conclusion
that the Cuban exile is no hero. "He's always been a
terrorist, just like Osama bin Laden and all the
terrorists we've made in the past," he says.

Unflinching words, but Rodriguez has indeed been tied
to known terrorists, most notably Luis Posada
Carriles, a CIA-trained operative who worked closely
with Rodriguez after his 1985 escape from a Venezuelan
jail, where he served nine years for his role in the
downing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 civilians.
Rodriguez admits he worked with Carriles on the contra
effort but says his friend wasn't convicted of
anything. He proffers that Fidel Castro may have blown
up the jetliner to "get rid of" Cuban military
officials on board who were plotting against the
dictator.

But that far-fetched theory doesn't explain the Havana
hotel bombings that Carriles has acknowledged
committing, or his recent incarceration in Panama for
planning to blow up Castro at a political conference
(his recent pardon made international news).

"I don't endorse or support bombings," Rodriguez says.
"I believe it kills innocent people, and that is not
the way to do it. That will backfire."

Rodriguez says he doesn't know why Castillo has made
the allegations against him. He insists he watched
every contra supply plane land, refuel, and take off
from Ilopango and that there were never any drugs
onboard. "What I understand from the guys I asked at
DEA was that they fired [Castillo] for making all
kinds of allegations about Ilopango," he says. "He was
fired for incompetence. If any of his allegations had
a grain of truth, the Iran-contra committee would have
brought it up. They looked at everything with a
toothbrush."

(Castillo actually retired from the DEA -- under
pressure from higher-ups regarding his whistleblowing
-- in 1992. He collects a pension from the agency.)

The Iran-contra Committee, which carried more weight
than Kerry's subcommittee, was, in reality, famously
unconcerned with the narcotics allegations.
Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, who conducted the
criminal investigation, never even interviewed
Castillo. Later, after reporter Gary Webb's
well-researched 1996 "Dark Alliance" series in the San
Jose Mercury News showed clear ties between the
contras and the Los Angeles crack trade, a Justice
Department investigation indeed found the "seed of
truth" in Castillo's allegations but didn't bother to
make a real case.

As for the media, they can only look back at the time
with shame. The press -- led by the New York Times,
Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times -- tried to
discredit Webb. Though the papers dutifully reported
many of the salient facts, they never conveyed the big
picture and, in the end, let the perpetrators of one
of the greatest scandals in American history go
largely unpunished.

Other than Soldier of Fortune, only the conservative
Website NewsMax.comhas brought up Iran-contra in the
context of the presidential election. In a July
article, the Website portrayed Rodriguez as a "wholly
innocent freedom loving patriot" who was blindsided by
the unscrupulous, CIA-hating senator.

It may be just the beginning. Rodriguez says he'll
vigorously oppose Kerry until election day, continuing
his work with the anti-Kerry veterans' group, which is
ideologically aligned with the similarly named Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth, and exposing the terrible
injustice done to him by the Democratic nominee. "He
will tell you one thing, then he will tell you another
thing," Rodriguez says of Kerry. "He is a complete
liar."

We all know that Rodriguez can fight with the best of
them, but what about Kerry? His Florida campaign
communications director, Matt Miller, didn't respond
to the question. Former DEA man Castillo, who counts
his vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 as one of the worst
mistakes of his life, isn't sure. And he believes Bush
II -- who has already led the country into a
nightmarish war using false pretenses -- will cook
scandals to make Iran-contra pale in comparison if
elected to a second term.

"They say Kerry is a liar, that he lied about Felix
Rodriguez, who is a hero and patriot," Castillo says.
"Bush and Cheney know how to fight. Cheney says, öGo
fuck yourself.' I am so upset because Kerry won't take
the gloves off. It's like he's idling. If he doesn't
fight now, will he ever fight for us?"

miaminewtimes.com | originally published: September
23, 2004

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0922-01.htm

Published on Wednesday, September 22, 2004 by the
University of South Florida Oracle
Former CIA Agent Says Bush to Blame for 9/11
by Chris Gardner

Former CIA agent Ray McGovern went over what he
considers the failures of the intelligence community
and current administration over the past few years. He
has 27 years of experience as a CIA analyst to draw
upon and has dealt with every administration from
Kennedy to Bush Sr.

"It's difficult for people to learn the truth about
things like Iraq," said McGovern, a member of the
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS),
which is comprised of more than 40 former employees of
agencies such as the CIA, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research, Army Intelligence, the FBI and the
National Security Agency.

Ray McGovern, who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst,
tells an audience of about 50 at the USF Library on
Tuesday that preventable intelligence failures and
questionable priorities led to the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks. (Oracle Photo/Victor Griley)

"We have hundreds of years worth of experience in
government service and intelligence to draw on so we
feel a civic responsibility to do our best to spread
as much truth as we can this fall," McGovern said.

He began his lecture by describing the CIA. He
explained that the agency is supposed to be the one
place in government with no political agenda, and
could be very disastrous if it obtains one.

McGovern told a story about CIA officials who gave
false information about enemy troop numbers in Vietnam
to President Johnson. The lie led to a surprise of
U.S. forces by the Tet Offensive in 1968. In this war
of attrition, the agency wanted to make it look like
the United States was doing better than it really was,
McGovern said.

"Picture the Vietnam Memorial in Washington; it's a
big 'V' shape. Now picture it with just one side of
the 'V'. It might have been that way if some people
had told the truth," McGovern said.

He also criticized the 9/11 Commission's final report,
saying the committee was comprised of political
extremists who couldn't reach a consensus.

"It wasn't a bipartisan commission; it was more like a
bipolar commission," McGovern said. "To say that no
one could prevent 9/11 was a bold-faced lie. It
basically let the president and everyone responsible
off the hook."

He went on to talk about the faulty intelligence
attorney general John Ashcroft used when he announced
that terrorist attacks may occur before or around
election time, saying that elections might have to be
postponed if the United States is attacked.

"There might be a real or staged terrorist attack in
order to postpone the elections," McGovern said. "This
might seem outlandish; I hope it is."

He mentioned how the Bush administration wanted to
involve the country with the war in Iraq for certain
reasons other than fear of weapons of mass
destruction, which was just a more media-friendly
explanation for the war.

"I have initials for why I think we went to war in
Iraq," McGovern said. "O.I.L. O-I-L, O is for oil, I
is for Israel and L is for logistics, as in when we
have Iraq we have a foothold and a number of bases
strategically placed in the Middle East so we can be
in control over there and also to protect Israel."

Next he brought up civil liberties in the United
States and how they have declined in the past few
years.

"I used to say when I was a kid growing up when
someone told me not to do something, 'It's a free
country,'" McGovern said. "I ask you to think about it
now."

In the audience was Nahla al-Arian, wife of imprisoned
former professor Sami al-Arian. She explained to
McGovern how she and her husband came to America to be
free and described their current situation. Then she
asked him why the government would target Palestinian
activists.

His initial response was just, "I'm sorry," then he
paused to collect his thoughts and said that things
like that come all the way from the top down.

McGovern had a speaking engagement at the University
of Florida later in the afternoon, and will also be
lecturing at UCF soon on his and the VIPS's quest to
spread the truth.

"No one has a corner on the truth. We don't have a
corner on the truth, but it is certain that Fox News
does not," McGovern said. "That most people get their
'news' from Fox News is extremely troubling."

Copyright © 2004 University of South Florida

###

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 41 Days to Go -- Bush bounce evaporates, US military on Fahrenheit 911, Homeland Insecurity, CBS Hit was Dirty Tricks Op, Is McCain setting Bush up?

There are 41 days to go until the national referendum
on the CHARACTER, CREDIBILITY and COMPETENCE of the
_resident and the VICE _resident. They are presiding
over the final days of a failed regime. The Bush
abomination's economic policy has squandered an
unprecendented surplus and supplanted it with an
unprecedented budget deficit. The current issue of
National Geographic is devoted to the very REAL and
DEVASTATING impact of Global Warming. We have lost
four years we could not afford to lose in coming to
grips with this and other burning national security
issues (e.g., nuclear proliferation and AIDS in
Africa) because of the Bush abomination's radical flat
earth ideology. The Bush abomination's foreign policy
has divided our friends, and united our enemies. The
odds on either the _resident or the
shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony-Blair winning
the Nobel Peace Prize are LITERALLY 10,000 to 1, the
same odds given for Milosevic, who is in jail at the
Hague and on trial for war crimes. Yesterday's the
_resident delivered his fourth and hopefully final
address to the UN General Assembly. It was a
chillingly quiet chamber. The *only* applause was for
the end of the speech. The _resident's address was
preceded by another diplomatic (i.e. veiled) but
principled and unmistakable denunciation of the Bush
abomination's illegal war in Iraq. Yesterday, in
Miami, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) thundered,
"The President really has no credibility at this
point." Yes. The Three Stooges Reich, which allowed
Osama bin Laden to escape in Tora Bora, has tried,
convicted and sentenced Martha Stewart to prison, and
diverted a plane, detained and denied entry to Cat
Steven...What would America look like after four more
years of the Bush abomination? What would the world
look like? Do not be deceived by the US regimestream
news media's cooked polls and craven
propapunditgandists. There is an Electoral Uprising
coming in November 2004. The US regimestream news
media, at least until this point, has, in large part,
been a full partner along with the Bush Cabal and its
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerluy-known-as-the-Republican-Party
in a Triad of shared special interest (e.g. oil,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) Here
are four very important news items. They should
dominate the air waves and demand headlines above the
fold. But they won't. Please read them and share them
with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote.
Please remember that the US regimestream news media
does not want to inform you about this presidential
campaign, it wants to DISinform you...

www.harrisinteractive.com: President Bush’s ratings
have slipped to 45 percent positive and 54 percent
negative, the lowest ratings of his presidency,
according to a new Harris Poll. These numbers compare
to 50 percent positive, 49 percent negative in June
and 48 percent positive, 51 percent negative in
August. This downward trend no doubt helps to explain
why the lead which the president enjoyed over Senator
Kerry immediately after the Republican convention in
New York – the so-called “convention bounce” – has now
disappeared.

Ann Scott Tyson, Christian Science Monitor: Washington
- Inside dusty, barricaded camps around Iraq, groups
of American troops in between missions are gathering
around screens to view an unlikely choice from the US
box office: "Fahrenheit 9-11," Michael Moore's
controversial documentary attacking the
commander-in-chief.
"Everyone's watching it," says a Marine corporal
at an outpost in Ramadi that is mortared by insurgents
daily. "It's shaping a lot of people's image of Bush."
The film's prevalence is one sign of a discernible
countercurrent among US troops in Iraq - those who
blame President Bush for entangling them in what they
see as a misguided war. Conventional wisdom holds that
the troops are staunchly pro-Bush, and many are. But
bitterness over long, dangerous deployments is
producing, at a minimum, pockets of support for
Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry, in part because
he's seen as likely to withdraw American forces from
Iraq more quickly.

Rick Hind and David Halperin, New York Times: While
President Bush continues to make terrorism and
domestic security the centerpiece of his campaign, he
has made little mention of one of the most urgent
threats to our safety: the risk that terrorists could
cause thousands, even millions, of deaths by
sabotaging one of the 15,000 industrial chemical
plants across the United States...
As The Wall Street Journal disclosed last month,
Homeland Security tried to reduce the threat of
catastrophic attack with the stroke of a pen. The
department announced that the number of plants that
threatened more than 1,000 people was actually only
4,391, and the number that endangered more than a
million people was not 123 but two.
Mr. Ridge has set in motion plans to install security
cameras at chemical plants in seven states - but not
in some high-threat states like Florida, Ohio and
Minnesota. Although the department visits plants and
offers advice, unlike the E.P.A., it doesn't have the
power to enforce security measures and relies instead
on voluntary efforts by the industry. Without
enforceable requirements, chemical firms will remain
reluctant to put sufficient safeguards in place, for
fear that their competitors will scrimp on security
and thus be able to undercut them on price.
Industry groups have lobbied intensely against the
Corzine legislation. While reluctant to invest in
plant safety, some of these companies and their
executives have found the resources to help pay for
the Republican campaign.
For the Bush administration, it seems, homeland
security is critical except when it conflicts with the
wishes of supporters who own chemical plants.

Terry McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee: “In
today’s New York Post, Roger Stone, who became
associated with political ‘dirty tricks’ while working
for Nixon, refused to deny that he was the source the
CBS documents.
“Will Ed Gillespie or the White House admit today what
they know about Mr. Stone’s relationship with these
forged documents? Will they unequivocally rule out Mr.
Stone’s involvement? Or for that matter, others with a
known history of dirty tricks, such as Karl Rove or
Ralph Reed?”

David Corn, The Nation: The McCain-Bush face-off has
been one of the most-watched soap operas in
Washington. Now it appears that when McCain hit the
campaign trail for Bush this summer, the conflict was
not ultimately resolved. A few more twists and turns
could come, and in this relationship, McCain at the
moment has more power. (Remember McCain's home state
of Arizona could end up being a key state on November
2.) With his recent comments, McCain has essentially
called out the administration and undermined Bush's
spin. If McCain continues to talk so candidly, he will
be serving as a wingman for Kerry. Is this calculation
or coincidence? Revenge being served out of a
deep-freezer? McCain likes to promote his reputation
as a straight-talker, but next time I see him in a
green room, I'm not going to bother asking him to
answer the question. Let him do what he's gotta
do--especially if it's personal. Anyway, who would
want to know the end of this melodrama before the
final page?

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=496

President Bush’s Ratings Slip to Lowest Level of His
Presidency, According to Latest Harris Poll
ROCHESTER, N.Y. – September 17, 2004 – President
Bush’s ratings have slipped to 45 percent positive and
54 percent negative, the lowest ratings of his
presidency, according to a new Harris Poll. These
numbers compare to 50 percent positive, 49 percent
negative in June and 48 percent positive, 51 percent
negative in August. This downward trend no doubt helps
to explain why the lead which the president enjoyed
over Senator Kerry immediately after the Republican
convention in New York – the so-called “convention
bounce” – has now disappeared.

This is one of the results of a Harris Poll of 1,018
U.S. adults surveyed by telephone by Harris
Interactive® between September 9 and 13, 2004.

This survey also tracked the ratings of other
government leaders and of both parties in Congress.
Some of the other findings are:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s ratings – 40 percent
positive, 54 percent negative – have not changed since
August.
Secretary of State Colin Powell’s ratings are down to
63 percent positive, 32 percent negative from 69
percent to 27 percent in August, but he is still by
far the most popular member of the administration.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s ratings are
down very slightly to 43 percent positive, 50 percent
negative. This is the first time his negative ratings
have touched 50 percent.
Attorney General John Ashcroft’s ratings – at 40
percent positive, 49 percent negative – are also down
slightly since August, and his negative ratings have
never been this high before.
The best news for Republicans in this poll is probably
the fact that Republicans in Congress continue to
receive somewhat better (or, more accurately, “less
bad”) ratings, 38 percent positive and 56 percent
negative, than the Democrats in Congress, 34 percent
positive, 60 percent negative.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092204C.shtml

Strident Minority: Anti-Bush U.S. Troops in Iraq
By Ann Scott Tyson
The Christian Science Monitor

Tuesday 21 September 2004

Though military personnel lean conservative, some
vocally support Kerry - or at least a strategy for
swift withdrawal.
Washington - Inside dusty, barricaded camps around
Iraq, groups of American troops in between missions
are gathering around screens to view an unlikely
choice from the US box office: "Fahrenheit 9-11,"
Michael Moore's controversial documentary attacking
the commander-in-chief.

"Everyone's watching it," says a Marine corporal
at an outpost in Ramadi that is mortared by insurgents
daily. "It's shaping a lot of people's image of Bush."

The film's prevalence is one sign of a discernible
countercurrent among US troops in Iraq - those who
blame President Bush for entangling them in what they
see as a misguided war. Conventional wisdom holds that
the troops are staunchly pro-Bush, and many are. But
bitterness over long, dangerous deployments is
producing, at a minimum, pockets of support for
Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry, in part because
he's seen as likely to withdraw American forces from
Iraq more quickly.

"[For] 9 out of 10 of the people I talk to, it
wouldn't matter who ran against Bush - they'd vote for
them," said a US soldier in the southern city of
Najaf, seeking out a reporter to make his views known.
"People are so fed up with Iraq, and fed up with
Bush."

With only three weeks until an Oct. 11 deadline
set for hundreds of thousands of US troops abroad to
mail in absentee ballots, this segment of the military
vote is important - symbolically, as a reflection on
Bush as a wartime commander, and politically, as
absentee ballots could end up tipping the balance in
closely contested states.

It is difficult to gauge the extent of
disaffection with Bush, which emerged in interviews in
June and July with ground forces in central, northern,
and southern Iraq. No scientific polls exist on the
political leanings of currently deployed troops,
military experts and officials say.

To be sure, broader surveys of US military
personnel and their spouses in recent years indicate
they are more likely to be conservative and Republican
than the US civilian population - but not
overwhelmingly so.

A Military Times survey last December of 933
subscribers, about 30 percent of whom had deployed for
the Iraq war, found that 56 percent considered
themselves Republican - about the same percentage who
approved of Bush's handling of Iraq. Half of those
responding were officers, who as a group tend to be
more conservative than their enlisted counterparts.

Among officers, who represent roughly 15 percent
of today's 1.4 million active duty military personnel,
there are about eight Republicans for every Democrat,
according to a 1999 survey by Duke University
political scientist Peter Feaver. Enlisted personnel,
however - a disproportionate number of whom are
minorities, a population that tends to lean Democratic
- are more evenly split. Professor Feaver estimates
that about one third of enlisted troops are
Republicans, one third Democrats, and the rest
independents, with the latter group growing.

Pockets of Ambivalence

"The military continues to be a Bush stronghold,
but it's not a stranglehold," Feaver says. Three
factors make the military vote more in play for
Democrats this year than in 2000, he says: the Iraq
war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's tense
relationship with the Army, and Bush's limited ability
as an incumbent to make sweeping promises akin to
Senator Kerry's pledge to add 40,000 new troops and
relieve an overstretched force.

"The military as a whole supports the Iraq war,"
Mr. Feaver says, noting a historical tendency of
troops to back the commander in chief in wartime. "But
you can go across the military and find pockets where
they are more ambivalent," he says, especially among
the National Guard and Reserve. "The war has not gone
as swimmingly as they thought, and that has caused
disaffection.

Whether representing pockets of opposition to Bush
or something bigger, soldiers and marines on Iraq's
front lines can be impassioned in their criticism. One
Marine officer in Ramadi who had lost several men said
he was thinking about throwing his medals over the
White House wall.

"Nobody I know wants Bush," says an enlisted
soldier in Najaf, adding, "This whole war was based on
lies." Like several others interviewed, his animosity
centered on a belief that the war lacked a clear
purpose even as it took a tremendous toll on US
troops, many of whom are in Iraq involuntarily under
"stop loss" orders that keep them in the service for
months beyond their scheduled exit in order to keep
units together during deployments.

"There's no clear definition of why we came here,"
says Army Spc. Nathan Swink, of Quincy, Ill. "First
they said they have WMD and nuclear weapons, then it
was to get Saddam Hussein out of office, and then to
rebuild Iraq. I want to fight for my nation and for my
family, to protect the United States against enemies
foreign and domestic, not to protect Iraqi civilians
or deal with Sadr's militia," he said.

Specialist Swink, who comes from a family of both
Democrats and Republicans, plans to vote for Kerry.
"Kerry protested the war in Vietnam. He is the one to
end this stuff, to lead to our exit of Iraq," he said.

'We Shouldn't be Here'

Other US troops expressed feelings of guilt over
killing Iraqis in a war they believe is unjust.

"We shouldn't be here," said one Marine
infantryman bluntly. "There was no reason for invading
this country in the first place. We just came here and
[angered people] and killed a lot of innocent people,"
said the marine, who has seen regular combat in
Ramadi. "I don't enjoy killing women and children,
it's not my thing."

As with his comrades, the marine accepted some of
the most controversial claims of "Fahrenheit 9/11,"
which critics have called biased. "Bush didn't want to
attack [Osama] Bin Laden because he was doing business
with Bin Laden's family," he said.

Another marine, Sgt. Christopher Wallace of
Pataskala, Ohio, agreed that the film was making an
impression on troops. "Marines nowadays want to know
stuff. They want to be informed, because we'll be
voting out here soon," he said. " 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
opened our eyes to things we hadn't seen before." But,
he added after a pause, "We still have full faith and
confidence in our commander-in-chief. And if John
Kerry is elected, he will be our commander in chief."

Getting Out the Military Vote

No matter whom they choose for president, US
troops in even the most remote bases in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere overseas are more likely
than in 2000 to have an opportunity to vote - and have
their votes counted - thanks to a major push by the
Pentagon to speed and postmark their ballots. The
Pentagon is now expediting ballots for all 1.4 million
active-duty military personnel and their 1.3 million
voting-age dependents, as well as 3.7 million US
civilians living abroad.

"We wrote out a plan of attack on how we are going
to address these issues this election year," says Maj.
Lonnie Hammack, the lead postal officer for US Central
Command, an area covering the Middle East, Central
Asia, and North Africa, where more than 225,000 troops
and Defense Department personnel serve.

The military has added manpower, flights, and
postmark-validating equipment, and given priority to
moving ballots - by Humvee or helicopter if necessary
- even to far-flung outposts such as those on the
Syrian and Pakistani border and Djibouti.

Meanwhile, voting-assistance officers in every
military unit are reminding troops to vote, as are
posters, e-mails, and newspaper and television
announcements. Voting booths are also set up at
deployment centers in the United States.

"We've had almost 100 percent contact," says Col.
Darrell Jones, director of manpower and personnel for
Central Command, and 200,000 federal postcard ballot
applications have been shipped.

"We encourage our people to vote, not for a
certain candidate, but to exercise that right," he
said, noting that was especially important as the US
military is "out there promoting fledgling democracy
in these regions." Many of the younger troops may be
voting for the first time, he added.

-------

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/22/opinion/22halperin.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 22, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Lots of Chemicals, Little Reaction
By RICK HIND and DAVID HALPERIN

Washington — While President Bush continues to make
terrorism and domestic security the centerpiece of his
campaign, he has made little mention of one of the
most urgent threats to our safety: the risk that
terrorists could cause thousands, even millions, of
deaths by sabotaging one of the 15,000 industrial
chemical plants across the United States.

The dangers from chemical plant mishaps are clear.
According to data compiled by Greenpeace
International, the 1984 accident at an Union Carbide
insecticide plant in Bhopal, India, has caused 20,000
deaths and injuries to 200,000 people. A terrorist
group could cause even greater harm by entering a
plant in the United States and setting off an
explosion that produces a deadly gas cloud.

The administration knows the dangers. Soon after the
9/11 attacks, Senator Jon Corzine, Democrat of New
Jersey, highlighted the issue with legislation
requiring chemical plants to enhance security and use
safer chemicals and technologies when feasible. (Such
safer substitutes are widely available.)

A study by the Army surgeon general, conducted soon
after 9/11, found that up to 2.4 million people could
be killed or wounded by a terrorist attack on a single
chemical plant. In February 2003, the government's
National Infrastructure Protection Center warned that
chemical plants in the United States could be Qaeda
targets. Investigations by The Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review and the CBS program "60 Minutes" have
highlighted lax or nonexistent security at chemical
plants, with gates unlocked or wide open and chemical
tanks unguarded.

The Environmental Protection Agency under Christie
Whitman did its part to evaluate the threat,
identifying 123 chemical facilities where an accident
or attack could threaten more than a million people,
and 7,605 plants that threatened more than 1,000
people. The agency determined that it could use the
Clean Air Act to compel chemical plants to increase
security.

Following the Corzine approach, the agency also
planned to promote the use of less hazardous
chemicals. But the Bush administration overruled the
initiative, and in December the president announced
that chemical security was now the province of the new
Department of Homeland Security, under Secretary Tom
Ridge.

As The Wall Street Journal disclosed last month,
Homeland Security tried to reduce the threat of
catastrophic attack with the stroke of a pen. The
department announced that the number of plants that
threatened more than 1,000 people was actually only
4,391, and the number that endangered more than a
million people was not 123 but two.

Mr. Ridge has set in motion plans to install security
cameras at chemical plants in seven states - but not
in some high-threat states like Florida, Ohio and
Minnesota. Although the department visits plants and
offers advice, unlike the E.P.A., it doesn't have the
power to enforce security measures and relies instead
on voluntary efforts by the industry. Without
enforceable requirements, chemical firms will remain
reluctant to put sufficient safeguards in place, for
fear that their competitors will scrimp on security
and thus be able to undercut them on price.

Industry groups have lobbied intensely against the
Corzine legislation. While reluctant to invest in
plant safety, some of these companies and their
executives have found the resources to help pay for
the Republican campaign.

For the Bush administration, it seems, homeland
security is critical except when it conflicts with the
wishes of supporters who own chemical plants.

Rick Hind is legislative director of Greenpeace's
toxics campaign. David Halperin, a lawyer, has served
on the staffs of the National Security Council and the
Senate Intelligence Committee.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home |
Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help |
Back to Top

http://www.democrats.org/news/200409210001.html

Sep 21, 2004

McAuliffe: Will GOP Answer If They Know Whether Stone,
Others Had Involvement With CBS Documents?
Washington, D.C. - In response to false Republican
accusations regarding the CBS documents, Democratic
National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe issued
this statement:

“In today’s New York Post, Roger Stone, who became
associated with political ‘dirty tricks’ while working
for Nixon, refused to deny that he was the source the
CBS documents.

“Will Ed Gillespie or the White House admit today what
they know about Mr. Stone’s relationship with these
forged documents? Will they unequivocally rule out Mr.
Stone’s involvement? Or for that matter, others with a
known history of dirty tricks, such as Karl Rove or
Ralph Reed?”

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1833

McCain: The October Surprise?
09/20/2004 @ 1:05pm
E-mail this Post
Will John McCain be the October Surprise?

Months ago, when the Republican senator who is often
dubbed a maverick finally started campaigning with
George W. Bush--after news reports noted that John
Kerry had delicately discussed with McCain the idea of
McCain becoming Kerry's running mate--the question
asked by political commentators (and cable talk show
consumers) was, what does McCain want? Did he want to
make peace with the GOP establishment so he could run
for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008
(when he would be 72 years old)? Was he looking to be
secretary of defense? Was he hoping that Bush would
bounce Dick Cheney and put McCain on the ticket?

The obvious answer was that McCain was just yielding
to the overwhelming Ds-and-Rs dynamic of Washington's
binary culture. In his case, the issue was whether
McCain was a Republican or not. And if he did want to
continue being a GOPer in good standing, then he had
to do right by the Family. (Think The Sopranos.) That
meant putting aside the resentment and anger he must
have felt toward the Bush clan, which--take your
pick--ran or countenanced an ugly and vicious campaign
against McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000
that included questioning McCain's commitment to
veterans and spreading rumors that McCain had been
brainwashed in a Vietnamese prison camp, that his
adopted daughter was a love-child he had had with a
prostitute, and that his wife was a junkie. So this
year McCain sucked it up and hit the trail for Bush,
even as the Bush brigade was mounting the same sort of
trash-and-slash attack against McCain's colleague,
John Kerry. At least, McCain could point to the war in
Iraq as a point of agreement with Bush. Though McCain,
according to a McCain adviser, has not accepted the
neoconservatives' argument (adopted by Bush) that the
Iraq war is necessary as an initial step in remaking
the region, he believed that because Saddam Hussein
posed a possible threat and was such a tyrant he
needed "to be taken out."

But maybe there was another reason beyond loyalty to
the party and to the commander-in-chief why McCain
saddled up with Bush. Perhaps he wanted to get near
enough to knife Bush--metaphorically speaking, of
course. As in, keep your friends close and your
enemies closer. (Think The Godfather.)

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, McCain whacked Bush on
Iraq. He accused Bush of making "serious mistakes
after the initial successes by not having enough
troops there on the ground, by allowing the looting,
by not securing the borders. There was a number of
things that we did. Most of it can be traced back to
not having sufficient numbers of troops there." When
he said "we," McCain actually meant Bush, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice.
He noted that the Bush administration has allowed
insurgents to establish sanctuaries--such as in
Falluja--where anti-American rebels or terrorists can
be trained and harbored. McCain, saying he still
supports the US mission in Iraq, was making a serious
charge: that Bush and his gang have screwed things up
tremendously.

Anchor Chris Wallace then asked what seemed to be a
Bush-friendly question: "Some have suggested that what
we're seeing, to use a Vietnam analogy, is kind of a
rolling Tet offensive to try to break the will of the
American and Iraqi people and to play a role in
defeating President Bush. Do you think that's what's
going on?"

While other GOPers have tried to make such a point to
shore up support for Bush among potential voters,
McCain would not. "I don't think they're interested so
much," he replied, "in defeating President Bush."

*********

When you're done reading this article,visit David
Corn's WEBLOG at www.davidcorn.com. Read recent
entries on a top military commander claiming Iraq is
lost, the Kerry campaign's lag on analogies, Bush's
most recent campaign-trail fibs, and the never-ending
flap over Bush's Air National Guard service and those
CBS memos.

********

McCain challenged Bush's assertion that progress is
under way in Iraq, noting "the situation has obviously
been somewhat deteriorating, to say the least." Bush,
he remarked, "is not being "as straight as maybe we'd
like to see." McCain called for the declassification
of the recent National Intelligence Estimate that
raised the possibility of civil war in Iraq. "The
key," said McCain, who urged more extensive US
military action in Iraq, is to "recognize those
mistakes, correct those mistakes, and prevail." He
added, "I'd like to see more of an overall plan
articulated by the president."

McCain's remarks were not what a consultant would call
politically useful to the fellow whom McCain is
supposedly trying to help get reelected. These
comments came the day before John Kerry was to give a
major speech blistering Bush for mistakes and
miscalculations in Iraq. McCain--as well as Republican
Senators Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar, who on other
talk shows each said the administration's handling of
postwar Iraq has been incompetent--softened up Bush
for Kerry's blows. But McCain's words, given his
standing in the media, hit the hardest.

Earlier this month, an editor at The Nation, dreaming
of magic-bullet scenarios, asked me whether Secretary
of State Colin Powell might break with Bush in October
and swing the election to Kerry. Not a chance I said,
read this. Powell is completely in the tank for the
Bush crew, enabling the neocons. But McCain--now he
might cause further difficult for his "good friend" in
the White House in the final weeks of the election.

The Bush campaign eagerly embraced McCain early in the
summer when Bush was slipping in the polls due to the
mess in Iraq. So when McCain (rather than Kerry) says
Bush hasn't articulated a plan for Iraq, can the White
House dismiss this serious statement? It sure cannot
be pooh-poohed by Bush's mouthpieces as partisan
rhetoric. Might such a remark cause Bushies to wonder
whether McCain infiltrated the Bush campaign in order
to better zing the man whose lieutenants once bitterly
and scurrilously attacked McCain's family and
questioned McCain's loyalty to veterans?

The McCain-Bush face-off has been one of the
most-watched soap operas in Washington. Now it appears
that when McCain hit the campaign trail for Bush this
summer, the conflict was not ultimately resolved. A
few more twists and turns could come, and in this
relationship, McCain at the moment has more power.
(Remember McCain's home state of Arizona could end up
being a key state on November 2.) With his recent
comments, McCain has essentially called out the
administration and undermined Bush's spin. If McCain
continues to talk so candidly, he will be serving as a
wingman for Kerry. Is this calculation or coincidence?
Revenge being served out of a deep-freezer? McCain
likes to promote his reputation as a straight-talker,
but next time I see him in a green room, I'm not going
to bother asking him to answer the question. Let him
do what he's gotta do--especially if it's personal.
Anyway, who would want to know the end of this
melodrama before the final page?

********

DON'T FORGET ABOUT DAVID CORN'S BOOK, The Lies of
George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception
(Crown Publishers). A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! An
UPDATED and EXPANDED EDITION is NOW AVAILABLE in
PAPERBACK. The Washington Post says, "This is a fierce
polemic, but it is based on an immense amount of
research....[I]t does present a serious case for the
president's partisans to answer....Readers can hardly
avoid drawing...troubling conclusions from Corn's
painstaking indictment." The Los Angeles Times says,
"David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush is as
hard-hitting an attack as has been leveled against the
current president. He compares what Bush said with the
known facts of a given situation and ends up making a
persuasive case." The Library Journal says, "Corn
chronicles to devastating effect the lies, falsehoods,
and misrepresentations....Corn has painstakingly
unearthed a bill of particulars against the president
that is as damaging as it is thorough." And GEORGE W.
BUSH SAYS, "I'd like to tell you I've read [ The Lies
of George W. Bush], but that'd be a lie."

For more information and a sample, go to
www.davidcorn.com. And see his WEBLOG there.

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LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 42 Days to Go -- 9/11, Media, Kitty Kelly, Theft of the Election, Michael Moore

There are 42 days to go until the national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the _resident and the VICE _resident...Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) appeared on David Letterman's show last night, and hung out for through two commercial breaks...It was a poignant act of resistance by Letterman and SeeBS. JFK and Letterman talked at length, and in a serious way, about the war in Iraq and the failed administration in the White House...,JFK taunted and baited the _resident...Associated Press: Besides reading his "Top 10" list, Kerry also poked fun at the tedious debate negotiations between the rival campaigns that ended in agreement Monday. Kerry said he wanted running mate John Edwards to stand in the vice presidential debate, but Cheney wanted to sit. "We compromised and now George Bush is going to sit on Dick Cheney's lap," he said...Kerry's "Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals" are:
10. No estate tax for families with at least two U.S. presidents.
9. W-2 Form is now Dubya-2 Form.
8. Under the simplified tax code, your refund check goes directly to Halliburton.
7. The reduced earned income tax credit is so unfair, it just makes me want to tear out my lustrous, finely groomed hair.
6. Attorney General (John) Ashcroft gets to write off the entire U.S. Constitution.
5. Texas Rangers can take a business loss for trading Sammy Sosa.
4. Eliminate all income taxes; just ask Teresa (Heinz Kerry) to cover the whole damn thing.
3. Cheney can claim Bush as a dependent.
2. Hundred-dollar penalty if you pronounce it "nuclear" instead of "nucular."
1. George W. Bush gets a deduction for mortgaging our entire future.
Here are five very important LNS selections. Please read them and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote. Please remember that the US regimestream news media does not want to inform you about this presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you...There is an Electoral Uprising coming at the Ballot Box in November...

Jennifer Barrett Ozols, Newsweek: Kristen Breitweiser supported George W. Bush in 2000. This year, she’s endorsing his opponent. She is certainly not the only woman in America to change her mind about whom she plans to vote for this election, but Breitweiser is no ordinary voter. The New Jersey lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom has taken on an increasingly prominent role since September 11. After her husband, Ron, a vice president at Fiduciary Trust, was killed in the World Trade Center, she joined three other widows from her state as activists demanding a full investigation into the 2001 attacks. The group, who call themselves "The Jersey Girls,” have since testified before Congress, met with administration officials, and lobbied successfully for the creation of the 9/11 Commission to look into intelligence failures leading up to the 2001 attacks.
Now Breitweiser has volunteered to join John Kerry’s campaign, speaking out in support of the Democratic challenger across the nation—even agreeing, for the first time since 9/11, to fly on an airplane to get the word out. This Tuesday, she and four other 9/11 widows, along with a survivor of the Pentagon attacks, held a press conference to endorse Kerry. As they described it, their reasons for speaking out are twofold: anger at the war on Iraq and a growing frustration with an administration they accuse of obstructing the investigation into intelligence failures. NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett Ozols spoke with Breitweiser about her decision and her new role in the White House race. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: You supported Bush in 2000. Why are you changing your vote this year?
Kristen Breitweiser: The predominant reason is because I don’t feel President Bush has done everything he could do to make us safer in the three years since 9/11. I’ve personally spent the last three years fighting to try to fix the problems that plague our intelligence apparatus, so we would not be so vulnerable to Al Qaeda the next time around. And during the three years, our largest adversary was the administration. Because of that, I can’t in good conscience vote for President Bush.
The second largest reason is the war in Iraq. We have lost more than a thousand soldiers in Iraq, thousands have been wounded—Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The net result is that we are more vulnerable to terrorism because Al Qaeda has increased [its] recruitment there, the hatred and animosity toward Americans has increased, worldwide support for Americans has decreased … If President Bush is in office for another four years, I shudder to think of how many other wars unrelated to terrorism he’ll take us into.
Was there a particular moment that triggered your decision to speak out in favor of Kerry?
For me, it was the [Republican National Convention] … At the convention, 9/11 was spoken about constantly and I thought, where was this interest, this passion, this fervor for the last three years when we [9/11 widows] were begging and pleading and screaming to get 9/11 issues addressed by this administration? They wanted nothing to do with it, and then there’s a convention where that’s all they’re talking about: 9/11. I can [also] give you a laundry list of other things that could have been done by this administration in the past three years that were not done. That’s upsetting to me.

William Rivers Pitt., www.truthout.org: The American mainstream television news media, in whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the American people and is singularly responsible for the untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people...
The decision by the mainstream television news media to get into bed with the very entities they are supposed to stand watchdog against has been a mortal one. Once it becomes acceptable to get your reporting from Defense Department and military spin-doctors, without doing any work on your own, the game is over. What started with the Gulf War as a new 'reporting' technique has become an institutionalized process of standing as mouthpiece for those who deserve the strongest scrutiny.
The White House and Defense Department boys know this, and exploited it ruthlessly in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration sought to capitalize on the tragedy by using it as an excuse to invade Iraq, something the power-pitchers in the administration had wanted for more than a decade. A shadowy and little-known media consulting company called The Rendon Group got a $100,000-a-month contract from the Pentagon right after the attacks. The Rendon Group was getting paid to offer media strategy advice. Or, in other words, propaganda.
The Rendon Group has been around a long time, and stands at the center of the media's failure to report accurately on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Rendon Group has received close to $200 million from the Pentagon and CIA over the last several years to spread anti-Hussein propaganda far and wide. One of the first steps they took was to create in 1992, out of absolute thin air, the Iraqi National Congress. The Iraqi National Congress, and its most famous spokesperson Ahmad Chalabi, are entirely the creation of a media strategy company doing the bidding of the United States government.

www.mediamatters.org: The Republican National Committee (RNC)'s public relations firm, Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, sent a memo to conservative media outlets instructing them not to give airtime to Kitty Kelley, author of The Family: The Real Story Of the Bush Dynasty (Doubleday, September 14). And according to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, White House communications director Dan Bartlett also discouraged news outlets from covering the book. Media Matters for America tracked mentions of Kelley and her book, as well as her personal appearances, during the week of the book's release (September 13-17) on the four major cable news networks: CNBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, and MSNBC. The only network on which Kelley did not appear in person is FOX News Channel.

Anne-Marie Cusac, The Progressive: What if Republican shenanigans tip the election? Many members of the media are looking at the dangers voting machines may pose to the integrity of the national election. Others are wondering whether voters may be disenfranchised by use of faulty felon lists, as happened in Florida in 2000. But there is another danger: Republicans may use a variety of tactics to suppress the vote of racial minorities in swing states. These tactics could determine control of the White House or the Senate.
In August, the Zogby International poll raised the number of battleground states from sixteen to twenty. In those states, notes John Zogby, "the pounding has been relentless."
Zogby was referring to negative ads, but the sanctity of the vote is also taking a pounding. In some states, Republicans are threatening to conduct widespread vote challenges in heavily minority areas. In others, recent events suggest that poll workers may wrongly turn away voters. In still others, new laws passed or enforced by Republicans have erected hurdles to trip up the minority vote. And on Election Day itself, say advocates, Republicans may direct numerous tricks at Democratic districts in an effort to confuse or frighten voters.
Here's a rundown of what's happening in several swing states...

[The LNS disagrees with M.M.'s assessment of JFK but M.M. is entitled to his opinion uncensured. He is one of the heroes of the Republic...]

Michael Moore, www.michaelmoore.com: My friends, it is time for a reality check.
1. The polls are wrong. They are all over the map like diarrhea. On Friday, one poll had Bush 13 points ahead -- and another poll had them both tied. There are three reasons why the polls are b.s.: One, they are polling "likely voters." "Likely" means those who have consistently voted in the past few elections. So that cuts out young people who are voting for the first time and a ton of non-voters who are definitely going to vote in THIS election. Second, they are not polling people who use their cell phone as their primary phone. Again, that means they are not talking to young people. Finally, most of the polls are weighted with too many Republicans, as pollster John Zogby revealed last week. You are being snookered if you believe any of these polls.
2. Kerry has brought in the Clinton A-team. Instead of shunning Clinton (as Gore did), Kerry has decided to not make that mistake.
3. Traveling around the country, as I've been doing, I gotta tell ya, there is a hell of a lot of unrest out there. Much of it is not being captured by the mainstream press. But it is simmering and it is real. Do not let those well-produced Bush rallies of angry white people scare you. Turn off the TV! (Except Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers -- everything else is just a sugar-coated lie).
4. Conventional wisdom says if the election is decided on "9/11" (the fear of terrorism), Bush wins. But if it is decided on the job we are doing in Iraq, then Bush loses. And folks, that "job," you might have noticed, has descended into the third level of a hell we used to call Vietnam. There is no way out. It is a full-blown mess of a quagmire and the body bags will sadly only mount higher. Regardless of what Kerry meant by his original war vote, he ain't the one who sent those kids to their deaths -- and Mr. and Mrs. Middle America knows it. Had Bush bothered to show up when he was in the "service" he might have somewhat of a clue as to how to recognize an immoral war that cannot be "won." All he has delivered to Iraq was that plasticized turkey last Thanksgiving. It is this failure of monumental proportions that is going to cook his goose come this November.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

MSNBC.com
‘He Can Make Us Safe’
A prominent 9/11 widow—and former Republican—explains why she now wants Kerry to win the White House race

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Jennifer Barrett Ozols
Newsweek
Updated: 4:21 p.m. ET Sept. 17, 2004

Sept. 17 - Kristen Breitweiser supported George W. Bush in 2000. This year, she’s endorsing his opponent. She is certainly not the only woman in America to change her mind about whom she plans to vote for this election, but Breitweiser is no ordinary voter. The New Jersey lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom has taken on an increasingly prominent role since September 11. After her husband, Ron, a vice president at Fiduciary Trust, was killed in the World Trade Center, she joined three other widows from her state as activists demanding a full investigation into the 2001 attacks. The group, who call themselves "The Jersey Girls,” have since testified before Congress, met with administration officials, and lobbied successfully for the creation of the 9/11 Commission to look into intelligence failures leading up to the 2001 attacks.

Now Breitweiser has volunteered to join John Kerry’s campaign, speaking out in support of the Democratic challenger across the nation—even agreeing, for the first time since 9/11, to fly on an airplane to get the word out. This Tuesday, she and four other 9/11 widows, along with a survivor of the Pentagon attacks, held a press conference to endorse Kerry. As they described it, their reasons for speaking out are twofold: anger at the war on Iraq and a growing frustration with an administration they accuse of obstructing the investigation into intelligence failures. NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett Ozols spoke with Breitweiser about her decision and her new role in the White House race. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: You supported Bush in 2000. Why are you changing your vote this year?
Kristen Breitweiser: The predominant reason is because I don’t feel President Bush has done everything he could do to make us safer in the three years since 9/11. I’ve personally spent the last three years fighting to try to fix the problems that plague our intelligence apparatus, so we would not be so vulnerable to Al Qaeda the next time around. And during the three years, our largest adversary was the administration. Because of that, I can’t in good conscience vote for President Bush.

The second largest reason is the war in Iraq. We have lost more than a thousand soldiers in Iraq, thousands have been wounded—Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The net result is that we are more vulnerable to terrorism because Al Qaeda has increased [its] recruitment there, the hatred and animosity toward Americans has increased, worldwide support for Americans has decreased … If President Bush is in office for another four years, I shudder to think of how many other wars unrelated to terrorism he’ll take us into.

Was there a particular moment that triggered your decision to speak out in favor of Kerry?
For me, it was the [Republican National Convention] … At the convention, 9/11 was spoken about constantly and I thought, where was this interest, this passion, this fervor for the last three years when we [9/11 widows] were begging and pleading and screaming to get 9/11 issues addressed by this administration? They wanted nothing to do with it, and then there’s a convention where that’s all they’re talking about: 9/11. I can [also] give you a laundry list of other things that could have been done by this administration in the past three years that were not done. That’s upsetting to me.

Can you give some examples?
Border security. The 9/11 Commission found that border security is in very bad shape. We’re less secure with regard to border safety than we were. That would take a simple reallocation of funds and for whatever reason it hasn’t been done. There are harder things to do, too, like the reorganization of the intelligence community. I understand that’s a concept that has been out there for 15 years and couldn’t get accomplished. But my God, if 9/11—the largest intelligence failure in U.S. history—was not enough to awaken President Bush to the need to reorganize the intelligence community, I don’t know what is.

What role will you have in the Kerry campaign?
I want to be able to talk to people across the country and make them understand that homeland security must be a priority and explain to them why, in the last four years, homeland security was not a priority. Bush is constantly saying national security is a priority, but where is the proof?

Did the Kerry campaign approach you?
No, I called the Kerry campaign and said we [the group of 9/11 widows] want to support John Kerry and do what we need to do to get the word out. Because we feel like he can make us safe.

You say you encountered initial resistance from the administration regarding the creation of a 9/11 commission. Why was that?
Well, the first argument was that we were a nation at war and we couldn’t spare the vital resources. But if we had established a commission sooner to investigate, as we did with Pearl Harbor, we might not have gone to Iraq because we might have learned that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

In your opinion, what needs to be done now to improve our national security?
Obviously, I’d like to see the 9/11 Commission recommendations thoughtfully put into legislation, which would entail a reorganization of our intelligence committee to better fight terrorism and groups like Al Qaeda specifically. And I would like to know that our transportation system—whether it be subways, buses or planes—are a serious part of our homeland security plan. Borders, nuclear plants, water plants are all vulnerable. Also, I’m a lawyer, and I know that our judicial system needs to be set up so we can successfully prosecute the terrorists. It’s not now. We need to make sure detainees’ rights aren’t being violated, [that] prisoners aren’t being abused. We need to dry up those money lines [to terrorist groups]. We have not made the efforts there.

How hopeful are you that all the 9/11 Commission recommendations will be implemented?
I truly feel the only way the 9/11 Commission recommendations will be implemented with the spirit and intent of what the commission wanted is if Kerry is elected.

Did you ever imagine you would be campaigning for Kerry or playing such a public role?
No, I am a very private person; I am a mom. Now I am a single mom. But what is so motivating for me is the amount of people who have contacted me to say thank you or to say, I feel the same way, I am scared. They ask me, why aren’t we fixing border security and looking into alternative energy sources to oil? That is what keeps you going … We have spent three years being very engaged in this because we feel we have to be. I would love nothing better then to have spent the last three years instead knowing we are safe. I think it’s sad that homeland security is even an issue in this election. I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now if we had addressed this earlier.

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6030699/site/newsweek/

Your Media is Killing You
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 21 September 2004

The American mainstream television news media, in whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the American people and is singularly responsible for the untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people.

The trajectory of this plunge is easy to chart. The 1980s saw unprecedented deregulation of the rules pertaining to the ownership of media outlets. Thus began the combination and consolidation of dozens of differing viewpoints under the iron control of a few massive corporations. The many voices became one voice, and a dullard's voice at that.

The opening year of the 1990s saw the push towards our first war in Iraq. Rather than hold to basic standards set by Edward R. Murrow and the other giants of journalism - see it for yourself, do the legwork, because the American people deserve to know what is happening - the mainstream television news media decided their best course was to allow themselves to be hand-fed by the Pentagon. No footage, no reports, no news whatsoever would be released to the public without first passing through Defense Department screeners. The American people learned from this that war looks like a video game, that death is remote, that victory is a simple matter of pushing a button.

After surrendering their integrity to governmental and military entities which lie as a matter of course, the mainstream television news media learned with the trial of O.J. Simpson the simple truth espoused by H.L. Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Day after day, for sixteen months, every television was filled around the clock with soap-opera entertainment passing itself off as news. The American people, deprived of substantive information about the world around them, learned that real news is only about celebrities.

Then came the greatest entertainment-as-news extravaganza of all time: The Monica Lewinski scandal and the impeachment of a President who lied about sex. As an athlete will lose muscle tone if he stays away from the gym or the playing field, so did the intellectual muscles of the media atrophy after years of avoiding the basic efforts required in their field. Why run a scoop down about the war if I can just publish this Pentagon-prepared battle assessment? Why investigate Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster when I can just regurgitate this fax I just got from the Republican National Committee's media headquarters? If I can just get in front of the camera with a salacious bit of gossip, I can become an anchor. For many 'journalists,' the inflated nonsense of the impeachment was their "White Bronco."

Meanwhile, during the period beginning with the O.J. trial and concluding with the impeachment extravaganza, the Taliban was taking control of Afghanistan in the wake left by the completion of our anti-Soviet policies in that nation. A man named Osama bin Laden was preparing to attack anything and everything American he could get close to. UNSCOM weapons inspectors under Scott Ritter were taking Iraq's chemical and biological warfare capabilities apart literally brick by brick, and the sanctions against that nation, which were killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, were also reducing Saddam Hussein's conventional arsenal to a large collection of formidable paperweights.

One threat was on the rise, another was on the wane, but this is boring stuff compared to ill-fitting leather gloves and a stained blue dress. The American people were never provided the full scope of the security issues facing their country, because the television news media they relied upon didn't want to put in the work. Often, when then-President Clinton acted to address these security issues, he was accused of "wagging the dog," i.e. manufacturing unimportant threats to obscure the really important stuff, like whether or not he purchased gifts for Lewinski at the Big Dog store on Nantucket.

Think of these points - media laziness, media complicity with the powers-that-be, media obsession with fantastically unimportant gossip and tabloidism - and then remember those tall buildings in New York collapsing to the ground. Perhaps the 'journalists' involved could have been focusing on other things before that dark day?

Sunday night's episode of the CBS News program '60 Minutes' had a long, detailed and graphic expose on the fighting that recently took place in Najaf and Fallujah. All of the commercials for the program, however, focused on the '60 Minutes' interview with New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It was a clever bit of sleight-of-hand; by now, Americans have been well-trained to spurn whatever tiny molecules of substantive news that might somehow blunder across their screens, because the truly important stuff has more to do with who is sleeping with J-Lo and how Ben feels about it.

Sports is, of course, the champion distraction. Listen to any sports talk radio show; if the American people could rattle off housing or budget statistics, if they could quote from memory the casualty statistics from Operation Iraqi Freedom, the way they can tell you in half a second how many doubles Manny Ramirez hit in his rookie season, half-bright loafers like George W. Bush would never have a prayer in American politics. Perhaps CBS knew this. Millions of viewers made time to watch Belichick, and were treated to a bloody and terrifying and accurate view of the Iraq occupation that has been thoroughly, completely and utterly absent.

For more than two years now, this column space has been dedicated to describing, with all truth and verified data in hand, the mess an invasion of Iraq would create. This column was among the first to declare that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that any alleged connection between Osama bin Laden and the government of Iraq was laughable on its face, that democracy was a pipe dream in Iraq, that we would not be greeted as liberators, and that any military action in Iraq based upon these unfounded claims would result in a destabilized Middle East, a world filled with furious former allies, and an ocean of blood spilled by American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

All of this has come to pass.

How is it that little truthout.org, with its limited resources and small staff, got it right time and again while ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN and Fox - with their massive financial resources and their huge pool of reporters - got it so totally and continuously wrong? The answer comes in two parts.

The first part is the degree to which these nationally broadcast news stations have become compromised by the corporations that own them. The ownership of the media is key to understanding the process. Take the example of General Electric, owners of NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. This company is one of the largest defense contractors in America; they get paid every time we go to war, and yet we somehow believe they will tell us the truth of war, even though it affects their profit margin. Such thinking is folly.

Take the example of AOL/TimeWarner, owner of CNN. This company lives and dies by the 'outsourcing' of American technological jobs overseas, where labor is cheaper. Do you think they will tell a straight story about the economy with so much on the line? Such thinking is folly, and never mind the fact that AOL/TimeWarner's largest investor is a Saudi. So much for the truth about who really supports Osama bin Laden and international terrorism. So much for the truth about what really happened on September 11, and why.

The decision by the mainstream television news media to get into bed with the very entities they are supposed to stand watchdog against has been a mortal one. Once it becomes acceptable to get your reporting from Defense Department and military spin-doctors, without doing any work on your own, the game is over. What started with the Gulf War as a new 'reporting' technique has become an institutionalized process of standing as mouthpiece for those who deserve the strongest scrutiny.

The White House and Defense Department boys know this, and exploited it ruthlessly in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration sought to capitalize on the tragedy by using it as an excuse to invade Iraq, something the power-pitchers in the administration had wanted for more than a decade. A shadowy and little-known media consulting company called The Rendon Group got a $100,000-a-month contract from the Pentagon right after the attacks. The Rendon Group was getting paid to offer media strategy advice. Or, in other words, propaganda.

The Rendon Group has been around a long time, and stands at the center of the media's failure to report accurately on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Rendon Group has received close to $200 million from the Pentagon and CIA over the last several years to spread anti-Hussein propaganda far and wide. One of the first steps they took was to create in 1992, out of absolute thin air, the Iraqi National Congress. The Iraqi National Congress, and its most famous spokesperson Ahmad Chalabi, are entirely the creation of a media strategy company doing the bidding of the United States government.

Since 1992, the Iraqi National Congress has become accepted completely by the mainstream news media as a legitimate group. They were embraced by the American Congress under Newt Gingrich and given hundreds of millions of dollars. They were, with the help of the aforementioned Congress, the driving force behind the passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998, an Act which made the removal of Saddam Hussein a matter of American law. All this for a group made out of nothing by what amounts to a media consulting company.

The post-9/11 money paid to the Rendon Group returned handsome dividends for the investment. Rendon creation Ahmad Chalabi, who has since been accused of giving vital national security secrets to Iran, arranged an interview between Judith Millerof the New York Times and an Iraqi defector named Adnan Ishan Saeed al-Haidieri. al-Haidieri claimed to have personal knowledge of the vast and growing stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Miller, thinking Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were worthy sources, believed al-Haidieri and printed an exclusive report on the threat posed by Iraq in the Times.

Time and a little legwork has since exposed al-Haidieri as a total fraud, but Rendon's propaganda got out there; as the New York Times goes, so goes the rest of the mainstream media. Miller's report, released in 2001, created a landslide push towards war, and allowed George W. Bush to sell the American people a frightening and utterly inaccurate portrait of why war was necessary, and necessary now.

Companies like The Rendon Group are a bellweather for exactly how depraved our journalistic institutions have become. Millions of dollars in government contracts are there for the taking by anyone who wants to scam the media with bogus stories. The media is more than happy to oblige, because it relieves them of having to put the necessary work in. Meanwhile, stories that might negatively affect the parent companies go by the boards, and everyone is happy.

Well, almost everyone is happy. The families of 1,033 American soldiers who have died in Iraq aren't happy. The families of the 17,000 or so American soldiers who have been 'medically evacuated' from Iraq for things like missing legs and faces aren't happy. The families of the 20,000 or so civilians killed in the invasion of Iraq aren't happy, and a lot of them are taking their unhappiness to the streets with grenades and rifles so they can make more American families unhappy by killing American soldiers.

Don't look to the mainstream television news media for an apology or a reversal of course anytime soon. They can't report the truth now. To do so would expose them as the incompetent lapdogs they have become, and as anyone who has ever screwed up at work knows, the hardest person to face after a grievous error is the person you find in the mirror.

The second part of the answer to that question - How is it that little truthout.org got it right time and again while the entire mainstream television news media got it wrong? - is simplicity itself.

We put in the work. We did the research in triplicate. We talked to the people who knew the score. We took the time. We cared. We understood that September 11 did not require us to click our heels and say "Yes sir!" to whatever balderdash Mr. Bush and his crew spouted. Quite completely the opposite is true. We understood that September 11 made it more important than ever for us to be very, very good at what we do.

The American mainstream television news media, in whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the American people and is singularly responsible for the untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. It is not too late for them to reverse course, to take again the simple rules and requirements espoused by Murrow and Mencken and place them at the forefront of their institutional mission. Nothing less than the basic stability of our republic is at stake.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.'

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RNC's p.r. firm urged conservative media to ignore Kelley's Bush book; FOX the only cable network not to host author

The Republican National Committee (RNC)'s public relations firm, Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, sent a memo to conservative media outlets instructing them not to give airtime to Kitty Kelley, author of The Family: The Real Story Of the Bush Dynasty (Doubleday, September 14). And according to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, White House communications director Dan Bartlett also discouraged news outlets from covering the book. Media Matters for America tracked mentions of Kelley and her book, as well as her personal appearances, during the week of the book's release (September 13-17) on the four major cable news networks: CNBC, CNN, FOX News Channel, and MSNBC. The only network on which Kelley did not appear in person is FOX News Channel.

As of September 17, Kelley had personally appeared for three interviews on CNN (NewsNight with Aaron Brown, American Morning, and Lou Dobbs Tonight), one interview on MSNBC (Hardball with Chris Matthews), and one interview on CNBC (Capital Report). In addition, several news programs on CNBC, CNN, and MSNBC aired clips of Kelley's interviews on NewsNight and on NBC's Today show. FOX News Channel, meanwhile, did not air or schedule a single interview with Kelley.

While Kelley has not appeared on the network, FOX News Channel hosts have made negative references to her on their programs. Brit Hume labeled Kelley a "gossip" [Special Report with Brit Hume, September 9]; Sean Hannity claimed Kelley was "discredited" and expressed outrage that the Today show would devote three days to her [Hannity & Colmes, September 15]; and Bill O'Reilly disparaged The New York Times for publishing a review of "the Kelley dirt" and the media in general for "giving huge exposure to Kitty Kelley's hatchet job on the Bush family" [The O'Reilly Factor, September 15]. O'Reilly solicited input from viewers and listeners on whether or not he should interview Kelley on his show. On September 14, O'Reilly reported that "50,000 Factor viewers and listeners voted down Ms. Kelley in a billoreilly.com poll. So we canceled her appearance here." O'Reilly said: "I just didn't want to get down there in the muck."

U.S. News & World Report's September 14 "U.S. News Bulletin" reported that Shirley & Banister Public Affairs sent a memorandum to conservative media outlets discouraging them from giving Kelley airtime:

"New Media" Urged To Ignore Kitty Kelley And Her Book.

Conservative talk radio, TV and print outlets are being urged to ignore Kelley, author of The Family: The Real Story Of the Bush Dynasty. "Don't give Kitty Kelley air time," says a memo from the conservative and influential PR firm Shirley & Banister Public Affairs. The memo was sent as NBC's Today Show was set to interview Kelley over three days.

Shirley & Banister Public Affairs is a public relations and government affairs firm founded by Craig Shirley, a longtime Republican activist. Shirley & Banister's client list is a virtual Who's Who of Republican and conservative organizations, including the RNC, the Cato Institute, Citizens United, The Club for Growth, The Federalist Society, The Gingrich Group, The Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Shirley's clients have also included discredited right-wing authors Gary Aldrich and Ann Coulter.

— A.F. & M.J.

Posted to the web on Monday September 20, 2004 at 12:34 PM EST

Counted Out

By Anne-Marie Cusac, The Progressive. Posted September 20, 2004.

What if Republican shenanigans tip the election? Many members of the media are looking at the dangers voting machines may pose to the integrity of the national election. Others are wondering whether voters may be disenfranchised by use of faulty felon lists, as happened in Florida in 2000. But there is another danger: Republicans may use a variety of tactics to suppress the vote of racial minorities in swing states. These tactics could determine control of the White House or the Senate.

In August, the Zogby International poll raised the number of battleground states from sixteen to twenty. In those states, notes John Zogby, "the pounding has been relentless."

Zogby was referring to negative ads, but the sanctity of the vote is also taking a pounding. In some states, Republicans are threatening to conduct widespread vote challenges in heavily minority areas. In others, recent events suggest that poll workers may wrongly turn away voters. In still others, new laws passed or enforced by Republicans have erected hurdles to trip up the minority vote. And on Election Day itself, say advocates, Republicans may direct numerous tricks at Democratic districts in an effort to confuse or frighten voters.

Here's a rundown of what's happening in several swing states.

Arizona

On the ballot in Arizona this November is a Republican-authored referendum called Protect Arizona Now or Proposition 200, which would do several things, including requiring proof of citizenship for anyone registering to vote. Steve Gallardo, a Democratic state legislator from Arizona, worries about what some supporters of that initiative might do. "There's a lot of rumors... that they want to stand out in front of polling places and report voters-anyone they feel is here illegally and is voting in our elections," he says. "Our fear is they're going to intimidate Arizona citizens, U.S. citizens who are brown-skinned. Imagine going up to the poll and seeing a man standing there with a gun and asking if you're a citizen. Are you not going to turn away?"

The Arizona attorney general's office acknowledges that it has heard similar rumors.

Does Protect Arizona Now plan to make an appearance at the polls? "I really don't know what we're going to do," says Kathy McKee, the founder of Protect Arizona Now. She says she's worried about fraud.

"In our state, a person can register to vote from a computer in their home, mail in their registration, and they have not shown their face in public, much less their identity," says McKee. Lots of people, she says, are "coming across our borders illegally and getting jobs, which is a felony. Why would they hesitate to vote?" McKee and other Protect Arizona Now members say that voter fraud is already high in the state and is bound to rise in the close election. The voter registration drives targeting the state have piqued their anger. "There are several groups from around the country that have just besieged Arizona," says McKee. "Project Vote Smart, which really disappointed me. The infamous Southwest Voter Registration Project, Moving America Forward, New American Freedom Summer, the Urban Institute. They have been in this state only targeting Hispanic voters. That's the most racist thing I've ever heard."

On September 7, primary day, two gentlemen came to Tucson Precinct 30, says a poll worker there named Ross (who does not want his last name mentioned). "They were both very intimidating and forceful looking," he says. "They said they were checking polls to see if illegal aliens were voting. They said their organization's name was Truth in Action." The men, says Ross, told him they believed that "Mexicans are coming to vote because it's really easy."

"They were making the runs on all kinds of polls," says Aurora Duron, AFL-CIO Tucson coordinator of the My Vote-My Right Campaign.

Russ Dove is editor of tianews.com, the website of Truth in Action, which supports Protect Arizona Now. He says he visited five polls on September 7. As a door-to-door campaigner for Proposition 200, Dove says he heard "verbal evidence from individuals on the street who said, 'Yes, illegal immigrants are voting.' " Dove says he is "bent on discovering" how many are doing so.

On the day I contact Dove, he is a little out of sorts. The AFL-CIO, he says, has accused him of intimidating voters. "Why would someone who supports the Constitution and wants to exercise his rights as a citizen intimidate U.S. citizens?" he asks. "What they're saying is that they know there are illegals voting."

On primary day, Dove says he sported "a black T-shirt with 'U.S. Constitutional Enforcement' on the back" and the image of a badge on the front. "I wear a tool belt," he says. On primary day, that belt carried tools, a camera, and a video recorder. Dove says he used the camera to take "some photographs of the polling places." He used the video recorder to film "all the conversations I had." Dove says that more people want to monitor polls in November. "After the AFL-CIO threw their fit," he says, people started wanting to get involved. "They said, 'Let's get the T-shirts printed up and let's go," he says.

"The only people we will bother are people who are in violation of the law," says Dove. For instance, if he sees "a busload of Hispanic individuals who didn't speak English and who voted," he plans to follow that bus to make sure they aren't voting more than once.

Florida

The state that started it all in 2000 is no stranger to controversy this election. In July, The Miami Herald revealed that the state issued faulty felon purge lists containing the names of 48,000 people it said were ineligible to vote. Among these were 2,100 who actually were eligible voters. Many of these people were African American Democrats. The list of 48,000 also contained only sixty-one Hispanic names. (Because of Florida's large Cuban population, the Hispanic vote in Florida is predominantly Republican. The Florida African American vote, on the other hand, tends to be heavily Democratic.)

In mid-August, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert revealed that the state was investigating get-out-the-vote drives among blacks in Orlando by sending armed police officers into the homes of citizens who had filed absentee ballots. Most of these citizens were African American, and many were elderly.

And in Florida's late August primary, representatives from People for the American Way saw poll workers turn back registered voters who neglected to bring their IDs. "Under Florida law," noted The New York Times, "registered voters can vote without showing identification."

But there's a lot more going on in the state, according to Alma Gonzalez, spokeswoman for the Voter Protection Coalition in Florida and special counsel to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "We keep hoping that they've learned from 2000," but early indications are that they haven't, she says. "When some of our members have gone to early voting or to register to vote, they're being asked if they're citizens of the United States." Gonzalez says she has heard from "about half a dozen people, all of them in South Florida," who approached the polls as part of the early election only to be asked their citizenship. And it's not poll watchers who are asking, says Gonzalez. It's "the poll workers, the duly deputized election officials."

Registered voters, Gonzalez points out, have already attested to their citizenship in their registration forms. "They cannot ask you your citizenship at the polling place. It's unlawful," says Gonzalez. "When that question is asked of you" based on your skin color or the fact that you have an accent, "it is not intended to ensure that you're complying with the law. It's intended to suppress voters." And, even though public attention to the faulty felon voter purge lists led the Florida government to say belatedly that it would not use them this time, the word has traveled slowly. "We are still getting reports from people when they go to vote in different parts of the state," says Gonzalez. "Apparently, there are still inaccuracies."

Then there's the provisional ballot crisis. In Florida in 2000, many people who attempted to vote found that they were not on the rolls, even though they had registered. This is the reasoning behind the provisional ballot requirement in the federal Help America Vote Act. If a voter is wrongly removed from the rolls in the future, he or she should be able to file a provisional ballot. Most states interpret this part of the act as allowing provisional ballots as long as the voter files them in the correct county. Florida is a little different. Rather than the correct county, voters must submit their provisional ballots to the correct precinct. "This will disenfranchise thousands and thousands of voters," says Gonzalez.

So the AFL-CIO is suing Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, along with two election supervisors from areas of Florida that have seen some of the largest population increases, and some of the most marked changes in precinct lines. The precinct requirements "impermissibly abridge the right to vote," the AFL says.

How intentional is all this on the part of Florida officials? "They're all intentional," Gonzalez says. "People didn't do these things in their sleep." Then she qualifies the point, saying the real question is, are they intentionally trying to suppress voter turnout? "I'm not going to make that allegation," she says. "I know what the result is." And, she points out, under the Voting Rights Act, the issue is not whether you intended to disenfranchise people, but what is the result. "These election schemes and the conduct of these officials are undermining" the rights of people to vote.

Michigan

Michigan is the state that Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, mentions as a potential trouble spot. On July 16, the Detroit Free Press quoted John Pappageorge, a Republican state representative from Troy, Michigan, who said, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle." Detroit is 83 percent African American.

Pappageorge later told the Associated Press that he was not advocating suppression of the black vote but that "you get it [the Detroit vote] down with a good message."

Cecelie Counts, AFL-CIO director of civil, human, and women's rights, says she thinks Pappageorge was acknowledging the truth the first time around. "That is the political reality in most of these swing states," she says. Democrats "can't win Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania without the African American vote, without a tremendous African American vote." And, she says, by using census numbers, Republican strategists "can pinpoint places" where minority voters are likely to influence an election. "They know it's Detroit. They know it's Kansas City and St. Louis. They know it's Las Vegas."

In late April, the Republican Party of Michigan announced that it hoped to recruit 1,000 poll watchers to monitor elections. The party told the Detroit Free Press that it planned to assign 300 of those to Oakland County, home of Pontiac, which is heavily minority. Why? The Republicans claimed that they had evidence that some people there had voted up to four times under different names. But even Republican Oakland County Clerk G. William Caddell doubted the allegation. "Last night was the first I'd heard of any problems," Caddell told the paper. "I want to be a good party person, but I haven't heard about this, and none of my local clerks have reported problems."

"We know there is going to be an aggressive effort to have poll watchers" across the country, including in Pontiac, says Greenbaum. "A poll watcher can be very intimidating." He says poll workers can confront voters with questions like, "What's your name?" or "What are you doing here?" or imply that the voters shouldn't be voting.

At issue is whether the poll watchers "are making accusations" that are based on real reasons or whether they're trying to slow down the lines "and impede voters, so less polling gets done," says Greenbaum.

Michigan is no stranger to aggressive poll watchers. In the 1999 election, a group calling itself Citizens for a Better Hamtramck went to the polling centers in Hamtramck, Michigan, and approached people who appeared to be Arab. "As people were standing outside waiting to vote, this group took it upon itself to ask people to prove they were citizens," says Laila Al-Qatami, communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "They were asking voters to step aside and say an oath of citizenship, even if they were capable of producing a U.S. passport." The group, says Al-Qatami, humiliated people, prohibited people from entering and voting and broke the law. The U.S. government filed a lawsuit that claimed violations of the Voting Rights Act. As part of an agreement resolving the suit, the U.S. Justice Department sent election monitors to Hamtramck between 2000 and 2003.

Missouri

The secretary of state of Missouri, Matt Blunt, is running for governor on the Republican Party ticket. "This gentleman has a vested interest in suppressing the black voter turnout in this state," says John Hickey, executive director of the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition.

"That is a ridiculous statement," says Spence Jackson, spokesperson for Blunt. "It is directly because of Matt Blunt's leadership that we have provisional balloting in our state." Because of Blunt, says Jackson, "thousands of voters have been given the opportunity to vote when they otherwise would not have had it." Provisional ballots allow voters who lack IDs, or whose names don't appear on the rolls, to cast votes. But the version Blunt introduced, concedes Jackson, requires that voters file any provisional ballots in the correct precinct-a demand that prompted a lawsuit from the Democratic Party and some citizens of Kansas City.

The suit claims that the new federal Help America Vote Act supersedes the older state law. It also alleges that toll-free help lines were so jammed during the August primary that many voters were unable to find out their correct polling site.

Other ominous problems cropped up that day. "In Democratic districts, which also happened to be predominantly African American, there were polls that opened late, like 10 a.m. instead of 7 a.m., which is a real problem for working people," says Counts of the AFL-CIO. "The hours weren't extended during the evening." Counts also says that "people who showed up without ID were turned away from the polls and not given /provisional ballots," even though that's what the law required.

The ID requirement, says Hickey, is a new law aimed at the black vote. It requires voters "to present the picture ID, unless the election official recognizes you." Where are they going to recognize you? asks Hickey. In small towns and rural areas, which, he points out, are majority white. In urban areas, says Hickey, it's more likely that poll workers won't recognize you, especially in areas that are poor and where people move frequently. "That means you need a picture ID in the city and not the country. The city's black. The country's white."

The new law amounts to "a sophisticated effort to suppress the vote," says Hickey. And he says the Republicans have given thought to this strategy. "OK, if we can shave off 1,000 black votes here and 500 black votes there, that's how" we're going to win. "It is disproportionately excluding poor and minority voters, and that is exactly why the Republicans passed that law after they took over the legislature."

Nevada

In late August, Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, met with the registrars from the Reno and Las Vegas areas. Peck says the registrar of Washoe County, which includes Reno, "noted that he had received calls" from people identifying themselves as members of the Republican Party. These Republicans, according to Peck, said "they intended to be out at polling places to challenge voters."

The registrar of Washoe County is Daniel Burk. "An official of the Republican Party" came to his office one day with a small group, he says. The official asked how to launch a "full-scale program for challenging voters who come to the polls." Burk says he informed the Republicans that vote challenges should be used narrowly, when one voter with personal knowledge of another calls attention to a problem.

"One said, 'Well, we were thinking of a wider scale use of it. We were thinking of challenging lots of voters,' " says Burk. It was the way they looked at each other, he says. "I began to wonder, what are they up to? I just told them I wouldn't tolerate it. The process isn't designed for one party challenging another."

Burk worked as a registrar in Oregon for eighteen years before he came to his position in Nevada seven years ago. "I have never in all those twenty-five years had a person challenge another person," he says.

The revelations, says Peck, are "consistent with reports people are getting all around the country. Republicans have a national strategy of going out and challenging voters" come November 2. "Our concerns are utterly nonpartisan," says Peck. "It's the integrity and fairness of the election." Although Nevada law does allow for voter challenges when a challenger has personal information about a voter's citizenship or place of residence, "it becomes problematic when people are using this strategically, in a partisan way." For instance, he says, "it would certainly be improper if they picked out the names of Latinos."

Juventino Camarena, a field representative for the Painters Union, is registering voters and keeping an eye out on voter protection issues as part of the My Vote-My Right campaign of the AFL-CIO. He is worried. "The people have been thinking what happened in Florida couldn't happen in Nevada," Camarena says. "Now, we're seeing little tactics here and little tactics there. There are all kinds of ways to confuse a person so bad that he takes it to his heart that it's so difficult, and I'm doing it for what? I've seen it in Mexico since I was a little kid. That's why I took it to heart to stop it. They're suppressing the right of the voter."

New Mexico

In August, a group comprised mostly of Republicans filed a suit claiming that people who were registering for the first time through a third party voter registration group, such as ACORN, should have to show IDs when they voted. The group said it was worried about voter fraud. Democrats said the Republicans were trying to disenfranchise voters.

"The plaintiffs are not able to demonstrate any fraud whatsoever," Luis Stelzner, an attorney, said while arguing against the ID requirement, according to the Associated Press. "The only thing we've heard from them is a vague fear of fraud." (Two plaintiffs in the suit who said that they were concerned about voter registration fraud admitted that they knew of no instances of the crime.) On September 7, Robert Thompson, a state district judge, refused to issue an injunction to force people to show IDs at the polls. "The eleventh-hour request by the plaintiffs creates a risk of substantially disrupting the public voting process, which far outweighs any potential harm to the plaintiffs," wrote Thompson in his decision.

The fraud allegations may be the least of the problems. Reyna Juarez, the administrative director of Revisioning New Mexico, a social justice organization connected to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, says that in 2000 her organization received reports that the immigration patrol showed up near some New Mexican polling sites. "Down south, they have the migra trucks that sit outside and scare people away," she says. "Not necessarily right outside the polls but in the neighborhood of the polls, so you see these enormous lime-green trucks."

South Dakota

South Dakota is hardly a swing state in the common sense, since George W. Bush is set to win here by a landslide. But the state is seeing a rough Senatorial race. The Republicans have targeted Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle for removal. And one tool is a new law that requires all voters to show ID at the polls and get all absentee ballots notarized.

During the 2002 election, Democratic Senator Tim Johnson won his seat by only 524 votes. He had strong Native American support. Republicans weren't happy about that. "In South Dakota, the common tactic is to allege voter fraud," particularly when the Democrats win, says Bryan Sells, staff attorney with the ACLU Voting Rights Project. "Usually it's called 'Indian voter fraud.' In fact, I can't recall a case of someone alleging 'non-Indian voter fraud.' The idea is, whether true or not, you create the sense" that Native American voters are not to be trusted.

After investigating fifty charges of fraud following that 2002 election, State Attorney General Mark Barnett, a Republican, said, "There was no widespread fraud and the election results are valid. No one stole the election."

Nonetheless, Republicans introduced legislation that Sells characterizes as "voter suppression." The legislation requires South Dakotans to show a picture ID in order to vote or else write up an affidavit. And, if they vote by absentee ballot, they need to get it notarized. The legislation, he says, will make it "harder to vote at the polls, harder to register, and harder to vote by absentee ballot," especially for people on reservations. "I don't know if you've ever been to a reservation, but there aren't a lot of notaries around."

Among Native Americans in South Dakota, there is a widespread belief that the legislation is aimed at them. "They decided, we got to do something to slow down the Indian vote," says Alfred Bone Shirt, a plaintiff in one of the five recent voting rights lawsuits the ACLU has filed in the state. "The bottom line of it all is racism." Jesse Clausen, who has been active in many voter registration drives, puts it another way. "In the summer of 2003, the South Dakota State Senate passed new laws to keep Native American people from voting," Clausen says. "Indian people living in poverty might have higher priority on other things than spending $8 to get their driver's license." Clausen points out that many people on the reservations don't have cars.

During a special election held on June 1, the effect of the new law on the Native American vote started to show. "People would go in and say, 'Well, I don't have an ID,' and [poll workers] would let it be known that if they didn't have an ID, they should turn around and leave," says Clausen.

Poll workers weren't supposed to do that. According to the law, they were supposed to give voters who lacked IDs an affidavit. Once signed, the affidavit would allow people to vote. Jason Schulte, executive director of the Democratic Party of South Dakota, says that, "mostly on or near reservations," people who forgot to bring their IDs "were not told about the affidavit scenario." Daschle himself says he "heard from countless voters who experienced difficulty when attempting to vote."

"Indians were disproportionately affected by the ID requirement," says Sells, adding that there were just more hurdles for Native Americans to leap.

Is this intentional on the part of the Republicans? Sells doesn't hesitate. "Yeah," he says. "In South Dakota, anyway. I don't for a minute suggest that Republicans have the suppression market cornered, but that's how it operates in South Dakota."

Additional efforts to suppress the vote are bound to happen in the last week of the campaign and on Election Day itself. Then, it will be almost impossible to remedy the situation.

Jim Gardner, communications director for the Missouri Democratic Party, describes some of the tactics that he says have happened in his state during past elections: "Videotaping people as they're coming into the polling place. Parking near a polling place in a Crown Victoria with a couple of guys in dark suits.... A whisper campaign that everyone trying to vote who has outstanding traffic tickets will be arrested." Gardner, who says the party had reports of such occurrences in 2000, says the Missouri Democrats have also heard stories in past elections of people handing out flyers in Democratic precincts that say, "Don't forget to vote on Wednesday, November 4," when the election is Tuesday, November 3.

If groups start trying to suppress the vote a month out from the election, says Greenbaum of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, "it gives people like us plenty of opportunity to react." Whereas, if voter suppression happens just before or the day of the election, "it's actually more likely to be effective." Greenbaum's organization faxed me a series of signs that have appeared in Democratic precincts on or near election day. One sign, which appeared in Baltimore in 2002, is entirely in capital letters. "URGENT NOTICE," it reads. "COME OUT TO VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6th. BEFORE YOU COME TO VOTE MAKE SURE YOU PAY YOUR

- PARKING TICKETS

- MOTOR VEHICLE TICKETS

- OVERDUE RENT

AND MOST IMPORTANT

ANY WARRANTS"

A second sign, this one from 1996, uses a tiny font to inform prospective voters that they may get into trouble when they walk into the booth. "Thanks to advances in computer technology Voting Machines can now be equipped with computers inside. The computers can be connected to a phone line to Federal State, and Local government agencies to instantly check if a voter is:

A NON-CITIZEN

Wanted on Criminal or Traffic Warrants or Parole or Probation violations
Is behind on child support payments
Is cheating on Welfare, Food Stamps, AFDC, Section 8 or Medicaid by earning money 'off the books'
Has defaulted on government-backed student loans
Has failed to file income taxes for two or more years."

In late August, People for the American Way and the NAACP released a report entitled, "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today." "In every national American election since Reconstruction, every election since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, voters-particularly African American voters and other minorities-have faced calculated and determined efforts at intimidation and suppression," says the report. However, it describes recent voter suppression tactics as "more subtle, cynical, and creative" than "the poll taxes, literacy tests, and physical violence of the Jim Crow era."

Jim Crow is still casting a very long shadow.

Anne-Marie Cusac is an investigative reporter at The Progressive.

Mike's Words : Mike's Message
Monday, September 20th, 2004
Put Away Your Hankies...a message from Michael Moore

9/20/04

Dear Friends,

Enough of the handwringing! Enough of the doomsaying! Do I have to come there and personally calm you down? Stop with all the defeatism, OK? Bush IS a goner -- IF we all just quit our whining and bellyaching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, "Oh, it's all over! We are finished! Bush can't win! Waaaaaa!"

Hell no. It's never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished -- they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying.

They are relentless and that is why we secretly admire them -- they just simply never, ever give up. Only 30% of the country calls itself "Republican," yet the Republicans own it all -- the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the majority of the governorships. How do you think they've been able to pull that off considering they are a minority? It's because they eat you and me and every other liberal for breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the planet.

Look at us -- what a bunch of crybabies. Bush gets a bounce after his convention and you would have thought the Germans had run through Poland again. The Bushies are coming, the Bushies are coming! Yes, they caught Kerry asleep on the Swift Boat thing. Yes, they found the frequency in Dan Rather and ran with it. Suddenly it's like, "THE END IS NEAR! THE SKY IS FALLING!"

No, it is not. If I hear one more person tell me how lousy a candidate Kerry is and how he can't win... Dammit, of COURSE he's a lousy candidate -- he's a Democrat, for heavens sake! That party is so pathetic, they even lose the elections they win! What were you expecting, Bruce Springsteen heading up the ticket? Bruce would make a helluva president, but guys like him don't run -- and neither do you or I. People like Kerry run.

Yes, OF COURSE any of us would have run a better, smarter, kick-ass campaign. Of course we would have smacked each and every one of those phony swifty boaty bastards down. But WE are not running for president -- Kerry is. So quit complaining and work with what we have. Oprah just gave 300 women a... Pontiac! Did you see any of them frowning and moaning and screaming, "Oh God, NOT a friggin' Pontiac!" Of course not, they were happy. The Pontiacs all had four wheels, an engine and a gas pedal. You want more than that, well, I can't help you. I had a Pontiac once and it lasted a good year. And it was a VERY good year.

My friends, it is time for a reality check.

1. The polls are wrong. They are all over the map like diarrhea. On Friday, one poll had Bush 13 points ahead -- and another poll had them both tied. There are three reasons why the polls are b.s.: One, they are polling "likely voters." "Likely" means those who have consistently voted in the past few elections. So that cuts out young people who are voting for the first time and a ton of non-voters who are definitely going to vote in THIS election. Second, they are not polling people who use their cell phone as their primary phone. Again, that means they are not talking to young people. Finally, most of the polls are weighted with too many Republicans, as pollster John Zogby revealed last week. You are being snookered if you believe any of these polls.

2. Kerry has brought in the Clinton A-team. Instead of shunning Clinton (as Gore did), Kerry has decided to not make that mistake.

3. Traveling around the country, as I've been doing, I gotta tell ya, there is a hell of a lot of unrest out there. Much of it is not being captured by the mainstream press. But it is simmering and it is real. Do not let those well-produced Bush rallies of angry white people scare you. Turn off the TV! (Except Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers -- everything else is just a sugar-coated lie).

4. Conventional wisdom says if the election is decided on "9/11" (the fear of terrorism), Bush wins. But if it is decided on the job we are doing in Iraq, then Bush loses. And folks, that "job," you might have noticed, has descended into the third level of a hell we used to call Vietnam. There is no way out. It is a full-blown mess of a quagmire and the body bags will sadly only mount higher. Regardless of what Kerry meant by his original war vote, he ain't the one who sent those kids to their deaths -- and Mr. and Mrs. Middle America knows it. Had Bush bothered to show up when he was in the "service" he might have somewhat of a clue as to how to recognize an immoral war that cannot be "won." All he has delivered to Iraq was that plasticized turkey last Thanksgiving. It is this failure of monumental proportions that is going to cook his goose come this November.

So, do not despair. All is not over. Far from it. The Bush people need you to believe that it is over. They need you to slump back into your easy chair and feel that sick pain in your gut as you contemplate another four years of George W. Bush. They need you to wish we had a candidate who didn't windsurf and who was just as smart as we were when WE knew Bush was lying about WMD and Saddam planning 9/11. It's like Karl Rove is hypnotizing you -- "Kerry voted for the war...Kerry voted for the war...Kerrrrrryyy vooootted fooooor theeee warrrrrrrrrr..."

Yes...Yes...Yesssss....He did! HE DID! No sense in fighting now...what I need is sleep...sleeep...sleeeeeeppppp...

WAKE UP! The majority are with us! More than half of all Americans are pro-choice, want stronger environmental laws, are appalled that assault weapons are back on the street -- and 54% now believe the war is wrong. YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO CONVINCE THEM OF ANY OF THIS -- YOU JUST HAVE TO GIVE THEM A RAY OF HOPE AND A RIDE TO THE POLLS. CAN YOU DO THAT? WILL YOU DO THAT?

Just for me, please? Buck up. The country is almost back in our hands. Not another negative word until Nov. 3rd! Then you can bitch all you want about how you wish Kerry was still that long-haired kid who once had the courage to stand up for something. Personally, I think that kid is still inside him. Instead of the wailing and gnashing of your teeth, why not hold out a hand to him and help the inner soldier/protester come out and defeat the forces of evil we now so desperately face. Do we have any other choice?

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 43 Days to Go -- Youth vote, Al Qaeda's endorsement, aWOL, Iraq, Global Warming

There are 43 days to go until the national referendum on the CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the _resident and the VICE _resident. Sadly, the US regimestream news media, in particular, the major network and cable news organizations, as well as the WASHPS and the NYTwits, are not just failing to provide you with substantive coverage and insightful commentary, they are COMPLICIT, they are full partners in a Triad of shared special interest (oil, weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) along with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-tahe-Republican-Party, they are carrying Rove's filthy water...Here are five very important LNS selections. Please read them, and share them with others. There is an Electoral Uprising coming in November. Please vote and encourage others to vote. There are two kinds of polls, the cooked ones they broadcast to cultivate despair, disbelief and disinformation among us, and the real ones they study in their war room. The real ones are making them very nervous. Please remember that the US regimstream news media does not want to inform you about this election or the choice it offers you, it wants to DISinform you...There is an Electoral Uprising coming at the Ballot Box in 43 days..."Fear no darkness."

Martha Irvine, Associated Press: Officials in several other battleground states — New Mexico, Ohio and Florida among them — see clear signs that more young people are interested in this election. And some election experts believe that polls of "likely voters" often miss young people because the population is so mobile...
In Wisconsin, the New Voters Project claims to have registered more than 109,000 young people — numbers election officials say they have "no reason to doubt."
Officials at Rock the Vote — a nationwide campaign aimed at young people — say they expect registration numbers to surge as deadlines in many states approach. In the first two weeks of September alone, more than 163,000 people filled out and downloaded registration forms from Rock the Vote's Web site. Hans Riemer, the organization's Washington, D.C., director, says that in the past week as many as 20,000 people a day used the site to register.

Reuters: Britain’s ambassador to Italy described President Bush as “the best recruiting sergeant” for al-Qaida, Italian media reported on Monday.
The comment, made at a closed-door conference at the weekend, was denounced by one leading Italian newspaper editor, who issued an open letter snubbing the veteran ambassador, Sir Ivor Roberts.
Roberts was quoted as telling an annual Anglo-Italian gathering in Tuscany, “If anyone is ready to celebrate the eventual re-election of Bush, it’s al-Qaida.”
Corriere della Sera newspaper said Roberts also told the meeting of British and Italian policy-makers, “Bush is al-Qaida’s best recruiting sergeant.”

Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), www.johnkerry.com: “One clear sign of weakness and failed leadership is when a politician stoops to the politics of fear. In the last twenty-four hours Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, has joined the fear mongering choir. Last night, he said something to the effect that Al Qaeda wants John Kerry to be President of the United States. Let me say this in the simplest possible terms: when John Kerry is President of the United States, we will find Al Qaeda where they are and crush them before they can do damage to the American people.
“Over and over, this president and his cronies have taken one of our nation’s greatest tragedies and used it as part of a cheap political ploy. With their words, they seek to divide us and they dishonor the fallen. They want to scare the American people but they will pay a price in November.
“None of us should be surprised by this, because just two or three weeks ago we heard what Dick Cheney said about this. He said that if you don't vote for him and George Bush come November and there is another terrorist attack, then it's your fault.
“The truth is that this statement by Dick Cheney was not an accident. It was calculated and it was calculated to divide us on one of the most critical issues to our country, keeping the American people safe and secure. It was un-American. The President of the United States should say it was un-American.”

James Moore, www.buzzflash.com: The available evidence is still pointing in the direction of deceit and the smoke machine fueled by the CBS memos cannot hide that fact. The president continues to refuse to allow uncontrolled access to his microfilmed documents at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis or the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the hard copy file is incomplete. People who know the truth about the president’s time in the Texas Air National Guard are angry that the cover up of his failings has been so effective. And now there are suspicions that the individuals who have long sought after the truth may have succumbed to the power of fighting a well-told lie with another; not so well-told. If this has happened, much more than just CBS’ future is at risk.
Reports that one of the controversial documents was faxed from a Kinko’s in Abilene are interpreted as evidence of the involvement of Lt. Col. (Ret.) Bill Burkett. Burkett, who has never concealed his anger at Mr. Bush, lives less than a half hour from the Kinko’s location. After appearing with me for an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher, Burkett, his wife, and a colleague of mine discussed politics over dinner. I had been talking to Burkett for over a year, gathering information and trying to corroborate a story he had told me and one other reporter about a purging of George W. Bush’s hard copy file at the Texas National Guard headquarters on Camp Mabry in Austin. Neither then, nor now, did Burkett attempt to hide his disdain for President Bush.
“I don’t know how he’s doing this,” Burkett said. “He says whatever he wants. It has nothing to do with the truth. And people are letting him get away with it. He’s just lying. Over and over again. About his past. About Iraq. You name it."
CBS and Rather may have to admit mistakes. And then make corrections. Why don’t we demand the same thing of our president? Maybe there are no big lies and small lies. There are just lies. And they all must be atoned for. We know the ones that belong to George W. Bush. And if we don’t hold him accountable, eventually, we the people will end up paying for his debts and his sins.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta): With us today is a remarkable group of women who lost loved ones on September 11th … and whose support I am honored to have. Not only did they suffer an unbearable loss – they helped us learn the lessons of that terrible time by insisting on the creation of the 9/11 Commission. I ask them to stand. And I thank them on behalf of our country -- and I pledge to them and to you that I will implement the 9-11 recommendations...
In June, the President declared, “The Iraqi people have their country back.” Just last week, he told us: “This country is headed toward democracy… Freedom is on the march.”
But the administration’s own official intelligence estimate, given to the President last July, tells a very different story.
According to press reports, the intelligence estimate totally contradicts what the President is saying to the American people.
So do the facts on the ground...
The first and most fundamental mistake was the President’s failure to tell the truth to the American people.
He failed to tell the truth about the rationale for going to war. And he failed to tell the truth about the burden this war would impose on our soldiers and our citizens.
By one count, the President offered 23 different rationales for this war. If his purpose was to confuse and mislead the American people, he succeeded.
His two main rationales – weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda/September 11 connection – have been proved false… by the President’s own weapons inspectors… and by the 9/11 Commission. Just last week, Secretary of State Powell acknowledged the facts. Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.
The President also failed to level with the American people about what it would take to prevail in Iraq.
He didn’t tell us that well over 100,000 troops would be needed, for years, not months. He didn’t tell us that he wouldn’t take the time to assemble a broad and strong coalition of allies. He didn’t tell us that the cost would exceed $200 billion. He didn’t tell us that even after paying such a heavy price, success was far from assured...
This President’s failure to tell the truth to us before the war has been exceeded by fundamental errors of judgment during and after the war.
The President now admits to “miscalculations” in Iraq.
That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment – and judgment is what we look for in a president.
This is all the more stunning because we’re not talking about 20/20 hindsight. Before the war, before he chose to go to war, bi-partisan Congressional hearings… major outside studies… and even some in the administration itself… predicted virtually every problem we now face in Iraq.
This President was in denial. He hitched his wagon to the ideologues who surround him, filtering out those who disagreed, including leaders of his own party and the uniformed military. The result is a long litany of misjudgments with terrible consequences.
The administration told us we’d be greeted as liberators. They were wrong.
They told us not to worry about looting or the sorry state of Iraq’s infrastructure. They were wrong.
They told us we had enough troops to provide security and stability, defeat the insurgents, guard the borders and secure the arms depots. They were wrong.
They told us we could rely on exiles like Ahmed Chalabi to build political legitimacy. They were wrong.
They told us we would quickly restore an Iraqi civil service to run the country and a police force and army to secure it. They were wrong.
In Iraq, this administration has consistently over-promised and under-performed. This policy has been plagued by a lack of planning, an absence of candor, arrogance and outright incompetence. And the President has held no one accountable, including himself.
In fact, the only officials who lost their jobs over Iraq were the ones who told the truth.
On May 1 of last year, President Bush stood in front of a now infamous banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” He declared to the American people: “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” In fact, the worst part of the war was just beginning, with the greatest number of American casualties still to come. The president misled, miscalculated, and mismanaged every aspect of this undertaking and he has made the achievement of our objective – a stable Iraq, secure within its borders, with a representative government, harder to achieve.
In Iraq, this administration’s record is filled with bad predictions, inaccurate cost estimates, deceptive statements and errors of judgment of historic proportions.
At every critical juncture in Iraq, and in the war on terrorism, the President has made the wrong choice. I have a plan to make America stronger.
The President often says that in a post 9-11 world, we can’t hesitate to act. I agree. But we should not act just for the sake of acting. I believe we have to act wisely and responsibly.
George Bush has no strategy for Iraq. I do.

Baltimore Sun: An International group of scientists studying global warming predicted in 2001 a sharp increase in melting of glaciers and polar ice, heat waves and related deaths, severe storms and flooding, and drought and wildfires, as well as substantially altered patterns of species migration.
Three years later, it can be reported all of that and more has happened - with stunning and record speed. The latest fearful evidence storming in from the Gulf of Mexico goes by the name of Ivan, the fourth major hurricane of a season that usually doesn't produce so many and still has 21Ú2 months to go.
Japan has been hit this year by seven typhoons, the most since record-keeping began in 1951, and the worst floods in decades have killed more than 400 people in China. In Europe, 19,000 people succumbed last year to a heat wave that was one of the deadliest of the decade.
This is only the beginning, experts agree. Even those who contend climate change is a natural cyclical phenomenon expect the cycle to last decades or more.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040920/ap_on_el_pr/young_voters_battleground_2

More Young People Registering to Vote

Mon Sep 20, 7:49 AM ET

By MARTHA IRVINE, AP National Writer

Voter registration drives aimed at young people are turning 18- to 24-year-olds into an important variable in the presidential election, especially in decisive battleground states such as Michigan — where nearly 100,000 young people have registered in recent months — and Wisconsin, where the numbers are even higher.

They are the nation's newest swing voters, with polls showing their support for the major candidates has vacillated in recent months. A Harvard University poll found that, in a five-month period, 19 percent of young potential voters changed their minds about whom they'd support.

"It's a big population of fluid voters, and they're largely unknown," says Ivan Frishberg, outreach and communications coordinator for the nonprofit New Voters Project, which has registered tens of thousands of young people across the country.

Take Kristin Wilson, a 23-year-old in Perrysburg, Ohio, and her 18-year-old sister, Kellyn, a freshman at Ohio State University. Both have registered to vote, but neither identifies as Republican or Democrat and both are taking their time deciding who to vote for.

"I think people underestimate people our age," Kellyn says. "And they shouldn't."

The candidates have made some attempts to reach out to college students and other young people. The Bush campaign has a Web log that includes "Barbara and Jenna's journal," detailing the president's daughters' campaign exploits. Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites), who made a campus tour last spring, recently appeared on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."

And the political parties are using volunteers and paid canvassers to register young voters and get them to the polls. But the attempts can sometimes fall flat.

"Some of it feels very awkward to young people — like the candidates are trying too hard," says Jane Eisner, author of the new book "Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy."

Other times, young people feel ignored, says Stephen Lucas, a high school junior in Leechburg, Pa.

"I haven't heard any serious talk about college tuition, or even people our age mentioned," says Lucas, who works with a group called Freedom's Answer to get upperclassmen interested in voting.

It's still anybody's guess how many young people have registered in his state, another thought to be a toss-up. Michigan is one of the few that has compiled registration numbers by age.

Officials in several other battleground states — New Mexico, Ohio and Florida among them — see clear signs that more young people are interested in this election. And some election experts believe that polls of "likely voters" often miss young people because the population is so mobile.

In Wisconsin, the New Voters Project claims to have registered more than 109,000 young people — numbers election officials say they have "no reason to doubt."

"It's been an incredible undertaking," says Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the State Board of Elections in Wisconsin, a state Al Gore (news - web sites) won by less than 6,000 votes in 2000.

Officials at Rock the Vote — a nationwide campaign aimed at young people — say they expect registration numbers to surge as deadlines in many states approach. In the first two weeks of September alone, more than 163,000 people filled out and downloaded registration forms from Rock the Vote's Web site. Hans Riemer, the organization's Washington, D.C., director, says that in the past week as many as 20,000 people a day used the site to register.

At that rate, he says Rock the Vote's registration numbers may surpass those from 1992 — a year when young voter turnout topped 50 percent for the first and only time since 1972.

One political scientist says he's particularly interested to see what happens this time in Minnesota, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, where voters can register on Election Day. Data has shown that young people are particularly likely to take advantage of same-day registration.

"It leaves the door open for a surprising outcome," says Donald Green, a political scientist at Yale University and co-author of "Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout."

Stephanie Camargo, a recent graduate of the University of Florida who opted not to vote in 2000, says she'll be one of those young people who gets to the polls Nov. 2. She has many motivators — from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the war in Iraq (news - web sites) (where she has a cousin fighting), to peers who are still looking for jobs.

"Before I thought of politics as a game," says Camargo, 22, who's registered in Broward County, Fla. "Now I realize you have to play the game if you want to make a difference."

___

On the Net:

http://www.rockthevote.org

http://www.freedomsanswer.org

___

Martha Irvine is a national writer specializing in coverage of people in their 20s and younger. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6052073/

MSNBC.com
U.K. envoy: Bush the best recruiter for al-Qaida
Italian media report ambassador's remarks at private conference

Reuters
Updated: 7:22 a.m. ET Sept. 20, 2004

ROME - Britain’s ambassador to Italy described President Bush as “the best recruiting sergeant” for al-Qaida, Italian media reported on Monday.

The comment, made at a closed-door conference at the weekend, was denounced by one leading Italian newspaper editor, who issued an open letter snubbing the veteran ambassador, Sir Ivor Roberts.

Roberts was quoted as telling an annual Anglo-Italian gathering in Tuscany, “If anyone is ready to celebrate the eventual re-election of Bush, it’s al-Qaida.”

Corriere della Sera newspaper said Roberts also told the meeting of British and Italian policy-makers, “Bush is al-Qaida’s best recruiting sergeant.”

The British embassy in Rome declined to comment about the remarks, saying the Tuscan conference had been covered by the so-called Chatham House Rules, which means that anything said by delegates should remain off the record.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair along with Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have been Bush’s strongest allies in Europe.

Conservative furor
Giuliano Ferrara, outspoken editor of the conservative Il Foglio broadsheet, wrote an open letter saying he would boycott a previously scheduled dinner with the ambassador on Monday.

“The dinner unfortunately would be a complete waste of time and a grotesque hypocrisy,” he said.

Ferrara added that he would prefer to have supper with the French ambassador to Italy “who loyally represents in Rome Mr. Jacques Chirac.”

Ferrara is a fervent supporter of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Roberts was British ambassador to Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s, helping negotiations between the international community and Yugoslav authorities. He then served as British ambassador to Ireland before his Italian posting.

Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6052073/

Statement by John Edwards on Republican Fear Mongering
Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards today made the following statement in response to Dennis Hastert’s comments last night that Al Qaeda wants John Kerry to be elected:

“One clear sign of weakness and failed leadership is when a politician stoops to the politics of fear. In the last twenty-four hours Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, has joined the fear mongering choir. Last night, he said something to the effect that Al Qaeda wants John Kerry to be President of the United States. Let me say this in the simplest possible terms: when John Kerry is President of the United States, we will find Al Qaeda where they are and crush them before they can do damage to the American people.

“Over and over, this president and his cronies have taken one of our nation’s greatest tragedies and used it as part of a cheap political ploy. With their words, they seek to divide us and they dishonor the fallen. They want to scare the American people but they will pay a price in November.

“None of us should be surprised by this, because just two or three weeks ago we heard what Dick Cheney said about this. He said that if you don't vote for him and George Bush come November and there is another terrorist attack, then it's your fault.

“The truth is that this statement by Dick Cheney was not an accident. It was calculated and it was calculated to divide us on one of the most critical issues to our country, keeping the American people safe and secure. It was un-American. The President of the United States should say it was un-American.”

http://blog.johnkerry.com/rapidresponse/

Posted on September 19, 2004 at 03:49 PM
Election 2004 | Entry link | Comments (0)

Statement from John Edwards on Despicable Republican Tactics
Senator John Edwards issued the following statement today based on reports that the Republican National Committee sent campaign mail into West Virginia claiming that the Bible will be banned if Democrats are elected in November:

“Republicans always say they want to have a values debate but lying and spreading hate were not the values I learned growing up in a small town in North Carolina where the Bible was the most important book my home. George Bush and Dick Cheney should be appalled by these despicable mailings. They should condemn this practice immediately and tell everyone associated with their campaign to never use tactics like this again. The American people deserve better.”

Posted on September 18, 2004 at 03:58 PM

http://www.buzzflash.com/buzzscripts/buzz.dll/sub2

BUZZFLASH REPORT Monday September 20, 2004 at 9:27:14 AM

James C. Moore, Co-Author of "Bush's Brain" and an Expert on Karl Rove and Bush's National Guard Lies, Speculates on the CBS Memos. Are They True Fabrications?
A BuzzFlash Exclusive.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

September 20, 2004

Men of Destiny

“It is one thing to show a man that
he is in error, and another to put
him in possession of the truth.”
John Locke

By James C. Moore, Co-Author of "Bush's Brain" and Author of "Bush's War for Reelection"

Liars are not supposed to last. Eventually, their fabrications can be expected to collapse and all of the sickness they have spread is cured by truth and righteousness. Most of the time that’s what happens. But there is a new perception in the American political process and it is a threat to candidates and our democracy. Lying has become an acceptable tactic. And the immorality of lying is no longer a reason to dismiss it as an effective tool. When voters are not paying attention, lying works. But it still creates casualties and they are beginning to accumulate in the controversy surrounding CBS and the George W. Bush National Guard memos.

In the cascade of events that has led CBS News into trouble, the first lie actually belongs to the President of the United States. No one any longer has doubt that there are records missing from the president’s Military Personnel Records Jacket. Huge gaps of service time are simply unaccounted for. Also, there is no commander’s report or counseling statement, which is required by guard regulations, to explain the grounding of Lt. Bush. Oddly, not one journalist has ever asked the president why he did not show up for his flight physical. His spokesman, Dan Bartlett, has been able to explain away the controversy by saying the physical was “a formality because he was no longer flying.” That’s not true, of course, because pilots are not allowed to decide on their own they no longer want to fly. Instead of addressing that matter, though, the White House consistently claims, “The president got an honorable discharge and is proud of his service in the National Guard.”

The available evidence is still pointing in the direction of deceit and the smoke machine fueled by the CBS memos cannot hide that fact. The president continues to refuse to allow uncontrolled access to his microfilmed documents at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis or the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the hard copy file is incomplete. People who know the truth about the president’s time in the Texas Air National Guard are angry that the cover up of his failings has been so effective. And now there are suspicions that the individuals who have long sought after the truth may have succumbed to the power of fighting a well-told lie with another; not so well-told. If this has happened, much more than just CBS’ future is at risk.

Reports that one of the controversial documents was faxed from a Kinko’s in Abilene are interpreted as evidence of the involvement of Lt. Col. (Ret.) Bill Burkett. Burkett, who has never concealed his anger at Mr. Bush, lives less than a half hour from the Kinko’s location. After appearing with me for an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher, Burkett, his wife, and a colleague of mine discussed politics over dinner. I had been talking to Burkett for over a year, gathering information and trying to corroborate a story he had told me and one other reporter about a purging of George W. Bush’s hard copy file at the Texas National Guard headquarters on Camp Mabry in Austin. Neither then, nor now, did Burkett attempt to hide his disdain for President Bush.

“I don’t know how he’s doing this,” Burkett said. “He says whatever he wants. It has nothing to do with the truth. And people are letting him get away with it. He’s just lying. Over and over again. About his past. About Iraq. You name it.”

I had included Burkett’s story in my new book, which was just being released at the time of our interview with Maher. What he had detailed, with unfailing repetition, was consistent with what I knew to be the facts based upon the released Bush file and dozens of other interviews I had conducted over the years. Burkett’s reputation was also considered impeccable by a number of people I had interviewed both on and off the record. Even the Chief Warrant Officer, George Conn, who later discounted Burkett’s version of events, described him as an honorable man who never opened his mouth without speaking the truth. Besides, Burkett was in the midst of a retirement on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, enjoying time with his wife and their grandchildren. But his health was failing. He suffered neural and muscular problems as a result of a virus he said he had contracted on a military mission in Panama. Bill Burkett did not seem a likely candidate to make up stories and take on the White House.

Burkett told me that he had witnessed hard copy documents being dumped out of Bush’s file and into a wastebasket. According to his memory, there were “retirement points” and pay sheets in the trash and he had a moment to “lightly rummage” through them as two other officers stepped away to talk. The officer Burkett claimed was doing the cleansing of the Bush file, Gen. John Scribner, has denied the story as has Conn, who had asked Burkett to go for a walk that evening and took him on a circuitous route to the building where Scribner was allegedly going through the file. In 1997, when this was supposed to have occurred, Bush was preparing to run for re-election as governor and was prepping a presidential campaign. Cleaning up a hard copy file and then controlling access to the microfilmed record was a simple method for hiding the facts. Bill Burkett either had a fanciful imagination or his unfettered access to senior officers in the Texas Guard had serendipitously put him a few right places at all the wrong times.

Burkett, who is subject to seizures as a result of his virus and has begun to need a cane to walk, is not the only officer within the Texas Guard who is angered at President Bush. At least a dozen commanders, some of them still within the guard, are mad over the lack of adequate funding and essential training. They blame former Texas Governor Bush and his successor, Rick Perry. Burkett had been hired to fix those failings. But he never got the chance. He was brought into the Texas Guard by recommendations from former Republican Governor Bill Clements and Jim Francis, one of the president’s closest friends and most prolific fund-raisers. Burkett’s job was to develop a plan to make the guard’s training and equipment more relevant to modern missions against enemies like terrorists. His years of work and recommendations, however, were never implemented and the governor is said to have turned down millions of dollars in federal money to pay for improvements when it was offered by the Clinton administration.

No one understood the decision to not upgrade the guard until Bush ran for president. In his first policy speech, given at the Citadel, candidate Bush told the assembled cadets, “If the commander-in-chief were today call upon all of our armed forces to defend America, at least one full division would be unable to answer that call.” The only “full division” that was incapacitated at the time of that speech was the Texas National Guard. The governor of Texas is the only governor in the country who has command of a full division. It struck Texas Guard commanders then, even some who supported Bush, that they had been used as a political ploy and their lousy training and equipment was part of a plan. Burkett’s complaints, and those of others, had already resulted in a Texas legislative investigation. Nothing changed, though, and a few years later stories of “ghost soldiers,” men kept on rosters after they had quit in order maintain federal funding, began to leak into the media. Burkett also related the purging incident to USA Today but the paper’s editors failed to publish it until my book was released in early 2004.

The disgust over all of this may have reached its flashpoint this summer when the Texas 56th Brigade Combat Team was called to active duty and sent to Iraq. The grumblings were the same. Not enough armored equipment. Outdated weaponry. No tactical training relevant to the conflict. An insufficient amount of body armor. One former officer threatened to hold a news conference and confront Mr. Bush and the governor of Texas. A president, who had avoided combat in Vietnam by getting into the guard and then had walked away four years into a six year hitch, was sending them into a deadly war without training or appropriate weaponry. Their anger was understandable.

The emotion was further exacerbated by political context. The same president that had avoided combat was allowing his re-election campaign to attack a candidate who had volunteered to go to the war, a man who had shed blood and had been awarded medals. Even Texas Guard soldiers that follow orders, regardless of the politics of their commanders, had now reached the end of their tolerance. And at least one of these individuals was probably angry enough to manufacture documents. The men accusing Kerry were using lies to destroy his military reputation and ruin his candidacy so why not use lies to fight back? It was faulty and dangerous rationale, if it were deployed. And it has frightening implications for American democracy.

Burkett gets named as the primary suspect because of his profile. When his friend George Conn failed to confirm the file purging story for the Boston Globe, a number of journalists tended to discredit everything Burkett said. Conn, who works as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army in Germany, has college age children and a wife who reportedly works for a large Republican law firm in Dallas, could have reasonably been expected to choose his family over Burkett. Burkett told me he understood Conn’s actions and probably would have done the same thing. The White House, meanwhile, is working very diligently on connecting the CBS Killian memos, if they are fabrications, to Burkett. Strategically, the political intent is transparent: he’s discredited so if the memos are his they are also discredited. Burkett’s personal medical files were leaked to reporters and it is now public knowledge that he had a nervous breakdown while fighting the virus he contracted in Panama. One skeptic has suggested that the use of the term “billet” in one of the documents is telling because it is an Army and not an Air Force term and Burkett’s background is not Air National Guard. And, of course, there is the Kinko’s fax.

If Burkett is suspect, though, so is Karl Rove. Admittedly, this is a five-cushion bank shot if it does involve Rove. But such things are no longer considered impossible when looking at his political machinations. Every campaign he runs seems to have well-timed distractions. In 2000, just before his inarticulate client was to debate Al Gore, a tape of Mr. Bush’s training ended up in the Gore campaign’s mailbox. Reporters wrote about this discovery and overwhelmed issues and debate coverage with the unraveling mystery. An employee of Mark McKinnon, Bush’s media expert, was later implicated in the scandal but nobody ever proved Rove wasn’t pulling strings. Of course, it was strictly coincidental when Rove’s office was found bugged in 1986, the day of a critical debate between another one of his inarticulate candidates and an incumbent governor. That mystery overwhelmed debate coverage and implicated the democratic opponent. I remember standing with other reporters outside of Rove’s building after his news conference to announce the revelation he was bugged. We all laughed about how amateurish it all appeared. And then we realized he had us because we had to report it straight; not the way we perceived the facts. When the FBI file was finally made public, it showed the bug on Rove’s wall had a battery with a life span of only six hours and just 15 minutes of it had been expended. Rove did it. But there are probably too many people who would have had to have been in on the fraud for him to make phony documents surface in CBS’s hands.

So, Rove, it turns out, might just be both lucky and good. His deceptive behavior through the years, involving everything from Swift Boat veterans to faux environmental groups made up of Bush donors, is not a sufficient rationale for others to enter lying into the political process. Nothing is. But that appears to be what has resulted from the persistent string of lies about the president’s time in the National Guard, should the CBS memos be proven false. Some of the good guys may not be the good guys any more. They may have become like their enemies. And in the process, they gave Rove what he needs to win. There is truth, however, in the fake memos. Witnesses, including commander Killian’s secretary, have said Lt. Bush defied an order to take his flight physical. The White House has not refuted what is in the memos. It has only attacked the legitimacy of the documents themselves. Republican congressional leaders, who asked no questions about faulty intelligence leading to the war with Iraq, are suddenly demanding investigations and hearings on the failings of CBS. Burkett told the Washington Post to not be so confident the Killian memos were forgeries. What does he know that he isn’t saying? Yet. Is it possible they are flawed transcriptions of real memos and the originals are being protected? And how would he know? Or does he know?

This has all worked very well for the Bush campaign. Reporters worried about the veracity of the Killian memos have not yet asked the president if he failed to obey a direct order to take his physical. And that’s a fair question, regardless of who wrote the Killian documents. Lt. Bush missed a physical and there has never been an explanation beyond Dan Bartlett’s lame argument of “formality.” This most glaring lie in the president’s resume, his time in the Texas Air National Guard, avoids intelligent scrutiny because memos raising the issue appear dubious.

The bonus for Rove is that Dan Rather is enduring greater evaluation than the President of the United States. The CBS anchor, who rode to the top of his profession on the crest of great national events like Hurricane Carla, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and Watergate, has long been vilified by the right. If Rather and his talented producer Mary Mapes did not bring proper skepticism to their analysis of the documents, they will likely pay a dear professional price. And John Kerry, who ran a positive convention and ignored the Swift Boat attacks while the GOP spat vitriol, can also be expected to pay a price for bad advice and a lack of political diligence. No toll, however, has ever been exacted on the life and political career of George W. Bush. The magnitude of his lies and mistakes far outweighs any possible transgression by CBS or those who might have fabricated the Killian memos. If they get caught, they suffer. Mr. Bush has been proved both wrong and deceptive and has danced into a lead in the polls through our collective American delusion. We punish the anchorman and praise the president.

CBS and Rather may have to admit mistakes. And then make corrections. Why don’t we demand the same thing of our president? Maybe there are no big lies and small lies. There are just lies. And they all must be atoned for. We know the ones that belong to George W. Bush. And if we don’t hold him accountable, eventually, we the people will end up paying for his debts and his sins.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2004_0920.html

Speech at New York University
Remarks of John Kerry
For Immediate Release

Bush's Catastrophic Failures in Iraq
Congressional Republicans Admit What Bush Hides
Kerry Leads, Bush Follows on Iraq Policy
Winning The Peace In Iraq


New York, NY - I am honored to be here at New York University -- one of the great urban universities, not just in New York, but in the world. You have set a high standard for global dialogue and I hope to live up to that tradition today.

This election is about choices. The most important choices a President makes are about protecting America… at home and around the world. A president’s first obligation is to make America safer,