Liberation News Service

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 2 Days to Go -- Remember, Winston, 2+2=4

There are only two days to go until the Electoral Uprising..Eight more US marines died yesterday in Iraq. For what? The neo-con wet dream of a Three Stooges Reich. But eight more US marines, as devastating as that loss is, may not be all we have lost irretrievably in the past 24 hours. It is painfully clear now that the Corporatist Media has chosen to remain a full partner in the Triad of shared special interest (i.e. energy, weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, tobacoo, etc.) with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party, and, consequently, it too will lose on this coming Tuesday. The propapunditgandists have spent the last news cycle spinning the re-emergence of Osama bin Laden, in a video in which he mocks the _resident, as somehow a boost for BC04. Remember, my friends, 2+2=4. Remember, the pre-9/11 negligence of the Bush national insecurity team gave Bin Laden a claer shot at this country on 9/11, Remember, their post-9/11 incompetence let him escape the dragnet and furthermore has exalted him, inflamed the Arab Street and infused his ranks with new recruits. Rememember, 2+2+4. After 9/11, the _resident said, "Wanted Dead or Alive." But after Bin Laden got away, the _resident said Bin Laden was "insignificant" and that he didn't spend much time "thinking about him," and then many months later, in the debates, the _resident denied having made the remark, now within few days of the US election, a Bin Laden video is released, in which he taunts the _resident for reading My Pet Goat while the country is attacked...Remember, too, that Al Qaeda already endorsed BC04...If the US electorate turns to the _resident because he makes them "feels safer," then the Bush Cabal will have made another conquest: first they seized Washington, D.C. and turned it into Beltwayistan, then they moved into Afghanistan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, etc. and turned them into Pipelineistan, but actually electing Bush-Cheney will prove that the US has been turned into Suckerstan...It is more likely that the US regimestream news, which has no credibility now whatsoever, will be repudiated, along with the _resident and the VICE _ resident, in the results of this Tuesday's national referendum…Remember, 2+2=4...NO DEFEAT\NO SURRENDER...Remember Duval County!

http://ydr.com/story/election/47450/printer/

Retired military men stump for Kerry
All three are critical of Bush's handling of Iraq.
By TOM JOYCE
Daily Record/Sunday News
Saturday, October 30, 2004

The three men eating lunch at a backroom in the Sunrise Restaurant in York had some things in common. All three were ex-military. All three voted for President Bush in the 2000 elections. And all three now regret it.
Two of the men are retired lieutenant generals. William Hilsman was commanding general of the Army's Research and Development Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, N.J., and, earlier, served a year in Vietnam with the 1st Infantry Division. He now lives in Nuremberg, Pa.

Robert Kelly was in the Air Force for more than 30 years, served as fighter pilot in Vietnam and was the military's top adviser on air power during the Persian Gulf War. He now lives in Gladwyne.

And former Army Capt. Patrick Murphy, 31, returned from Baghdad in January. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Iraq.

All three men have volunteered for the Kerry campaign, and have been touring Pennsylvania to speak about their experiences and opinions.

Kelly said he's been a Republican since 1964. Not only did he vote for President Bush, he actually attended his inaugural ball.

"I'm ashamed I did that," Kelly said on Friday afternoon. "It's been a disaster."

Kelly dislikes Bush's approach to the economy, accusing him of putting corporate interests ahead of the public's. But most of their discussion Friday afternoon focused on the president's policies in Iraq.

As far as Kelly's concerned, the entanglement in Iraq is counterproductive to fighting terrorism. As al-Qaida strikes in far-flung areas such as Russia and Spain, the United States military is bogged down in one spot.

Hilsman faults Bush for entering Iraq with no exit strategy. He also believes a big part of the problem is Bush's unwillingness or inability to form alliances with other countries.

Critics may complain such alliances would compromise U.S. sovereignty, Hilsman said. But he argues that the United States couldn't have won the Cold War without NATO, and that didn't compromise the country's sovereignty.

"We can't just keep trying to do this alone," Hilsman said. "President Bush can't do it. He's burned too many bridges."

Murphy, for his part, said he doesn't feel qualified to discuss policy. But he did describe what he's seen firsthand. And he said it's even worse than news accounts indicate. His brigade of 3,500 soldiers was asked to secure an area populated by 1.5 million Iraqis, he said.

The day after Murphy returned home to Philadelphia from Fort Bragg, N.C., he volunteered full time for Kerry's campaign.

"I believe in the leadership of John Kerry," Murphy said. "He will make the best commander-in-chief of this nation."

Reach Tom Joyce at 771-2089, 783-2365 or tjoyce@ydr.com.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/103104W.shtml

No Retreat, No Surrender
By Bruce Springsteen
CommonDreams.org
Comments to Kerry Rally in Madison, Wisconsin

Thursday 28 October 2004

Thank you! Thank you.

As a songwriter, I've written about America for thirty years. Tryin' to write about who we are, what we stand for, what we fight for. And I believe that these essential ideas of American identity are what's at stake on November 2nd.

I think the human principles of economic justice -- just healing the sick, health care, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, a living wage so folks don't have to break their backs and still not make ends meet, the protection of our environment, a sane and responsible foreign policy, civil rights and the protection and safeguarding of our precious democracy here at home -- I believe that Senator Kerry honors these ideals. He has lived our history over the past fifty years. He has an informed and adult view of America and its people. He's had the life experience, and I think he understands that we as humans are not infallible. And as Senator Edwards said during the Democratic convention, that struggle and heartbreak will always be with us. And that's why we need each other. That's why "united we stand" -- that's why "one nation indivisible" -- aren't just slogans, but they need to remain guiding principles of our public policy. And he's shown starting as a young man, that by facing America's hard truths, both the good and the bad, that that's where we find a deeper patriotism. That's where we find a more complete view of who we are. That's where we find a more authentic experience as citizens. And that's where we find the power that is embedded only in truth, to make our world a better and a safer place.

Paul Wellstone, the great Minnesota senator -- he said the future is for the passionate, and those that are willing to fight and to work hard for it. Well the future is now, and it's time to let your passions loose.

So let's roll up our sleeves. That's why I'm here today, to stand alongside Senator Kerry and to tell you that the country we carry in our hearts is waiting. And together we can move America towards her deepest ideals. And besides, we had a sax player in the [White] House -- we need a guitar player in the White House.

Alright -- this is for John. This is for you, John.

[Bruce launches into No Retreat, No Surrender]

We busted out of class had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school
Tonight I heart the neighborhood drummer sound
I can feel my heart begin to pound
You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes and follow your dreams down

We made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, believe me, no surrender
Like soldiers in the winter’s night with a vow to defend
No retreat, believe me, no surrender

Now young faces grow sad and old and hearts of fire grow cold
We swore blood brothers against the wind
I’m ready to grow young again
And hear your sister’s voice calling us home across the open yards
Believin’ we could cut someplace of our own
With these drums and these guitars

We made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, believe me, no surrender
Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend
No retreat, believe me, no surrender

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
But it’s good to see your smiling face and to hear your voice again
We could sleep in the twilight by the river side
With a wide open country in our hearts
And these romantic dreams in our heads

We made a promise...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1339597,00.html

US election

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The case for Kerry

Leader
Saturday October 30, 2004
The Guardian

Plenty of Americans believe it is none of our business whom they elect as their leader on Tuesday. But there are two underlying reasons why any presidential election matters to the rest of the world. The first concerns America's power. There is no nation in the history of the planet whose strength and actions more directly affect the whole human race than the United States. To an unprecedented degree, America makes the world's weather. Its economic, military and cultural might shapes our lives. If America goes to war, we are all embroiled, as the events of the past three years have certainly shown. If the American economy booms or busts, then ours follows suit. If America spurns global agreements on climate change, the whole planet is more vulnerable. Even our domestic politics are shaped by theirs, as the last three years have again dramatically proved. We may not have a vote, but our interests are at stake on November 2, as surely as if we lived in Ohio, Oklahoma or Oregon ourselves.
The second reason, more controversially for some, concerns America's example. There has never been a nation like the United States. Its creation was, at least arguably, the single greatest constitutional achievement of mankind in the last millennium. From the earliest days until now, the eyes of all people have indeed been upon America, just as John Winthrop claimed four centuries ago. We can debate whether the greatest of all US presidents was right to see America as "the last best hope of mankind". But it is a matter of fact that successive generations on every continent have shared Abraham Lincoln's optimism about his homeland, that they have been inspired by American opportunity and freedom, and that new generations continue to be so. Few nations may have been so fundamentally shaped by racial injustice as the US was, but none in the history of the world has ultimately made a greater success of mass migration and of multi-cultural life either. Anti-Americanism may be more rife than ever in many parts of our world, but even where it is strongest it is a matter of record that millions of people in these very same societies admire America above all other nations.
Since at least 1945, when the United States played the decisive role in creating the United Nations, an American presidential election has always been the single most influential event in the global political cycle. No such election, though, has mattered as overwhelmingly and urgently as this one. Four years ago, George Bush was beaten in the popular vote nationwide, yet captured the presidency because of electoral abuse in Florida and a shoddy legal judgment by the nation's highest court. Ever since, far from governing in the unifying manner that would have been appropriate in the circumstances (and that he briefly promised), he has done the opposite. But if Mr Bush has been partisan and confrontational at home - over the federal budget, education, race, civil liberty, the environment and a host of other social and cultural issues - he has been every bit as partisan and confrontational abroad. The attack of September 11 2001, an event of historic seriousness, created an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity worldwide. Three years later, much of that solidarity has been squandered. This has happened largely as a result of a war on Iraq that was not just ill-prepared and ill-executed in its own terms but that also exemplified the administration's aggressive contempt towards other nations, with disastrous consequences that continue to this day.
To adapt the words of Talleyrand, the Bush presidency has been not merely a crime but a mistake. Mr Bush has proved a terrifying failure in the world's most powerful office. He has made the world more angry, more dangerous and more divided - not less. This, above all, is why it matters to us, as it should to Americans, that John Kerry is elected on Tuesday. A safer world requires not just the example of American power but the power of American example. Mr Bush has done more to destroy America's good name in the world than any president in memory. Mr Kerry provides an opportunity to begin to repair the damage. It is as simple - and as important - as that.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/25/iraq/main651082.shtml

2 More Iraq Arms Stashes In Focus

VIENNA, Austria, Oct. 30, 2004

Fallujah Campaign Near

A bunker in the Al-Qaqaa facility in Iraq is seen in this video footage made by Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP-TV on April 18, 2003. (Photo: AP/KSTP ABC NEWS)

"They asked mainly about chemical or biological weapons, which we hadn't seen. I had a pretty hard time getting anyone interested in it"
Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, on Iraq explosives stash he told U.S. about

IAEA inspectors investigated reports of widespread looting of storage rooms at Tuwaitha, Iraq's main former nuclear site. (Photo: AP)

(AP) Looters unleashed last year by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq overran a sprawling desert complex where a bunker sealed by U.N. monitors held old chemical weapons, American arms inspectors report.

Charles Duelfer's arms teams say all U.N.-sealed structures at the Muthanna site were broken into. If the so-called Bunker 2 was breached and looted, it would be a new case of restricted weapons being at risk of having fallen into militants' hands.

Separately, Human Rights Watch said Saturday it alerted the U.S. military to a cache of hundreds of warheads containing high explosives in Iraq in May 2003, but that officials seemed disinterested and still hadn't secured the site 10 days later, even though it was being looted every day by armed men.

The disclosure, made by a senior leader of the New York-based group, raised new questions about the willingness or ability of U.S.-led forces to secure known stashes of dangerous weapons in Iraq.

Peter Bouckaert, who heads Human Rights Watch's international emergency team, told The Associated Press he was shown two rooms "stacked to the roof" with surface-to-surface warheads on May 9, 2003, in a warehouse on the grounds of the 2nd Military College in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Bouckaert said he gave U.S. officials the exact location of the warheads, but that by the time he left the area on May 19, 2003, he had seen no U.S. forces at the site, which he said was being looted daily by armed men.

His comments came as the question of 377 tons of high explosives reported missing from another site - the Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad - has become a heated issue in the final days of the U.S. presidential campaign.

Officials are unsure whether the episode at Muthanna points to a threat of chemical attack, since it isn't known if usable chemical warheads were in the bunker, what may have been taken, or by whom.

"Clearly, there's a potential concern, but we're unable to estimate the relative level of it because we don't know the condition of the things inside the bunker," said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the U.N. arms inspection agency in New York, whose specialists have been barred from Iraq since the invasion.

Chief arms hunter Duelfer told The Associated Press by e-mail Friday from Iraq that he was unaware of "anything of importance" looted from the chemical weapons complex. The report his Iraq Survey Group issued on Oct. 6 said, however, that it couldn't vouch for the fate of old munitions at Muthanna, a 35-square-mile complex in the heart of the embattled "Sunni Triangle."

One chemical weapons expert said even old, weakened nerve agents - in this case sarin - could be a threat to unprotected civilians.

The weapons involved would be pre-1991 artillery rockets filled with sarin, or their damaged remnants - weapons that were openly declared by Iraq and were under U.N. control until security fell apart with the U.S. attack. They are not concealed arms of the kind President Bush claimed Iraq had, but which were never found.

In its Oct. 6 report, summarizing a fruitless search for banned weapons in Iraq, Duelfer's group disclosed that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna, 35 miles northwest of Baghdad, in the aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi capital in April 2003.

A little-noted annex of the 985-page report said every U.N.-sealed location at the desert installation had been breached in the looting spree, and "materials and equipment were removed."

Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's central chemical weapons production site, was put under U.N. inspectors' control in early 1991 after it was heavily damaged by a U.S. precision bomb in the first Gulf War. At the time, Iraq said 2500 sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there.

The U.N. teams sealed up the bunker with brick and reinforced concrete, rather than immediately attempt the risky job of clearing weapons or remnants from under a collapsed roof and neutralizing them.

A CIA analysis, not done on site, hypothesized in 1999 that all the sarin must have been destroyed by fire. But a U.S. General Accounting Office review last June questioned that analysis, and the United Nations, whose teams were there, said the extent of destruction was never determined.

Buchanan said a U.N. team inspected the sealed Muthanna bunker on Dec. 4, 2002, and inspectors continued to visit Muthanna up to March 14, 2003, although they did not view the bunker that day. Four days later, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, the U.N. monitors had to leave Iraq.

As for when the sealed bunker may have been breached, the report said, "The facilities at the southern section" - the bunker area - "were removed by unknown entities between April and June 2003." It didn't elaborate, but presumably the first U.S. search teams arrived at Muthanna in June and discovered the looting.

"The (Iraq Survey Group) is unable to unambiguously determine the complete fate of old munitions, materials and chemicals produced and stored there," the Duelfer report said.

The three-week-old report also said, without elaboration, that chemical munitions "are still stored there" and that warheads, apparently not filled with chemical agent, "are still being looted."

As for the Baqouba facility, Human Rights Watch's Bouckaert said displaced people he was working with in the area had taken him to the warheads. "They said, `There's stocks of weapons here and we're very concerned - can you please inform the coalition?"' he said in a telephone interview from South Africa.

After photographing the warheads, Bouckaert said he went straight to U.S. officials in Baghdad's Green Zone complex, where he claimed officials at first didn't seem interested in his information.

"They asked mainly about chemical or biological weapons, which we hadn't seen," he said. "I had a pretty hard time getting anyone interested in it."

Bouckaert said he eventually was put in touch with unidentified U.S. officials and showed them on a map where the stash was located, also giving them the exact GPS coordinates for the site.

But he said he never saw U.S. forces at the site when he returned to the area for daily interviews with refugees, and that the site still was not secured when he finally left the area.

"For the next 10 days I continued working near this site and going back regularly to interview displaced people, and nothing was done to secure the site," he said.

"Looting was taking place by a lot of armed men with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades," Bouckaert said. He said each of the warheads contained an estimated 57 pounds of high explosives.

"Everyone's focused on Al-Qaqaa, when what was at the military college could keep a guerrilla group in business for a long time creating the kinds of bombs that are being used in suicide attacks every day," he said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday that Iraq had reported 377 tons of high explosives missing from al-Qaqaa "due to a lack of security" at the vast site 30 miles south of Baghdad.

Iraqi officials told the agency the explosives - which can be used to make the kind of car bombs that insurgents have used in numerous attacks on U.S.-led forces - went missing amid looting after the April 9, 2003 fall of the Iraqi capital.

The Pentagon has suggested the explosives, which can be used to make the kind of car bombs that insurgents have used in numerous attacks on U.S.-led forces, may have been removed before U.S. forces moved into the area.

U.S. Army Maj. Austin Pearson said Friday that his team removed 250 tons of plastic explosives and other munitions from al-Qaqaa on April 13, 2003. But those munitions were not located under U.N. nuclear agency seal as the missing high-grade explosives had been, and the Pentagon was unable to say definitively that they were part of the missing 377 tons.

Bouckaert, who last year criticized U.S. officials for not acting on important information about mass graves in Iraq, said he estimates there were between 500 and 1,000 tons of high explosive warheads at the war college site in Baqouba.

The site also included anti-tank mines and anti-personnel mines, he said.

Car bombs require only about 6 1/2 pounds of explosives, meaning each warhead potentially could have yielded enough material for nine bombs, Human Rights Watch said.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/EC3AC145-96B2-4858-AE3D-63FDE0B59D69.htm

Al-Qaida's vote for Bush
By Imad Khadduri

Sunday 24 October 2004, 20:02 Makka Time, 17:02 GMT

Who would the 'terrorists' like to see elected in the upcoming US presidential elections?

Predictions about how they would try to influence this form of the democratic process were sparked by the train bombings in Madrid last March.

The timing of the attack, coming immediately before presidential elections in Spain, produced a backlash of anger against Jose Maria Aznar’s right-wing government, leading to the victory of the Socialist Party (PSOE).

The bombing was seen by many as a consequence of Aznar’s support for the US-led war in Iraq, a war opposed by the overwhelming majority of Spaniards. Aznar’s attempt to exploit the bombings to push the agenda of his Popular Party backfired and lead to his defeat.

But what does this augur for the US? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was one of the first to speculate on this event's impact on the US presidential elections.

In an 18 April interview on the US news talk show Face the Nation, she said: "I think that we do have to take very seriously the thought that the terrorists might have learned, we hope (sic), the wrong lesson from Spain. I think we also have to take seriously that they might try during the cycle leading up to the election to do something."

This statement was followed by one from Attorney General John Ashcroft. In a 26 May press conference, Ashcroft said: "The Madrid railway bombings were perceived by Usama bin Ladin and al-Qaida to have advanced their cause. Al-Qaida may perceive that a large-scale attack in the United States this summer or fall would lead to similar consequences."

Ashcroft's supposition is that Bin Ladin would like to influence the US elections in the same way al-Qaida influenced Spain's.

What would similar consequences mean for the US? Defeat for the hawkish incumbent, Bush, at the polls and the derailment of a neo-conservative policy on Iraq.

Ashcroft all but said 'Usama bin Ladin wants you to vote for John Kerry'.

"The message the terrorists learned in Madrid is that attacks can change elections and change policy"

A handful of reporters chimed in, among them David Sanger of the New York Times.

In a May article, he issued what could be seen as a serious warning to the American people. Entitled Calculating the Politics of Catastrophe, the piece describes "obsessive" talk within political and national security circles about the possible electoral consequences of another terror attack in the US.

Sanger quotes a senior administration official as saying, "The message the terrorists learned in Madrid is that attacks can change elections and change policy.

"It’s a very dangerous precedent to have out there."

Immediately following the elections, administration officials and right-wing media pundits in the US denounced the Spanish population for learning the "wrong lesson" from the terrorist attacks and for "appeasing" terrorism.

According to Sanger, however, the Bush administration is making its own calculations over whether a terrorist attack can "change elections" in the US - in Bush's favour.

He writes: "Mr Bush's political aides - speaking only on background, because no one dissects terror on the record - argue that the crazier the world gets, the more it plays to the theme of the campaign: Now more than ever, the country needs a president who has proved to be strong on terror."

A more authoritative political aide, Vice President Dick Cheney, announced on 7 September that the US will risk another terrorist attack if voters make the wrong choice on election day, suggesting Senator John Kerry would follow a pre-9/11 policy of reacting defensively.

"The wide-eyed view of America's 'war on terror' is dangerous to the whole world"

"It's absolutely essential we make the right choice on 2 November because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told supporters at a town hall meeting.

If Kerry were elected, Cheney says the nation risks falling back into a "pre-9/11 mindset" where terrorist attacks are seen merely as criminal acts that require a reactive approach. Instead, he says Bush's offensive approach roots out terrorists where they plan and train, and pressures countries that harbour them.

In all of this, little notice has been given by the Western media to an al-Qaida declaration following the Madrid bombing and published in full on 17 March in the Arabic-language dailies al-Quds al-Arabi and al-Hayat in the UK.

A week after the Madrid attack, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claims to act on behalf of al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for the bombing and declared a truce in Spain to see if the new government would withdraw its troops from Iraq, but warned that it was gearing up for new attacks.

This part of the declaration was widely reported. However, very few mentioned the more ominous part of that declaration, short of excerpts which were reported by the BBC and Reuters.

"What is a cause for concern is that half the American people still wrongly believe that Iraq had links with al-Qaida and a hand in the 9/11 attacks"

The declaration turned its attention to President Bush, saying: "A word for the foolish Bush. We are very keen that you do not lose in the forthcoming elections as we know very well that any big attack can bring down your government and this is what we do not want.

"We cannot get anyone who is more foolish than you, who deals with matters with force instead of wisdom and diplomacy.

"Your stupidity and religious extremism is what we want as our people will not awaken from their deep sleep except when there is an enemy.

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation.

"Because of this we desire you [Bush] to be elected."

A political tactic of this calibre should have perhaps appealed to pundits and political scientists in the media.

However, al-Qaida gravely underestimates the likely political result of an attack against the US in the months leading up to the election. It would lead to a landslide victory for Bush as it would resonate with the American culture's "circle the wagons" mentality and take orders from John Wayne.

Such an attack would play to Americans' deep inner insecurity and violent reaction to any threat has had disastrous effects, and not only to the American Indians.

Whether that threat is real, or manufactured, as that of Cheney's dire threat of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia in 1991 citing satellite photos (that have not been shown or proven to this day) which induced Saudi Arabia to invite US forces to invade Iraq, or his pushing the assertion and spin of an Iraqi nuclear threat in 2002 and 2003 (he was claiming that US intelligence had proof of Iraq's nuclear weapons up to two days before Iraq's occupation) and ended with the disastrous occupation of Iraq, the American people's reaction is explosive and dangerous.

What is a cause for concern is that half the American people still wrongly believe that Iraq had links with al-Qaida and a hand in the 9/11 attacks, and that cushions the outrage they should feel after tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, as well as more than a thousand of their soldiers.

The wide-eyed view of America's "war on terror" is dangerous to the whole world.

Aljazeera

©MMIV, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 3 Days to Go --Bin Laden Mocks Bush's Incompetence in the War on Terror, Zogby predicts JFK victory, 12 Ways They are Trying to Steal Ohio

There are only 3 days to go until the national
referendum on the COMPETENCE, CREDIBILITY and
CHARACTER of the _resident and the VICE
_resident...The botched, bungled, mis-named "war on
terror" is not the strength of the Bush abomination,
it is the SHAME of the Bush abomination...The pre-9/11
negligence and post-9/11 incompetence of the Bush
national insecurity team would be reason enough for
the Electoral Uprising that's coming...but there is so
much more: 1K + US soldiers killed so far in a foolish
military adventure in Iraq, hundreds of billions of
dollars of federal budget deficit because of TWO
foolish, ill-time tax cuts skewed to the wealthiest
among us, four years lost (that we could not afford to
lose) while the Bush abomination pretended that Global
Warming might not even really exist, four years lost
(that we could not afford to lose) in stem cell
research because of the Bush abomination's panderng to
the American Taliban, and the future of the US Supreme
Court hanging in the balamce (the next President will
probably appoint two or three Justices including the
next Chief Justice)...Yes, there is an Electoral
Uprising coming...in spite of the US regimestream news
media's complicity...in spite of a massive nation-wide
vote suppresion operation...NO DEFEAT/NO
SURRENDER...They cannot steal it if enough of us vote...Remember Duval County!

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_04/103004A.shtml

Osama's Election Editorial
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 29 October 2004
So the bastard is still alive.

He isn't dead of kidney failure or rotting in a
cave somewhere in the Hindu Kush. He wasn't smoked out
of his hole, and he in no way appeared to be on the
run. The images broadcast on every American television
station in the last few hours showed a man apparently
in good health, clothed in traditional white and
wrapped in a golden robe. His hands were steady and
his voice was clear. From all appearances, Osama bin
Laden is tanned, rested and ready.

In as much as it is possible for a wanted mass
murderer to have a conversation with the American
public, this is what we are seeing tonight. Osama bin
Laden directed his message not at the Muslim world,
not at the American government, but at the people
gearing up to vote for a President on Tuesday. "You
American people, my speech to you is the best way to
avoid another conflict about the war and its reasons
and results," said bin Laden. A lot of people thought
the capture of bin Laden would be the 'October
Surprise' to affect the vote. Instead, we got, hard as
it is to believe, an election editorial from Osama,
who remains alive and free. As far as October
surprises go, this one is completely off-the-grid
strange.

For the first time, bin Laden openly took
responsibility for the attacks of September 11. "We
fought you because we are free...and want to regain
freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security,
we undermine yours," he said. "To the U.S. people, my
talk is to you about the best way to avoid another
disaster. I tell you: Security is an important element
of human life and free people do not give up their
security."

Bin Laden attempted to explain his reasons for the
9/11 attacks, stating that the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 1982 lit his homicidal fuse. "I will tell
you the reasons behind these incidents," he said. "I
will be honest with you on the moment when the
decision was taken. We never thought of hitting the
towers. But after we were so fed up, and we saw the
oppression of the American-Israeli coalition on our
people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind
and the incidents that really touched me directly goes
back to 1982:. When the US permitted the Israelis to
invade Lebanon with the assistance of the 6th fleet.
In these hard moments, it occurred to me so many
meanings I can't explain, but it resulted in a general
feeling of rejecting oppression, and gave me a hard
determination to punish the oppressors. While I was
looking at the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it came to
my mind to punish the oppressor the same way and
destroy towers in the U.S. to get a taste of what they
tasted, and quit killing our children and women."

While candidates Bush and Kerry were careful to
avoid using the video as a club to batter each other,
their surrogates have already taken to the airwaves to
spin this event for one or the other. At first blush,
it is difficult to imagine how bin Laden's entrance
into this voting season helps the election prospects
of Mr. Bush. The videotape was first broadcast by the
al Jazeera network, which is based out of Qatar.
According to CNN, the U.S. Ambassador to Qatar
attempted to stop Al Jazeera from broadcasting the
tape. That, as much as the actual content of the tape,
speaks to how nervous the re-appearance of bin Laden
makes the Bush administration.

Beyond the demonstrable fact that Mr.
Wanted-Dead-Or-Alive is still upright and breathing,
there is the scathing mockery bin Laden leveled at
Bush, along with a back-handed thank-you to Bush for
giving the 9/11 terrorists the time they needed to
complete the attack. "We never thought that the high
commander of the U.S. armies would leave 50,000 of his
citizens in both towers to face the horrors alone,"
bin Laden said. "It appeared to him that a little
girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more
important than the planes and their butting of the
skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required
time to carry out the operations, thank God."

Once again, Bush's comments from March of 2002
rise again with the impact of a gut-punch. "So I don't
know where he is," said Bush of bin Laden at the time.
"Nor - you know, I just don't spend that much time on
him really, to be honest with you. I... I truly am not
that concerned about him." The fellow who orchestrated
the massacre of 3,000 people, the fellow whom Bush
said he wasn't concerned about, thanked Bush for
giving him the time necessary to complete his wretched
act. In the parlance of American youth, Bush got
punked by the top terrorist on national television.

An issue which has already been pressing on this
campaign season now resonates with new urgency. For
the last several days, the Bush administration has
been wrestling with the fact that nearly 400 tons of
high explosives - the same kind of explosives used to
bring down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, the same
kind of explosives used to blow a hole in the USS Cole
- walked away from a storage bunker in Iraq.

Videotape from a Minnesota news station, shot by
embedded reporters during the invasion of Iraq, showed
members of the 101st Airborne cutting the locks on the
place. No troops stayed to guard the well-known
bunker, however, because such duty was not a priority
of Bush administration officials handing out marching
orders to the troops. Bush's own weapons inspector,
David Kay, was appalled at what he saw on the
Minnesota news station's footage of the opening of the
bunker. "When you break into it, you own it," said
Kay. "It's your responsibility to secure it."

Thanks to the disastrous Iraq invasion, and the
continuing debacle that is the occupation, Iraq is now
a place where al Qaeda terrorists may operate freely.
How much of the missing explosives in question have
fallen into the hands of bin Laden loyalists? How much
of the thousands of tons of explosives and weaponry
that went similarly unguarded by American forces all
across Iraq have likewise found their way into al
Qaeda hands? The re-emergence of Osama bin Laden makes
these questions all the more pressing.

How all of this will shake out among the American
electorate remains to be seen. Perhaps the American
people, upon seeing a healthy bin Laden again on their
televisions, will be reminded of Bush's failure to
capture or kill him and punish Bush at the polls.
Perhaps they will be angered that bin Laden dared to
throw his two bloody cents into the political
conversation and side with Bush over Kerry. Perhaps
the only absolute conclusion to draw from all this is
the one that almost certainly occurred to every
American who tuned into the broadcast.

The bastard is still alive.

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

-------

Jump to TO Features for Saturday October 30, 2004

Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers
Pitt | Osama's Election Editorial News Video Is at
Center of Storm over Iraq Explosives Halliburton
Contracts Bypassed Objections Mideast Experts: Hope,
but Don't Expect, Easy Transition Jonathan Chait | For
Bush, Too Late for Honesty A Tie? Expect 'Stark Raving
Mad Chaos' for a Month Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | The
Worst Environmental President in U.S. History Sylvie
Kauffmann | The Battle for Democracy IRS Investigating
NAACP for Criticism of President Robert Scheer | The
Man Behind the Oval Office Curtain Register-Guard |
Bush Refuses to Acknowledge Dire Situation Springsteen
Brings Out 80,000 to Cheer Kerry Ashcroft Seeking
Control of Voting Rights Eyewitness to Looting of al
Qaqaa Explosives Cache Marines Poised to Storm
Fallujah and Ramadi Video Shows U.S. Troops at Iraq
Weapons Cache Marc Ash | African America to the Rescue
FBI Investigates Halliburton's No-Bid Contracts t r u
t h o u t Home

Print This Story E-mail This Story

© : t r u t h o u t 2004

http://nydailynews.com/front/story/247447p-211694c.html

What Zogby tells
me: Kerry wins

Pollster John Zogby, in a telephone interview with me
yesterday, predicted that John Kerry will win the
election. "It's close," he said, "but in the last
couple of days things have been trending toward Kerry
- nationally and in the swing states. Between this and
history, I think it will be Kerry."
When Zogby talks, politicians listen. He made his
bones in the Bill Clinton-Bob Dole election of 1996,
when he came within one-tenth of a percentage point of
the final tally.

Bet me that when the Bushies read what Zogby told me,
not just the rhetoric will rise, but so will the
fever.

Particularly since one of their favorite columnists,
Robert Novak, reported in yesterday's Washington Post
that Zogby called the race for President Bush in a
conversation he had with the pollster on Monday.

Zogby was jocular about the Novak column, although he
has decided not to post a comment on his Web site.
Here's what he told me: "I said Bush was winning, I
didn't say I thought he'd win. On Monday, he was
indeed looking good. But on Tuesday, things changed.
Kerry, in that one day, picked up 5 points."

Well, what about New Jersey? Al Gore took the Garden
State by 16 points, and now the Quinnipiac poll makes
it even. If Kerry loses Jersey, it could be a
landslide for Bush, no, Mr. Zogby?

I could hear Zogby shrug. "New Jersey?" he said. "Take
out your navy blue crayon and color Jersey dark. I
don't even poll New Jersey."

The politicians of both parties appear to agree. If
they believed Jersey was in play, Kerry and Bush would
be in Newark and Jersey City on the spot. But nobody
showed.

Maurice Carroll nodded - I heard that on the phone,
too. Mickey runs the Quinnipiac poll, and being
straight, he said, "It makes me trepidatious about our
numbers."

What?

"I've gotta look it up, too," he laughed. "But of
course when the politicians pay no attention, we have
to wonder if we got it right."

And then he added: "Maybe because our poll had 6%
undecided. Historically, the undecided vote goes big
to the challenger."

Polls, polls, polls. Is that all there is, Alfie?

Let's check the London line. The legal bookies across
the sea have been uncannily right over the years on
our elections. They probably called 1776 for George
Washington.

And on this one, the Republicans have to love it.

The latest line from sunny old England makes Bush, in
their funny lingo, a 4-7 favorite. (Vegas would say it
7-4.) That's almost 2-to-1.

Maybe London looks at it this way because they don't
have the benefit of our pundits, day in, day out. On
the other hand, we don't need polls to tell us that
the Brits hate the Iraq war and consider Dubya to be a
cut under Jack the Ripper.

The one poll that chilled me yesterday went like this:
"If the candidate you're against wins, will you still
support him?"

Sixty-two percent said no.

Maybe not civil war, but certainly something that
great Texan Jim Hightower could explain to us.

"If the gods wanted us to vote," Hightower once
observed, "they'd have given us candidates."

Originally published on October 29, 2004

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810

Sat Oct 30 2004


Departments
Campaign 2004

Twelve ways Bush is now stealing the Ohio vote
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
October 27, 2004

The Republican "November Surprise" to steal the 2004
election is in full force here in Ohio. With polls
showing a dead heat, the GOP is staging an all-out
attack on a fair vote count in the Buckeye State.

Here are a dozen ways they're doing it:

* Under an archaic Ohio law, both the Republican and
Democratic Parties, or any slate of five candidates,
may embed official election challengers inside polling
places. The New York Times reported on Oct. 23 that
the Republican Party intends to place thousands of
lawyers and other GOP faithfuls inside the polls to
challenge voters. Republican insiders confide here
that the key goal is to jam lines and frustrate new
voters. The GOP apparently figures many voters in key
Democratic precincts won't wait in line more than 15
minutes to vote. This is certain to be a major tactic
in Cleveland's Cuyahoga County and other Democratic
strongholds. The GOP is not planning to challenge
voters in Republican districts.

* The Republican party has sent letters challenging
thousands of Franklin County students who are
registered to vote absentee. Franklin County is home
to Columbus, the state's largest city and its capitol.
Though it is also home to Ohio State University,
thousands of local students go to schools outside the
county or state. The GOP apparently does not want
their votes counted. This unprecedented mass
challenge has prompted the Franklin County Board of
Elections, whose director is a conservative
Republican, to reserve the large Veterans Memorial
Auditorium downtown to process the challenges this
Thursday, as John Kerry comes to town with Bruce
Springsteen. The County has told thousands of
students that if they don't appear in Columbus to
answer the GOP challenges, they may lose their right
to vote.

* The Franklin County Board of Elections has called
or written an undetermined number of voters who
obtained absentee ballots, challenging their
addresses. In at least one case, after a series of
angry phone calls, the Board admitted there was
nothing wrong with the address in question and
re-instated voting rights. The voter in question was
a registered Democrat. His wife, an independent at
the same address, was not challenged. It is unclear
how many others have been wrongly knocked out.

* Even if they are counted, Franklin County's absentee
ballot forms are rigged in ways strikingly reminiscent
of those in Florida 2000. On many absentee forms,
Kerry is listed third on the list of presidential
candidates. But the actual number you punch for Kerry
is "4." If you punch "3" you've just voted for Bush.
Sound familiar?

* Franklin County's right wing Elections Director is
insisting on e-voting machines which have
malfunctioned in at least two Congressional elections,
and which have no paper trail. The November issues of
Popular Science and Popular Mechanics Magazines ran
the following headlines on their covers, respectively:
"E-vote emergency: And you thought dimpled chads were
bad'" and "Could hackers tilt the election?" Vigorous
protests against the paperless machines have been
staged here, but many will be used, rendering a
meaningful recount impossible.

* In four other Ohio counties, the notorious Diebold
company, whose CEO Wally O'Dell has pledged to deliver
Ohio's votes to Bush, will provide the e-voting
machines to count votes without any paper trail while
using proprietary "secret" software. O'Dell lives in
the wealthy Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington and is
a major Bush donor.

* Twenty GOP-dominated Ohio counties have given wrong
information to former felons about their voter
eligibility. In Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati
and the Republican Taft family, officials told
numerous former felons that a judge had to sign off
before they could vote, which is blatantly false.

* Franklin County, which normally cancels 2-300
registered voters a year for felony convictions, has
sent at least 3500 cancellation letters to both
current felons and ex-felons whose convictions date
back to 1998. The list includes numerous citizens who
were charged with felonies but convicted only of
misdemeanors.

* Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell
has reversed a long-standing Ohio practice and is
barring voters from casting provisional ballots within
their county if they are registered to vote but
there's been a mistake about where they are expected
to cast their ballot. In this year's spring primaries,
Blackwell allowed voters to cast provisional ballots
by county, even if they were in the wrong precinct.
But this fall, such voters will have to leave the
wrong precinct and find their way to the right one.
Blackwell hopes to succeed Republican Bob Taft as
governor, and has labored hard to install e-voting
machines with no paper trail, to give the statewide
contract to Diebold, and to take a long series of
steps apparently designed to help hand Ohio to George
W. Bush. Blackwell is being widely compared to the
infamous Katherine Harris, who handed Florida to
George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded with a safe
Congressional seat.

* The Columbus Dispatch (which has endorsed Bush) and
WVKO Radio have both documented phone calls from
people impersonating Board of Elections workers and
directing registered voters to different and incorrect
polling sites. One individual was falsely told not to
vote at the polling station across the street from his
house, but at a "new" site, four miles away. Under
Blackwell's new rules, such a vote would not be
counted.

* In Cincinnati, some 150,000 voters were moved from
active to inactive status within the last four years
for not voting in the last two federal elections. This
is not required under Ohio law, but is an option
allowed and exercised by the Republican-dominated
Hamilton County Board of Elections.

* Secretary of State Blackwell ruled that any voter
registration form on other than 80-pound weight bond
paper would not be accepted. This is an old law left
over from pre-scanning days. Many voters who had
registered on lighter paper, had their registration
returned, even though the forms had been officially
sanctioned by local election boards.

No Republican has ever won the presidency without
carrying Ohio. This year the GOP seems determined to
win it, no matter what they have do to the electoral
process.

------------------------
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of
GEORGE W. BUSH VERSUS THE SUPERPOWER OF PEACE and
IMPRISON GEORGE BUSH, from www.freepress.org.

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 4 Days to Go -- Gen. Clark rebukes Bush cowardice, JFK is ahead in early NV voting, 9/11 families rebuke Bush, Julian Bond on vote surpression, and as a bonus -- The New Yorker Editorial Endorsement

There are only 4 days to go until the national referendum on the COMPETENCE, CREDIBILITY and CHARACTER of the _resident, the VICE _resident and the US regimestream news media that has provided them with cover for four years...80,000 people joined Bruce Springsteen and Sen. John F. Kerry )D-Mekong Delta)in Madison, WI yesterday...The Electoral Uprising is at hand...NO DEFEAT/NO SURRENDER...Here are FIVE important stories. Please read them and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote. The life of the Republic itself is at stake in this election. Yes, they are trying to steal it, but they cannot steal it if enough of us vote...

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://blog.johnkerry.com/blog/archives/003705.html

General Clark on Giuliani Comments:
"Insulting and Cowardly"
General Wesley Clark issued the following statement today about Rudolph Giuliani's comments about the responsibility of U.S. troops for the missing explosives in Iraq:

“For President Bush to send Rudolph Giuliani out on television to say that the 'actual responsibility' for the failure to secure explosives lies with the troops is insulting and cowardly.

“The President approved the mission and the priorities. Civilian leaders tell military leaders what to do. The military follows those orders and gets the job done. This was a failure of civilian leadership, first in not telling the troops to secure explosives and other dangerous materials, and second for not providing sufficient troops and sufficient equipment for troops to do the job.

“President Bush sent our troops to war without sufficient body armor, without a sound plan and without sufficient forces to accomplish the mission. Our troops are performing a difficult mission with skill, bravery and determination. They deserve a commander in chief who supports them and understands that the buck stops in the Oval Office, not one who gets weak knees and shifts blame for his mistakes.”
Posted by DickBell on October 28, 2004 at 04:33 PM

http://www.alternet.org/election04/20321/

The Silver State for Kerry?

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted October 27, 2004.

Early voting is underway in Nevada, and Kerry is ahead by 7,000 votes. But there's a lot more at play in the Silver State. Story Tools

More stories by Don Hazen

It is election crunch time as the end game shifts into high gear, and the presidential race is too close to call in a number of states – that is, if one trusts the polls.

And as election day closes in, there is a separate question: with the predicted chaos and glitches, will we know who has won on election night, or will we have an ongoing donnybrook long after Nov. 2?

A very close race is certainly the case in Nevada, where the tension is already rising as early vote totals are being tallied. While current polls, particularly the Zogby tracking poll, have Bush winning Nevada by a few points, the early voting returns, already in record numbers, suggest something else.

At this point virtually every state faces some potential for confusion over voting procedures, mechanical glitches or law suits and Nevada is no exception. Interestingly, Nevada is the only state that has paper trails attached to its electronic machines, but that also could breed confusion because voters cannot take the paper with them, like a receipt, since as the theory goes, having proof of how you voted might facilitate vote buying.

In Nevada, the focus of voting is Clark County, which contains Las Vegas, and is the area where most of the state's inhabitants reside. It is possible for a candidate to win Nevada just by carrying a large majority in Clark County while losing in every other county. That scenario almost worked for Gore in 2000, when the only county he won was Clark, and lost by a small margin.

It could work this time around. According to the Ralston Report as of Tuesday, 183,252 Clark County voters had already gone to the polls – a record 24,042 on Tuesday alone. Add 34,744 absentee ballots delivered to election offices, and the total is 217,996. That means about a quarter of southern Nevada's registered voters have already cast ballots – that adds up to a lead for Kerry's of 7,042 for the early vote, and a slim lead in absentee ballots of 143. Kerry's total lead in Clark County is 7,185, adding up to a three percent advantage over Bush so far. Since most analysts see more Republicans voting early than Dems, the early lead for Kerry is seen as a good omen for the Kerry camp.

Behind the vote totals there is a much larger Nevada story. For many, Las Vegas is off the hook. It's the coolest, most-hyped destination in the continental United States. Suddenly more people are traveling to Las Vegas and spending more money there than most thought possible.

Much of the credit for its striking economic boom is the hotel and gambling industry's sexification of Las Vegas. A lot of the new Vegas is a far cry from the family fare and amusement rides of old. These days, the city is aimed at liberating the libido. And the high roller owners of Vegas are raking it in. A record $32.8 billion was spent in Vegas in 2003. And apparently the effort to stimulate the collective horniness knows no bounds, as many new high-priced, sex-themed attractions are in the works, and $6.2 billion in new construction is underway.

As the intense, claustrophobic struggle for the presidency slogs on, what Las Vegas' "irrational exuberance" means politically is still up in the air. Ultimately, will the financial success of liberating Vegas from its inhibitions be a plus for the more tolerant Democrats in a country where the Republicans often stand for sexual abstinence and repression? Or will a state where ironically straight-laced Mormons exercise enormous power stay in the Republican column, as it did in 2000 when Bush scored a three-point victory over Gore with 21,500 votes? Steve Rosenthal, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and now the CEO of the well-funded America Coming Together still thinks Nevada's five electoral votes will go for the Democrats this year. "We feel that Nevada is a good bet for a 'take away state,'" he said. And with number crunchers having various scenarios for a tie in the Electoral College, Nevada's five electoral votes are very, very important – especially if Kerry holds all the states that Gore won in 2000.

A Boom Town with Party Bosses

Nevada, overwhelmingly dominated by Las Vegas, is a tough state to figure; anomalies abound. Despite widespread poverty throughout the Southwest, the Las Vegas region is arguably the most vibrant in the country at this moment. It is hands down the fastest-growing city in the U.S. with more construction underway than any other city. One direct result of the growth is low unemployment with some workers in the fast food industry making over $9 an hour, almost twice the country's minimum wage.

Nevada has a lot of economic contradictions. It is a "right-to-work" state (meaning that workers can opt out of joining unions), but it also has a strong union presence. The 50,000-strong Culinary Workers Union, part of the national Hotel and Restaurant Workers (HERE) are legendary, both in their service to members and their grassroots clout in local politics in Las Vegas and across the state.

At the same time, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), under the new leadership of Executive Director Jane McAlevey, is beginning to flex its political muscle in Vegas, particularly after Local 1107 won a big victory on behalf of nurses and other hospital workers in recent contract negotiations and showed grassroots power in recent political primaries. Meanwhile, the national SEIU, which by some accounts is investing more than $60 million in the effort to defeat Bush, has prioritized Nevada meaning that some of the hundreds of SEIU members who have volunteered to go to work in swing states (while still being paid by the union – SEIU calls them "heroes") are in Nevada.

In Las Vegas, the corporate casinos and developers rule, and their cash buys everything, and that includes the politicians. It's something the local Republicans and Democrats have in common. With so much money in play, payoffs seem to be prevalent in Nevada. Currently no less than six current and former elected officials are under investigation or indictment, including officials of both parties.

The parties in Nevada have more in common than corruption. Both senators – Democrat Minority Whip Harry Reid and Republican John Ensign – are Mormons. Reid exercises lots of influence – his son Rory Reid ran for and now serves on the Clark County Commission, and no wonder. Most agree that the Commission is the most powerful body in the state, overseeing the Nevada strip, which is in the unincorporated portion of the city, while colorful mayor Oscar B. Goodman, a strong proponent of selling the sexier side of Las Vegas, rules a very small fiefdom north of the strip. The Clark County manager, Thom Reilly, and the head of the Clark County airport, Randall W. Walker are two of the other key power brokers in the state.

A Mountainful of Politics

A final point of affinity between the Republicans and Democrats in Nevada is that both are against the disposal of all the nation's nuclear waste in Yucca mountain. The public is against it as well; a recent poll had 54% of Nevadans against Yucca, with 39% supporting it if the state received "federal benefits" for storing it. Yucca figures to be the biggest local issue for Nevadans in the presidential race, and Bush and Kerry are divided on it. Bush has generally supported bringing all the nuclear waste to Yucca, while John Kerry has voted six times in the Senate against bills relating to the Yucca plan. The Kerry campaign sees this as a big wedge issue for the Nevada voters. Katie Selenski, director of the New Voters Project's Nevada office says "issues like the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain are motivating young people to reach out to their friends and neighbors to vote in record numbers."

Kerry made a pledge in May of this year that, "there's going to be no nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain" if he were elected. Kerry reaffirmed his pledge on Aug. 10 at an evening rally before more than 12,000 people at the Thomas & Mack center in Vegas, and according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Kerry said that the Bush administration "has pursued a relentless, purposeful policy to push the science no matter what the science says."

A Soft Strategy for the Left

The closeness of the races in the Southwest has garnered the attention of national groups like America Coming Together and the New Voters Project. It is unclear how much impact the outside groups will have on Nevada. One possible critique is that the groups trying to deliver Nevada for the Democrats are putting too many of their resources in Clark County.

At first glance, that strategy would seem to make sense. In the 2000 presidential elections, southern Nevada – where 80 percent of the state's electorate resides – accounted for 63 percent of the votes cast in the presidential race. Al Gore carried only Clark County (Las Vegas), while Bush won 16 of the 17 counties in the southern part of the state, and Bush won the state. It is clear that a campaign that focuses only on Democratic base turnout in Clark County is not enough to carry the whole state. America Coming Together claims to have a statewide focus in Nevada, but perhaps too many resources are being used in Las Vegas.

America Coming Together (ACT), operating full blast in a number of swing states, was late-forming in Nevada. One insider's sense of ACT in Nevada is that it has been slow to get rolling and has not been making much of an impact. Some suggest that the ACT Nevada leadership is from out of state and lacks roots or experience in the desert.

Ty Weinert, political director of SEIU local 1107 in Las Vegas, says that despite there being 20 organizations ranging from 527's (these are organizations permitted to conduct political activity – running ads, registering voters, etc. – but aren't allowed to coordinate their work with specific candidates) labor organizations (Culinary/UNITE HERE and SEIU at the forefront), and other non-partisan groups active in the state, "a less Clark County-centric strategy is needed for those who would like to see Kerry/Edwards win Nevada," which Bush won by a mere 21,500 votes out 600,000.

Cooking Up Politics, Latino Style

A big factor in Nevada politics is the role of the Culinary Workers Union, which has membership that is roughly 45% Latino. Part of the union's success is in creating the Immigrant Worker's Citizen Project – aimed at assisting members with naturalization, and registering them as new voters. Another group, Voices for Working Families, has aimed to register 15,000 new Hispanic voters, according to Las Vegas City Life. Also New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's non-partisan Hispanic-focused Moving America Forward (MAF) has registered more than 9,000 Hispanic voters in Clark County since June. Twenty-two percent of Clark County is Latino, according to the 2000 census.

The Las Vegas Culinary union success story is the tale of how John Wilhelm, sent to Las Vegas years ago to prove his mettle, helped to produce one of the biggest union organizing success stories in recent years which eventually led to his taking over as head of the national Hotel and Restaurant Workers.

The ambitious Wilhelm, who is often discussed as a possible successor to AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, recently engineered the groundbreaking merger of HERE with UNITE, the textile workers' union. Wilhelm will be co-president with Bruce Raynor, the head of UNITE. The shorthand explanation of the merger is that UNITE, by dint of savvy investments many years ago, is a wealthy union with a rapidly shrinking worker base. In contrast, HERE has a huge gambling and restaurant industry to pursue across the country, but lacks the resources to do it – as some would say, "a match made in heaven." Suddenly there were big stakes for for HERE, particularly in Atlantic City where some of the casinos have been struck by HERE workers, and key leaders have been scattered around the country. Nevertheless, it has been very important for HERE to refocus its attention on Nevada, and make sure its vaunted political operation at Culinary Workers is in high gear this last week if Kerry is to win the state.

So there you have it: Las Vegas is a wild mix of sex, gambling, enormous growth, Mormons, political corruption, nuclear waste, and grassroots voter registration in the barrios by a powerful local union. What does all of this add up to? Check in with the Las Vegas oddsmakers. Chances are, the prospects are even money.

Don Hazen is the Executive Editor of AlterNet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/politics/28panel.html?oref=login

9/11 Families Group Rebukes Bush for Impasse on Overhaul
By PHILIP SHENON

Published: October 28, 2004

ASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - The principal advocacy group for families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks blamed President Bush and a group of House Republicans on Wednesday for the failure of Congress to approve a bill to enact the recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission and overhaul the nation's intelligence agencies.

In a statement clearly meant to influence voters in next week's election, the group did not explicitly endorse Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, but said Mr. Bush had "allowed members of his own party to derail the legislative process."

The statement, which also singled out Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and five other House Republicans for blame, said, "The president never took time from his campaign to come to Washington himself to see this through," adding: "Election Day is imminent. Now it's our turn."

Advertisement


Efforts by House and Senate negotiators to work out a compromise bill appeared close to collapse on Wednesday, with lawmakers at a stalemate over the powers of a proposed national intelligence director \and other issues.

Asked about the group's criticism of the president, a White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, suggested that Mr. Bush did not deserve the families' blame, and that he had been active in encouraging Congress to agree on a final bill.

"He has urged the House and Senate to come together and resolve their differences," she said. "The administration has been actively engaged in this. We've been up on the Hill. We've been taking part in the conferees' process."

The Kerry campaign instantly seized on the families' statement to attack President Bush. Mark Kitchens, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, said it showed that "George Bush has squandered this golden opportunity to achieve meaningful and lasting intelligence reform."

John Feehery, a spokesman for the speaker, said the families' criticism of Mr. Hastert was "unfair because the speaker and his staff have been negotiating day and night to get a bill that will make the country safer."

No advocacy group claims to speak for all relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. But the leaders of the Family Steering Committee - in particular, four New Jersey widows who became known as "the Jersey girls" - were instrumental in pressuring Congress and the White House to create the Sept. 11 commission in late 2002, and in insisting that the commission be aggressive in demanding documents and testimony from the Bush administration.

Their statement, the most pointedly political one ever issued by the committee, said the group's members were "angry and saddened that the opportunity for significant reform of our country's intelligence structure has been squandered." Nikki Stern, leader of another large victims' family group, Families of September 11, said that her group's nonprofit status barred her from urging voters to support or oppose individual political candidates.

"But we do say that those people who are responsible for not helping push through legislation that supports the 9/11 commission will be held accountable on Nov. 2," she said. "We're encouraging everyone to vote."

Congressional negotiators have been meeting for a week to try to reconcile House and Senate bills intended to enact major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, most importantly its call for the creation of the job of a national intelligence director to coordinate the work of the government's 15 spy agencies, including the C.I.A. Congressional leaders had asked that a final bill be ready in time for it to be signed into law by President Bush before the election on Tuesday.

But lawmakers say the talks have been at a virtual standstill this week, with House Republicans refusing to accept the wording of the bipartisan Senate bill, which would grant broader budget and personnel authority to a national intelligence director than would the House bill.

House Republicans say they have been willing to make concessions about the intelligence director's authority, but that they cannot make concessions that would hamper the work of intelligence agencies within the Pentagon, like the National Security Agency.

Their position has been endorsed by senior officials at the Pentagon, which has proved awkward for the White House to explain in recent days since President Bush has offered his public support to the Senate provisions, which have also been endorsed by the Sept. 11 commission. The House Republicans have also insisted on the inclusion in a final bill of several law-enforcement and immigration provisions from the House bill that have been strongly criticized by civil liberties groups and were never addressed by the commission.

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"It Will Be Worse Than in 2000"
By Mary Jacoby
Salon.com

Thursday 28 October 2004

NAACP head Julian Bond says the GOP is going all out to suppress the black vote. Can his "Election Protection" offensive stop them?

Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has devoted his life to civil rights and voting rights issues. After a group of black college students refused to leave a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960, Bond -- then a student at Atlanta's Morehouse College -- helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Famous for its "Freedom Rides" challenging segregation, SNCC also worked to register black voters in rural areas of the deep South in the early 1960s, with Bond serving as the organization's communications director.

Elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, the 25-year-old Bond was denied his seat by legislators angry about his opposition to the Vietnam War; he was seated after three elections and a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Chairman of the NAACP since 1998, Bond is now a distinguished professor at American University in Washington and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He narrated the prize-winning documentaries "A Time for Justice" and "Eyes on the Prize."

Salon spoke to Bond on Wednesday by telephone about Republican attempts to suppress the black vote in next Tuesday's election, including the placing of 3,600 election "challengers" at the polls in Ohio. The Republican secretary of state in Ohio, a crucial swing state with 20 electoral votes, asserts the challengers are needed to prevent voting fraud. But Bond countered that if fraud is really the issue, why are the GOP challengers focusing on cities like Cleveland, which have large Democratic-leaning African-American and Hispanic populations?

Nearly 40 years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, dirty tricks and intimidation tactics against black voters are alive and well, Bond said. In Louisiana in 2002, he said, fliers were passed out in African-American neighborhoods advertising the wrong date for a U.S. Senate runoff election. In the 2003 mayoral election in Philadelphia, he added, men wielding clipboards and official-looking law enforcement insignia paroled African-American neighborhoods asking voters for identification.

The NAACP and the People for the American Way Foundation have issued a report titled "The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today." Your organization will also be staffing an Election Day war room with a toll-free telephone number for voters to report irregularities or intimidation at the polls. Obviously, you think the risk of minority voters being denied their rights is serious.

I do. I think it's going to be a major factor in either delaying, knowing or deciding who won. In Ohio for example, Republicans have targeted 35,000 voters [for election challenges], most of them registered in cities with large minority populations. And they do this based either on the racist assumption that minorities are inveterate cheaters or because they know that these are voters who are likely to vote against them. Either way, it's a dirty tactic, and only can be thought to slow up, gum up, mess up the whole process. And this is something they [Republicans] have consistently done in every election since the middle to late 1960s -- underhanded, tricky, illegal and immoral tactics.

Are you saying that the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 has not been particularly effective in ensuring the enfranchisement of minorities?

Curiously, the Voting Rights Act shifted the partisan direction of these tactics. Before the Voting Rights Act was passed, this [black-voter suppression] was the exclusive province of Democrats. But the Voting Rights Act made two things happen. First, Democrats who were resistant to equality migrated in large numbers to the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party, which had been hostile to black voters, became welcoming. When LBJ signed the law, he said to an aide, "We're giving the South to the Republican Party for a generation." The parties traded places.

Do you expect the tactics to be any heavier-handed this year than in the past?

Oh, yeah. I think it will be worse than in 2000. For one thing, in 2000 you did not have the law-enforcement apparatus of the government engaged on one side of the contest, as you do now. Attorney General [John] Ashcroft has instituted this so-called ballot integrity program. Yes, despite appeals to him to issue statements saying we're interested in protecting the voters' right to cast their votes, he's focused entirely on suspicions and allegations of fraud. I don't think anyone thinks that fraud is a widespread problem in the American electoral system. Instead, he's instructed his attorneys general across the United States to be on the alert for fraud, rather than be on the alert for people who are likely to stymie voters and keep them from casting their votes. The two parties are much more aware, taking a lesson from 2000, that every vote counts, and the Democrats take the lesson to mean we need to get all our people to the polls, while the Republicans take the lesson to mean we have to keep as many people as we can away.

Have you ever heard of thousands of people being employed to challenge voters before, as is happening in Ohio?

I don't know how old this practice is, but it's a fairly standard option in most jurisdictions that one voter is able to challenge the legitimacy of another. But it has never been a widespread practice until this year, and that's what makes it so significant. Typically, in small local races where most voters know each other, the right to challenge means that if I see John Smith coming, and I know that John doesn't live in this precinct, I'm going to challenge him. In the South before the Voting Rights Act, it was typically done by white Democrats against blacks. Now, things are reversed, and this Ohio thing is just unprecedented. Just the sheer number -- never before in American political history have 35,000 voters been challenged at one time.

What can the NAACP do about it?

Unfortunately, all you can do in the absence of any intervening authority is to say these are harassment tactics and will not be tolerated. All you can do is have your own people at the polls. In Ohio, you have a partisan secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, whose hopes for achieving the governorship next year rest on his ability to win this election for George W. Bush. He's done everything he can to make the process of casting votes difficult, and he's tolerating this massive challenge, which at best will gum things up.

And you can't really counter these tactics?

You can give instructions to the poll managers to say these things won't be tolerated. You can try to educate them about the standards under which challenges are conducted. But as I understand it, Blackwell hasn't set any standards or issued any warnings. You hope that the poll managers will do it, but they're likely to be overwhelmed by the enormous numbers of people. This is an invitation to chaos.

As far as the hard-won right to vote is concerned -- and to have that vote count -- what's at stake for African-Americans in this election?

If one person is denied the right to vote, that's a tragedy. If one is turned away for a phony reason, that's a little chink in our democracy. When it happens to thousands, and when their votes are disallowed, as happened in Florida in 2000, then citizens' confidence in the process is weakened.

The result will always be open to challenge and dispute. As you know, there are many, many people, myself among them, who are convinced that President Bush has been an illegitimate president for four years. He didn't win the popular vote; he won the Florida vote by 527 votes, when thousands of black votes were cast aside. If the president doesn't have legitimacy, it makes the process of governing less legitimate.

And yet some polls suggest that Bush is not doing so badly among black voters, at least compared with the single digits he pulled in the 2000 election.

It's because after years of trying to suppress and nullify black voters, they've [Republicans] now tried to slice away a wedge of black voters. And in 11 states, [they] have these so-called marriage amendments on the ballot [to prevent gay marriage] and have begun an aggressive campaign to solicit the support of conservative black clergy. And in some respects, they've succeeded. Now, the NAACP opposed the federal amendments, which failed, and opposed these state-level amendments. And Kweisi Mfume, the president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, and I as the chairman, have written letters to ministers in these 11 states, telling them of our opposition and saying that these state-level amendments are simply devices to split the progressive coalition.

Why don't you ever hear about intimidation tactics being used in predominantly white precincts?

You never hear about it because if you're walking down the street and you see a black face and a white face, you can make an informed guess that that black face is going to vote for the Democrats, and so minorities are the targets of people who want to suppress Democratic votes. That's true -- you never hear about this occurring in white precincts. And it's evidence of the partisan and pernicious nature of these practices.

Tell me about the "Election Protection" project that the NAACP has set up with People for the American Way. You've got a toll-free hot-line number for people to call on Election Day to report irregularities and intimidation tactics?

Yes, but I hope we don't just get overwhelmed. Ideally, if you see a practice you think is questionable, you call and somebody nearby you will be dispatched to take care of it. We also have this cadre of lawyers who will be on the ready in places where, based on past experience, we expect trouble, chiefly in Florida. It's basically a dispatch system to ensure that every complaint is attended to.

Do you do this every election year?

Yes. We've done it in the last two presidential elections, but it really didn't seem to be something needed much until 2000. In 2000, we were just flooded with all kinds of calls all over the country.

So you do or do not think you have the resources to counter any Republican tactics?

I'm sure [the Republicans' efforts] are going to be successful. The only question is to what degree will they be successful. With the resources available, the only way this can be countered is by overwhelming the polls with a record turnout of voters.

We've focused on intimidation of African-American voters. But this is an issue that is important beyond the minority community, isn't it?

Yes. We're talking about things that are beyond the pale of normal politics. It's normal politics for candidates to run negative ads in the hope that they suppress their opponent's votes. But we're talking about things that border on the illegal, or which are illegal. And it ought to be an issue for everyone. How can you wake up the next morning and say Joe Blow has been elected when you know that Joe's election has been tainted by suppressed votes, nullified votes and voters frightened away? How can that election have any credibility? The issue is confidence in the democratic system.

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COMMENT
THE CHOICE
by The Editors
Issue of 2004-11-01
Posted 2004-10-25
This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger—who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war—as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger’s adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on November 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays. On Tuesday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million Americans went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable plurality, voted to make Al Gore President of the United States. Because of the way the votes were distributed, however, the outcome in the electoral college turned on the outcome in Florida. In that state, George W. Bush held a lead of some five hundred votes, one one-thousandth of Gore’s national margin; irregularities, and there were many, all had the effect of taking votes away from Gore; and the state’s electoral machinery was in the hands of Bush’s brother, who was the governor, and one of Bush’s state campaign co-chairs, who was the Florida secretary of state.

Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring them—by cutting off the process and installing Bush by fiat—the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism.

A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the damage would have been far less severe if the new President had made some effort to take account of the special circumstances of his election—in the composition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals, perhaps even in the goals themselves. He made no such effort. According to Bob Woodward in “Plan of Attack,” Vice-President Dick Cheney put it this way: “From the very day we walked in the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election—full speed ahead.”

The new President’s main order of business was to push through Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening environmental protection and cutting off funds for international family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in English, not Arabic) as “the base,” which is to say the conservative movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The President’s enthusiastic embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the Administration, the defection of a moderate senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, cost his party control of the Senate. And, four months after that, the President’s political fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but inexorable decline. Then came the blackest Tuesday of all.

September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of solidarity, global and national—solidarity with and solidarity within the United States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a second opportunity to create something like a government of national unity. Again, he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the political capital handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through more elements of his unmandated domestic program. A year after 9/11, in the midterm elections, he increased his majority in the House and recaptured control of the Senate by portraying selected Democrats as friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that the anger felt by many Democrats is even greater than can be explained by the profound differences in outlook between the two candidates and their parties?

The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently, ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence.

In January, 2001, just after Bush’s inauguration, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated bounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last year’s federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year’s will top four hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3 trillion.

Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation that enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects them to go away on schedule; they were designated as temporary only to make their ultimate results look less scary. If Congress extends the expiration deadlines—a near-certainty if Bush wins and the Republicans retain control of Congress—then, according to the C.B.O., the cumulative deficit between 2005 and 2014 will nearly double, to $4.5 trillion.

What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq’s collapse in April, 2000. It’s true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn’t make them wise policy. “Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans,” Bush said during his final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is false—a lie, actually—though at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller marriage penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly. Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of ninety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-two dollars.

These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of American jobs. This Administration’s most unshakable commitment has been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that rewards wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, another Washington research group, estimates that the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about twenty-three per cent. The President promises, in a second term, to expand tax-free savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains, and permanently abolish the estate tax—all of which will widen the widening gap between the richest and the rest.

Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as “new source review,” which requires power-plant operators to install modern pollution controls when upgrading older facilities. The change, it turned out, had been recommended by some of the nation’s largest polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was chaired by Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed new rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions from power plants. The E.P.A.’s regulation drafters had copied, in some instances verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing the utility industry.

“I guess you’d say I’m a good steward of the land,” Bush mused dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you’d say nothing of the kind. The President has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast stretches of accessible wilderness have been opened up to development. By stripping away restrictions on the use of federal lands, often through little-advertised rule changes, the Administration has potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area larger than Indiana and Iowa combined, to logging, mining, and oil exploration.

During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has been excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About others there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for example, permits government investigators to obtain—without a subpoena or a search warrant based on probable cause—a court order entitling them to records from libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and Internet service providers, among other public and private entities. Officials of the Department of Justice say that they have used Section 215 with restraint, and that they have not, so far, sought information from libraries or bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be more reassuring if their record were not otherwise so troubling.

Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the Justice Department under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its investigation had resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The arrests have continued, but eventually the Administration simply stopped saying how many people were and are being held. In any event, not one of the detainees has been convicted of anything resembling a terrorist act. At least as reprehensible is the way that foreign nationals living in the United States have been treated. Since September 11th, some five thousand have been rounded up and more than five hundred have been deported, all for immigration infractions, after hearings that, in line with a novel doctrine asserted by Ashcroft, were held in secret. Since it is official policy not to deport terrorism suspects, it is unclear what legitimate anti-terror purpose these secret hearings serve.

President Bush often complains about Democratic obstructionism, but the truth is that he has made considerable progress, if that’s the right word, toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues. The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one of his judicial nominees, more than the per-term averages for Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush senior. Senate Republicans blocked more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees; Senate Democrats have blocked only ten of Bush’s. (Those ten, by the way, got exactly what they deserved. Some of them—such as Carolyn Kuhl, who devoted years of her career to trying to preserve tax breaks for colleges that practice racial discrimination, and Brett Kavanaugh, a thirty-eight-year-old with no judicial or courtroom experience who co-wrote the Starr Report—rank among the worst judicial appointments ever attempted.)

Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it has been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. Like some of the Court’s worst decisions of the past four years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its best—salvaging affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for terrorist suspects, striking down Texas’s anti-sodomy law, banning executions of the mentally retarded—were reached by one- or two-vote majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two justices removed from reversal.) All but one of the sitting justices are senior citizens, ranging in age from sixty-five to eighty-four, and the gap since the last appointment—ten years—is the longest since 1821. Bush has said more than once that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are his favorite justices. In a second Bush term, the Court could be remade in their images.

The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that long antedates 9/11. The President’s hostility to science, exemplified by his decision to place crippling limits on federal support of stem-cell research and by a systematic willingness to distort or suppress scientific findings discomfiting to “the base,” is such that scores of eminent scientists who are normally indifferent to politics have called for his defeat. The Administration’s energy policies, especially its resistance to increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, are of a piece with its environmental irresponsibility. Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind education program, enacted with the support of the liberal lion Edward Kennedy, is being allowed to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding. Some of the money that has been pumped into it has been leached from other education programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year.

Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But this election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education, and the rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect of large-scale terrorist attack. The most important Presidential responsibility of the next four years, as of the past three, is the “war on terror”—more precisely, the struggle against a brand of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that uses particularly ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon.

Bush’s immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was an almost palpable bewilderment and anxiety. Within a few days, to the universal relief of his fellow-citizens, he seemed to find his focus. His decision to use American military power to topple the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who had turned their country into the principal base of operations for the perpetrators of the attacks, earned the near-unanimous support of the American people and of America’s allies. Troops from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Norway, and Spain are serving alongside Americans in Afghanistan to this day.

The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last month’s Presidential election, for which the votes are still being counted, is clearly a positive sign. Yet the job in Afghanistan has been left undone, despite fervent promises at the outset that the chaos that was allowed to develop after the defeat of the Soviet occupation in the nineteen-eighties would not be repeated. The Taliban has regrouped in eastern and southern regions. Bin Laden’s organization continues to enjoy sanctuary and support from Afghans as well as Pakistanis on both sides of their common border. Warlords control much of Afghanistan outside the capital of Kabul, which is the extent of the territorial writ of the decent but beleaguered President Hamid Karzai. Opium production has increased fortyfold.

The White House’s real priorities were elsewhere from the start. According to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a Situation Room crisis meeting on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld suggested launching retaliatory strikes against Iraq. When Clarke and others pointed out to him that Al Qaeda—the presumed culprit—was based in Afghanistan, not Iraq, Rumsfeld is said to have remarked that there were better targets in Iraq. The bottom line, as Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said, was that the Bush-Cheney team had been planning to carry out regime change in Baghdad well before September 11th—one way or another, come what may.

At all three debates, President Bush defended the Iraq war by saying that without it Saddam Hussein would still be in power. This is probably true, and Saddam’s record of colossal cruelty--of murder, oppression, and regional aggression--was such that even those who doubted the war’s wisdom acknowledged his fall as an occasion for satisfaction. But the removal of Saddam has not been the war’s only consequence; and, as we now know, his power, however fearsome to the millions directly under its sway, was far less of a threat to the United States and the rest of the world than it pretended—and, more important, was made out—to be.

As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain, Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome views are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-created bubble of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism been more damaging than in the case of Iraq. The arguments and warnings of analysts in the State Department, in the Central Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military services, and in the chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no more effect than the chants of millions of marchers.

The decision to invade and occupy Iraq was made on the basis of four assumptions: first, that Saddam’s regime was on the verge of acquiring nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with Al Qaeda and (as was repeatedly suggested by the Vice-President and others) might have had something to do with 9/11; third, that within Iraq the regime’s fall would be followed by prolonged celebration and rapid and peaceful democratization; and, fourth, that a similar democratic transformation would be precipitated elsewhere in the region, accompanied by a new eagerness among Arab governments and publics to make peace between Israel and a presumptive Palestinian state. The first two of these assumptions have been shown to be entirely baseless. As for the second two, if the wishes behind them do someday come true, it may not be clear that the invasion of Iraq was a help rather than a hindrance.

In Bush’s rhetoric, the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, with precision bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, and ended exactly three weeks later, with the iconic statue pulldown. That military operation was indeed a success. But the cakewalk led over a cliff, to a succession of heedless and disastrous mistakes that leave one wondering, at the very least, how the Pentagon’s civilian leadership remains intact and the President’s sense of infallibility undisturbed. The failure, against the advice of such leaders as General Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to deploy an adequate protective force led to unchallenged looting of government buildings, hospitals, museums, and—most inexcusable of all—arms depots. (“Stuff happens,” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld explained, though no stuff happened to the oil ministry.) The Pentagon all but ignored the State Department’s postwar plans, compiled by its Future of Iraq project, which warned not only of looting but also of the potential for insurgencies and the folly of relying on exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi; the project’s head, Thomas Warrick, was sidelined. The White House counsel’s disparagement of the Geneva Conventions and of prohibitions on torture as “quaint” opened the way to systematic and spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American-run prisons--a moral and political catastrophe for which, in a pattern characteristic of the Administration’s management style, no one in a policymaking position has been held accountable. And, no matter how Bush may cleave to his arguments about a grand coalition (“What’s he say to Tony Blair?” “He forgot Poland!”), the coalition he assembled was anything but grand, and it has been steadily melting away in Iraq’s cauldron of violence.

By the end of the current fiscal year, the financial cost of this war will be two hundred billion dollars (the figure projected by Lawrence Lindsey, who headed the President’s Council of Economic Advisers until, like numerous other bearers of unpalatable news, he was cashiered) and rising. And there are other, more serious costs that were unforeseen by the dominant factions in the Administration (although there were plenty of people who did foresee them). The United States has become mired in a low-intensity guerrilla war that has taken more lives since the mission was declared to be accomplished than before. American military deaths have mounted to more than a thousand, a number that underplays the real level of suffering: among the eight thousand wounded are many who have been left seriously maimed. The toll of Iraqi dead and wounded is of an order of magnitude greater than the American. Al Qaeda, previously an insignificant presence in Iraq, is an important one now. Before this war, we had persuaded ourselves and the world that our military might was effectively infinite. Now it is overstretched, a reality obvious to all. And, if the exposure of American weakness encourages our enemies, surely the blame lies with those who created the reality, not with those who, like Senator Kerry, acknowledge it as a necessary step toward changing it.

When the Administration’s geopolitical, national-interest, and anti-terrorism justifications for the Iraq war collapsed, it groped for an argument from altruism: postwar chaos, violence, unemployment, and brownouts notwithstanding, the war has purchased freedoms for the people of Iraq which they could not have had without Saddam’s fall. That is true. But a sad and ironic consequence of this war is that its fumbling prosecution has undermined its only even arguably meritorious rationale—and, as a further consequence, the salience of idealism in American foreign policy has been likewise undermined. Foreign-policy idealism has taken many forms—Wilson’s aborted world federalism, Carter’s human-rights jawboning, and Reagan’s flirtation with total nuclear disarmament, among others. The failed armed intervention in Somalia and the successful ones in the Balkans are other examples. The neoconservative version ascendant in the Bush Administration, post-9/11, draws partly on these strains. There is surely idealistic purpose in envisioning a Middle East finally relieved of its autocracies and dictatorships. Yet this Administration’s adventure in Iraq is so gravely flawed and its credibility so badly damaged that in the future, faced with yet another moral dilemma abroad, it can be expected to retreat, a victim of its own Iraq Syndrome.

The damage visited upon America, and upon America’s standing in the world, by the Bush Administration’s reckless mishandling of the public trust will not easily be undone. And for many voters the desire to see the damage arrested is reason enough to vote for John Kerry. But the challenger has more to offer than the fact that he is not George W. Bush. In every crucial area of concern to Americans (the economy, health care, the environment, Social Security, the judiciary, national security, foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the fight against terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective alternative to Bush’s curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery. Pollsters like to ask voters which candidate they’d most like to have a beer with, and on that metric Bush always wins. We prefer to ask which candidate is better suited to the governance of our nation.

Throughout his long career in public service, John Kerry has demonstrated steadiness and sturdiness of character. The physical courage he showed in combat in Vietnam was matched by moral courage when he raised his voice against the war, a choice that has carried political costs from his first run for Congress, lost in 1972 to a campaign of character assassination from a local newspaper that could not forgive his antiwar stand, right through this year’s Swift Boat ads. As a senator, Kerry helped expose the mischief of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, a money-laundering operation that favored terrorists and criminal cartels; when his investigation forced him to confront corruption among fellow-Democrats, he rejected the cronyism of colleagues and brought down power brokers of his own party with the same dedication that he showed in going after Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal. His leadership, with John McCain, of the bipartisan effort to put to rest the toxic debate over Vietnam-era P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for Washington’s normalization of relations with Hanoi, in the mid-nineties, was the signal accomplishment of his twenty years on Capitol Hill, and it is emblematic of his fairness of mind and independence of spirit. Kerry has made mistakes (most notably, in hindsight at least, his initial opposition to the Gulf War in 1990), but—in contrast to the President, who touts his imperviousness to changing realities as a virtue—he has learned from them.

Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed opportunity. But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate. Kerry’s mettle has been tested under fire—the fire of real bullets and the political fire that will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected—and he has shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a properly Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal broadly to the American center. In a time of primitive partisanship, he has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.

Countdown to Electoral Uprising - 5 Days to Go -- Zarqawi & the Corporatist Media, US Colonel debunks WH denials on 350 tons of explosives, CIA Inspector General's report repressed, Ohio, Palm Beach and Abu Ghraib

There are only 5 days to go until the Electoral
Uprising...Get it straight, because the Corporatist
Media won't: 1) The Bush abomination had a chance to
wipe out Zarqawi and his crew, presented to them by
the CIA, before the start of the Iraq war and didn't
because of domestic political concerns in the ramp up
to their foolish military adventure. 2) The Bush
abomination was warned by the UN about the 380 tons of
high explosives at the site, and US military of
officers confirm that the explosives were still there
when they swept in. 3) The CIA inspector general
finished a report, back in mid-summer, that names high
government officials who failed the country pre-9/11
but the Bush abomination is blocking its release...The
US regimestream news media is complicit (at best) and
the Bush cabal's
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party
is engaged in a massive vote supression operation in
Bardoground States, BUT there is an Electoral Uprising
coming, and the Bush Cabal, the US regimestream news
media and the Bush cabal's
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party,
i.e., the Triad of shared special interest (energy,
weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, tobacco,
etc.), is going to be repudiated at the Ballot Box on
November 2...Here are SIX important stories. Please
read them and share them with others. Please vote and
encourage others to vote. The life of the Republic
itself is at stake in this election... They cannot
steal it if enough of us vote...Remember Duval County!

Phillip Carter, The Washington Monthly: The biggest
scandal of the Bush administration began at the top.
A generation from now, historians may look back to
April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the
war in Iraq...
If Osama bin Laden had hired a Madison Avenue public
relations firm to rally Arabs hearts and minds to his
cause, it's hard to imagine that it could have devised
a better propaganda campaign.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200410270007

Media largely silent on WSJ report: Bush admin
"stopped the military from attacking" Zarqawi before
the start of the Iraq war
The media has remained largely silent on The Wall
Street Journal's October 25 report that President
George W. Bush's administration passed up several
opportunities to attack and potentially kill terrorist
leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the start of the
Iraq war. The Journal article expanded on a March 2
NBC Nightly News report suggesting that the
administration passed up chances to attack Zarqawi;
the report noted that several former administration
officials and military officers have questioned the
administration's decision to hold off on such attacks.
While the Bush administration has repeatedly called
attention to Zarqawi, their failure to attack him in
2002 has gone virtually unreported. Zarqawi has
recently made headlines in connection with the killing
of 50 U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers and is, according to
the Associated Press and The New York Times, "believed
responsible for hundreds of killings."

The October 25 Journal report documented several
former military officers and administration officials
who have questioned the administration's decision to
refrain from attacking Zarqawi's camp, especially in
light of the mounting "toll of mayhem" for which he is
believed to be responsible:

Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who was in the White House as the
National Security Council's director for combatting
terrorism at the time, said an NSC [National Security
Council] working group, led by the Defense Department,
had been in charge of reviewing the plans to target
the [Zarqawi's] camp. She said the camp was
"definitely a stronghold, and we knew that certain
individuals were there including Zarqawi." Ms.
Gordon-Hagerty said she wasn't part of the working
group and never learned the reason why the camp wasn't
hit. But she said that much later, when reports
surfaced that Mr. Zarqawi was behind a series of
bloody attacks in Iraq, she said "I remember my
response," adding, "I said why didn't we get that
['son of a b-'] when we could."

[...]

[Retired] Gen. [John M.] Keane [then-U.S. Army vice
chief of staff] characterized the [Zarqawi's] camp "as
one of the best targets we ever had," and questioned
the decision not to attack it.

>From the original March 2 NBC Nightly News report:

JIM MIKLASZEWSKI (NBC News chief Pentagon
correspondent): With today's attacks, al-Zarqawi, a
Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda, is blamed
for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. But NBC
News has learned that long before the war, the Bush
administration had several chances to wipe out his
terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, perhaps kill Zarqawi
himself, but never pulled the trigger. June 2002, U.S.
government officials say intelligence revealed that
Zarqawi and members of Al Qaeda had set up a weapons
lab at Kirma in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin
and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to
attack the camp and sent them to the White House,
where, say government sources, the plans were debated
to death.

[...]

MIKLASZEWSKI: Four months later, intelligence showed
Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks
in Europe. The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan,
and the White House again killed it. By then, the
administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

ROGER CRESSEY (NBC terrorism analyst): People were
more obsessed with developing the coalition to
overthrow [former Iraqi leader] Saddam [Hussein] than
to execute the president's [Bush's] policy on
preemption against terrorists.

[...]

MIKLASZEWSKI: And despite the Bush administration's
tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they
strike, Zarqawi's killing streak continues today.

As of this writing, the October 25 Wall Street Journal
report was the subject of a Paul Krugman New York
Times column and two newspaper editorial pieces. It
was also mentioned by CNN Crossfire co-host Paul
Begala, WashingtonPost.com "White House Briefing"
columnist Dan Froomkin, and MSNBC host Keith
Olbermann. No other major newspaper, none of the
network news programs, and no primetime news shows on
CNN or FOX News Channel addressed the report. On
MSNBC, it was mentioned only on Countdown with Keith
Olbermann.

>From an October 27 Sarasota [Florida] Herald Tribune
editorial, titled "Zarqawi's escape: Decision against
a pre-invasion strike should be investigated":

To the long and growing list of the Bush
administration's pre-war and post-war misjudgments in
Iraq, add a missed opportunity that might have averted
much of the bloodshed that has marked the U.S.
occupation. A great deal of the havoc in post-war Iraq
-- car-bombings, kidnappings, videotaped beheadings of
hostages, the recent massacre of Iraqi troops -- has
been attributed to a group led by Jordanian terrorist
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His followers have been blamed
for more than 700 deaths. Yet, according to Monday's
Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon drew up a plan,
almost a year before the U.S.-led invasion, to wipe
out Zarqawi's terrorist camp in northern Iraq. ... Why
Bush rejected the Pentagon's plan is a matter for
speculation -- and great regret. That decision, along
with the administration's overall abysmal preparations
for the war in Iraq, should be the subject of a
congressional investigation. Zarqawi's camp was in a
part of Iraq not under Saddam Hussein's control. Yet,
according to a report by NBC last March, military
officials have speculated that the continued presence
in Iraq of Zarqawi -- an al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist
who had fled Afghanistan with his followers -- may
have helped bolster the administration's case for an
invasion.

>From an October 27 Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial,
titled "Incompetence: Zarqawi, explosives got away":

Two news stories out of Iraq Monday illustrated again
the incompetence that President Bush and his national
security team have brought to the war in Iraq: In the
first story, Scot J. Paltrow, a Wall Street Journal
reporter, tells how the White House prevented the
Pentagon from taking out terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi months before the war began. ... Here you
have the perfect storm of incompetence: Before the
war, the Bush administration rejected Pentagon efforts
to take out Zarqawi. Following the war, the Bush
administration failed to secure 377 tons of high
explosives that could help Zarqawi kill more
Americans. Then they tried to hide the loss. It's
mind-boggling.

Host Keith Olbermann on the October 26 edition of
MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

OLBERMANN: The terror group led by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi is claiming responsibility for the
slaughter of those Iraqi troops and tonight come new
charges that the Bush administration passed up several
opportunities to take out Zarqawi when it could have,
well before the war began in Iraq.

Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda,
accused of most of the violence we have seen in Iraq
since the invasion. Senior Pentagon officials now
telling The Wall Street Journal that in the spring
2002, the U.S. military had Zarqawi in its sights,
tracking him down in Iraq, drawing up a number of
plans to go after him and sending those plans to the
White House. The president personally -- say those
Wall Street Journal sources -- rejected those plans,
choosing instead to wait.

This is not the first time such reports have surfaced.
NBC News having reported in March that the Bush
administration had several chances to wipe out
Zarqawi's terrorist group and perhaps Zarqawi himself,
but it never pulled the trigger.

>From Paul Krugman's October 26 New York Times column,
titled "A Culture of Cover-Ups":

The story of the looted explosives has overshadowed
another report that Bush officials tried to suppress
-- this one about how the Bush administration let Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi get away. An article in yesterday's
Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on an ''NBC
Nightly News'' report from March that asserted that
before the Iraq war, administration officials called
off a planned attack that might have killed Mr.
Zarqawi, the terrorist now blamed for much of the
mayhem in that country, in his camp.

Citing ''military officials,'' the original NBC report
explained that the failure to go after Mr. Zarqawi was
based on domestic politics: ''the administration
feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq'' -- a
part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein --
''could undermine its case for war against Saddam.''
The Journal doesn't comment on this explanation, but
it does say that when NBC reported, correctly, that
Mr. Zarqawi had been targeted before the war,
administration officials denied it.

>From the October 25 edition of CNN's Crossfire:

BEGALA [co-host]: Today's Wall Street Journal reports
that the Bush administration canceled a plan to kill
Iraqi terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the
invasion of Iraq. General John M. Keane, then the
Army's vice chief of staff, called Zarqawi's camp --
quote -- "one of the best targets we ever had" --
unquote.

Former Bush national security aide Lisa Gordon-Hagerty
tells the Journal there was intelligence that
al-Zarqawi was in the camp and when Zarqawi began
murdering American troops, she asked -- quote -- "Why
didn't we get that SOB when we could?" -- unquote.
Good question, Lisa. The Bush administration says one
factor was -- quote -- "the president's decision to
engage the international community on Iraq" --
unquote.

So, if we could kill the No. 1 terrorist in Iraq
without invading, there would be less support for Mr.
Bush's invasion of Iraq. And so Zarqawi is alive.
Scores of Americans are dead, some of them beheaded.
Think about that the next time Mr. Bush lectures you
about how strong he is.

>From Dan Froomkin's October 25 "White House Briefing"
column:

There's the Wall Street Journal weighing in with a
story about how Bush apparently had the chance to kill
terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi before the Iraq
War, but opted not to.

— N.C.

Posted to the web on Wednesday October 27, 2004 at
4:44 PM EST

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27attack.html?oref=login&oref=login

C.I.A. Is Accused of Delaying Internal Report
By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: October 27, 2004

ASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - The Central Intelligence Agency
has blocked, at least temporarily, the distribution of
a draft internal report that identifies individual
officers by name in discussing whether anyone should
be held accountable for intelligence failures leading
up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of Congress
from both parties said.

Advertisement


The delays began in July, at the direction of John E.
McLaughlin, then the acting director of central
intelligence, and have continued since Porter J. Goss
took over as the intelligence chief last month,
members of Congress said. The delays have postponed
the next step in the process, which calls for the
draft report to be reviewed by affected individuals.

It is not known who is named in the report, conducted
by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, an independent
internal investigator. The review was sought in
December 2002 by the joint Congressional committee
that investigated intelligence failures leading up to
the Sept. 11 attacks. The purpose, that panel said,
should be to determine "whether and to what extent
personnel at all levels should be held accountable''
for any mistakes that contributed to the failure to
disrupt the attacks.

In a Sept. 23 letter to Mr. McLaughlin, the top
Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee, Representatives Peter Hoekstra of Michigan
and Jane Harman of California, said they were
"concerned that the C.I.A. is unwilling to hold its
officers accountable for failures to meet the
professional standards we know C.I.A stands for.'' On
Tuesday, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia,
wrote separately to Mr. Goss, expressing concern
"about the appearance that the inspector general's
independence is being infringed.''

Neither letter has been made public, but copies were
obtained Tuesday by The New York Times. In both
letters, the members of Congress cited as evidence of
the delays identical letters sent to the intelligence
committees on Aug. 31 by John Helgerson, the C.I.A.
inspector general. The members of Congress described
the delays as a departure from normal procedure.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about the
status of the report. An intelligence official said
that Mr. Goss had asked to review the draft himself
before it was distributed further. The official would
not address the question of who might be named in the
document but said, "No C.I.A. official, current or
former, has been found accountable, because we're
talking about a draft.''

Senator Pat Roberts, af Kansas Republican who is
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not
sign the letter that Mr. Rockefeller sent. A
Republican Congressional official said that Mr.
Roberts did not yet believe that the postponement of
the report was a matter for concern and said the delay
was "uncommon but not abnormal.''

Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for Mr. Roberts, said:
"Senator Roberts is closely monitoring the progress of
the C.I.A. inspector general's report on 9/11. Senator
Roberts has already made it clear to the agency that
he expects to see the report upon its completion."

That Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman had called on the
C.I.A. to release the report had been previously
disclosed, but not the contents of the letter. In it,
Mr. Hoekstra and Ms. Harman said that Mr. Helgerson
had indicated that Mr. McLaughlin had broken with
normal practice and directed him "not to distribute
the sections of the report that identify individual
officers by name.''

A spokesman for George J. Tenet, who stepped down in
July after seven years as director of central
intelligence, said that Mr. Tenet had not been
interviewed for the draft report, had not been briefed
on its contents and had not been asked to respond to
it.

James L. Pavitt, who retired in August as the C.I.A.'s
deputy director of operations, also said he had not
seen the report and had not been asked to respond to
it. Mr. Pavitt said in an e-mail message: "We failed
to stop the 11 September attacks. It surely was not
for lack of effort, lack of focus or lack of
courage.''

"Given what we now know, in all the hindsight of the
year 2004, I still do not believe we could have
stopped the attacks,'' Mr. Pavitt added. "If there is
to be blame, it belongs with me, not with the
remarkable folks who worked the counterterrorism issue
day in and day out."

Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27bomb.html?oref=login&oref=login

MISSING EXPLOSIVES
No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says
By JIM DWYER and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 27, 2004

hite House officials reasserted yesterday that 380
tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from
a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein
controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers
did not find the explosives when they visited the
complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.

But the unit's commander said in an interview
yesterday that his troops had not searched the site
and had merely stopped there overnight.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second
Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he
did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa,
was considered sensitive, or that international
inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003
to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a
decade of monitoring.

Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for
the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort
Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north
toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make
plans for their next push.

"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't
know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get
involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our
mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping
there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave
that very same day. The plan was not to go in there
and start searching. It looked like all the other
ammunition supply points we had seen already."

What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an
unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took
on new significance this week, after The New York
Times, working with the CBS News program "60 Minutes,"
reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX
and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion.

Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi
government informed the United Nations International
Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives disappeared
sometime after the fall of Mr. Hussein on April 9,
2003. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded since the
American invasion, was looted in the spring of 2003,
and looters were seen there as recently as Sunday.

President Bush's aides told reporters that because the
soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives
on April 10, they could have been removed before the
invasion. They based their assertions on a report
broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed
video images of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.

By yesterday afternoon Mr. Bush's aides had moderated
their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the
explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want
to comment on the matter until the facts were known.

On Sunday, administration officials said that the Iraq
Survey Group, the C.I.A. taskforce that hunted for
unconventional weapons, had been ordered to look into
the disappearance of the explosives. On Tuesday night,
CBS News reported that Charles A. Duelfer, the head of
the taskforce, denied receiving such an order.

At the Pentagon, a senior official, who asked not to
be identified, acknowledged that the timing of the
disappearance remained uncertain. "The bottom line is
that there is still a lot that is not known," the
official said.

The official suggested that the material could have
vanished while Mr. Hussein was still in power,
sometime between mid-March, when the international
inspectors left, and April 3, when members of the
Army's Third Infantry Division fought with Iraqis
inside Al Qaqaa. At the time, it was reported that
those soldiers found a white powder that was
tentatively identified as explosives. The site was
left unguarded, the official said.

The 101st Airborne Division arrived April 10 and left
the next day. The next recorded visit by Americans
came on May 27, when Task Force 75 inspected Al Qaqaa,
but did not find the large quantities of explosives
that had been seen in mid-March by the international
inspectors. By then, Al Qaqaa had plainly been looted.

Colonel Anderson said he did not see any obvious signs
of damage when he arrived on April 10, but that his
focus was strictly on finding a secure place to
collect his troops, who were driving and flying north
from Karbala.

"There was no sign of looting here," Colonel Anderson
said. "Looting was going on in Baghdad, and we were
rushing on to Baghdad. We were marshaling in."

A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division
thought they had discovered a cache of chemical
weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of
them came down with rashes, and they had to go through
a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he
wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and
because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in
two dozen places, did not care to poke through the
stores at Al Qaqaa.

"I had given instructions, 'Don't mess around with
those. It looks like they are bunkers; we're not
messing around with those things. That's not what
we're here for,' " he said. "I thought we would be
there for a few hours and move on. We ended up staying
overnight."

Thom Shanker and William J. Broad contributed
reporting for this article.

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=17319

Neas: Something Is "Terribly Wrong" in Ohio




Late Wednesday, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell
issued a directive that, for the first time, will
allow political parties to apportion partisan
challengers by precinct instead of polling site,
thereby greatly increasing the number of challengers
at Ohio polling places.

For example, a polling place serving four precincts
would normally have one challenger from each party.
Blackwell’s directive will now allow four challengers
at that location, one for each precinct served.

The deadline for registering partisan poll challengers
passed on October 22nd. A New York Times story the
following day revealed that the Republican Party
registered 3,600 challengers, while the Democratic
Party registered 2,000. Neither party is allowed to
add challengers, but Blackwell’s directive will allow
the parties to concentrate multiple challengers at
polling places with multiple precincts.

People For the American Way Foundation President Ralph
G. Neas said:

“There is something terribly wrong here. The question
must be asked: is the Ohio Secretary of State using
his position for partisan advantage? What is the
purpose for putting an unprecedented number of
challengers at the polls and allowing them to be
concentrated in precincts?

“At a minimum, this creates the potential for long
lines, great confusion and frustration, and
ultimately, the possibility that many working men and
women who can’t afford to stand in long lines on a
work day will effectively be denied the right to vote.
That’s wrong.

“The Secretary of State should protect the rights of
legitimate voters, not curtail them. He should make
decisions that bring more voters to the polls, not
keep them away. He should clear the path to the ballot
box, not put up barriers. There should be nothing to
fear, and everything to gain, from a massive voter
turnout in Ohio.”

People For the American Way Foundation is a founding
member of the nonpartisan Election Protection
coalition, an organization dedicated to voter
education, empowerment and protection. The coalition
will have poll monitors stationed at voting sites
around Ohio on Election Day, and operates a toll-free
hotline, 1-866-OUR VOTE, to provide free legal
assistance and information to voters.







Read Secretary Blackwell's directive








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http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/local_news/epaper/2004/10/08/s3d_voters_1008.html

Lack of early-vote sites near blacks ripped
By Scott McCabe and Dara Kam

Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

Friday, October 08, 2004

Early-voting advocates are angry that outgoing
Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore neglected to
put booths in the largely black communities in central
Palm Beach County.

County Commissioner Addie Greene accused LePore of
retaliating against black voters who helped thwart her
reelection bid in August by failing to put any of the
eight early polling sites in places such as Riviera
Beach, West Palm Beach and Mangonia Park.

"I'm not trying to be mean," said Greene, who backed
off earlier charges that LePore's motives were because
her opponent was black. "But the people who were the
most disenfranchised are the minorities."

LePore said that she had her staff calculate the
distance between early voting sites after Greene's
accusations.

The distance from her office to the Palm Beach Gardens
site is 13 miles, which is about 6 miles from Riviera
Beach, where Greene resides. Riviera Beach is about 7
miles from the suburban West Palm Beach office, LePore
said.

"So they have to drive 5 or 6 miles to vote? Come on,"
LePore said Thursday.

LePore said she relied merely on population and
geography to pick the eight early-voting locales.

"We don't look at putting sites where the Democrats
are, where the blacks are, where the Hispanics are,
where the Jewish people are, where the Republicans
are," she said.

Black ministers and civil rights leaders in Duval
County, which has early voting only in the elections
office, have made similar complaints.

LePore said Greene's accusation is "absurd" because
she has worked hard to "enfranchise blacks, Haitians
and Hispanics" in her years as an elections worker.

"We're here trying to do a job and do it to the best
of our ability with all the challenges we've had,
these storms, and to get criticized is just very
frustrating," LePore said.

Florida Senate Minority Leader Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca
Raton, who sponsored the initiative to expand
early-voting polling places, said LePore could have
put out more polling places in the county,
geographically the second-largest in Florida.
Miami-Dade has 20 locations; Broward has about 15,
Klein said.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102704B.shtml

The Road to Abu Ghraib
By Phillip Carter
The Washington Monthly

November 2004 Edition

The biggest scandal of the Bush administration began
at the top.
A generation from now, historians may look back to
April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the
war in Iraq. On that date, "CBS News" broadcast the
first ugly photographs of abuses by American soldiers
at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. There were images of a
man standing hooded on a box with wires attached to
his hands; of guards leering as they forced naked men
to simulate sexual acts; of a man led around on a
leash by a female soldier; of a dead Iraqi detainee,
packed in ice; and more. The pictures had been taken
the previous fall by U.S. Army military police
soldiers assigned to the prison, but had made it into
the hands of Army criminal investigators only months
later, when a soldier named Joseph Darby anonymously
passed them a CD-ROM full of prison photos. The images
aroused worldwide indignation, and illustrated in
graphic detail both the lengths to which the United
States would go to get intelligence, and the extent to
which those efforts had been corrupted by the
exigencies of the difficult war in Iraq.

Two days later, The New Yorker published a report
on Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh. Hersh won a Pulitzer
Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the U.S. Army's
atrocities in Vietnam; now he had come full circle,
documenting the full extent of the abuses at Abu
Ghraib and the Army's initial efforts to investigate
them. Hersh's reporting-which forms the nucleus of his
new book, Chain of Command-helped launch nearly a
dozen different criminal investigations into what
former vice president Al Gore dubbed "the American
Gulag," the extraterritorial chain of prisons and
detainment centers, stretching from Guantánamo Bay to
Afghanistan, set up by the Bush administration to hold
suspected terrorists. More than 300 instances of abuse
in those facilities, from November 2001 to as recently
as March 2004, have been alleged since then. To date,
eight out of 11 investigations have been completed.
They have produced thousands of documents, witness
interviews, military orders, emails, and PowerPoint
briefings, with each one telling a small piece of the
story of how America's vaunted all-volunteer
professional military lapsed into some of the most
unprofessional and despicable conduct of its history.
Forty-five soldiers have been recommended for
courts-martial, and 23 others for summary discharge.
Nearly one year after the first sadistic acts took
place, the extent of the abuses remains unknown. But
by all indications, the worst revelations are yet to
come. In closed-door presentations before Congress,
Pentagon officials revealed evidence of crimes ranging
from the rape of female detainees to the sexual abuse
of minors held at Abu Ghraib.

There is no doubt that the abuses at Abu Ghraib
stand as an indelible stain on the honor of the
American military. What is less clear is the degree to
which the resulting scandal has damaged our national
security and undermined our efforts to bring peace to
Iraq and win the war against radical terrorism-a war
that is as much a fight for the political and moral
high ground as it is a shooting war that pits American
soldiers against Islamist ones. America suffered a
huge defeat the moment those photographs became
public. Copies of them are now sold in souks from
Marrakesh to Jakarta, vivid illustrations of the worst
suspicions of the Arab world: that Americans are
corrupt and power-mad, eager to humiliate Muslims and
mock their values. The acts they document have helped
to energize the insurgency in Iraq, undermining our
rule there and magnifying the risks faced by our
soldiers each day. If Osama bin Laden had hired a
Madison Avenue public relations firm to rally Arabs
hearts and minds to his cause, it's hard to imagine
that it could have devised a better propaganda
campaign.

The damage done by Abu Ghraib might at least have
been minimized had the administration pursued a
strategy of publicly and sincerely holding accountable
those responsible for it. Instead, it has done
something close to the opposite. The Bush
administration has condemned the abuses as the work of
a "few bad apples," while working diligently to get
the story off the front pages and out of the
presidential campaign. In a meeting with Human Rights
Watch executive director Kenneth Roth shortly after
the scandal broke, reports Hersh, National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice argued that the abuses
resulted not from the president's policies in the war
on terrorism, but from "implementation of policy" by
the military. The various committees and commissions
investigating the scandal have more or less abetted
this line of defense. Discussing the results of the
independent investigation into Abu Ghraib he chaired,
former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger
explained that while "institutional and personal
responsibility" for the abuses went all the way to
Washington, they were rooted in the sadism and
brutality of a few individuals-"Animal House on the
night shift," as he put it. While the military's
civilian leadership was guilty of "indirect
responsibility," Schlesinger told reporters, Donald
Rumsfeld's resignation "would be a boon to all of
America's enemies."

Go past the executive summaries and press
releases, however, and a careful reading of the
reports reveals a different story. The devastating
scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn't a failure of
implementation, as Rice and other administration
defenders have admitted. It was a direct-and
predictable-consequence of a policy, hatched at the
highest levels of the administration, by senior White
House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months
after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed
to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month
from election day, almost no one in the press or the
political class is talking about what is, without
question, the worst scandal to emerge from President
Bush's nearly four years in office.

Defenders of the administration have argued, of
course, that there is no "smoking gun"-no chain of
orders leading directly from Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld to Pfc. Lynndie England and her
co-conspirators. But that reasoning-now largely
accepted within the Beltway-betrays a deliberate
indifference to how large organizations such as the
military actually work. In any war, civilian leaders
set strategic aims, and it falls to commanders and
planners at successively lower levels of command to
refine that guidance into executable orders which can
be handed down to subordinates. That process works
whether the policy in question is a good one or a bad
one. President Bush didn't order the April 2003
"thunder run" into Baghdad; he ordered Tommy Franks to
win the war and the Third Infantry Division's leaders
figured out how to make it happen. Likewise, no order
was given to shove light sticks into the rectums of
Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Nevertheless, the road
to the abuses began with flawed administration
policies that exalted expediency and necessity over
the rule of law, eviscerated the military's
institutional constraints on the treatment of
prisoners, commenced combat with insufficient
planning, preparation and troop strength, and thereby
set the conditions for the abuses that would later
take place.

But there's a reason why most of the
investigations into Abu Ghraib have punted on the
essential question of executive responsibility. To
judge the administration's decisions to have been
wrong, after all, requires us to discern what the
right decisions would have been. And to do that, we
must put ourselves in their shoes. Given the
particular conditions faced by the president and his
deputies after 9/11-a war against terrorists, in which
the need to extract intelligence via interrogations
was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by
international law on interrogation techniques were
very constricting-did those leaders have better
alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is
that they did. And we will be living with the
consequences of the choices they made for years to
come.

Breaking the Law

War has always had its own codes and rules, but
the modern laws governing armed conflict were
developed during the 20th century, when industrialized
nations fought large, mechanized, bloody wars of
attrition. World Wars I and II-featuring aerial
combat, bombing campaigns, chemical and trench
warfare, and the slaughter of soldiers and civilians
on an unprecedented scale-spurred the four Geneva
Conventions of 1949, which laid out basic principles
of conduct for civilized nations. These treaties aimed
to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and
to the extent possible, to minimize the suffering
inherent in war. But like their predecessors-the
prisoner-of-war treaty signed in Geneva in 1929, the
Union Army's Lieber Code of 1863, the 1864 Geneva
Convention, and the 1907 Hague Conventions, among
others-the Geneva Conventions of '49 were
fundamentally backward-looking, reflecting the
dominant nature of warfare at the time: large air and
land campaigns between states employing relatively
symmetrical forces. When the treaties mentioned
paramilitaries and non-state guerrillas, they were
typically treated as bandits who played only a
tangential role in the conduct of warfare. The
conventions wholly failed to anticipate the wave of
unconventional warfare that would sweep the world
after World War II, from U.S. and British-sponsored
guerillas in Greece to Communist-backed insurgents in
Vietnam to the asymmetric warfare practiced by the
terrorists of today. By the late 1990s, conflicts in
the Balkans and elsewhere made it clear that
paramilitaries, terrorists, and other irregular
combatants-far from fighting on the margins-had become
the principal security threat to much of the world,
including the United States. Yet international law
continued to treat them as mere criminals, best dealt
with through indictments rather than artillery.

Such was the legal paradigm in place when al Qaeda
attacked the nation on September 11, 2001. By the
conventional laws of war, al Qaeda was neither a state
nor a military; its operatives were neither soldiers
nor civilians. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the
United States launched its armed response in
Afghanistan-and, almost immediately, legal questions
emerged which showcased the difficulty of pounding the
round problem of al Qaeda into the square hole of
existing international law. Unlike a national army, al
Qaeda and the Taliban militia wore no conventional
uniforms, and often did not operate in conventional
units that could be identified or distinguished from
the civilians among whom they hid. Most importantly,
al Qaeda rejected the very notion of the laws of war,
of protecting civilians when at all possible. Indeed,
the terrorists' apocalyptic doctrine expressly made
civilians-in their view, agents of Western cultural
and economic imperialism-legitimate targets.

The inherent nature of stateless terrorism
presented the Bush administration with another
quandary, this one linked to the desperate need, in
the months after 9/11, for reliable intelligence about
the shadowy force that had just murdered more than
3,000 Americans. In a conflict between states,
captured soldiers rarely possess strategically useful
information; they may know about their own unit, or
the plans for the next ground offensive, but rarely
much more than that. A German corporal, or even a
colonel, was unlikely to know much in 1944 about the
big picture on the Western Front, let alone plans for
V-2 strikes on London. Thus nations at war could, in
the past, usually afford to treat prisoners relatively
well-because doing so did not require trading away
significant intelligence opportunities. The war on
terror-an asymmetric war in which small numbers of
combatants could inflict catastrophic damage-changed
that equation. Unlike states, where the most important
intelligence might concern evidence of a nuclear
capability or the presence of tanks near the border,
the most valuable intelligence about al Qaeda
concerned its plans and intentions. Moreover,
rank-and-file enemy operatives might well possess such
information; were U.S. authorities to capture someone
from a terror cell on the eve of its next attack, they
couldn't afford simply to store him in a jail cell
until the war was over. (Similar conditions obtained
once the war in Iraq shifted from a conventional war
fought largely between designated combatants to an
insurgency fought between American soldiers on the one
side, and a hodgepodge of guerrillas and irregulars on
the other.)

In military terms, the global war on terror
shifted the calculus of intelligence-gathering almost
entirely towards human intelligence (HUMINT) of the
kind that can only be produced through clandestine
infiltration, interrogation, and other means.
Satellites, surveillance systems, giant listening
devices, and ground-penetrating radar won't alert the
CIA and FBI to the next terrorist attack, or tell the
U.S. Army where the insurgents have placed explosives
on the highway between Fallujah and Baghdad. Yet here,
too, the Bush administration had a problem: Over the
years, the intelligence community's HUMINT
capabilities had atrophied considerably, in favor of
"technical" intelligence collection systems like
satellites and electronic surveillance. Indeed, where
the Middle East was concerned, the CIA, FBI, and
military had virtually no HUMINT assets in place
before or immediately after 9/11 to provide
intelligence about the terror organization that had
hit the United States. "At the time of the attacks,
it's possible that there wasn't a single such
[clandestine] officer operating today inside Islamic
fundamentalist circles," Hersh writes in, based on
what he says are extensive interviews with current and
former officials in the U.S. intelligence community.
Writing in the Atlantic in the summer of 2001, former
CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht summed it up this way:
"Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life
don't happen." The only way to gather intelligence
about global terrorism would be to extract it from the
terrorists themselves.

Prisoner's Dilemma

These problems converged with the first mass
capture of prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan
in November 2001. Under the Geneva Conventions,
prisoners of war are accorded certain rights and
privileges-among them humane treatment, freedom from
coercive interrogation, and repatriation at the end of
active hostilities. But the Pentagon and CIA needed to
gather HUMINT from these detainees about al Qaeda and
its global terror network. As the Bush administration
saw it, its choice was clear. Al Qaeda posed a clear
and present danger. The nation desperately needed to
gather intelligence about that threat. Either they
could toss out the rule book and operate by any means
necessary, or America would be attacked again.

Any president in that situation would have had to
go beyond the bounds of existing law. But in truth,
there were choices beyond either action or
acquiescence. Well before Mazar-i-Sharif, legal
scholars and philosophers had grappled with the
question of whether a nation could ever justify the
use of torture, assassination, hostage-taking, mass
internment, and other measures. One course would have
been to open up a series of narrow loopholes in the
law, with tight oversight, and require that top
leaders approve every use of extraordinary measures.
This is more or less what former president Bill
Clinton did during the 1990s, when he secretly signed
an order essentially legalizing the assassination of
Osama bin Laden should the opportunity arise.
According to the order, the president had to
personally sanction bin Laden's death-a measure framed
largely at the insistence of Agency officials who
wanted to ensure their agents would not be found
culpable if anything went wrong. (In the end, when the
opportunity did present itself-a planned 1998 raid by
the CIA on the al Qaeda camp at Tarnak Farms near
Kandahar-the Clinton White House was talked out of
it.)

The other option was to sanction a wholesale
abandonment of the law and delegate the responsibility
for its violation down the chain of command to
front-line troops. And that's precisely what the Bush
administration did. They began with the plausible
argument that the Geneva Conventions were
anachronistic in an age of asymmetrical, non-state
warfare. Al Qaeda didn't wear uniforms or fight
according to the laws of war, they reasoned, and so
they were not necessarily entitled to the conventions'
protections. But the lawyers-including White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales, Defense Department general
counsel William Haynes II, Vice President Cheney's
counsel David Addington, and Jay Bybee of the Justice
Department (who now sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals)-went further. They advised the president to
sign a blanket statement of policy that the men
captured in Afghanistan would not be subject to the
Geneva Conventions, and that by executive fiat, they
would all be declared "unlawful enemy combatants," a
category that does not exist in international law.
White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers
also pushed President Bush to sign a secret finding on
Feb. 7, 2002, that would have far-reaching
consequences for the nation and the world. "I...
determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply
to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or
elsewhere throughout the world," this document
determined, adding that the White House also had "the
authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as
between the United States and Afghanistan, but I
decline to exercise that authority at this time." For
all intents and purposes, these memoranda gutted the
Geneva Conventions.

Within months, those first legal memoranda were
joined by more focused opinions from the
administration's top lawyers, each authorizing
specific tactics the Bush administration wanted to use
in the global war on terrorism. In 2002 and 2003,
attorneys in the departments of Justice and Defense
drafted memoranda outlining what international and
domestic law would allow with respect to "coercive
interrogation" practices, eventually settling on a
list of dozens of tactics, among them sleep
deprivation and the use of stressful and painful
physical positions. Such tactics, argued the lawyers,
didn't run afoul of the Geneva Conventions because the
President had already unilaterally declared those
conventions null and void with respect to al Qaeda and
other terrorist detainees. This opinion also rendered
the U.S.'s own federal war-crimes statute impotent,
because that law defines a war crime as a violation of
the existing international laws of war, including the
Geneva Conventions. To be enforced, that law depends
on the existence of a Geneva Convention violation;
similarly, the Uniform Code of Military Justice
prohibits war crimes, but without a Geneva Convention
violation, there was no war crime.

The Bush administration's memoranda also took an
excruciatingly narrow view of the federal torture
statute, essentially defining it out of existence for
the purposes of interrogations in Afghanistan and
Guantánamo Bay: "A defendant is guilty of torture only
if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting
severe pain or suffering on a person within his
custody or physical control." In other words,
interrogation tactics which accidentally result in
severe pain or suffering were not enough to merit the
label of torture. Only tactics which were specifically
intended to cause severe pain and suffering-and
performed by professional torturers with the knowledge
of how their tactics would affect the body-would fit
the definition under federal criminal law. Under this
reasoning, amateur interrogators (such as the reserve
military police soldiers assigned to Gitmo) could
never be guilty because they lacked the skill and
experience to know the exact causal links between
their tactics and the pain and suffering those tactics
would cause. The Justice Department also took the view
that only someone who specifically intended to cause
extreme pain and suffering, on the level of organ
failure and death, would be guilty. This
interpretation set a bar so high that virtually no
prosecutor would ever be able to meet it in court, and
opened the door to any use of coercive interrogation
tactics that fell just shy of the "severe pain and
suffering" threshhold. Justice's interpretation
ensured no U.S. defendants would ever face torture
charges and made the U.N. Convention Against Torture a
dead letter too.

The Bush administration also chose Guantánamo as
the site to hold detainees specifically because it was
thought to be outside the reach of U.S. courts-and it
was, until the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that
detainees there had the right to ask a federal court
for a writ of habeas corpus. In addition, the federal
anti-torture statute excluded from jurisdiction
military bases and diplomatic missions, such as
Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, a loophole that would
remain open until October 2004 when Congress closed
it. Thus, in addition to stripping the detainees
themselves of rights, the administration picked a
place where the law simply had no force-Gitmo provided
the perfect legal black hole in which to house
detainees and practice the dark arts of interrogation.

One of the problems cited by the Schlesinger
report was the disconnect between tactics authorized
at Guantánamo, where "unlawful enemy combatants" were
held and the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and the
tactics authorized in Iraq where the president had
said the Geneva Conventions did apply. As guidance
from the top filtered down through several layers of
command, it became unclear which methods were
appropriate for which location, an ambiguity
compounded by the movement of individual interrogators
and guard force personnel between the two physical
locations. One fateful decision was the one to
"Gitmoize" the prison operation in Iraq in August
2003, a response to the blooming insurgency there and
the failure of the U.S. military prisons in Iraq to
produce intelligence about the insurgency. The
Pentagon brought Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the head
of the Guantánamo Bay facility, to Iraq to make
recommendations on how better to squeeze detainees for
information. His prescription: "Detention operations
must act as an enabler for interrogation... to provide
a safe, secure and humane environment that supports
the expeditious collection of intelligence." Miller
imported a number of the non-Geneva Convention
techniques from Cuba to Iraq to assist interrogators
in gathering information, and by so doing reportedly
turned on a spigot of human intelligence, leading,
among other things, to the capture of Saddam Hussein.
But in his own investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses,
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba reported that this extension
of Gitmo tactics to Iraq had only exacerbated
confusion about what the Geneva Conventions did and
did not authorize, and where Geneva applied, to the
point that intelligence officers and military lawyers
could not define any recognizable lines between the
two modes of interrogation. Under the circumstances,
it was almost inevitable that the techniques
authorized for Gitmo would migrate over to Abu Ghraib.

The investigation by Maj. Gen. George Fay and Lt.
Gen. Anthony Jones, which looked at the role of
military intelligence units in the abuse scandals,
backed up Taguba's findings. According to Gen. Paul
Kern, who oversaw the Fay-Jones inquiry, "the people
who were conducting the interrogations clearly were
feeling a lot of pressure to produce intelligence, as
they should have been. That's what the purpose of the
interrogation is." But when they sought policy
guidance and legal advice about what they could do to
produce intelligence, they got directives back from
headquarters "which were never in our view completely
clarified ... in the end, [headquarters] did not
absolutely make it clear what the boundaries were." An
after-action report on the "legal lessons learned"
from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, authored by the
Army's Judge Advocate General ("JAG") school, found
the same thing: "Detainees are a potential source of
valuable information, and the motivation to extract
that information through interrogation may sometimes
create strong temptation to test the limits of the
[law of armed conflict]. Questions often concerned the
legality of specific proposed interrogation
techniques." Army officers tend to understate these
things, especially in after-action reports, so it's no
surprise that Gen. Kern and the JAG school phrase
their findings so circumspectly. But don't be fooled:
This is the military equivalent of shouting from the
rooftops.

The memos had another practical effect, which was
the evisceration of any legal opposition from the
ranks to the proposed methods of interrogations.
Military units of a certain size are staffed with JAG
officers, chaplains, and other professionals who
typically serve as a unit's legal and ethical
conscience. In formal and informal ways, they vet
operational plans to ensure missions comply with the
laws of war. According to Army doctrine, operational
orders at the brigade level and above must contain an
annex covering the legal implications of the plan,
procedures for dealing with prisoners, and other
issues. It's not clear to what extent the actions at
Abu Ghraib were subjected to this sort of scrutiny
before they were implemented. But even if a young JAG
officer were to raise objections in the field, it's
unlikely they would have gone anywhere. The memoranda
from the White House-signed by the
commander-in-chief's top lawyer -stamped the
interrogation tactics with the imprimatur of legality,
ensuring that any dissent from the field would have
been ignored.

Finally, the memos directly affected the junior
soldiers, like Pfc. England, who now stand accused of
torturing Iraqi prisoners. Every new soldier learns in
basic training that he or she must follow lawful
orders when they are given. But they also learn they
must disobey orders-to kill innocent civilians, for
example, or torture detainees-that are unlawful, and
they cannot invoke "superior orders" as a defense when
those orders are illegal. The junior soldiers now
charged with abuses at Abu Ghraib should have objected
to any orders to abuse prisoners, because they were
patently immoral and unlawful. But in reality, that's
easier said than done. After all, the orders to
interrogate prisoners by coercion had come from the
very highest levels of the administration.

They had been filtered through every level of the
chain of command without objection. Senior
administration lawyers with Ivy League credentials and
decades of experience had approved these procedures,
including some that were startlingly close to those
depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as the
use of stress positions and hoods. It may be
unrealistic to expect that a junior enlisted soldier
such as England, or even her immediate supervisor,
Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, would have the knowledge or
the temerity to contradict such orders when they were
given. The effect of the Bush administration's
exhaustively creative research into breaking the rules
was virtually to ensure that every player in this
tragedy went along and followed orders.

Unintended Consequences

Two other decisions by the Bush administration
also proved fateful, both of them made long before the
Iraq war began. One was the administration's
attempt-directed by Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld-to run the Iraq war with fewer soldiers in
place than considered military opinion believed
necessary. The resulting shortage of troops set the
conditions for abuse at the prison. The after-action
report by the Army's JAG school specifically blames
troop shortages for the chaotic and disorganized
detainee operations in Iraq, sharply criticizing the
decision to delay the deployment of the 800th Military
Police Brigade-the unit responsible for Abu
Ghraib-until well after combat had begun. From the
moment it touched ground, the 800th was behind the
eight ball, and it's not clear the brigade ever got a
handle on the detainee mission.

"There was chaos at Abu Ghraib... there was a very
low ratio of military police to the number of inmates,
which ranged as high as 8,000," Schlesinger noted in
announcing his panels' findings last summer. "At
Guantánamo, which is something of a model, the ratio
of military police to detainees was one to one. At Abu
Ghraib, the ratio of military police was one to 75."
Add in the pressure from the Bush administration to
produce intelligence, and take away the legal
constraints of the Geneva Conventions, and you can
appreciate what a pressure cooker Abu Ghraib became.
Even had there been no bad apples in the 372nd MP
Company, with which Pfc. England served, abuses were
almost inevitable.

The second fateful decision was to rush those
troops that were allocated to Operation Iraqi Freedom
into battle too quickly. During the first Gulf War,
military planners set aside months to build a war
machine in the Arabian desert, allowing units to
stabilize and train together at length before the
start of hostilities-time that was especially valuable
to the hundreds of thousands of reservists called up
for the war. (Indeed, it's worth noting that, although
American soldiers took as prisoners tens of thousands
of Iraqis soldiers during the first Gulf War,
allegations of abuse were sparse.) But the second Gulf
War was launched in a hurry, even before most of the
forces assigned to it were in place. Many have pointed
out that, had the Bush administration not "rushed to
war," U.N. inspectors might have been able to show
that Iraq had no WMD capability; at the very least,
the White House would have had time to line up more
support from our allies. Less widely understood is
that a longer delay would have given military police
and civil affairs units-most of which come from the
reserves-time to arrive, acclimate, and train longer
together, bringing them up to readiness levels
approaching those of active duty troops.

The situation in Iraq deteriorated rapidly after
the United States took Baghdad, with the result that
reserve units had to be called up and immediately
thrown into the fight. The 372nd MP Company hit the
ground in Kuwait in May 2003, and was immediately sent
into Iraq to patrol the town of Al-Hillah with Marines
and Iraqi police units. Although its soldiers received
pre-deployment training in the states after their
February 2003 call-up, they received nothing like the
pre-war training of their active-duty brethren in the
Third Infantry Division, some of whom spent a year in
the Kuwaiti desert before actually crossing into Iraq
in March 2003. When the 372nd went into combat, it was
not ready for war. Perhaps more importantly, the 372nd
MP Company's training records indicates that it barely
trained at all on handling prisoners of war, let alone
managing a maximum-security prison even though
"internment and resettlement" operations are a bread
and butter MP mission. The Taguba report found that
this unit and its parent headquarters-the 320th MP
Battalion and 800th MP Brigade, both reserve
units-suffered from chronically poor training,
resourcing, and leadership. These problems within the
MP units combined with atrocious planning and
resourcing decisions in Washington to create a formula
for disaster.

Creative Tactics

The duty force at Abu Ghraib, then, had ambiguous
policy guidance from Washington, too few men, and too
little training. What happened next should hardly have
been a surprise. Take, for example, the guards'
implementation of the interrogation practices
authorized by the Pentagon. Interrogation tactics like
"sleep deprivation" sound entirely too sterile when
taken out of context-after all, who hasn't been
deprived of sleep, whether by a newborn baby or a
last-minute project at work? What's crucial to
understand is how such methods are translated into
practice in the field. As Hersh writes:

In May 2004, I interviewed a company captain in a
military police unit in Baghdad who told me about an
incident the previous fall in which he was approached
by a junior military intelligence officer who
requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees
awake around the clock until they began talking. "I
said, 'No, we will not do that,'" the captain said.
"The M.I. commander comes to me and says, 'What is the
problem? We're stressed, and all we are asking you to
do is to keep them awake.' I ask, 'How? You've
received training on that, but my soldiers don't know
how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old
kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn't know how to
do it, he's going to get creative.'"
What, exactly, does "creative" mean? Consider the
iconic image of Abu Ghraib: a hooded Iraqi man
standing on an Army rations box with wires extending
from his arms in a grotesque pose almost reminiscent
of a crucifixion. It turns out that this was among the
tactics employed by untrained prison guards and
interrogators as a means both of instilling fear and
of keeping a detainee awake, in faithful execution of
the "sleep deprivation" tactic authorized by the
secretary of defense. Even though the wires were
actually inert, the detainee was likely told that he
would be electrocuted if he moved off the box, which
he would do if he fell asleep. And thus, so
modestly-named a tactic as sleep deprivation was
transformed into something far more sinister. The same
tactic could be used in conjunction with the "stress
position" technique approved by the Pentagon,
according to one former intelligence officer I talked
to. A hooded person forced to stand still on a box for
hours will quickly lose his sense of equilibrium and
orientation. Lower back pain will eventually develop
from the strain of remaining upright for such a long
time; pain in the legs and feet will follow as blood
pools there. Held for several hours without movement,
such a position can induce excruciating pain,
particularly for detainees not in top physical
condition. When the image first surfaced, these
officers said they were not surprised by the tactic.
It was merely a creative attempt by amateurs to
achieve the results desired by their leaders-an
unfortunate twist on the old maxim of Gen. George S.
Patton: "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them
what to do, and they will surprise you with their
ingenuity."

Weighing Torture

There are few slopes more slippery than the one
from small war crimes to large ones, as evidenced by
the incremental movement of U.S. interrogation tactics
from "a little bit of smacky face," as one
intelligence officer described the
officially-sanctioned tactics at Gitmo to The Wall
Street Journal, to the abuses depicted in the Abu
Ghraib photographs. For decades, the laws of war have
stood as a braking point on this slippery slope,
establishing bright-line rules about what is forbidden
even in the heat of combat. Generally speaking,
absolute rules are the only ones that work well in
wartime. Where only vague guidance exists, junior
military leaders may exploit ambiguity to employ
tactics that fall outside the boundaries of acceptable
conduct. In war, there is always some battlefield
exigency or necessity which can be invoked as a
justification before or after the fact. It's one thing
to argue that there was a compelling need for these
tactics, and that therefore they were implicitly
authorized in certain situations but always tightly
controlled; it's quite another to loosen the rules
altogether and let junior soldiers take the initiative
to do what they think must be done.

If our political leaders decide that Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed needs to be immersed in water so that he
spills his guts about the next terror plot, I can
accept that-and I suspect the rest of the world could,
too. But those who take action should also take
responsibility for it. Our soldiers need a better
legal framework to deal with these situations, one
that gives commanders the flexibility to do what must
be done while not stepping on our values or hurting
our strategic interests in the process.

First and foremost, the framework should maintain
existing rules about treating prisoners, because those
should govern all but the most extraordinary of cases.
Second, when a departure is necessary, we should
require authorization from the White House and
Pentagon articulating both the scope of the
authorization and the justification for doing so. Such
authorizations might mirror the kind of court
documents required of the Justice Department when it
applies for a secret warrant under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act. This will let our
soldiers know why they are breaking the rules, and
minimize the cognitive dissonance that led to so much
confusion at Abu Ghraib about what was allowed and
forbidden. Third, the services should actively rely on
their lawyers, chaplains and career non-commissioned
officers to serve as the legal, moral and
institutional checks respectively on this kind of
activity. All three of these systems failed at Abu
Ghraib. Fourth, to the extent practical, we must add
some measure of transparency to detention operations.
The military can't publicize exactly what it's doing
to interrogate prisoners, because that would destroy
the value of these methods, but we should recognize
the value of good publicity and let the Red Cross see
as much as possible.

Finally, the nation's political leaders must
constantly reevaluate these departures from the law,
to ensure we are getting something in exchange for our
calculated decision to break the law. A measured
approach to this problem will ensure that breaches of
international law, if they must occur, will take place
in an orderly and disciplined manner, allowing
soldiers to resume their normal treatment of prisoners
immediately afterwards. What's wrong is to loosen the
restrictions across the board or abandon them
altogether; once discipline is lost, it is nearly
impossible to restore.

There's a reason why career military officers are
among those who have expressed the greatest revulsion
over the Bush administration's cavalier treatment of
the laws of war. These officers aren't soft-minded
idealists who believe in the rule of law for its own
sake. Quite the contrary; three generations of
military officers have grown up respecting the Geneva
Conventions for extremely practical reasons. When the
administration publicly declared in February 2002 that
those conventions would not apply to the detainees at
Guantánamo Bay, many of America's soldiers worried
that this policy would be reciprocated by our nation's
enemies, should Americans themselves ever be captured
in a future conflict. It is worth noting that
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who saw combat in
Vietnam and helped run the first Gulf War, strongly
opposed this move, as did his chief legal adviser,
William Howard Taft IV. The principle of reciprocity
has long served as one of the chief mechanisms for
compliance with the laws of war. The Bush
administration's approach has put future generations
of U.S. military personnel in grave risk of
mistreatment.

But our overriding of international law has also
had much broader implications for U.S. interests.
Although America's record in establishing and
complying with the laws of war has stood the test of
time, the rhetoric of realism and national interest
reigned supreme during most of the Cold War;
international law was relegated to the back burner.
Something changed around the time of the first Gulf
War. In his arguments for that war against Iraq,
then-President George H.W. Bush invoked the language
of international justice. The case for the first Gulf
War hinged on international law and the need to
maintain the rule of law among nations. Bill Clinton
made similar arguments to justify American
interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, and, most
spectacularly, Kosovo, where principles of
international justice were use

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 6 Days to Go -- They are trying to steal it, but they will not succeed...

There are only 6 days to go until the national
referendum on the CHARACTER, COMPETENCE and
CREDIBILITY of the _resident and the VICE
_resident...At least one more US soldier has died in
Iraq for what? The neo-con wet dream of a Three
Stooges Reich...And yes, they are trying to steal it,
as you know, but if enough of us vote they cannot get
away with it...Lean into the fire...There is an
Electoral Uprising coming...Please read these FIVE
pieces and share them with others. Please vote and
encourage others to vote...Remember Duval County!

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.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A707-2004Oct26.html

The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A25

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear
whether President Bush is running a campaign or
plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans
are spending these last precious days devoting nearly
as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as
they are to mobilizing their own.

Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by
their efforts to keep African Americans from the
polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was all but
drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay
black ministers to keep their congregants from voting
in a 1993 New Jersey election came to light.

For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of
genteel thugs, however, universal suffrage is just one
more musty liberal ideal that threatens conservative
rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote
suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm.

In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll
monitors and assigned them disproportionately to such
heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland, where
Democratic "527" groups have registered many tens of
thousands of new voters. "The organized left's efforts
to, quote unquote, register voters -- I call them
ringers -- have created these problems" of potential
massive vote fraud, Cuyahoga County Republican
Chairman James P. Trakas recently told the New York
Times.

Let's pass over the implication that a registration
drive waged by a liberal group is inherently
fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word "ringers."

Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent
analysts estimate that roughly 400,000 new Democrats
have been added to the rolls this year. Who does
Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of
African Americans been sneaking over the state lines
from Pittsburgh and Detroit to vote in Cleveland --
thus putting their own battleground states more at
risk of a Republican victory? Is Shaker Heights
suddenly filled with Parisians affecting American
argot? Or are the Republicans simply terrified that a
record number of minority voters will go to the polls
next Tuesday? Have they decided to do anything to stop
them -- up to and including threatening to criminalize
Voting While Black in a Battleground State?

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in
which politics has become a continuation of civil war
by other means. In Bush's America, there's a war on --
against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the
Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so
insidious that we can ignore democratic norms. Only
bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set still
believe in voting rights.

For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war
on terrorism. From the first day of his presidency,
Bush opted to govern from the right, to fan the flames
of cultural resentment, to divide the American house
against itself in the hope that cultural conservatism
would create a stable Republican majority. The Sept.
11 attacks unified us, but Bush exploited those
attacks to relentlessly partisan ends. As his foreign
and domestic policies abjectly failed, Bush's reliance
on identity politics only grew stronger. He anointed
himself the standard-bearer for provincials and
portrayed Kerry and his backers as arrogant
cosmopolitans.

And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a
latter-day version of the election of 1928, when the
Catholicism of Democratic presidential nominee Al
Smith bitterly divided the nation along
Protestant-Catholic and nativist-immigrant lines. To
his credit, Smith's opponent (and eventual victor),
Herbert Hoover, did not exploit this rift himself.
Bush, by contrast, has not merely exploited the
modernist-traditionalist tensions in America but
helped create new ones and summoned old ones we could
be forgiven for thinking were permanently interred.
(Kerry will ban the Bible?)

Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more
deliberately divisive than the current one. I can come
up with only one other president who sought so
assiduously to undermine the basic arrangements of
American policy (as Bush has undermined the New Deal
at home and the systems of post-World War II alliances
abroad) with so little concern for the effect this
would have on the comity and viability of the nation.
And Jefferson Davis wasn't really a president of the
United States.

After four years in the White House, George W. Bush's
most significant contribution to American life is this
pervasive bitterness, this division of the house into
raging, feuding halves. We are two nations now, each
with a culture that attacks the other. And politics,
as the Republicans are openly playing it, need no
longer concern itself with the most fundamental
democratic norm: the universal right to vote.

As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and
Kerry to the center.

That foretells the course of the administrations that
each would head. The essential difference between them
is simply that, as a matter of strategy and
temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry
to narrow them. That, finally, is the choice before us
next Tuesday: between one candidate who wants to pry
this nation apart to his own advantage, and another
who seeks to make it whole.

meyersonh@washpost.com

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102804Z.shtml

New Florida Vote Scandal Feared
By Greg Palast
BBC

Wednesday 27 October 2004

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign
headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in
violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's
African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight
investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of
the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's
national research director in Washington DC, contain a
15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in
predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas
of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown
the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason
why they would keep such a thing is to challenge
voters on election day."

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law
allows political party operatives inside polling
stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot.

Mass challenges

They may then only vote "provisionally" after
signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting
status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida.
Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been
made to a voter "in the 16 years I've been supervisor
of elections."

"Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow
down the voting process and cause chaos on election
day; and discourage voters from voting."

Sancho calls it "intimidation." And it may be
illegal.

In Washington, well-known civil rights attorney,
Ralph Neas, noted that US federal law prohibits
targeting challenges to voters, even if there is a
basis for the challenge, if race is a factor in
targeting the voters.

The list of Jacksonville voters covers an area with
a majority of black residents.

When asked by Newsnight for an explanation of the
list, Republican spokespersons claim the list merely
records returned mail from either fundraising
solicitations or returned letters sent to newly
registered voters to verify their addresses for
purposes of mailing campaign literature.

Republican state campaign spokeswoman Mindy Tucker
Fletcher stated the list was not put together "in
order to create" a challenge list, but refused to say
it would not be used in that manner.

Rather, she did acknowledge that the party's poll
workers will be instructed to challenge voters, "Where
it's stated in the law."

There was no explanation as to why such clerical
matters would be sent to top officials of the Bush
campaign in Florida and Washington.

Private detective

In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were
using the lists or other means of intimidating voters,
we filmed a private detective filming every "early
voter" - the majority of whom are black - from behind
a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

The private detective claimed not to know who was
paying for his all-day services.

On the scene, Democratic Congresswoman Corinne Brown
said the surveillance operation was part of a campaign
of intimidation tactics used by the Republican Party
to intimate and scare off African American voters,
almost all of whom are registered Democrats.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/campaign/27felon.html?oref=login

October 27, 2004
FLORIDA
Judge Rules Against 10,000 Floridians Barred From
Voting
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

IAMI, Oct. 26 - A federal district judge here
dismissed a lawsuit Tuesday that was filed on behalf
of more than 10,000 new voters whose registration
forms had been rejected as incomplete.

The judge, James Lawrence King, said the labor unions
that brought the case had no standing because they had
not proved that any of their members were affected.
Judge King also said several other plaintiffs, people
who had turned in incomplete registration forms, could
not blame their local elections supervisors, who were
named as defendants.

"No federal or state statute,'' he wrote, "prescribes
a time period within which a supervisor must notify an
applicant that her application is incomplete.''

Sheila Thomas, a lawyer for the Advancement Project, a
rights group that represented the plaintiffs, said,
"We think the ruling is incorrect as a matter of law,
and we are considering appealing it."

The suit, brought against elections supervisors in
Broward, Miami-Dade and several other counties,
charged that the rejected registration forms had come
disproportionately from blacks and Hispanics. In some
cases, the applicants did not check a box indicating
that they were American citizens, though they signed
an oath on the form affirming that they were. Some
registrants corrected their incomplete forms before
the Oct. 4 registration deadline, the suit said, but
elections officials did not always process them in
time, and did not let other registrants know that
their forms were flawed.

The suit is among several charging voter
disenfranchisement that are being fought by the
administration of Gov. Jeb Bush.

In another case, the federal appeals court in Atlanta
heard new arguments on Tuesday in a class-action suit
seeking to end Florida's policy stripping all felons
of the right to vote. That court is not expected to
rule before Election Day.

The suit, filed just before the 2000 election by the
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University,
charges that the state's ban on felons' voting is
racially discriminatory. It estimates that the law
strips blacks of voting rights at more than twice the
rate of whites. The plaintiffs are the 600,000 people
with felony convictions who the Brennan Center
estimates have finished serving their time in Florida
yet still cannot vote.

The ban has been in effect since 1868, when Florida
gave blacks the right to vote as a condition of the
state's being readmitted to the Union after the Civil
War. A new State Constitution drafted that year
expanded the number of crimes that required
disenfranchisement, a change that the plaintiffs say
was intended to affect blacks disproportionately.

They also charge that the discriminatory intent
persists, even though the provision was re-enacted in
1968 as part of a new Constitution.

A federal judge in Miami dismissed the suit in 2002.
But in December a three-judge panel of the appeals
court reversed the decision and ordered a trial,
saying the state had to prove that it had re-enacted
the provision for a "nondiscriminatory purpose" and
not just for the sake of continuity.

Lawyers for Governor Bush, the defendant, asked for a
rehearing, which is what took place before the full
appeals court on Tuesday.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home |
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http://www.local10.com/politics/3854230/detail.html

Local10.com
Local 10 Uncovers Big Ballot Mystery
Elections Office Says Situation Is 'Odd'
POSTED: 4:10 PM EDT October 26, 2004
UPDATED: 6:14 PM EDT October 26, 2004

BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. -- Local 10 has received many
phone calls from viewers in Broward County who say
they have not received the absentee ballots –- and the
news from the elections office doesn't sound good.

Local 10 has learned that many as many as 58,000
ballots that were supposed to mailed out on Oct. 7 and
8 could be missing.

The Broward County Supervisor of Elections office is
saying only that the situation is "unusual," and they
are looking into it.

Gisela Salas, Broward Deputy Elections Supervisor,
said, "I hate to say 'missing' at this time because
that has not yet be substantiated. Some ballots are
starting to arrive. But there is an extraordinary
delay."

An elections office representative told Local 10 that
the office has investigated with the U.S. Post Office
what might have happened to the ballots, but so far,
no one has been able to figure it out.

"It is unusual. It's a puzzle on the part of our
office and the postal service," Salas said. "Our
office did make the delivery and the post office
assures us they were processed. What happened is in
question."

The postal service told Local 10 late Tuesday that
they don't have 58,000 ballots floating around. They
did say that they have several employees assigned to
deal only with ballots and they are being delivered in
one to two days -- once they get them.

How Will You Vote?

As far as the voters go that haven't received their
ballots, the elections office is now suggesting that
they take the opportunity to vote early.

Since many who request absentee ballots cannot
physically vote in their county, there are likely to
be some angry voters.

If you are able to and would like to vote early in
Broward County, click here to find a voting location.

Watch Local 10 News for more coverage of this missing
ballot controversy.

Copyright 2004 by Local10.com. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/opinion/26edt1.html?ei=1&en=b41d16beb8f45e7e&ex=1099804536&pagewanted=print&position=

October 26, 2004
MAKING VOTES COUNT
Election Day Misdeeds

he Republican Party has announced plans to place
thousands of election challengers in Ohio polling
places next week. It says it is only trying to prevent
fraud. But there is a real danger that these
challengers could be used to block eligible voters
from casting their ballots or, just as bad, to
drastically slow down voting in some parts of the
state. Election officials must be vigilant about
ensuring that partisan challengers do not disrupt the
voting.

Republicans have been raising a lot of charges of
fraud lately. Fraud is a danger in any election, and
neither party has a monopoly on it. But the
Republicans have come up with little in the way of
specifics. They have pointed to a few instances in
which paid canvassers apparently submitted
registrations with phony names. But it is highly
unlikely that anyone will show up on Election Day
claiming to be Mary Poppins or Dick Tracy. The
Republicans have made much of the fact that some
jurisdictions have more names on their rolls than they
have eligible voters. But that is generally because
election offices are slow to remove the names of
people who move away or die.

In the name of fraud prevention, the Republicans plan
to use 3,600 challengers in Ohio, a pivotal state
where the race is dead even and there has been a big
surge in first-time registrations for Democratic
voters. There is no telling how many partisan
challengers there will be nationwide next week because
many states do not require them to be identified in
advance. If challengers behave properly, they can help
make elections better. But partisan challengers acting
in bad faith can do considerable damage. Aggressive
challengers have been known to bully poll workers,
many of whom are elderly and have only limited
knowledge of election law.

It is likely that some voters will be challenged next
week not because they appear to be ineligible, but
because partisan challengers think that they will vote
for the other side. There is a long history of
challengers' targeting minority precincts and minority
voters. It is troubling that in Ohio this year, the
Republicans appear to be focusing much of their effort
on Cleveland, Dayton and other cities with large
African-American and Latino populations.

One of the gravest dangers is that partisan teams will
challenge many, if not all, voters in selected
precincts, with the goal of slowing voting to a
standstill. In Ohio, every challenge will require a
deliberation over whether the person in question
should be allowed to vote. In presidential elections,
lines in urban polling places are often hours long
under normal conditions. If the challengers can add 10
minutes per voter, waiting times may become so long
that thousands of voters will simply give up.

Ohio law gives election officials broad authority to
keep order at the polls and to make sure that voting
is "unobstructed." Poll workers should be quick to
dismiss baseless challenges, and if they see
challengers acting in bad faith, they should not
hesitate to have them removed from the polling place.
Election Day voting is far more fragile than most
people realize. A small number of challengers,
strategically placed and up to no good, could
disenfranchise thousands of voters, and even change
the outcome of a presidential election. Having been
put on notice, election officials in Ohio - and around
the country - must make sure that this does not
happen.

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 7 Days to Go -- JFK is ahead in the Electoral College, the Red States are bleeding Red, White & Blue...

There are only 7 days to go until the national
referendum on the COMPETENCE, CREDIBILITY and
CHARACTER of the _resident and the VICE _resident.
There is an Electoral Uprising coming...The Bush
abomination allowed 250 tons of explosives, which the
UN had warned it about, disappear a year and a half
ago. The explosives are being used by Zarqawi to kill
US soldiers. The Bush abomination had a golden
opportunity, presented to it by the CIA, to tkae out
Zarqawi and his operation PRIOR to going into Iraq,
but they nixed it because of domestic politics in the
ramp up to their foolish military adventure. The
Emperor has no uniform. The botched, bungled,
mis-named "war on terrorism" is not the strength of
the Bush White House, it is the SHAME of the Bush
White House...According to the Hotline, a Beltwayistan
insider newsletter, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong
Delta) has re-taken the lead in Electoral College
votes. Even AnythingButSee (ABC) has been backed into
the corner of conceding the lead to JFK allbeit within
the "margin of error" in their skewed to the
white/right Corporatist poll data...Do NOT indulge in
hand-wringing about "election day chaos" or
"post-election chaos." There are far too many
propapunditgandists, besotted anchors and craven
political correspondnets suddenly concerned about it
in the US regimestream news media. Wishful thinking?
There is an Electoral Uprising coming...Yes, there
will be disputes that result in law suits and court
decisions down the road. BUT the victory is going to
be significant enough that none of them will be
reasonably perceived to alter the outcome...LEAN INTO
THE FIRE...Seize the day...If enough of us vote they
cannot steal it...Nevada, New Hampshire, West
Virginia, Virginia, Arkansas, Ohio and even Fraudia
itself are either lost or slipping out of their
grasp...These red states are now red, white and blue
states...Electronic voting is not pervasive enough,
the deep fix in the Corporatist media is not
persuasive enough...It is finished...Prepare to stomp
on Nov 2...LEAN INTO THE FIRE...Please read these
FOUR important pieces. Please vote and enourage
others to vote. Please remember that the US
regimestream news media does not want to inform you
about this election, it wants to DISinform you. It has
been, for four years, a full partner in a Triad of
shared special interest (e.g., energy, weapons, media,
pharmaceuticals, chemicals, tobacco, etc.) with the
Bush Cabal and its
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party...REMEMBER
DUVAL COUNTY!

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_04/102704X.shtml

Why I'm Voting Against My Commander in Chief
By David Thalheimer
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 22 October 2004

I have been a registered Republican since I first
became eligible to vote. I've been an Air Force
officer for 20 years, first on active duty and now in
the reserves. I gladly voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980
and supported his battle to win the Cold War. If
called to serve in Iraq, I would willingly do my duty
for my country. You might think I'm a slam-dunk for
the Republican ticket this year, but you'd be wrong. I
backed John McCain in the 2000 primary, but I did not
vote for George W. Bush and I'm even more opposed to
him after seeing his performance over the past four
years. I can't say I'm a big fan of John Kerry, but
he's a smart guy and I'm willing to give him a chance
because Bush has done such a bad job and shows so few
signs of improvement that he doesn't deserve to get
reelected. This letter explains why I'm voting against
my Commander in Chief.

President Bush would have you believe that he is
making hard decisions and doing what needs to be done
to win the Global War on Terrorism. While I have no
doubt that he is trying, his actions have shown me
that his judgment is poor and he and his advisers
aren't smart enough to figure out the right way to win
this war. Taking out Al Qaida and the Taliban in
Afghanistan was a no-brainer, but the invasion of Iraq
was a huge diversion of resources away from the real
sources of terrorism. Showing the world that we can
and will "take out" any country we want may make puny
countries like Libya quiver, but it isn't a smart way
to beat the terrorists or our real enemies - it plays
right into their hands.

Bush has made no real attempt to win the support of
the large majority of Muslims who oppose terrorism.
Instead, he has created millions of new enemies around
the world - people who used to admire the USA - and
these people are now more likely to be recruited by or
support future terrorists. It is now more likely that
they will overthrow their moderate, pro-US
governments, such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia,
and replace them with radical Islamic regimes. Far
more dangerous to America than Iraq are the radicals
trying to take over Pakistan (which already has
nuclear weapons), the unpredictable leader of North
Korea (which also has nukes), and Iran (which is
allegedly working hard to get them). We are less
secure today because we are creating more new enemies
than we are able to kill or capture. There are smarter
ways to track down terrorists and reduce the appeal of
radical Islamic ideology, but Bush has decided to take
the easy but wrong course of flexing America's
conventional military might and intimidating the world
rather than rallying our friends and allies around a
grand strategy that has a chance of success.

American troops are doing the best they can to win
in Iraq, but the decision to go to war and the lack of
planning to win the peace were strategic political
mistakes made by President Bush, Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld, and the senior White House staff. The
rhetoric coming out of the White House about what is
happening in Iraq not only continues to mislead our
citizens, but it has misled our own troops. It has
caused them to misjudge their enemies and make fatal
mistakes in dealing with the Iraqi population. Senior
White House decisions also sent the message to our
troops that they could get around the Geneva
Convention when interrogating suspected terrorists -
with disastrous results for the detainees at Abu
Gharib prison.

President Bush says he has fully supported his
troops, but he is really taking credit for good
Congressional support and ignoring his own poor
record. He has repeatedly submitted defense budgets
cutting active, reserve, guard and veterans' benefits,
including imminent danger pay, family separation
allowance, and the funding of VA hospitals, only to
have them protected by Congress. Attempting to pay for
tax cuts by cutting military benefits during wartime
is outrageous and damaging to our military families.

While national security is of my most grave concern,
there are other domestic issues that also matter and
can't be allowed to suffer through another four years
of bad policy.

I was recently shocked to learn that President Bush,
despite all his talk about love of freedom, has
attempted to deny our most precious freedom to
American citizens who oppose him - the right to free
speech. On many occasions, he has used the Secret
Service to keep legal, peaceful protesters quarantined
in designated "free speech zones" where nobody
(especially the media) can see or hear them. Pro-Bush
crowds are allowed to get near him during speeches,
but people with signs critical of him have been
forcibly moved away or illegally arrested. I find this
outrageous and intolerable. Some provisions in the
Patriot Act are also dangerous to our liberty in the
hands of an attorney general who is willing to jail
citizens for months or years without any possibility
of judicial review. Many American citizens have been
jailed secretly, and while I am all for giving the FBI
greater powers to investigate suspected terrorists,
there have to be checks and balances to protect us
from over-zealous government officials. Absolute power
corrupts absolutely, and all Americans should be wary
of any President who is willing to violate our most
basic rights.

While I'm not a fan of extreme environmentalists who
want to protect every endangered species around, I do
care about the quality of my air and water and
controls on toxic waste that could endanger all of our
health. I'm willing to pay for healthy living
conditions, and I don't think that such costs threaten
the competitiveness of US companies against low-cost
foreign companies that are allowed to pollute.
President Bush has attempted to reverse environmental
protections across the board and has given big
business interests the ability to profit from the
destruction of our natural resources. He forced the
EPA to stop prosecuting Clean Air Act violators,
attempted to increase the amount of toxic mercury
allowed in our water, under-funded the cleanup of
hazardous waste, reversed EPA bans on the sale of
contaminated land, increased logging in our national
parks, allowed giant pig "factory farms" to pollute
the land, water and homes without having to clean it
up, and ignored the threat of global warming. Yes, it
costs money to have healthy living conditions and some
countries don't want to pay the price. That's when the
President has a duty to lead the world to negotiate
good environmental treaties, not to refuse to
participate, thus guaranteeing failure. He has a duty
to protect American companies against unfair foreign
competition, not give them a license to break the laws
established to protect our own citizens. President
Bush has failed to lead the world and protect our
citizens from environmental hazards or unfair foreign
competition.

President Bush also appears willing to sacrifice our
national parks to the interests of oil companies,
strip miners and loggers. Once these national
treasures have been exploited, they will be ruined
forever. Our parks belong to the people and I'm not
willing to sell them out for a few bucks, most of
which will go to private companies and the rest of
which will go to support more government spending or
tax cuts for the wealthy.

Finally, let me address the economy. I've never
really believed that the President has much short-term
influence over the state of the economy. However, I do
know that cutting taxes and increasing spending is
normally a great way to stimulate economic growth for
a few years, while hurting us in the long-term when we
have to pay off the debt. Yet, despite the billions in
tax cuts and increased homeland security spending, I
haven't seen any growth in jobs or spending. I guess
that means all we get is the long-term debt. Finally -
is President Bush willing to fix Social Security? No -
but then again, I don't think anyone in Washington has
the guts to do it.

The bottom line is this. President Bush had four
years to show us what he can do. He has completely
bungled our foreign policy and has been favoring big
business interests and wealthy individuals over fiscal
responsibility, the well being of our economy, and the
health of our citizens. There is no way he's getting
another chance if I have anything to say about it.

Sir, you are relieved of duty!

-------

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Cleveland 'Plain Dealer' Decides to Not Decide

By Shawn Moynihan

Published: October 25, 2004 9:00 PM EDT

NEW YORK Discussions at the Cleveland Plain Dealer to
resolve an impasse between the paper's editorial board
and its publisher about who to endorse for president
have ended with a Tuesday morning editorial announcing
the paper would back neither Bush nor Kerry.

"We believe our readers are perfectly capable of
making an informed, rational decision by their own
lights," the editorial concludes, "and we strongly
urge them to do so."

The paper's editorial board, as E&P first revealed,
decided last week that it wanted to endorse Sen. John
Kerry, but Publisher Alex Machaskee, who has final
say, prefers President George W. Bush. The paper
backed Bush in 2000.

Indeed, this morning's editorial confirms, "A majority
of the editorial board favored Kerry, but after long
and difficult deliberations, it was decided that the
better path would be to sit this one out." It does not
mention Machaskee's role in this.

"We believe our readers are perfectly capable of
judging" Bush's conduct as president, the editorial
declared, "and deciding whether Bush's flaws bother
them more than Kerry's ambiguities."

Shirley Steinman, the Plain Dealer's director of
community affairs, insisted Monday that the paper had
not yet chosen a candidate for endorsement and that a
decision would be made "later this week," but the
editorial ran a few hours later.

Since Sunday, the Plain Dealer had been deluged with
e-mails, according to three sources. The e-mails,
noted Brent Larkin, the Plain Dealer's editorial page
editor, came not just from readers, but from all over
the country.

When asked whether public opinion had any bearing on
the paper's decision process in choosing a candidate,
Larkin responded, "Not even a little bit."

In this unusually divisive election, many other
newspaper boards have been split down the middle. Some
have chosen not to endorse at all, while in other
cases the publisher stepped in and cast the only vote
that counted.

Tuesday editorial opened with: "In a year of deep
political divisions, this newspaper's opinion section
is experiencing deep divisions of its own." However,
according to several sources, the editorial board
clearly favored Kerry.

When asked Monday afternoon how negotiations were
going between the editorial board and Machaskee,
Larkin said, "'Negotiations' is not the right word.
We're all in this together."

Regardless of the paper's choice, "It's exciting no
matter what," said Plain Dealer Metro Columnist Regina
Brett, who noted that the Cleveland community is
buzzing about the paper's impending endorsement.
"People in Cleveland are really solid readers of the
paper," she noted.

If Machaskee deflected the Plain Dealer editorial
board's choice, it reportedly won't be the first time:
In the 2002 gubernatorial race, according to Plain
Dealer insiders, Machaskee decided the newspaper would
endorse Bob Taft despite the editorial board's
preference for his opponent, Tim Hagen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shawn Moynihan (smoynihan@editorandpublisher.com) is
managing editor of E&P.

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=31763

Financial Times backs Kerry, bashes 'radical' Bush
AFP: 10/25/2004
LONDON (AFP) - Britain's respected Financial Times
endorsed John Kerry as the best choice for US
president, saying incumbent George W. Bush had
polarized the world with his radical foreign policy
and led a reckless economic policy.

The paper, one of the world's leading financial
dailies, called Bush "a polarizer, exploiting the war
on terror to cow domestic opposition and divide the
world into Them and Us."

"Over the past three years, the gap between ambition
and reality has created what could be termed a 'Bush
bubble'," it said.

During that time since the September 11 2001 attacks
in the United States, Bush's "radical, faith-based
politics" and his inability to recognize his mistakes
had led to a disastrous occupation in Iraq and taken
the wrong tack in the war on terrorism, it charged.

"Mr. Bush's flaw is his stubborn reluctance to admit
mistakes and to adjust personnel and policy. Blind
faith in military power as a tool for change has too
often influenced decision-making," it said.

"The US needs allies in the struggle against terrorism
but Mr. Bush's crusading moralism has alienated the
rest of the world, and a large constituency at home
already fearful of the religious right."

But the paper cautioned that Kerry, the Democratic
senator, "still has much to prove" on domestic policy
and lacks pizazz, but values international alliances
and can recognize his mistakes.

"He owes his rise more to opposition to Mr. Bush than
loyalty to his own cause. But on balance, he is the
better, safer choice," it said.

Moreover, it said, Kerry would return a sound fiscal
policy to Washington, instead of Bush's short-term
economic fix in the form of tax cuts and low federal
interest rates, it went on.

"A President Kerry would probably revert to the fiscal
responsibility of the Clinton years... Coupled with
the need for international economic policy
cooperation... this could be a recipe for success,"
judged the financial daily.

The world's other influential financial pages have not
issued direct endorsements, but the Wall Street
Journal is regularly critical of Kerry. The Economist
weekly issues its endorsement for the November 2 US
vote in its edition out this Friday.

Copyright 2004 Agence France Presse. All rights
reserved. The information contained in the AFP News
report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed without the prior written authority of
Agence France Presse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/opinion/26krugman.html?oref=login&oref=login&hp

10/25/2004 - 15:12 GMT - AFP

A Culture of Cover-Ups
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 26, 2004
Aides to John Kerry say that if he wins, he'll replace
Porter Goss as head of the C.I.A. Let's hope so: Mr.
Goss has already confirmed the fears of those who
worried about his appointment by placing Republican
staff members from Capitol Hill in key positions and
raising fears about a partisan purge.

But the flap over Mr. Goss is only a symptom of a much
broader issue: whether the Bush administration will be
able to maintain its culture of cover-ups. That
culture affects every branch of policy, but it's
strongest when it comes to the "war on terror."

Although President Bush's campaign is based almost
entirely on his self-proclaimed leadership in that
war, his officials have thrown a shroud of secrecy
over any information that might let voters assess his
performance.

Yesterday we got two peeks under that shroud. One was
The Times's report about what the International Atomic
Energy Agency calls "the greatest explosives bonanza
in history." Ignoring the agency's warnings,
administration officials failed to secure the weapons
site, Al Qaqaa, in Iraq, allowing 377 tons of deadly
high explosives to be looted, presumably by
insurgents.

The administration is trying to play down the
importance of this loss, arguing that because Iraq was
awash in munitions, a few hundred more tons don't make
much difference. But aside from their potential use in
nuclear weapons - the reason they were under seal
before the war - these particular explosives, unlike
standard munitions, are exactly what a terrorist
needs.

Informed sources quoted by the influential Nelson
Report say explosives from Al Qaqaa are the "primary
source" of the roadside and car bombs that have killed
and wounded so many U.S. soldiers. And thanks to the
huge amount looted - "in a highly organized operation
using heavy equipment" - the insurgents and whoever
else have access to the Qaqaa material have enough
explosives for tens of thousands of future bombs.

If the administration had had its way, the public
would never have heard anything about this.
Administration officials have known about the looting
of Al Qaqaa for at least six months, and probably much
longer. But they didn't let the I.A.E.A. inspect the
site after the war, and pressured the Iraqis not to
inform the agency about the loss. They now say that
they didn't want our enemies - that is, the people who
stole the stuff - to know it was missing. The real
reason, obviously, was that they wanted the news kept
under wraps until after Nov. 2.

The story of the looted explosives has overshadowed
another report that Bush officials tried to suppress -
this one about how the Bush administration let Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi get away. An article in yesterday's
Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on an "NBC
Nightly News" report from March that asserted that
before the Iraq war, administration officials called
off a planned attack that might have killed Mr.
Zarqawi, the terrorist now blamed for much of the
mayhem in that country, in his camp.

Citing "military officials," the original NBC report
explained that the failure to go after Mr. Zarqawi was
based on domestic politics: "the administration feared
destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq" - a part of
Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein - "could
undermine its case for war against Saddam." The
Journal doesn't comment on this explanation, but it
does say that when NBC reported, correctly, that Mr.
Zarqawi had been targeted before the war,
administration officials denied it.

What other mistakes did the administration make? If
partisan appointees like Mr. Goss continue to control
the intelligence agencies, we may never know.

This isn't speculation: Mr. Goss is already involved
in a new cover-up. Last week Robert Scheer of The Los
Angeles Times revealed the existence of a devastating
but suppressed report by the C.I.A.'s inspector
general on 9/11 intelligence failures. Newsweek has
now confirmed the gist of Mr. Scheer's column.

The report, the magazine says, "identifies a host of
current and former officials who could be candidates
for possible disciplinary procedures." But although
the report was completed in June, Mr. Goss has refused
to release it to Congress. "Everyone feels it will be
better if this hits the fan after the election," an
official told the magazine. Better for whom?

What really happened on 9/11, or in Iraq? Next week's
election may determine whether we ever find out.

LNS Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- Only 8 Days to Go -- The Dam is Breaking, The Torrent is Bursting...

There are only 8 days to go until the Electoral Uprising. The dam has broken. Can you feel it? They cannot steal it now, unless they are prepared for rebellion (and they are not)…They will try, but it is too far gone…There is an Electoral Uprising at hand. It cannot be thwarted. Lean into the fire, just as Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) and Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) are doing...The dam has broken…Even the cooked polls of the Corporatist Media as starting to show the cracks…It is finished…They must do something drastic if they are going to retain power, and the closer Nov 2nd comes such drastic measures become less and less likely…There are many stories about voter supression in Bardoground States, but there will be time for that tomorrow and the next day…Today read these FIVE powerful stories…Feel the moral pressure being brought to bear, feel the conscience of a nation shining forth, feel common sense and human decency driving your fellow patriots to the polls…The LNS is a drum we have been beating for four years…There are storm clouds billowing now…The torrent is about to burst open the parched ground…The Electoral Uprising is coming…REMEMBER DUVAL COUNTY!