October 2003

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Scary stuff

by Mark Gisleson

Not a lot new in this Salon story just posted about electronic voting machines, but if you didn't click on all those links I posted the other day (Diebold, Diebold, Diebold, etc.), this Robert Tanner article provides a solid overview of the issues.

"I'm deeply concerned about this whole idea of election integrity," said Warren Slocum, chief election officer in California's San Mateo County. His doubts were so grave that he delayed purchasing new voting machines and is sticking with the old ones for now.

He's not alone. While the Florida recount created momentum for revamping the way Americans vote, slow progress on funding and federal oversight means few people will see changes when they cast ballots next week. And new doubts could further slow things.

In Florida's Broward County -- scene of a Bush-Gore recount of punch-card ballots -- officials spent $17.2 million on new touchscreen equipment. Lately, they've expressed doubts about the machines' accuracy, and have discussed purchasing an older technology for 1,000 more machines they need....

"The computer science community has pretty much rallied against electronic voting," said Stephen Ansolabahere, a voting expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "A disproportionate number of computer scientists who have weighed in on this issue are opposed to it."

.... This week, a federal appeals court in California threw out a lawsuit that challenged computerized voting without paper trails, finding that no voting system can eliminate all electoral fraud.
That didn't satisfy doubters.

John Rodstrom Jr., a Broward County (Fla.) commissioner said local officials there wanted to upgrade to optical scan machines, but were pressured into buying more than 5,000 touchscreens.

"We were forced by the Legislature to be a trailblazer," he said. "The vendors ... they're going to tell you it's perfect and wonderful. (But) there are a lot of issues out there that haven't been answered. It's a scary thing."

As partial atonement for lifting so much of Tanner's article, I'd like to take a moment to pitch Salon membership. Since going online in 1994, I have seen just about every "big thing" to come along, Internetwise. Over the years no website has been as valuable to me, or as consistently entertaining as Salon's. Click here if you're ready to part with a few dollars in exchange for complete access to the number one left-leaning political/cultural publication online today.

* *

As long as we're doing some following up on earlier stories (and isn't that pretty much what 98% of political reporting is about?), Salon also has a nice story from Tim Grieve about that Romenesko letter from Charlie Reina.

Reina is out of journalism for the moment -- he's running his own woodworking business in suburban New York -- and he realizes that going public about his experience at Fox won't improve his career prospects. He says he doesn't care.

Fox did not respond to calls or a faxed letter from Salon seeking comment on Reina's tenure at the network or his comments about news values there. But Reina has plainly hit a nerve. Late Thursday, Romenesko posted a response to Reina's note that appeared to be from Sharri Berg, a vice president for news operations at Fox. The response called Reina a "disgruntled employee" with "an ax to grind." And Berg included comments she attributed to an unnamed Fox staffer who described Reina as one "any number of clueless feature producers" who made inane calls to the news desk, "the kind of calls where after you hung up you say to the phone, 'go f?k yourself.'" Berg quoted the newsroom employee as saying, "[I]t's not editorial policy that pisses off newsroom grunts -- it's people like Charlie."

If you care to watch the commercial (or if you decide to subscribe), you can read Grieve's interview with Reina, which includes background on Fox's decision to turn against Trent Lott. PressThink also has quite a bit more on this story, as well as some interesting comments from readers.

* *

Atrios and some other serious political bloggers have convinced me to bookmark Juan Cole's weblog. A bit depressing (he tends to focus on body counts), but interesting. Unsurprisingly, Coles linked to Mark Clayton's story about Cole's insights into the 9/11 terrorists in the Christian Science Monitor ("Reading into the mind of a terrorist"). A good serious read.

While I was at the CSM, I noticed this intriguing article: "Secret 9/11 case before high court." OK, I'm a sucker for words like "secret," especially when they're right next to "9/11." I think I may have heard about this case, but for the most part, this is one of those really important stories that no one's covering — but in this case, not for the usual reasons:

This is among the first of the post-Sept. 11 terrorism cases to wend its way to the nation's highest tribunal. There was no public record of its existence, however, until the appeal was filed with the clerk of the US Supreme Court.

A federal judge and a three-judge federal appeals-court panel have conducted hearings and issued rulings. Yet lawyers and court personnel have been ordered to remain silent.

"The entire dockets for this case and appeal, every entry on them, are maintained privately, under seal, unavailable to the public," says a partially censored 27-page petition asking the high court to hear the case. "In the court of appeals, not just the filed documents and docket sheet are sealed from public view, but also hidden is the essential fact that a legal proceeding exists."

* *

If you're absolutely determined not to do any more work this afternoon, or if you're settled in for a long night in front of your monitor, here's three more good reads:

Michael Tomasky on Wesley Clark in The American Prospect

Daniel Gross on why the new economic numbers aren't that important, in Slate

and an AP article, "Report Links Iraq Deals to Bush Donations," in the New York Times

And, if you're still looking for more reading, you can always check out my daily (7/52) blog on Babelogue's front page.

 

 

Posted by at October 31, 2003 1:23 PM

 

"Roger's Revenge"

by Mark Gisleson

Jim Romenesko's webpage is pretty much a haunt for newspaper people. I was a bit surprised then to see how quickly one of his letters page items has gotten around. Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer has some interesting things to say about his former employer.

[A]t Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, "Roger's Revenge" - against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling's transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge's physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

* *

Josh Marshall continues to closely watch the goings on in Congress. His latest column in the Hill News has some regarding recent Republican efforts to blame the CIA for the mess in Iraq.

Why was the NIE so rushed and why was it produced when it was? An NIE is put together to assemble all the information in the intelligence community on a given topic. Normally, the point is to assist the executive — as well as the Congress — in the process of fashioning policy.

But that’s not what happened here.

We know that the Bush administration specifically resisted calling for an NIE until very late in the game because it didn’t want the results and findings getting in the way of the policy the administration had already decided on. The reason an NIE was finally pulled together is that Senate Democrats wanted some sense of what the evidence was for all the White House’s claims about Iraqi WMD and ties to international terrorism.

In other words, the NIE was only put together when the policy was being sold, not when it was being put together. So the administration could not have been misled or ill-served by it because it was never used to formulate policy. The administration only used it to sell the policy to a skeptical Congress.

The timing of the NIE points to another important conclusion. If you’re wondering why the document seemed so slanted in favor of alarmist judgments about Iraq’s WMD, it’s probably because it was produced for a White House that already had a policy in place. With the policy already decided upon, it was, shall we say, pretty clear how the White House wanted the report to turn out. And, unfortunately, the agency obliged.

[more]

* *

Lost in all the shuffle over Iraq has been Haley Barbour's recent Trent Lott like moment in the sun. Derrick Z. Jackson updates the record. I'll give Jackson credit. It's hard to follow Barbour's story without coming to the obvious conclusion that he's little more than a racist jerk, but Jackson contents himself with just present the facts. I think you'll find it hard not to agree with my assessment, however.

Barbour has blatantly appealed to the most racist elements in Mississippi by defiantly refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to remove his photograph from its website home page. The photo shows Barbour at a CCC-sponsored barbecue with five other men, including CCC field director Bill Lord.

The CCC grew out of the racist white citizens councils that fought integration during the civil rights movement. In yet another example of its hatred, the CCC home page features an article titled "The Racial Compact." The article proposes a South African-style apartheid in most of the United States reserved for the "Nordish-American population." African-Americans, who are referred to as "Congoid," would be shoved into what is now Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and north Texas. Latinos would be consigned to south Texas and New Mexico....

Barbour tried to play it both ways last week, saying merely that some of the CCC's views are "indefensible." Unfortunately, some African-Americans in the Republican Party, too timid to criticize the pandering, have afforded him some racial cover. But there is no defending in any way a group whose sole purpose is to glorify the most poisonous aspects of American history, from the traitorous Confederacy to calling immigrants of color "trash" to denunciations of Jewish Americans. Perhaps the problem is that it is unrealistic to expect Barbour to fully renounce the CCC if he has not fully renounced his own past. When he ran for the Senate in 1982, a New York Times report said:

"The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be 'coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

* *

Via Atrios, this AP story presents a side to the war in Iraq you probably haven't heard much about: mercenaries, or, as they're now called, private contractors.

For over twenty years the military has been trending Republican. George W. is single-handedly reversing that trend. Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports on "Corps Voters" at the Washington Monthly.

Steve Gilliard has transcribed some recent comments by Robert Fisk, who was interviewed by Pacifica's Amy Goodman. "Well, I can tell you there are at least 200,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and 146,000 of them are wearing American uniform. You know, Americans in Iraq did not grow up in Tikrit eating dates for breakfast. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, a thousand times over anything Al Qaeda can do, are western soldiers. And we need to realize that we're maintaining an occupation there."

Retired Colonel David H. Hackworth has more on the Army's shameful treatment of our wounded troops.

And for those who've been wondering, Moja Vera is back in the States and doing fine. Updating his blog has taken a backseat to finding a civilian job. Drop me an e-mail if you know of any suitable opportunities in the Arizona area for former military satellite communications experts.

UPDATE: Gaius Publius sends us this link to an Aussie article, "Cheney's hawks 'hijacking policy.'" Good read.

For future reference, if you e-mail me about anything in this weblog, try to remember to slap a few ###'s at the front of your subject line. I'm getting over 600 spam a day, and this makes it a lot easier to spot your e-mail. And, for what it's worth, I think the "re:" tag is now worthless thanks to our "creative" spam corps.

 

Posted by at October 30, 2003 10:49 AM

 

D-D-D-D-Dieb-b-b-b-old (now that's scary!)

by Mark Gisleson

All together now:

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

Diebold

So where's our "cease and desist" letter?

* *

Are the Republicans beginning to fracture? Maybe just a little? Geoff Earle at The Hill thinks so.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who recently compared aspects of the conflict to Vietnam, yesterday said U.S. forces need to be more proactive....

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was concerned that U.S. forces were unable to anticipate many of the attacks in a situation he described as tantamount to a guerrilla war in which the enemy is able to strike and then quickly retreat into the population....

“Honestly, it’s a little tougher than I thought it was going to be,”[Trent] Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”

* *

A shout out to Daily Kos for the definitive slam dunk put down of Bush's attempt to blame the USS Abraham Lincoln's crew for the "mission accomplished" sign. For someone who looked unbeatable, George W., more and more, looks like one of life's bigger losers. For what it's worth, here's my winning debate strategy for the first 2004 Bush-?? debate. The Democratic nominee should make their opening statement, then turn over the rest of their time (save closing remarks) to Bush with the invitation to spend that time outlining his plans for the next four years. That would make for a pretty tortured and unconvincing hour of incoherent babbling.

Some folks are pondering whether Howard Dean is more like George McGovern or Jimmy Carter. I'd like to know what in the hell is wrong with being compared to McGovern?

 

* *

From the front page blog, here's an interesting pair of links about working for Microsoft: what he did, what happened.

Rightwingnews compiled an unscientific list of rightwing bloggers' favorite books. "All bloggers were allowed to make anywhere from 1-20 selections. Rank was determined simply by the number of votes received. I think you'll find that more than a few surprises made this incredibly diffuse list." Actually, I don't think you'll be very surprised at all, unless you forget the obvious and are expecting "Atlas Shrugged" to come in first. [link]

And here's a pair of good non-rightwing reads from the New York Observer, one by Joe Conason, the other from Nicholas von Hoffman.

 

 

Posted by at October 29, 2003 12:25 PM

 

Counting it up

by Mark Gisleson

George W. Bush just held his first press conference since late July. I dunno, is it just me, or does the president sound like he's taking dictation from a little voice in his ear? I kept watching to see if he was wearing his "hearing aid," but the camera angle didn't really let you see into his ear at all.

Here are some highlights:

[W]hat they're trying to do is cause people to run. They want to kill and create chaos. That's the nature of a terrorist. That's what terrorists do: They commit suicide acts against innocent people and then expect people to say, "Well, gosh, we better not try to fight you anymore."

We're trying to determine the nature of who these people were. But I will tell you, I would assume that they're either/or and probably both Baathists and foreign terrorists.

The Baathists try to create chaos and fear because they realize that a free Iraq will deny them the excessive privileges they had under Saddam Hussein. The foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits — that freedom is exactly what terrorists fear the most.

* *

[In reference to his landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln] I think you ought to look at my speech. I said Iraq's a dangerous place, got hard work to do, there's still more to be done.

And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops.

The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from staff. They weren't that ingenious, by the way.

* *

What I was saying is, there's more than just the terrorist attacks that are taking place in Iraq. There's schools opening, there are hospitals opening, the electricity — the capacity to deliver electricity to the Iraqi people is back up to prewar levels, where nearly 2 million barrels of oil a day being produced for the Iraqi people.

So I was just saying we've got to look at the whole picture, that what the terrorists would like is for people to focus only on the conditions which create fear, and that is the death and the toll being taken....

The strategy remains the same. The tactics to respond to, you know, more suiciders driving cars, will alter on the ground.

* *

As a matter of fact, military action is the very last resort for us. And a reminder, when you mention Saddam Hussein, I just want to remind you that the Saddam Hussein military action took place after innumerable United Security Council resolutions were passed. Not one, two or three, but a lot.

And so this nation is very reluctant to use military force. We try to enforce doctrines peacefully or through alliances or multi- national forums. And we will continue to do so.

* *

Q: You have said that you are eager to find out whether somebody in the White House leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Many experts in such investigations say you could find out if there was a leaker in the White House within hours if you asked all staff members to sign affidavits denying involvement. Why not take that step?

Bush: Well, the best person to do that so that the -- or the best group of people to do that so that you believe the answer is the professionals at the Justice Department. And they're moving forward with the investigation. It's a criminal investigation. It is an important investigation.

* *

We must never forget the lessons of September the 11th. The terrorists will strike and they will kill innocent life, not only in front of a Red Cross headquarters, they will strike and kill in America, too. We are at war.

I said right after September the 11th, this would be a different kind of war. Sometimes you'd see action and sometimes you wouldn't. But it's a different kind of war than what we're used to.

And Iraq is a front on the war on terror. And we will win this particular battle in the war on terror.

* *

[O]ne of the things that [David Kay] first found was that there was clear violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, material breach they call it in the diplomatic circles. Causes belie (ph), it means that would have been a cause for war. In other words, he said it's dangerous.

And we were right to enforce U.N. resolutions as well. It's important for the U.N. to be a credible organization. You're not credible if you issue resolutions and then nothing happens. Credibility comes when you say something is going to happen and then it does happen.

And in order to keep the peace, it's important for there to be credibility in this world, credibility on the side of freedom and hope.

In case you're wondering, the finally tally on actual words coming out of the president's mouth was:

terrorists - 29 mentions

terror - 17 mentions

terrorism - 1 mention

"September the 11th" - 4 mentions

Saddam Hussein – 14 mentions

Taliban - 1 mention

Osama bin Laden - zero mentions

accountability - zero mentions

87 billion dollars - zero mentions

Donald Rumsfeld - zero mentions

Iraq/Iraqis - 60 mentions

America/American/Americans - 23 mentions, mostly in his opening remarks

 

Posted by at October 28, 2003 12:47 PM

 

Getting "it"

by Mark Gisleson

We're at a point in Iraq and with the war on terror where it's fairly interesting to look around to see who gets "it," and who doesn't. As part of a discussion on Krugman's latest book that will be largely familiar to regular Bush Wars readers, I did some digging to see what the conservative columnists are writing about. Iraq's not high on their list, and many are clutching at some highly irrelevant topics (e.g., missing Sudanese penises, breast implants, "intelligent design," etc.) — anything to avoid talking about the elephant in their ideological living rooms.

Jimmy Breslin, not surprisingly, is one of the columnists who gets "it." His October 23rd column, "Bin Laden, Cop Killer," spells out for New York's finest the nitty gritty details of how George W. Bush and his administration have betrayed cops everywhere by failing to deal with the world's biggest cop killer, Osama bin Laden.

George Bush stood in the World Trade Center ruins and said he would get bin Laden. Get bin Laden as a sheriff would, smoke him out, shoot him cold dead. All the poor cops cheered. What a thrill to have a good tough guy as president! That was over two years ago. Now you never hear bin Laden mentioned.

And the cops who have lost their own do nothing. They are the most extraordinarily gullible of people. They support with all fervor the idea of our president sending troops to Iraq and not where they could capture bin Laden. The cops say nothing about their dead. They are afraid to demand that their government honor the tradition of the 1013 and catch this common cop killer, bin Laden. They are afraid of anybody in authority. They have their dead bodies and they don't have the guts to shout. If they yelled with the emotion used when pushing around a peace demonstration, or anything made up of blacks, their prep school hero, Bush, would quiver and I say he makes bin Laden the goal again.

What is this, bin Laden has killed cops and we don't even catch him, but now we have to listen to tapes of bin Laden threatening to attack us again? Why do we put up with this?

Ben Smith, in the New York Observer, writes about Jim Wilkinson, and offers him as exhibit A in the case against the Republican party having a clue as to how to handle things. As Gen. Tommy Franks director of strategic communications, Wilkinson managed to piss off the entire assembled press corps with his arrogant "no news" press briefings. His reward? Wilkinson will be handling the media for the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City.

"What’s clear is, it won’t look like any other convention we’ve ever seen. We’re looking to provide as much access to reporters as possible," Mr. Wilkinson said, taking the war’s key lesson to the convention.

But that, as many reporters would remind him, is what he said in Qatar....

Plenty of reporters seethed at him during the war, and not covertly. Reporters there barked and protested—many are still brutally angry—at the "No comment" after "No comment" they received in Doha as their embedded colleagues broke news in the field and Mr. Rumsfeld gave press conferences at the Pentagon. Doha was, to them, a kind of biosphere of non-news.

"We were basically a studio audience to make it look like a real press conference," said Kevin Diaz of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "They were talking—literally—directly over our heads to the television cameras."

The President, at least, is still on topic. In the aftermath of the horrendous Baghdad bombings, he made the following comments this morning, as reported by Fox News:

"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become," Bush told reporters at the White House.

He said those who are continuing to engage in violence "can't stand the thought of a free society. They hate freedom. They love terror. They love to try to create fear and chaos."

[more]

Oh yes, those freedom-hating Iraqis...

* *

A quick Diebold footnote. Swarthmore College, responding to Diebold's flurry of legal action in their efforts to suppress stories about electronic voting machine errors, has initiated a policy of "terminating the internet connection of any student who links to the Why War? website."

It's not quite as bad as that sounds. Swarthmore will let you spell out the URL, but warns students against actual links.

* *

Saw Beyond Borders Sunday afternoon with a friend. The horrific scenes from the refugee camps in Ethiopia, Cambodia and Chechnya will stay with me for a long time, even though the love story that runs through the movie was almost unbearably sketchy and clichéd.

Something else will stay with me as well: the nine consecutive commercials we sat through before the previews started. The first was perhaps the most grating, a teaser for Fox's season premier of "24" brought to us by Ford. Ford wanted to make sure that we knew that the season opener would be broadcast uninterrupted by commercials! Having just paid to see a first-run movie, we weren't terribly amused by Ford's logic of punishing a paying audience by bragging about not interrupting a free television show with commercials.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 27, 2003 10:23 AM

 

The "Friday" Report

by Mark Gisleson

REALLY LATE UPDATE: Apparently late Friday night wasn't good enough for the Caspar Milquetoasts over at the 9/11 commission. They waited until today to issue a subpoena threat for "several highly classified intelligence documents" from the White House. Here's the link, but the bottom line is that former Republican Governor Thomas Keane still hasn't issued any subpoenas, and he saved his "fiery" bluster for Saturday, making sure the administration wouldn't be overly embarrassed.

And, as usual when the New York Times decides to "slow walk" a story they can't otherwise ignore, some of the best quotes come at the very end of the article:

Slade Gorton, a Republican member of the panel who served in the Senate from Washington from 1982 to 2000, said that he was startled by the "indifference" of some executive branch agencies in making material available to the commission. "This lack of cooperation, if it extends anywhere else, is going to make it very difficult" for the commission to finish its work by next May, he said.

Timothy J. Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy in Washington and a former Democratic member of the House from Indiana, said that "our May deadline may, in fact, be jeopardized — many of us are frustrated that we're still dealing with questions about document access when we should be sinking our teeth into hearings and to making recommendations for the future."

Congress would need to approve an extension if the panel requested one, a potentially difficult proposition given the reluctance of the White House and many senior Republican lawmakers to see the commission created in the first place.

"If the families of the victims weighed in — and heavily, as they did before — then we'd have a chance of succeeding," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was an important sponsor of the legislation creating the commission. He said that, given the "obfuscation" of the administration in meeting document requests, he was ready to pursue an extension "if the commission feels it can't get its work done."

UPDATE: Another Blackhawk down.

* *

Mark A.R. Kleiman has the two best links for explaining the Republicans' current efforts to blame this war on the CIA. Click here for the Washington Post story of record, and here for the CNN spin cycle dissection (courtesy of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who's doing a great job of monitoring Sen. Pat Roberts' yeoman-like disinformation efforts). Josh Marshall is following this story closely, and speculates on what's really going on (here and here). [The Globe and Mail, The Age, Al-Jazeera, NYTimes, Voice of America]

Marshall also wrote recently about Grover Norquist's incredibly extensive ties to radical Muslims:

My sense has always been that Norquist got into the Islam business back in the late 1990s when it looked like a growth industry for the Republican coalition.

He had a lot of ideas about Muslims being natural cultural conservatives and free marketeers, and so forth. This three-cheers for Muslim capitalism! conference in Doha is a prime example.

His 'Islamic Institute' is run out the offices of his main operation, 'Americans for Tax Reform.' (I just checked the website and apparently it's now 'The Islamic Free Market Institute.' So, you know, Mohamed von Hayek.)

In any case, after 9/11 came along he probably realized that he might have gotten tied up with at least a few questionable characters. But he was too proud to admit he'd been naive and then just dug himself deeper.

That's always been my sense. But when people start getting arrested, maybe it's time to give the whole thing a closer look.

Via Atrios, Body and Soul reports that the Eastern European undocumented workers nabbed in those Wal-Mart raids were making as little as two dollars a day. ???!!! Seems to me that an aggressive federal prosecutor could go after Wal-Mart and the subcontractor for enslaving these hapless immigrants. This is more than a labor law violation. Two dollars a day might buy the groceries in parts of Bangladesh, but in the United States prison workers make that much an hour (there is no other legal comparison).

Also courtesy of Atrios, here's Dwight Meredith on why school vouchers are unconstitutional in thirty states. Ironically, the root cause of all these state constitutional amendments was virulent anti-Catholicism.

Billmon nails down the details on just how failed the Madrid "fundraiser" for Iraq really was. It's my tax dollars too, but it's hard to blame other countries for not wanting to chip in to bail us out of this unholy and totally unnecessary mess.

Steve Gilliard spotted this Courier-Journal article on the GOP's decision to put "Election Day challengers" into 59, mostly black, voting places in the Louisville area. Gilliard accurately assesses the situation:

Hmmm, yet another case of nigger vote suppression.

It didn't work in 1965, it won't work now. But the Dems should pick the richest, whitest counties in the state and do the same. See how quickly this plans dies.

In the real world, most of these people are long time, regular voters and know the people at the polling stations. This is just legal intimidation.

[link — scroll down to "GOP to put challengers in black voting precincts"]

If you didn't read yesterday's Mark Crispin Miller Diebold story, here's a link to Black Box Voting and the original story on how Diebold's voting machines may have provided the catalyst for the television network's decision to "uncall" Florida for Gore. More and more and more the bits and pieces come out. Florida was stolen, the Supreme Court anointed a cheater, and tens of thousands have died as a result. Is Ashcroft's DOJ investigating? Are bears Catholic? Does the Pope . . . well, you get the idea.

Here in Minnesota, and at dozens of locations around the country, it's Wellstone World Music Day. Skip a game or two and listen to some music and think about the Wellstone legacy. It's also the 74th anniversary of the first recording of "Happy Days Are Here Again."

 

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 25, 2003 11:39 AM

 

Holy shit!

by Mark Gisleson

Whether you care about the Diebold story or not, CLICK ON THIS LINK NOW!

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 24, 2003 11:37 AM

 

For a few oil wells more

by Mark Gisleson

I missed a really hot show last night. Wynton Marsalis and his band were playing a tiny club in downtown St. Paul when Itzhak Perlman walked in fresh from a performance at the Ordway Center. Needless to say, the resulting jam was, by all accounts, pretty amazing.

Then my thoughts turned to Jack Kennedy's presidency. JFK was renown for routinely inviting great minds to dine with him at the White House. If you have no pretensions to being an intellectual, it may be hard to understand why talking with a great poet about Walt Whitman can help you to better understand complex issues pertaining to breaking developments in the Congo, but trust me, it's all in having your mental switches in the "on" position.

How comforting then to read a Reuters report that appears to indicate that President Bush likened Australia's role in the Asia-Pacific region to that of a "sheriff." True, it is the mark of a great mind to be able to reduce complex issues to simple equations, but somehow I don't think that's what Bush was doing. In his inimitable fashion, he was yet again creating a garbled Wild West scenario, and not a hard-scrabble one in which most settlers couldn't afford a gun, but the Hollywood kind with white hats and dark-skinned natives.

Ted Rall has a somewhat more irreverent take on a similar theme.

* *

Josh Marshall is looking for a smoking gun. The vast rightwing you know what is cackling that there's no money quote of George W. Bush saying, in exactly so many words, that Saddam was an "imminent threat."

im·mi·nent, adj. About to occur at any moment:IMPENDING.

"Our wingerly friends have made a lot of the rarity of occurrences in which the phrase ‘imminent threat’ was used. But they rather ignore all the instances in which administration officials told the public we had to depose Saddam right now before he could use his nuclear weapons and smallpox on us. Any quotation which conveys the imminent threat message is acceptable even it doesn't contain the phrase 'imminent threat.'"

So there you have it: Josh has a contest going. Feel free to peruse through Steve Perry's compendium of Bush's Lies to find your winning entry.

* *

Via Atrios, Dennis Kucinich has taken the high road and refused to appear on Hardball. Good for him.

You'll have to scroll down a ways, but if you're into the environment, be sure to read Tom Dispatch's post, "Notes from the colonial era." I know you'd rather read an excerpt, but if you follow the link, you can also read some selected quotes from General Jerry Boykin that are well worth the click.

Media Whores Online interviews Gene Lyons about Wesley Clark. Hot.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 24, 2003 11:29 AM

 

Bush story

by Mark Gisleson

Our sojourning President got off a lot easier than I had hope during his Australian visit. Here are some highlights from the Reuters report:

The U.S. president was on a whirlwind visit to Australia to reward conservative Prime Minister John Howard, whom he dubbed "a man of steel" for sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, despite public protests.

His 20-hour visit triggered a massive security operation in the usually sleepy capital with armed air force jets escorting Bush into Canberra late Wednesday night and patrolling the city's skies until he flew out on Thursday evening.

Authorities took the unprecedented step of barring the public from the parliament where Bush spoke on Thursday, backing a special security role for Australia in the Asia-Pacific region that has raised concerns among Asian neighbors.

REGIONAL SHERIFF

"Security in the Asia-Pacific region will always depend on the willingness of nations to take responsibility for their neighborhood, as Australia is doing," Bush told parliament....

"We are not a sheriff," shouted Greens leader Bob Brown who ignored an order to leave the house.

The heckling did not rattle Bush, who is on his first trip to Australia. The last US president to visit Australia was Bill Clinton in 1996 -- who was also heckled by Brown....

The 18-year-old son of Mamdouh Habib, one of two Australians held at a US military prison in Cuba for two years without charge after the Afghan invasion, was dragged out, arms pinned behind his back, after yelling: "Hey Bush, what about my Dad?"

* *

Michelle Goldberg writes about Wesley Clark at Salon [paid subscription req., or watch the commercial], and picks up on the wishful thinking regarding Republicans for Clark.

On Oct. 14, Harold Bloom, the venerable Yale humanities professor, cultural conservative and defender of the Western canon, published a remarkable encomium to Clark in the Wall Street Journal's ordinarily right-wing editorial page with the portentous title "Cometh the Hour." In it, he references Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and writes, "It is not at all clear whether we are already in decline: bread is still available for most and circuses for all. Still, there are troubling omens, economic and diplomatic, and a hint or two from Gibbon may be of considerable use ... We need, at just this time, a military personage as president, one who is more in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower than of Ulysses Grant. In Wesley Clark, we have a four-star general and former NATO commander who is a diplomatic unifier, an authentic hero, wise and compassionate. That Gen. Clark saved tens of thousands of Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo is irrefutable, despite current deprecations by worried supporters of the president."

....Nicomodos Sy Herrera, a 31-year-old Republican lawyer in a well-tailored suit, seemed almost surprised to find himself at a Democratic event. A pro-life hawk who'd been "a big Bush supporter" in 2000, he'd grown alarmed by Bush's inability to "balance the hard and soft power of the US" Now, he was considering changing his party affiliation in order to vote for Clark in the primary. "Bush was seduced too much by the hard right's insistence that it had to go alone," he says. "He made that bed, he has to sleep in it." Still, while he says he doesn't think Bush could win him back, he also says Clark is the only Democrat he would support.

"Those are exactly the kind of people you want," [Ruy] Teixeira says of these Clark fans. "The people who hate Bush 24/7, those voters are not the Democrats' problem. The Democrats' problem are the people who say, 'Goddamn it, he did a pretty good job after 9/11, but he's really doing a lousy job now.' That's the sweet spot. Those are the voters you're going to need to get in droves."

Clark's ability to appeal to these voters is, in turn, attracting pragmatic Democrats who are looking for a winner, not a hero. "The kind of people I tend to talk to by and large tend to have been skeptical of the Dean candidacy while respecting its energy," says Teixeira. "They're worried to death about whether Dean can actually beat Bush. These people are very interested in Clark. We need the guy who's best able to beat Bush. I think he's probably the guy."

[more]

Is the notion of "Republicans for Clark" far fetched? Google pulls up 466 responses, including www.RepublicansforClark.com. There are Young Republicans for Clark, Independents for Clark, Environmentalists for Clark, Kansas Republicans for Clark, Hispanics for Clark, Students for Clark, Women for Clark, etc.

Obviously, a candidate who appeals to such a broad center-right coalition is not going to be appealing to many liberals. So why am I still leaning Clark? As I've said before, thirty years of poisonous disinformation from the hard right (cum neo-Trotskyite neoconservatives) has made this country all but ungovernable from the left. We're going to need a grace period to clean up the mess, and some time to re-educate our young on the meaning of democracy, as opposed to demagoguery.

Clark might be the person to do that.

We'll see soon enough.

* *

One link led to another, and found myself reading Keith Burgess-Jackson's "The Natural History of Bush-Hating" yesterday. Burgess-Jackson is a prof at the U-TX Arlington, and purports to be a Ralph Nader voter. He picks up on Paul Krugman's track record of trashing Bush's economic record, and makes the oft-heard rightwing claim that Krugman hates Bush.

I think that claim is dead wrong, and that it would be impossible for Krugman to be consistent and find favor with any Bush economic policies. Wrong is wrong.

I wrote Burgess-Jackson to suggest that if Bush's policies are consistent, and if they are wrong, then Krugman's opposition does not necessarily imply dislike or hatred of Bush, just disagreement. I suggested that if he were right, he should be able to name a Bush economic policy that has worked, and been well received.

Burgess-Jackson dodged the request, giving a bizarre list of Fox News style quotes regarding Bush. I'd love to pass them on, but I don't have permission so we won't go there. I dogged him for an example nonetheless, but finally gave up when he wrote, "I'm not giving the answers you want, that's all."

Yeah, that's one way of putting it. My bottom line is that he refused to offer one example of a Bush economic policy that makes sense. I don't question Burgess-Jackson's Nader vote, but I do feel compelled to point out that this Nader voter has never encountered another Nader supporter who was so compliant to RNC talking points. Or who viewed Bush as having legitimately won Florida, but that quote's off limits as well.

Read his article for yourself. I think Professor Burgess-Jackson's logic is a bit circular, and strangely in lockstep with established Republican disinformation.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 23, 2003 11:50 AM

 

Denial of service attacks on pro-war blogs

by Mark Gisleson

Living so close to Chicago (seven hours by Interstate), you'd think I'd read the Chicago Tribune a little more often. That rarest of media creatures, a Republican newspaper that's ideologically consistent (i.e., anti-Bush at times), the ChiTrib is one of the great American dailies. Thanks to Jim Romenesko, here's a link to Emily Nunn's fantastic write-up on a recent Al Franken book signing in Skokie.

[Franken] calls his wife several times a day ("To ... Franni," he wrote in the book's dedication, "who's been screaming about this stuff for years and believed in the book. I love you so much. And even more importantly, you love me"). And he has two kids whom he obviously adores. One teaches grade school in the Bronx; the other has just started his first year at Princeton.

When I pointed out that he was becoming the mouthpiece of the left, he demurred.

"There are plenty of other voices. ... There's Paul Krugman, who been out there from the very beginning, God bless him, he is a blessing, and there's Molly Ivins who is wonderful, and Joe Conason [from Salon.com]. ... people keep saying you're the one, but it's just because I'm the No. 1 best seller. The book is funny and says the same that they're saying but says it in a way that [makes you laugh]."

Another Romenesko link took me to Al Kamen's "Nothing Negative, See?" from today's WaPost. Not quite as funny, but reeking of irony, Kamen sums up Ashcroft's latest assault on open government.

The Justice Department, after stonewalling media requests for more than a year, has finally posted an outside consultant's study of the agency's efforts to ensure diversity in the workplace.

Reporters, who had filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the 186-page report by KPMG Consulting -- a report that mostly likely cost taxpayers a few hundred grand -- at last got a chance to see it.
And there it was, in stark black and white: half white, the other half blacked out by department officials, who noted the law permits concealing "pre-decisional deliberative information."

The cuts were made, we are told, by a career "senior department FOIA officer" using that legal interpretation. Officials say this exemption allows them to receive critical reports without worrying about negative publicity.

"The bureaucracy run amok," one stunned political appointee said yesterday of the nifty rationale for cutting such a mundane report.

So in the contents section, under "Recommendations," we find . . . nothing.

How about under "the key findings of the study"? The first five are blacked out. But the sixth paragraph says, "The department's attorney workforce is more diverse than the U.S. legal workforce." Somehow, that critical "pre-decisional deliberative information" was left in.

Thanks to Counterspin I had a chance to read this Winds of Change post about denial of service attacks on pro-war blogs. Is there anything quite so tired and clichéd as rightwingers huffing about freedom of speech? Losing a few hours of access is hardly a major 1st Amendment issue, while hacking a bunch of tools who parrot pro-war propaganda is, credibly, a blow against empire building. Now if the hackers managed to shut down some of these windbags they might have a case, but seeing as how I read about it on one of their blogs, you gotta wonder how much damage was done? Hell, I'm just a liberal weenie and I've got to cut them some slack: with Rush in treatment, life's got to be tough for the hard right. No more denial of service attacks, OK guys? If you keep interrupting these pro-war circle jerks, these bloggers might have to leave their rumpus rooms and start interacting with normal Americans, and then we'd all suffer. 'Nuff said.

UPDATE: As with the Terri Schiavo case (see yesterday's post), nothing is ever quite exactly what it seems. Turns out that denial of service attack also shut down TalkLeft and Calpundit, two prominent lefty blogs. So while it may have been about the shutting down of pro-war blogs, it might have been just the opposite, or possibly just apolitical hacking.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 22, 2003 10:37 AM

 

Vegetative or comatose?

by Mark Gisleson

Got a second wind, you know, the kind where you're too tired to work, but have enough energy to surf and blog. In any event, I just spotted this story at Google News and felt compelled to post it.

I think this story involves both the differences and the common ground between the right and the left in this country. If you're not familiar with the Terri Schiavo case in Florida, you may be shocked to hear that the heroes (or villains) in this story are rightwing talk radio and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The Weekly Standard has the whole story, and you'll be glad you read it. How tough a right-to-die case is this? Here's the official statement from the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg:

Roman Catholic moral theology suggests that the removal of food and hydration from a patient, even though that person may be comatose, is justifiable only if the natural projected path of the individual's medical condition will lead inevitably to death, sooner rather than later. Some of the members of Terri's family believe that her condition is irreversible and inevitably deteriorating towards death, while others do not. As there is significant disagreement among the family of Terri Schiavo, the Catholic Church would prefer to see all parties take the safer path. The Church, however, will refrain from passing judgement on the actions of anyone in this tragic moment.

The other side, the side I'd normally expect to be on, is pretty invisible on the web. That only makes sense since the motivation to allow for the right to die is not usually eager to get caught up in family disputes, and this case, ultimately, appears to be about the right of the husband to pull the plug, vs. the right of Schiavo's parents to keep her on life support. Here's a lukewarm post at Health Law Blog in support of the husband's position, and a CNN story from a week ago when the court issued its latest ruling.

You can vote on this issue by clicking here.

The issue here appears to be the belief, held by many not close to the case, that Schiavo would have benefited from rehabilitation services that were not provided. The question is, can we really trust doctors to know who might recover from serious injuries, who most certainly will not?

The older I get, the more I believe in the right to die, but at the same time, my confidence in doctors declines with each passing year, as well. In my resume business, I had one client who was hounded out of an advanced residency program by doctor-professors with severe cases of God almighty complex. The notion that any of those doctors might be called upon to testify in a case like this is not encouraging to me, as I find their judgment to sometimes be troubling and arbitrary. Sadly, they are exactly the kinds of doctors who grab lucrative fees to testify in such cases.

But none of this changes my personal preferences. If I'm in a coma and not likely to come out of it, shove a pillow in my face. To hell with anyone who tries to stop that from happening. And that gives me pause, because I'm not sure Terry Schiavo wanted to spend the last ten years in a coma while people argued back and forth about comatose vs. vegetative states.

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 21, 2003 4:05 PM

 

Familiar themes emerge

by Mark Gisleson

 

The Washington Times is frequently a good place to get the real dope on this administration's foul ups. Mark Benjamin has a solid story on the treatment of injured and ill Guard members and Reservists at Fort Stewart. Buried towards the end is a particularly damning graf:

The soldiers estimate that around 40 percent of the nearly 600 personnel in medical hold were deployed to Iraq. Of those who went, many described clusters of strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among previously healthy troops. They said the Army has tried to refuse them benefits, claiming the injuries and illnesses were due to a "pre-existing condition," prior to military service, a charge the Army denied.

[more]

Gee, that almost sounds like they're taking their cue from private insurance carriers.

* *

Juan Cole reports on the third attack agains US forces in two days in the Fallujah area. The latest attack resulted in one dead and five wounded. Let's hope none of the wounded end up at Fort Stewart.

Thanks to the flu I'm not sure how big a play this Toledo Blade series is getting, but judging by how slow (i.e., not at all) the story loads, I'm guessing more than a few people are still interested in reading about American atrocities in Vietnam. Here's the link to the paper. You'll have to find the story on your own, but meanwhile, here's some feedback:

Biloxi Sun Herald: Vietnam responds to rampage allegations

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Buried secrets, brutal truths: Vietnam inquiry yielded no justice

Tri-Valley Herald: Massacre haunts man

* *

Kos unloads on the GOP budget deficit, Mother Jones lists the Top 10 campuses for political activism [via TalkLeft], and Josh Marshall on Sy Hersh's new article in The New Yorker.

* *

Take the time to scroll down Steve Gilliard's blog to find "Why David Brooks is an idiot."

You do understand that the children of todays CEO's are of course going to live lives of unparalleled luxury off of your dad's retirement money. Ken Lay's grandkids will have nothing denied them, while your dad, who froze his ass off in Korea, worked as a gas line repairman for 30 years and then had his money stolen, will be fueling their latest binge. So while some CEO's spawn is snorting coke and slamming Dutch hookers, you can meditate on the snobbery of the Democratic party.

So while your son is playing dodge the RPG in his Humvee in Iraq, because his only way to college was through Baghdad, you can read about Jenna and Babs buying $250 bottles of Absolute in a bottle club and how the Secret Service has to ignore their "escapades." So remember, it's the Democratic Party, with all those union members and working people, who are the real snobs and the GOP represents you, as their kids spend your dad's retirement money on whores and coke.

Now that's my notion of a red blooded, fully American political screed. I sincerely hope someone shows it to David Brooks.

* *

Still battling the flu but should be able to post from here on out. Just be sure to wash your hands after reading. And, in the meantime, read Mark Hand's "Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky and Nader."

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 21, 2003 11:17 AM

 

Sick day

by Mark Gisleson

No post today — sniffle, cough, hack.

 

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 20, 2003 10:02 AM

 

The "Friday" Report

by Mark Gisleson

UPDATE: Courtesy of David Niewert's Orcinus, here's a wonderful story about rightwing family values, NRA style. So far it's only appeared in a local Michigan paper, but, as Niewert wonders, how big a story would it be had the principal been Arab or liberal?

"[F]ollowing the bloodiest day of attacks against American forces in a month," US forces and Iraqi police conducted raids in Baghdad today. In "good" news, they got the main oil pipeline running...for almost two hours. In not so good news, the death total from combat injuries is up to 211 (those are in "Bush numbers," the actual number of dead US troops is 336, including many accidents and illnesses that may be war related). [USA Today] [more from Billmon]

The administration is hoping that the General Boykin story will fade and disappear over the weekend. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is working to make sure that doesn't happen. [CNN.com]

This hardly counts as news, but it still didn't make the wires until last night that a reporter had obtained previously classified documents showing that George W.'s grandpa Preston was a director of a bank seized by the feds during WWII for helping to finance the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. [Yahoo] [more from Counterspin]

Oregon conservative Becky Miller, who has worked for Oregon Taxpayers United, thinks Al Franken's book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," is right on the money.

I read the book in one sitting. It is an amazing book, and -- if you're a decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue conservative who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and watches Fox News -- an earth-shattering book....

Until I read this book, I believed the Bill Sizemore/Oregon Taxpayers United mess was a bit of a fluke. (In 2002 I testified against him in a civil trial in which a Multnomah County jury found that his charitable foundation and political action committee had committed fraud and forgery, and that Oregon Taxpayers United had engaged in a pattern of racketeering to obtain signatures on initiative petitions for tax measures drafted by Sizemore.) The spin, the lies, the greed, the disregard for the everyday person -- I thought it was all just a fluke and really limited to this one little pustule of filth that had festered in a little storefront in Clackamas, Oregon. Boy, was I wrong.

I believe Franken is telling the truth in his book because it meshes perfectly with what I personally have observed. And I think every decent, honest, hardworking, patriotic, true-blue conservative owes it to himself to read it. Hold your nose if you must -- Franken is as foul-mouthed and crass as his reputation would lead you to believe (and quite mistakenly believes Christians love Israel because it is the center of prophecies that include the fiery deaths of all Jews) -- but read it anyway.

[The Oregonian, via Atrios]

Spinning the war, part LXVII: "If you're saying it's actually worse than being reported, could it also be better than what's being reported also, if you consider that these reporters, many of them tell us they want to go cover the new school opening, but they can't because there's another bombing or shooting and that prevents them from sending that story?" [CNN Anchor Bill Hemmer as quoted by Billmon]

More from Josh Marshall on the slowly unfolding contracting scandals in Iraq. A reader writes to point out that labor in the Middle East is dirt cheap, but the preferred imported labor from India is practically free. [Talking Points Memo]

If you scroll down past the pitch for a used laptop, Steve Gilliard has some interesting stuff about our great allies, the Uzbekistanis. "The terrible case of Avazoz and Alimov apparently tortured to death by boiling water, has evoked great international concern. But all of us know that this is not an isolated incident. Brutality is inherent in a system where convictions habitually rely on signed confessions rather than on forensic or material evidence. In the Uzbek criminal justice system the conviction rate is almost 100%. It is difficult not to conclude that once accused by the Prokurator there is no effective possibility of fair trial in the sense we understand it." [Steve Gilliard]

 

* *

Truth

by Sam Gardiner, Col. USAF (ret.)

 

Summary

• Clearly, the assumption of some in the government is the people of the United States and the United Kingdom will come to a wrong decision if they are given the truth.
  
  
• We probably have taken "Information Warfare" too far.
  
  
• We allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs.
  
  
• We failed to make adequate distinctions between strategic influence stuff and intelligence.
  
  
• Message became more important than performance.

[More (.pdf)]

--

This is definitely worth passing on to your pro-war friends. [download free Adobe Acrobat Reader]

 

Posted by Steve Perry at October 18, 2003 10:54 AM

 

Lies, death, torture, and more death

by Mark Gisleson

Not the cheeriest of reading selections, but if you check out today's This day in history at my regular blog, you might get a feel for the really weird vibes associated with October 16. It was on this day that Mao's Long March began, ten Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg, Enver Hoxha was born, and George Jo Hennard killed 23 of his fellow Texans before committing suicide. And people think that the Cubs blowing it yet again is tragic.

For starters, Jay Bookman unloads in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Lies beget more lies; a policy built on deception will always require further deception to sustain itself." And speaking of Dick Cheney:

"Another criticism we hear is that the United States, when its security is threatened, may not act without unanimous international consent. Under this view, even in the face of a specific agreed-upon danger, the mere objection of even one foreign government would be sufficient to prevent us from acting."

With that statement, Cheney abandons deception and traipses merrily into the Land of the Completely Absurd. Nobody -- not the Democrats, not the United Nations, not even the French -- makes the argument that he describes. It would be insane to do so.

Cheney invents that argument to support his larger point: After Sept. 11, the Bush administration at least did something, while its less-than-manly critics would have done nothing.

And that is the ultimate falsehood.

[read the rest]

The consequences of this administration's deceit are both obvious and subtle, depending on where you look first. Billmon, the man who provides "Free Thinking in a Dirty Glass" at his Whiskey Bar blog, connects the wars and finds that the most likely culprit in the recent Gaza Strip bombing was "Al Qaeda itself. If correct, this would suggest the organization has been able to establish a base of operations in Gaza -- either working alone, or, as mentioned above, in conjunction with homegrown Palestinian resistance organizations."

Erasing any remaining distinction between the Palestinian intifada and the global war on terrorism would help advance the neocon/Likud strategy of drawing America into another round of "regime changes" in Syria and Iran — steps which the Sharon government apparently hopes would finally squeeze the life out of the Palestinian resistance and bring an end to the suicide bombings. Sharon could then impose his own peace terms (bantustan classic as opposed to the road map's bantustan light) on the Palestinian Authority, with minimal, if any, interference from the Bush Administration.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has a more straightforward objective: It simply wants to spread the conflict as wide and far as possible, ultimately converting the War on Terrorism into a War on Islam — in hopes the backlash eventually will destablize shaky regimes in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The tactical goal -- a unified war -- is easily within reach for both parties. But their strategic objectives both seem pretty far fetched. Regime change in Syria and/or Iran appears to be beyond the Bush Administration's present capabilities, while regime destabilization in Saudia Arabia and Pakistan is probably beyond Al Qaeda's.

So it seems we've got all the ingredients here for a proper stalemate, with U.S. troops and diplomats taking rising casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Palestine, while Al Qaeda uses the breathing space provided by the neocons' Iraq miscalcuations to recover gradually from its losses in the first phase of the war.

[more]

City Pages' David Schimke contacted Douglas A. Johnson, the executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture, to get his response to Mark Bowden's recent The Atlantic Monthly cover story, "The Art of Interrogation: A Survey of the Landscape of Persuasion."

Bowden describes the various methods of psychological "coercion" carried out by the US military. There is "sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving, or shaking), forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fear for himself and his family."

What's most alarming to Johnson and his colleagues is Bowden's recurring assertion that these tactics, "although excruciating" for the victim, "generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm."

"In fact, they are forms of torture that our clients have reported to us as being much more difficult for them to recover from than the physical pain," Johnson told the Commonwealth Club in a speech CVT's communications director hoped would be on National Public Radio. (It was pre-empted by the now infamous gubernatorial debate in California.) "We know that these do present lasting harm, and can lead to a lifetime of nightmares, depression, and suicidality."

[More]

Dept. of Unlikely Places

Even the NRA occasionally does good things. [via TBogg]

* *

Truth

by Sam Gardiner, Col. USAF (ret.)

 

Truth from These Podia

It was not bad intelligence. It was much more. It was an orchestrated effort. It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions....

In the most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.

My plea is for truth. I believe we have to find ways to restore truth as currency of government in matters as serious as war....it appears as if the issues of this war will become even more important for future wars. We have reason to be concerned.

[More (.pdf)]

--

I'm planning to run a lot of quotes from Col. Gardiner's book. You can read them piecemeal, or you can give in, click on the link, and get a .pdf file of the entire 56-page document. This is must reading if you care about this country and are concerned about what's going on. A lot of effort went into this research and the only payment Gardiner is seeking is a more aware electorate. The fact is, this has been out for a week now and I feel guilty for having been so slow to pick up on the importance of this document. This is definitely worth passing on to your pro-war friends. [download free Adobe Acrobat Reader]

Oh, and Atrios links to another military guy today. Click here for the other (messianic) side of this argument from General William Boykin.

 

Posted by at October 16, 2003 11:12 AM

 

Vote fraud in Georgia?

by Mark Gisleson

Finally sat down and read Andrew Gumbel's "All the President's votes?" in the Independent. This Diebold thing is much more serious than I had realized.

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss....

But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points....

Political analysts credited the upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes around the country - to a huge campaigning push by President Bush in the final days of the race. They also said that Roy Barnes had lost because of a surge of "angry white men" punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the old confederate symbol from the state flag.

But somet