Saudi Prince Bandar Resigns as Ambassador to U.S.

A close friend of the first President Bush, Bandar was at the White House during the 1991 Gulf War, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Ahead of the invasion, Bandar was even called in by the current President Bush to view the attack plans.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry said Bandar - who had held the post for 22 years but had been out of Washington for most of the past year - was stepping down for "personal reasons."

He will be replaced by Prince Turki bin al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence and current ambassador to Britain.

Bandar's resignation coincides with looming changes in Saudi Arabia's ruling hierarchy. King Fahd is seriously ill. Crown Prince Abdullah, who has been de facto ruler during Fahd's long illness and will become king after Fahd's death, is expected to name Prince Sultan - Bandar's father - as the next crown prince.

Sultan is already 76, and how long he might serve is not certain. There are concerns about an eventual fight for the throne among the next generation - the hundreds of grandsons of Saudi founder Abdul Aziz, including Bandar.

Bandar has been rumored to be in line for a top security post in Riyadh.

"What we are seeing is a generational change or the realignment of the family," said Edward S. Walker, president of the Middle East Institute, who has served as American ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel and was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 1999-2001...

Bandar's influence in Washington seemed to wane somewhat in recent years, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. Crown Prince Abdullah had his own foreign policy adviser in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, who seemed to speak more directly for the crown prince and has increasingly become the public face of the kingdom in Washington.

Saudi Prince Bandar Resigns as Ambassador to U.S.

Prince Bandar, Saudi Ambassador to U.S. Steps Down After 22 Years

Thursday, July 21, 2005; Page A02

Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the dean of Washington's diplomatic corps and confidant of presidents both Republican and Democratic over the past 22 years, has resigned and will be replaced by the former head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service.

Bandar, a former air force pilot who came to the job with limited diplomatic experience, ended up as a central player in Washington politics. Famed for his cigars and good-humored confidence that sometimes bordered on audacity, he brokered deals that heavily influenced U.S. policies and cemented American ties to the world's largest oil producer. A Saudi statement cited unspecified personal reasons for the move.


Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan pauses while answering reporters' questions outside of the West Wing of the White House in this Wednesday, April 21, 2004 file photo in Washington. Bandar is resigning for what the Saudi foreign ministry said Wednesday, July 20, 2005 were
Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan. (Charles Dharapak - AP)

In a reflection of his influence, officials in the first Bush administration referred to him as "Top Gun." He had such direct access to presidents and Cabinet members that he could show up at their offices unscheduled and gain entry. He once arrived at the State Department with ten bags of McDonalds hamburgers for a 10 p.m. strategy session -- when top officials had no idea he was coming and were discussing an initiative that was still secret. The current Bush administration reviewed war plans with him before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

His departure comes at a sensitive time because of fears of instability in a country that has become a pillar of U.S. policy and a vital energy source. In yet another scare, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh warned American residents yesterday that militants are planning new terrorist attacks but said it had no details on the target. Saudi security forces announced the discovery of bomb-making materials used in previous al Qaeda attacks. They were found in a hideout south of the capital.

Saudi Arabia also faces political challenges, with King Fahd incapacitated by a stroke and with many senior princes aging. Fahd was hospitalized recently amid signs that the royal family is preparing for a transition to Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler. Bandar's father, the defense minister, is the leading candidate to be crown prince, although he is recovering from stomach cancer, U.S. officials say.

Prince Bandar will be replaced by Prince Turki al Faisal, son of the late King Faisal. He headed Saudi intelligence for 14 years and is the ambassador to Britain. He, too, has long-standing ties to Washington...

Bandar also served as a secret conduit for U.S. messages to top Arab officials, from then-Syrian President Hafez Assad to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, said former assistant secretary of state Edward S. Walker. "He played a role constantly and repeatedly."

The prince was pugnacious on Saudi priorities, such as when he prodded Libya and the United States into a rapprochement neither wanted. During President Bill Clinton's 1998 visit to South Africa, then-President Nelson Mandela pulled the U.S. leader aside for a one-on-one in the next room -- where, unbeknownst to Clinton, Bandar was waiting to press the issue. National security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger was "furious that Bandar had outwitted him" by getting Mandela to help him, Indyk recalled.

Bandar pressured Libya into admitting culpability for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and paying the victims' families. A secret U.S.-Libyan dialogue took place in Bandar's residences in Europe, U.S. officials said.

Bandar, who was the product of his father's liaison with a family slave, had a wily ability to blend Riyadh's wealth and Washington's power for a common end.


Saudi Ambassador to U.S. Steps Down After 22 Years

Bin Laden still commanding attacks - Saudi envoy

LONDON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden is still giving direct orders for al Qaeda attacks, Saudi Arabia's next ambassador to the United States said on Sunday.

Outgoing Saudi ambassador to Britain Prince Turki al-Faisal said some of the most recent attacks attributed to al Qaeda in the oil-rich kingdom had been directly ordered by the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

'Some of the events (attacks) that occurred in the kingdom over the past 2-1/2 years were under the immediate directions of the leadership of al Qaeda, particularly bin Laden,' Turki said in comments broadcast by Reuters Television on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia has been battling a two-year wave of violence by supporters of Saudi-born bin Laden's al Qaeda network, who are trying to drive Westerners out of the world's biggest oil exporter and destabilise the pro-Western ruling family.

Many top militants have been killed or captured and the pace of attacks has slowed, but Western diplomats say the threat remains.

There has been an ongoing debate over how much direct control bin Laden exercises over al Qaeda since a U.S.-led international effort to capture him and his top lieutenants began in 2001 after the attacks on the United States.

Turki said some al Qaeda groups operated autonomously because they were in places where it was difficult to communicate with al Qaeda's central command.

'In such cases, it is left to those in charge of those networks to decide when, how and where to take their measures,' Turki said.

Turki's former role as Saudi foreign intelligence chief brought him into contact with bin Laden when both the United States and Saudi Arabia were supporting Arab mujahideen (freedom fighters) fighting Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan.

The prince later tried but failed to persuade Afghanistan's Taliban rulers to hand bin Laden back to Saudi Arabia, a failure diplomats believe led him to leave his job just 10 days before the September 11 attacks.

Turki is due to take over as Saudi ambassador to the United States from Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who enjoyed unrivalled access to the very top of U.S. political power.

Bandar, who resigned in mid-July, is a friend of the Bush family and used his close White House contacts to weather the storm after the 2001 strikes on New York and Washington by mainly Saudi hijackers.

International news from swissinfo, the Swiss news platform

Informed Comment: London Bombings: State of Play

Juan Cole blogs:

Somalian-British Osman Hussein, captured in Rome. He was traced using his cell phone!

The use of two distinct ethnic networks for the two operational cells was an excellent way to throw the police off the trail and prepare the way for the July 21 bombings. The police would have been looking at British/Pakistani networks after the first bombing. The question of what ties the two networks together is the real question. It would only be necessary that the two operational cell leaders-- say Muhammad Sidique Khan and Yasin Hassan Omar-- knew a third person. Or that they each had a handler who knew the third person.



Informed Comment

Informed Comment: US military base near Fallujah takes mortar fire, no peep from the press

You're not allowed to blog about the Iraq War critically if you are an active duty serviceman over there. This is why we know so little about what is really going on. Few will risk reporting on the reality while Don Rumsfeld wants boosterism and cheerleading.

I reported a few days ago that a US military base near Fallujah had taken mortar fire. Aljazeerah even had film showing damage to a building as US troops standing around. I noted that the wire services and other reporters appeared to have ignored the story. I heard from a relative of someone serving in Fallujah, who said that all the bases around there take mortar fire so frequently that it has become a big yawn for the troops. Now, since march the US military has conducted a vigorous propaganda campaign proclaiming how nice post-invasion Fallujah is, how life has returned to normal, with bustling traffic and trade, and how it is the safest city in Iraq. While some quarters may in fact have gotten back to a semblance of normality, not all the city has, and the area isn't safe, just as Anbar province in general is not. The reason we don't know more about the real situation is that the troops are being forbidden to tell us about it. Most of what they could reveal would not in fact endanger the US military. But it would endanger the propaganda and black psy-ops campaigns being run on us by the civilians in the Department of Defense

Informed Comment

BBC: Iraq's descent into bombing quagmire

By John Simpson
BBC world affairs editor

Here in Baghdad, it's beginning to feel like a critical moment.

Scene of a suicide bombing in Mussayib, Iraq
A tanker bomb killed nearly 100 people in Musayyib
In the last week this city has seen 22 car bombs, with 10 on a single day - last Friday. Not far from Baghdad, at Musayyib, between Hilla and Karbala, nearly 100 Shia Muslims were killed.

The shadowy resistance movements seem to be operating on a new and much more ambitious level.

Last summer, and in the summer of 2003, there were similar peaks, though much lower ones: The ferocious heat seems to produce new reserves of anger and violence here.

As I flew in, sitting in the aircraft cockpit, Baghdad lay dark and irregular, like a blotch of ink, straight ahead of us. Below lay the ribbon of road from the south.

In the months after the US-led invasion of Iraq we used to drive up that road to get to Baghdad. By the beginning of 2004 that was already becoming much too dangerous, and we had to fly.

Notorious road

The pilots looked at each other, and the plane went into a fierce dive, down towards the military airfield on the south-west of the ink-blotch.

We straightened out, then banked so steeply to the left that everything loose skidded across the cockpit floor. Then a sudden turn, equally heart-wrenching, in the other direction.

During the hour-long flight the pilots scarcely spoke to me. Ever since an RAF Hercules went down north of Baghdad, six months ago, air crews have concentrated totally on the job of getting their planes in safely.

The plane door opened, and we clambered out. The air was as hot as an electric heater: 50C, even in the late afternoon.

The sun glared down angrily through the haze, reddish and inflamed like a nasty wound.


On average as many people are now dying here every day as were killed in the London bombings

Ahead of us lay the most dangerous stretch of road in the world: the highway from Baghdad to the airport. Two car bombs had just been discovered along it.

Another change since I was last here, a few months ago: the Iraqi national police were out in force along the road, stopping cars of particular makes, and particular colours; that's how they found the two car bombs before they went off.

Yet the greater numbers of police haven't stopped the bombers; on the contrary, they have given the bombers a new target - the police checkpoints themselves.

I visit Baghdad at least four times a year, to see how things are developing. Since the fall of Saddam in May 2003, and the capture of Baghdad, after which major operations were declared over, I have been here eleven times.

Each time the security situation has been markedly worse than the time before.

'Endless' bombers

Briefly, after the election in January, which brought an Iraqi government to power, things seemed to improve; then, after some weeks of fewer bombs and fewer deaths, the level of attacks rose again.

Now it is higher than it has been at any time since May 2003. The supply of suicide bombers seems endless.

Two separate campaigns appear to be going on: the Baathist resistance movement which Saddam Hussein planned and provided vast stocks of weapons and money for, is targeting the Iraqi army and police, and to a lesser extent the American and British forces.

An Iraqi soldier points his rifle at a driver at a checkpoint
Iraqi checkpoints have become targets for bombers

As far as anyone can tell, this is the larger and better equipped of the two main underground movements.

The other is the extremist religious movement headed (we assume) by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which announced last year that it was associating itself with al-Qaeda. Foreign Muslims in sizeable numbers have come into the country to support it.

Intelligence officials in Baghdad say this group gives the appearance of being more active, because it apparently has a policy of claiming responsibility for major attacks whether or not it has actually carried them out.

But to be honest, who does what is largely a matter of guesswork.

'Civil war'

Someone, though, is deliberately targeting Shia Muslims. Last Friday's attack in Musayyib was carried out by a suicide bomber driving a hijacked petrol tanker. It exploded outside the Shia mosque.

Both of the main streams of resistance, the Baathists and the supporters of al-Qaeda, are predominantly Sunni, and both seem to believe that they will benefit if the security crisis here turns into an outright civil war between Shias and Sunnis.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iraq's descent into bombing quagmire

"There is NO god here"

Not me, from someone else online, who shall remain nameless -- law

Having listened in on a flashback my brother was having during his recovery (thanks to the maximum amount possible of morphine they gave him), the war weighs very heavily on many of those who return home.

Only occassionally do we ever talk about how the war has scarred him. In a moment of complete honesty and self-loathing my brother told me there was no way to redeem his soul. There was nothing he could do to make up for the hundreds of lives he took, though he was pretty sure that 98% of his kills were insurgents. His nightmares are of his buddies re-dying in his arms or his own death and the relief it is. He talked about the terror he feels in being with loved ones and bringing them into his twisted world. He worries that he might snap, like other men have done. The fact that he is concerned about it shows me he retains his soul, no matter how tarnished he believes it to be. But since then he has never spoken of it again. And I wait for him, in case he needs me to listen..... And fear that after his recovery, they will re-deploy him back into a living nightmare.

Like many of the current and returning warriors he has a macho image to maintain. They do not talk about the nightmares, the anquish, and the guilt they have shouldered. It is is not the 'manly' thing to do. So, like my brother, they keep up the facade of normalacy and bravado. And I would guess that even with an annonymous survey, they would be relucant to admit to themselves where they really are mentally. Like refusing to see the elephant under the rug because then you'd have to figure out how to get it out of the front door.

My friend in the Army says "There is NO god here", not the one worshiped by the Muslims or by the Christians. He says it is truly god-forsaken and without hope. I would say that comments such as these are made to friends and family more honestly than to surveyors.....

With soldiers making statements like this, how high could morale really be?

Troop morale in Iraq hits 'rock bottom' | csmonitor.com

Specials > Iraq in Transition
from the July 07, 2003 edition

Troop morale in Iraq hits 'rock bottom'
Soldiers stress is a key concern as the Army ponders whether to send more forces.
By Ann Scott Tyson | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – US troops facing extended deployments amid the danger, heat, and uncertainty of an Iraq occupation are suffering from low morale that has in some cases hit "rock bottom."

Even as President Bush speaks of a "massive and long-term" undertaking in rebuilding Iraq, that effort, as well as the high tempo of US military operations around the globe, is taking its toll on individual troops.


Related stories
08/01/2005
Iraq constitution may be delayed
more stories...




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Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.

In some units, there has been an increase in letters from the Red Cross stating soldiers are needed at home, as well as daily instances of female troops being sent home due to pregnancy.

"Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom," said another soldier, an officer from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq.

Such open grumbling among troops comes as US commanders reevaluate the size and composition of the US-led coalition force needed to occupy Iraq. US Central Command, which is leading the occupation, is expected by mid-July to send a proposal to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on how many and what kind of troops are required, as well as on the rotation of forces there.

For soldiers, a life on the road

The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.

Experts warn that long, frequent deployments could lead to a rash of departures from the military. "Hordes of active-duty troops and reservists may soon leave the service rather than subject themselves to a life continually on the road," writes Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution here.

A major Army study is now under way to examine the impact of this high pace of operations on the mental health of soldiers and families. "The cumulative effect of these work hours and deployment and training are big issues, and soldiers are concerned about it," says Col. Charles Hoge, who is leading the survey of 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers for the Walter Reed Institute of Army Research.

Concern over stressed troops is not new. In the late 1990s, a shrinking of military manpower combined with a rise in overseas missions prompted Congress to call for sharp pay increases for troops deployed over a certain number of days.

"But then came September 11 and the operational tempo went off the charts" and the Congressional plan was suspended, according to Ed Bruner, an expert on ground forces at the Congressional Research Service here.

Adding manpower to the region

Despite Pentagon statements before the war that the goal of US forces was to "liberate, not occupy" Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld warned last week that the war against terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere "will not be over any time soon."

Currently, there are some 230,000 US troops serving in and around Iraq, including nearly 150,000 US troops inside Iraq and 12,000 from Britain and other countries. According to the Pentagon, the number of foreign troops is expected to rise to 20,000 by September. Fresh foreign troops began flowing into Iraq this month, part of two multinational forces led by Poland and Britain. A third multinational force is also under consideration.

A crucial factor in determining troop levels are the daily attacks that have killed more than 30 US and British servicemen in Iraq since Mr. Bush declared on May 1 that major combat operations had ended.

The unexpected degree of resistance led the Pentagon to increase US ground troops in Iraq to mount a series of ongoing raids aimed at confiscating weapons and capturing opposition forces.

A tour of duty with no end in sight

As new US troops flowed into Iraq, others already in the region for several months, such as the 20,000-strong 3rd Infantry Division were retained in Iraq.

"Faced with continued resistance, Department of Defense now plans to keep a larger force in Iraq than anticipated for a period of time," Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, explained in a statement to families a month ago. "I appreciate the turmoil and stress that a continued deployment has caused," he added.

The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.

Security threats, heat, harsh living conditions, and, for some soldiers, waiting and boredom have gradually eroded spirits. An estimated 9,000 troops from the 3rd Infantry Division - most deployed for at least six months and some for more than a year - have been waiting for several weeks, without a mission, to return to the United States, officers say.

In one Army unit, an officer described the mentality of troops. "They vent to anyone who will listen. They write letters, they cry, they yell. Many of them walk around looking visibly tired and depressed.... We feel like pawns in a game that we have no voice [in]."


Troop morale in Iraq hits 'rock bottom' | csmonitor.com

U.S. Soldiers in Iraq Report Low Morale - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - A majority of U.S. soldiers in Iraq say morale is low, according to an Army report that finds psychological stress is weighing particularly heavily on National Guard and Reserve troops.

Still, soldiers' mental health has improved from the early months of the insurgency, and suicides have declined sharply, the report said. Also, substantially fewer soldiers had to be evacuated from Iraq for mental health problems last year. The Army sent a team of mental health specialists to Iraq and Kuwait late last summer to assess conditions and measure progress in implementing programs designed to fix mental health problems discovered during a similar survey of troops a year earlier. Its report, dated Jan. 30, 2005, was released Wednesday.

The initial inquiry was triggered in part by an unusual surge in suicides among soldiers in Iraq in July 2003. Wednesday's report said the number of suicides in Iraq and Kuwait declined from 24 in 2003 to nine last year.

A suicide prevention program was begun for soldiers in Iraq at the recommendation of the 2003 assessment team.

The overall assessment said 13 percent of soldiers in the most recent study screened positive for a mental health problem, compared with 18 percent a year earlier. Symptoms of acute or post-traumatic stress remained the top mental health problem, affecting at least 10 percent of all soldiers checked in the latest survey.

In the anonymous survey, 17 percent of soldiers said they had experienced moderate or severe stress or problems with alcohol, emotions or their families. That compares with 23 percent a year earlier.

The report said reasons for the improvement in mental health are not clear. Among possible explanations: less frequent and less intense combat, more comforts like air conditioning, wider access to mental health services and improved training in handling the stresses associated with deployments and combat.

National Guard and Reserve soldiers who serve in transportation and support units suffered more than others from depression, anxiety and other indications of acute psychological stress, the report said. These soldiers have often been targets of the insurgents' lethal ambushes and roadside bombs, although the report said they had significantly fewer actual combat experiences than soldiers assigned to combat units.

The report recommended that the Army reconsider whether National Guard and Reserve support troops are getting adequate training in combat skills. Even though they do less fighting than combat troops, they might be better suited to cope with wartime stress if they had more confidence in their combat skills, it said.

U.S. Soldiers in Iraq Report Low Morale - Yahoo! News

I formally renounce my vote for Bush...

But I ain't no Liberal!

It's up in the air until 2008.

Stephen


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

What about you neocon ? If a NRA member can do it, why can't you ? What are you waiting for ? WW 4 ? -- law

--------------------
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank
and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake,
since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice."
-- Albert Einstein

Common Ground Common Sense

From CA to Indiana - Rove editorials

I'm loving it ! (tm) -- law
Online Café _ From CA to Indiana - Rove editorial
Posted by: Indianhead Jul 31 2005, 12:15 AM

Before I hit the sack (check the post time)
I just had to share one more thing....

http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/thisday/opinion.20050730-sbt-MICH-A10-Operation_coverup.sto

From South Bend (Indiana) Tribune

July 30, 2005


Operation coverup
ANOTHER OPINION

From The Los Angeles Times

Scandals metastasize. That is the pattern since Watergate. What starts out looking like a small, isolated incident gradually reveals itself to be part of a larger abuse of power. Meanwhile, an unraveling coverup adds new elements. Is that happening now with the scandal over White House leaks of the identity of a CIA agent?

Some folks say that as we learn more, the scandal is getting smaller, not larger. Valerie Plame was a CIA functionary commuting openly to agency headquarters, not a spy working behind enemy lines. The law against revealing the identities of intelligence agents is complicated and probably wasn't broken in this case. And the story line gets muddier: Journalists may have revealed Plame's identity to White House honchos.

We don't buy it. However they came to learn about this juicy factoid, people in the Bush administration misused an intelligence secret to discredit a critic of its Iraq policy. And outing Plame, whether illegal or not, did harm to our national security.

It's a good bet that there has already been some lying under oath. One theory about the puzzling tenacity and ferocity of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is that he's switched his attention from the leak itself to perjury by White House officials who were asked about it earlier in the investigation.

President Bush says he won't publicly comment about the Plame case while the investigation continues. But the reason the investigation continues is partly his fault. He should have determined early on who leaked Plame's CIA identity to members of the press, and dealt with it.

Why didn't Bush two years ago just ask Karl Rove and a few others in the administration whether they had leaked Plame's identity to Bob Novak and the others? Why doesn't he ask Rove now? Is it because he knows the answer? Or because he doesn't want to have to fire Rove?

The coverup, in short, is going well.
............

41 ran his war very well, knew when
to hit and when to git...as former CIA I believe he
was mortified when the political baby boomers blew
Valerie's cover.

Ya know they say the acorn don't fall far from the tree...
there must have been a hurricane blowin' when GW was born.

Now that he's big and he's such a failure, he must feel
like a crashing load on The House of Bush.



Common Ground Common Sense Board

My Left Wing :: A Liberal Translation

Maryscott's frontpager Bonddad frontpaged my diary today. Weee!!!! -- law

2006 Voting Guidelines (2): NOT secure enough for a post 9/11 world
by: lawnorder
July 31, 2005 at 14:50:06 America/Los_Angeles
(According to the Left Wing Manifesto "Not only am I FOR it, I hereby declare that if you're a Democrat, Independent, Green, Libertarian, progressive, liberal or just an honest Republican and you don't consider mandating transparency and consistency in all voting procedures nationwide to be the Number One Item on the agenda of the Democratic Party, to say nothing of Democracy itself, then you are either ignorant, deluded or an asshole.

Voting reform is usually an issue after an election, not during the period between elections. It is therefore important to find a way to bring this very important issue into the public dialog at a time when most people don't want to talk about it. I think this diary makes a solid connection between security and establishing voting standards and provides a viable strategy to frame voting standards in a way the public can get behind. - promoted by Bonddad)

No fraud happened in 2004
Not for you guys, for the gun shy kossacks who break in hives every time they hear the word Diebold
Bush won fair and square. Kerry was correct to concede. Electronic voting was not used in all precincts. We lost the election because of values, gays, deaniacs, feminazis, Moveon, Greenpeace, Nader... take your pick. But we were not cheated. There is absolutely no proof of cheating.


There. I said it. Can we move on now ? Can we be proactive and DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE PITIFUL VOTING TECHNOLOGY WE HAVE ? Can we ignore the tinfoil elephant in the room and forget fraud for a minute ?


On June 24, 2005, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) for public comment. If adopted, the guidelines will become effective in October 2006.


Our current voting system is NOT secure enough for a post 9/11 world

The current voluntary standard is from 1990 and predates palm pilots, wireless computing, the World Wide Web and Al Qaeda terrorism


Please review and comment the 2006 standards
Diaries :: There's More... :: (3 Comments, 1020 words in story)
(+) Bush's Middle Class Squeeze
by: Bonddad
July 31, 2005 at 12:17:47 America/Los_Angeles



Lest I let the impression that I am somehow not aware of the problems facing the US middle class, I present this diary. It is a compilation of numerous posts I have made over the last 6 months which highlight the incredibly difficult problems faced by America’s middle class, largely as a result of Bush’s policies. In short, the middle class is getting fucked half a million different ways and there is no end in sight. It is a problem I have documented in extensive detail....

My Left Wing :: A Liberal Translation

TIME.com: When They Knew -- Aug. 08, 2005

Rove is in the hot seat along with Powell

As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration. That prospect increases the chances that White House official Karl Rove and others learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from media contacts. Rove has told investigators he believes he learned of her directly or indirectly from reporters, according to his lawyer.

The previously undisclosed fact gathering began in the first week of June 2003 at the CIA, when its public-affairs office received an inquiry about Wilson's trip to Africa from veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. That office then contacted Plame's unit, which had sent Wilson to Niger, but stopped short of drafting an internal report. The same week, Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman asked for and received a memo on the Wilson trip from Carl Ford, head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Sources familiar with the memo, which disclosed Plame's relationship to Wilson, say Secretary of State Colin Powell read it in mid-June. Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage may have received a copy then too.

When Pincus' article ran on June 12, the circle of senior officials who knew about the identity of Wilson's wife expanded. "After Pincus," a former intelligence officer says, "there was general discussion with the National Security Council and the White House and State Department and others" about Wilson's trip and its origins. A source familiar with the memo says neither Powell nor Armitage spoke to the White House about it until after July 6. John McLaughlin, then deputy head of the CIA, confirms that the White House asked about the Wilson trip, but can't remember exactly when. One thing he's sure of, says McLaughlin, who has been interviewed by prosecutors, is that "we looked into it and found the facts of it, and passed it on." --By Massimo Calabresi. With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Michael Duffy and Viveca Novak
From the Aug. 08, 2005 issue of TIME magazine

Related Stories From The TIME ARCHIVE
* Leaking With A Vengeance Did someone in the Bush Administration unmask a CIA spy to punish her husband for challenging the case for war? A classic tale of whispers, retribution and rivalries [10/13/2003]
* Anatomy Of A Leak Reports that Iraq was buying African uranium sparked Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger, his wife's exposure as a covert agent and a bitter fight between the White House and the CIA. [10/13/2003]
* The Rove Problem Did Bush's top aide commit a crime talking to reporters about a spy? Here's what the case is really about--and why it grows more fascinating [7/17/2005]

TIME.com: When They Knew -- Aug. 08, 2005

Daily Kos: WaPo Page One: World Not Set To Deal With Bird Flu

crossposted to The Next Hurrah

Regular readers of TNH [and Daily Kos] will note a familiar theme on page one of the Washington Post:

World Not Set To Deal With Flu

Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades -- the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia -- is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.
It in Russian birds, now. And that, btw, means Europe.

The public, conditioned to believe in the power of modern medicine, has heard little of how poorly prepared the world is to confront a flu pandemic, which is an epidemic that strikes several continents simultaneously and infects a substantial portion of the population.

Since the current wave of avian flu began sweeping through poultry in Southeast Asia more than 18 months ago, international and U.S. health authorities have been warning of the danger and trying to mobilize. Research on vaccines has accelerated, efforts to build up drug supplies are underway, and discussions take place regularly on developing a coordinated global response.

Daily Kos: WaPo Page One: World Not Set To Deal With Bird Flu

The Meaning of the S Word

Taoism: Shit happens.
Buddism: Shit happens because of desire.
Zen: What is the sound of shit happening?
Confusianism: Confusius says: 'Shit happens.'
Islam: If shit happens, it's because Allah willed it.
Catholism: If shit hsppens, it's because you deserve it.
Protestantism: Shit happens because we're being punished.
Hinduism: This shit happened before.
Judaism: Why does shit always happen to us?
Christian Science: There is no shit.
Exhistenitalism: Shit happens & then you die.
New Agers: You needed to have this shit in your life. Learn the lesson it has to teach. Now visualize it away.
Quadrinity Process: Shit happens, re-cycle it.
Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this shit!

Bushianity: Shit happened. It's Clinton's fault.

Religion :: Religion"

Lizardman skeleton

Ewwwwww!!!! Photoshop, fake skeleton or what ? -- law

This picture below was taken this morning near the
Safaniya beach in the eastern province. Aramco
security & industrial security force are debating
as to whether to issue a warring close the beach or
do nothing and assist in man power control
investigation resulted that there are more than
3500 for this kind of human-animal in the tanajib
area. It is 25 years since last time it was seen in
the tanajib area."



Religion :: Religion

U.S.: Blackout Shows America's Infrastructure Vulnerable To Terrorists

The massive blackout that crippled the northeastern United States last week may have been caused by human or mechanical error, but security analysts say the next one could be an act of terror -- and that the U.S. government must act now to protect its electrical infrastructure.

Washington, 18 August 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Everyone agrees that the power failure that blacked out more than 240,000 square kilometers of the United States and Canada last week should not have happened.

But it did, and security analysts say it can happen again -- next time perhaps with the help of terrorists.

Even before all the power was restored to the state of New York, its governor, George Pataki, expressed incredulity at the massive collapse in electrical service on 14 August. At a news conference in New York City, Pataki said: "It is 2003 and there is no reason why most of the Northeast, a lot of the Midwest, cascading through Canada, should have this type of systemic power failure. We were told after the blackouts in the '60s and then in the '70s that it wasn't going to happen again and, in fact, I'm advised this is the largest blackout the country has ever experienced."

Pataki should not be surprised. The United States electrical grid is old and notoriously poorly maintained. And yet the country's electrical system must provide warmth in the winter and cool air in the summer in a country that is subject to temperature extremes greater than those experienced in much of Europe.

The recent heat wave in Europe brought high temperatures in the mid-30s Celsius. Many Europeans are not accustomed to such heat, and as a result rely much less frequently on air conditioners. But such temperatures are common in many parts of the United States during the summer, and as a result, air conditioning is far more common in American offices, shops, and homes.

The country's electrical grid system can run energy-hungry air conditioners, along with lights and other ubiquitous appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, and microwave ovens. But only barely.

Unexpected blackouts are not uncommon in the United States, nor are so-called "brownouts" -- targeted electrical service reductions due to a power shortage or excessive use by consumers. But never has there been a blackout in North America that covered so wide an area or affected so many people.

When subways and elevators stopped, when air conditioners went silent, when televisions blinked off from the center of the country to the Atlantic Ocean, many people wondered if the blackout was a coordinated terrorist attack on America's infrastructure.

Quickly it became clear that the cause was likely more benign, but the very fact of the blackout opens a new opportunity for sabotage, according to Jamie Metzl, the coordinator for homeland security programs at the Council on Foreign Relations, a private policy research center in New York.

U.S.: Blackout Shows America's Infrastructure Vulnerable To Terrorists

Major Religions Ranked by Size

# Christianity: 2.1 billion
# Islam: 1.3 billion
# Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
# Hinduism: 900 million
# Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
# Buddhism: 376 million
# primal-indigenous: 300 million
# African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
# Sikhism: 23 million
# Juche: 19 million
# Spiritism: 15 million
# Judaism: 14 million
# Baha'i: 7 million
# Jainism: 4.2 million
# Shinto: 4 million
# Cao Dai: 4 million
# Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
# Tenrikyo: 2 million
# Neo-Paganism: 1 million
# Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
# Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
# Scientology: 500 thousand



Major Religions Ranked by Size

Books: Unholy Alliance : Radical Islam and the American Left

Hitler would be proud of his disciples -- law

all too true, March 10, 2005
Reviewer: Albert Lee (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews
This is a brillant book by Horowitz. He clearly shows that
liberalism, old-europe socialism and Islamic terrorism have
the same intellectual basis and the same goals. That goal
being the destruction of America and its culture of Freedom.

His well-researched book shows that the ACLU, NAACP and other
liberal groups are nothing more than fronts for the support of
Islamic terrorism. The liberals give the terrorists their ideas,
then send them out to attack, protect them after and then run
propoganda campaigns in free countries telling us we have no
choice but to surrender to the terrorists demands.

This opened my eyes to something else. The fall of communism
in the soviet union didn't end the war. It only drove the
enemies of freedom into deep cover. The war on America,
its values, its freedom, its culture and its special place
of moral authority in the world continues by other means.

Horowitz shows that we need to open new fronts in the great
war on terrorism. We not only need to get the terrorists in
their caves, but put an end to their ideological base within
free countries. We need higher education reform, a law to
go after not just financial support for terror, but intellectual
support of it as well by front organizations like those shown
by Horowitz. We also must clean up the law by first removing
the judges that support evil and then creating a system of
ethical standards for the legal profession to eliminate the
idea that any tactic is allowed under the law to free the guilty.
A lawyer who enters false pleas of innocence or defends someone
who they know to be guilty should be driven from the practice
of law.

Amazon.com: Books: Unholy Alliance : Radical Islam and the American Left

Books: In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power

IN THE PATH OF GOD is a reprinting of the 1983 edition that came out during the Reagan era. Following its initial publication reviewers noted its hostility towards Islam and Muslims. One such reviewer observed in the Washington Post (12/11/83) that Pipes reveals "a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims [...] he professes respect for Muslims, but is frequently contemptuous of them." The writer went on to add that Pipes "is swayed by the writings of anti-Muslim writers," and that his book "is marred by exaggerations, inconsistencies, and evidence of hostility to the subject."

Not much of the content has changed in this latest publication. The important distinction that Pipes has more recently been drawing between "Islamism" (the political ideology) and "Islam" (the religion) is more or less absent from this work.

The shortcomings of the earlier work remain. One can't help to wonder whether anyone could write about Judaism or Christianity with the same liberty that Pipes gives himself with Islam. His arguments, unfortunately, are deceptively convincing on the surface, until further scrutiny.

What is one to make, for example, of Pipes's categorization of Westerners who have a favorable view of Islam as either those "who feel ill at ease in the West," or as "apologists...[who] promote Islam for profit" (pp. 14-15)? This is a sweeping generalization, and it is unfortunate that a self-proclaimed intellectual of his stature can resort to such a gross and binary simplification. His train of thought implies that no one can be an adherent of mainstream Western values and at the same time admire Islam. This mindset would presume that such respectable scholars of Islam, such as Charles Butterworth, Michael Sells, and Jane McAullife, to name a few, who often speak highly of Islam, are either achieving a personal gain by doing so or are "ill at ease" in their own societies.

The book is also marred by numerous errors. But the problem is not so much the errors as it is the kinds of errors one finds, and what they show us about the ideological nature of his scholarship. For example, in chapter 4 Pipes claims that "Muhammad abrogated the treaty [with the pagans] and captured Mecca." This is false. Any historian will tell you that it was the Koreish (then the pagan enemies of Muhammad) who launched an offensive onslaught against an ally of the Prophet, thus abrogating the treaty. Pipes's claim that Muhammad abrogated the treaty to capture Mecca presents the Prophet of Islam as a crude liar and conniving leader.

His ignorance of Muslim theology comes out when he claims the Koran falsely implies the Trinity to consist of Mary, Jesus, and the Father (p. 78). The Koran only presents a scenario of Judgment Day in which Jesus will deny having called people to worship him and Mary (5:116). Infact, there was a sect known as the Maryamites in early history that actually worshipped Mary. Had Pipes examined the verse, its commentaries, and the Near and Middle Eastern historical and theological context in which the Koran emerged, he would not have put forth the argument so hastily. But perhaps that would be making too much of a demand on someone already intent on showing us how the Sacred Text of Islam has it all wrong.

Some of his historical mistakes are simply embarrassing, coming as they are from someone who holds a PhD in Islamic history. "They [Shi'i Muslims] recognize as valid," he writes, "only the third of those first four caliphs, Ali ibn Abi Talib." Ali ibn Abi Talib was the fourth caliph, not the third, a fact that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Islamic history should be familiar with. To use Bernard Lewis's words in another context, "This would be rather like putting the English Civil War before the Normal Conquest. Although no doubt irrelevant to the main issue, this procedure would not inspire confidence in the writer's ability to evaluate work on English [read: Islamic ] history" (p109, Islam and the West).

Athough IN THE PATH OF GOD has been widely praised by non-specialists since its publication 20 years ago, it has hardly been used by academics who are actually familiar with the territory, and who are able to detect the politically charged nature of his writing, which presents itself as disinterested scholarship but which actually distorts the subject. Only those experts who share the one-sided political leanings of this author utilize and recommend his works.

Amazon.com: Books: In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power

Daily Kos: CIA supressing new book about Tora Bora

When Bin Laden slipped through Bush & Rummies fingers.. Never to be caught again -- law

CIA supressing new book about Tora Bora
by topdog08
Sat Jul 30th, 2005 at 19:36:27 CDT

Did you see this article? We've got to keep the focus on this story, until the truth comes out. Bush and Co have convinced the media to ignore investigating what really happened at Tora Bora in 2001 for too long. Don't let this slip by.



WASHINGTON (AP) -- The CIA is squelching publication of a new book detailing events leading up to Osama bin Laden's escape from his Tora Bora mountain stronghold during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, says a former CIA officer who led much of the fighting. In a story he says he resigned from the agency to tell, Gary Berntsen recounts the attacks he coordinated at the peak of the fighting in eastern Afghanistan in late 2001, including how U.S. commanders knew bin Laden was in the rugged mountains near the Pakistani border and the al-Qaeda leader's much-discussed getaway....

During the 2004 election, President Bush and other senior administration officials repeatedly said that commanders did not know whether bin Laden was at Tora Bora when U.S. and allied Afghan forces attacked there in 2001.


* topdog08's diary :: ::
*


They rejected allegations by Sen. John Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee, that the United States had missed an opportunity to capture or kill bin Laden because they had "outsourced" the fighting to Afghan warlords.

"When I watched the presidential debates, it was clear to me ... the debate and discussions on Tora Bora were -- from both sides -- completely incorrect," said Berntsen, who won't provide details until the agency finishes declassifying his book. "It did not represent the reality of what happened on the ground."

A Republican and avid Bush supporter, Berntsen, 48, retired in June and hasn't spoken publicly before.


UPDATE: You can already pre-order it for October 18th.

It covers his role handling the agency's response to al-Qaeda's 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. And the book continues through late 2001 when he was assigned to command a CIA team inserted into Afghanistan, code-named "Jawbreaker" — the title of his book, tentatively due out in October.

Daily Kos: CIA supressing new book about Tora Bora

Don't you miss the years when Democrats were in charge of the Senate ?

If I was writing an ad for Democrats -- law

Don't you miss the years when Democrats were in charge of the Senate ?
True balance. Respect for different views. Keeping what's good for the country above partisanship. Honor even with opponents. Not everything goes. Admitting errors and correcting them...

When was the last time you saw GOP doing any of the above ? Isn't this the way your mom raised you ? Do you think she was wrong ?

The next sentences may be too much.. -- law

Why would you accept the complete opposite from your government ?

Vote Democrat. For our founding fathers. For the future. Our country depends on it.

Daily Kos :: Comments The Wolves Among Us

Daily Kos: More Bad Environmental News: Arctic Sea Ice Melting

More Bad Environmental News: Arctic Sea Ice Melting
by Steven D [Subscribe]
Sat Jul 30th, 2005 at 15:45:12 CDT

(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page)

And its melting at a greater rate than ever before in history:

Satellite data for the month of June show Arctic sea ice has shrunk to a record low, raising concerns about climate change, coastal erosion, and changes to wildlife patterns.

Not only that, but 2005 is on pace to become the hottest year in recorded history.

A weak El Nino and human-made greenhouse gases could make 2005 the warmest year since records started being kept in the late 1800s, NASA scientists said this week.

More on the Great Arctic Melt Off after the break . . .

Daily Kos: More Bad Environmental News: Arctic Sea Ice Melting

BBC: Saudi police 'stopped' fire rescue of unveiled girls

Saudi Arabia's religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.

In a rare criticism of the kingdom's powerful "mutaween" police, the Saudi media has accused them of hindering attempts to save 15 girls who died in the fire on Monday.

About 800 pupils were inside the school in the holy city of Mecca when the tragedy occurred.

Saudi hospital staff carry a victim of the girl school fire to an ambulance in Mecca
15 girls died in the blaze and more than 50 others were injured
According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam.

One witness said he saw three policemen "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya".

The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the police - known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice - had stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned "it is a sinful to approach them".

The father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out.

BBC News | MIDDLE EAST | Saudi police 'stopped' fire rescue

SBS - The World News

Reports have emerged that Iraqi women held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison were raped by both US and Iraqi jailers, according to human rights groups, following the reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US troops there.

However coalition spokesman Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt said the prisons department is unaware of any such reports at Abu Ghraib, and the reports have not been confirmed.

The International Occupation Watch Centre, an NGO that gathers information on human rights abuses under coalition rule, said one former detainee has told of the alleged rape of her cellmate.

"She claimed she had been raped 17 times...

SBS - The World News

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS: IRAQI WOMEN RAPED AT ABU GHRAIB JAIL

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS: IRAQI WOMEN RAPED AT ABU GHRAIB JAIL
By Rouba Kabbara

May 29, 2004 – (Middle East Online) Iraqi women who were held at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad have complained of rape by both US and Iraqi jailers, according to human rights groups citing alleged victims. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, chief military spokesman for the US-led coalition in Iraq, told AFP the prisons department was "unaware of any such reports at Abu Ghraib," and the cases were not confirmed first-hand by AFP. Kimmitt said there were at present no female prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which has become notorious after evidence of abuse of male inmates by US military police guards.According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Abu Ghraib held some 30 women in October last year.According to the prison management, there were five at the beginning of this month.

Iman Khamas, head of the International Occupation Watch Center, a non-governmental organisation which gathers information on human rights abuses under coalition rule, said one former detainee had recounted the alleged rape of her cellmate in Abu Ghraib. According to Khamas, the prisoner said her cellmate had been rendered unconscious for 48 hours. "She claimed she had been raped 17 times in one day by Iraqi police in the presence of American soldiers." Mohammed Daham al-Mohammed said the Iraqi group he heads, the Union of Detainees and Prisoners, had been told of a mother of four, arrested in December, who killed herself after being raped by US guards in front of her husband at Abu Ghraib. The account came from the woman's sister who said she had helped in the suicide. According to the sister, the woman had told of "being taken into a cell where she saw her husband attached to the bars."..

Kimmitt said the "total present female criminal population" in Iraq stood at 78, but there were none at Abu Ghraib. While the coalition prisons department was "unaware" of reports of rape at Abu Ghraib, "there have been reports of abuses by Iraqi police in their jails," he said. A spokeswoman for Amnesty International said the London-based human rights group had not received any such reports of rape, and added that the closed nature of Iraqi society made them very difficult to verify.

From: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=10096

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS: IRAQI WOMEN RAPED AT ABU GHRAIB JAIL

One Hundred Twelve Women Assaulted in Iraq, Afghanistan

May 18, 2004 - The US serviceman waited outside the latrine and hit the woman on the back of the head as she exited, knocking her unconscious. He tied her hands with cord, blindfolded her, cut her clothes off with a knife, stuffed her underwear in her mouth and proceeded to rape her. When she regained consciousness and began to resist, he threatened to rape her with the knife instead. He hit her in the head again, this time forcefully between the eyes, again causing her to lose consciousness. When she came to she was transported to another facility where she was interrogated for three hours. She received no medical treatment for her head injuries. For the first few days following the rape she was housed with another woman; she was subsequently left in isolation for an extended period. Her requests for religious counsel were denied.

Sound like the latest exposé from Abu Ghraib? Guess again. It’s just one of the more than 100 incidents of rape, sexual assault and other forms of sexual misconduct reported in the past 18 months by U.S. women soldiers currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been sexually assaulted by fellow U.S. soldiers.

The military’s response to these victims has been grossly inadequate. Many victims did not receive even the most basic medical care– emergency contraception, rape evidence kits, testing for sexually transmitted infections, prophylactic treatment or testing for HIV, and rape crisis counseling are not consistently available. Military personnel lack even common-sense sensitivity as to how to respond to rape trauma; one mental health counselor cleared an Army sergeant who had just been raped to go out on missions again, feeling it would be good for her to “keep busy”. Prosecution of these crimes is delayed indefinitely, and servicewomen must often continue to serve in the same unit with their assailant.

One Hundred Twelve Women Assaulted in Iraq, Afghanistan

The Austin Chronicle Politics: Rove stories

The case of the purloined videotape is far from over, but fingers are already pointing at Karl Rove, Gov. George W. Bush's chief political strategist. There's no proof that Rove or any other of the Bush campaign insiders sent the tape of Bush preparing for his upcoming debate to an ally of Al Gore's two weeks ago. But many pundits are suggesting Rove did it, pointing to a 1986 bugging incident at Rove's office to bolster their allegations.

In October of 1986, Rove was working for Republican Bill Clements in his race against then-Gov. Mark White. A few days before the candidates were to debate, Rove discovered a listening device that had been planted behind a needlepoint picture of an elephant hanging on his wall. The FBI investigated. Accusations and counteraccusations were made. But no charges were ever brought, and the matter slowly dissipated, amid general speculation that Rove had planted the bug himself.

The latest dirty trick took place earlier this month, when a videotape was apparently taken from the offices of Bush media advisor Mark McKinnon. The tape, along with copies of other debate briefing materials, was then mailed to the office of Gore ally, lobbyist, and former U.S. Rep. Thomas Downey, where it arrived on Sept. 13. Only a handful of Bush campaign staffers had access to the materials, including Rove, McKinnon, communications director Karen Hughes, campaign manager Joe Allbaugh, campaign chairman Don Evans, and policy director Josh Bolten.

Although no suspects have been named, the FBI, which is investigating the matter, has told several media outlets that it believes the tape was sent by someone inside the Bush camp, presumably in an attempt to entrap the Gore campaign. And given Rove's history, which includes more than a passing familiarity with dirty tricks, many pundits believe Rove is the chief suspect. Rove did not return calls from the Chronicle.

Adding interest to the video shenanigans are a few other fun facts. In 1986, when Rove was working for Clements, the chief spokesperson for White was an idealistic young turk named Mark McKinnon. It is "outrageous and sad that Rove would suggest the White campaign would be involved in a matter like this," McKinnon told the Austin American-Statesman at the time. Calling the bugging incident "bizarre and incredible," McKinnon said the Clements campaign was "desperate and frayed at the edges."

There's more. The bug was reportedly responsible for tipping Democrats that the Clements campaign had recently hired a Washington-based consultant, whom Rove and Clements campaign manager George Bayoud had discussed hiring over the phone shortly before the matter was mysteriously leaked. The consultant was a sometime blues guitar player renowned for his facility with attack ads and dirty tricks. His name: Lee Atwater.

Oh, one other fact about the 1986 incident stands out: Rove's candidate won that year.

The Austin Chronicle Politics: Naked City

Operation Rockingham: UK's "Office of Special Plans"

by Rowena Thursby

31 July 2004



Britain's Defense of Intelligence Staff's Deputy Chief John Morrison was dismissed in July from his post as chief investigator to the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) for his derisive comments on BBC's Panorama, about the manipulation of intelligence. DIS is the key intelligence unit of the Department of Defense.

Of Blair's "serious and current threat" regarding Iraq's WMD, Morrison asserted on BBC network television:

"You could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall".

"…In moving from what the dossier said Saddam had, which was a capability possibly, to asserting that Iraq presented a threat, then the Prime Minister was going way beyond anything any professional analyst would have agreed."

All the more curious then that it was Morrison who set up Operation Rockingham in 1991.

Morrison referred to it protectively as a "tiny cell" set up to offer UN weapons inspectors accurate intelligence regarding WMD.

Possibly Rockingham started out with honourable intentions, but then morphed into a propaganda monster - making both Morrison and Kelly distinctly uncomfortable. It is interesting to observe how this transformation coincided, in the closing months of 2002, with the creation of its counterpart in the US:

Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans".

The general consensus seems to be that the US defence secretary couldn't count on the CIA or the State Department to provide a pretext for war in Iraq. So he created a new agency that would tell him what he wanted to hear. It seems the Brits, preferring to be a tad less obvious, decided to apply a little nip and tuck to their "tiny" Rockingham cell.

With this double-headed Hydra in operation, how could we fail to go to war?

Operation Rockingham:

The Truth Seeker - Kelly: 'I'll probably be found dead in the woods'

... he asked Dr Kelly what would happen if the coalition went to war with Iraq. He told the inquiry: "His reply was, which I took at the time to be a throwaway remark, he said 'I will probably be found dead in the woods'.


David Kelly, the government weapons expert, predicted that he would be "found dead in the woods" if Iraq was invaded, months before his apparent suicide, the Hutton Inquiry heard today.

The weapons inspector slashed his wrist in Oxfordshire woodlands after being revealed as the source for BBC claims that the Government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been "sexed up" in the run-up to war.

Foreign Office official David Broucher said Dr Kelly had made what he thought to be the "throwaway" remark in February, when they met in Geneva.

Dr Kelly had expected to remain anonymous after meeting BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, the inquiry had heard earlier.

He had publicly maintained that the Ministry of Defence had been "quite good" when he revealed he had briefed Mr Gilligan. But privately the weapons expert told a trusted contact: "I have been through the wringer."

Dr Kelly told Sunday Times journalist Nick Rufford, shortly after hearing from the MoD that he would be named in the next day's papers: "I am a bit shocked, I was told it would all be confidential."

Mr Broucher told the inquiry Dr Kelly had told him that continued inspections "properly carried out would give a degree of certainty about compliance" with UN disarmament demands.

"He said he had tried to reassure them that if they cooperated with the weapons inspections, they had nothing to fear," Mr Broucher said.

"My impression was that he felt he was in some personal difficulty or embarrassment about this because he felt the invasion might go ahead anyway and somehow it was putting him in a morally ambiguous situation."

Mr Broucher, the Foreign Office's ambassador-ranking permanent representative at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, said: "As David Kelly was leaving, I said to him 'what do you think will happen if Iraq is invaded?'.

"His reply was, which at the time I took to be a throwaway remark, he said 'I will probably be found dead in the woods'."

Mr Broucher said he had discussed the dossier with Dr Kelly and told the inquiry that it was part of his job to "sell" the dossier to senior officials at the UN, many of whom found it "unconvincing".

Dr Kelly had defended the dossier, saying there had been a lot of pressure to make it "as robust as possible".

The Truth Seeker - Kelly: 'I'll probably be found dead in the woods'

The Truth Seeker - Dark Actors at the Scene of David Kelly's Death

Entering the witness box at the Hutton Inquiry on 16th September 2003, one key figure stands out in the events surrounding Dr David Kelly's death. The fact that his testimony contradicts that of five previous witnesses has received no attention in the mainstream press and has failed to be brought out in the Inquiry itself. Moreover, the position of David Kelly's body prior to his arrival is different from its position when he leaves. This man is a British policeman: his name, Detective Constable Coe.

In his testimony before Lord Hutton, DC Coe, the third witness to Kelly's dead body, relates how he is called out at 6.00am on 18th July to Abingdon police station. Here he is instructed (we are not told who by) to make house-to-house enquiries in the village of Longworth, about a mile from Kelly's house. He does not follow these instructions. He heads instead to Southmoor, Kelly's home village. Here he visits Ruth Absalom, one of Kelly's neighbours, who was the last person to speak to the scientist the previous afternoon. From here, rather than make house-to-house enquiries, Coe sets off to the area where Ruth Absalom last sees Kelly to make what he describes to the Inquiry as "a sort of search towards the river".

Perjury?

The next section of DC Coe's testimony contains one of the most blatant discrepancies in the whole of the Hutton Inquiry. While it is clear from his own and other testimonies that he is not alone while in the region of Harrowdown Hill, a serious question mark hangs over the number of people who are with him....

DC Coe Unrecognised by Police Search Team

DC Coe arrives on the scene independently of other police officers - indeed they are not notified that he is to be on the scene at all.

PC Franklin, the officer responsible for the police search, is given to understand that on Friday 18th July only he and his search team leader, PC Sawyer and "6 other officers" are to conduct the search, which is (after conferring with Sergeant Woods on Kelly's oft-frequented routes) set to begin at Harrowdown Hill, the site where Kelly's body is ultimately found. "PC Sawyer and I were going to be the first", said Franklin.

Yet on arriving at the scene they meet Paul Chapman, the volunteer searcher, who directs them to "two uniformed police officers and DC Coe".

"Q: You mentioned DC Coe. Was he part of your search team?
A: No.
Q: What was he doing:
A: He was at the scene. I had no idea what he was doing there or why he was there. He was just at the scene when PC Sawyer and I arrived."

The Truth Seeker - Dark Actors at the Scene of David Kelly's Death

DAVID KELLY AND VICTORIA'S SECRET

DAVID KELLY AND VICTORIA'S SECRET

Originally Published in MEDIUM RARE November 12, 2003

by Jim Rarey

(Republished with permission)

[There have been many new developments throughout this past year in the field of biowarfare and the ongoing epidemic of deaths among world-class microbiologists. One thing many of these scientists have in common is that their work had to do with genetic sequencing, biowarfare and a growing record showing that gene-specific bioweapons are being hotly pursued by a number of governments. FTW is currently planning a major series of articles on these developments for the first part of 2004. As the compelling need to achieve population reduction is becoming as apparent as the deadly effects of Peak Oil and Gas, Jim Rarey takes us further into the murder of David Kelly and the dark recesses of his work as one of Britain's top Biowar experts. --MCR]

December 9, 2003 100 PDT (FTW) -- No, it's not the Victoria's Secret of the soft porn lingerie ads. This is a different Victoria who may have innocently provided the final impetus for the assassination of David Kelly.

In Part I of this writer's *article, The Murder of David Kelly we detailed the numerous red flags in the evidence and testimony submitted at the Hutton inquiry into Kelly's death that showed conclusively that his death was not a suicide. One of the more important "clues" was evidence that his body had been moved after he died to the scene in which it was found. Other testimony showed it to be very doubtful that Kelly had inflicted the knife wounds on his left wrist that severed an unlikely artery but left the most easily reached artery untouched.

In Part II of the article, we detailed Kelly's extensive involvement with and/or knowledge of the bio/chemical weapons programs of the U.K., U.S. and Russia. One author reports Kelly also had visited the Israeli bio/chemical weapons facility. Kelly almost certainly would have been aware of the involvement of two U.K. scientists at Porton Down simultaneously as paid consultants to South Africa's notorious bioweapons program. He had also served as an inspector in Iraq of that country's WMD programs.

We also recited the deplorable treatment Kelly had been subjected to by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Personnel Department in withholding any pay increase over a three-year period as Kelly approached retirement.

However the public perception of Kelly was as the "single source" of statements made by BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan to the effect that the government had "sexed up" the dossier used to justify the war against Iraq. Kelly had voluntarily disclosed to his MoD superiors he had met with Gilligan but denied he made the statements Gilligan attributed to his source.

In a July 9th press conference, the MoD confirmed that Dr. Kelly was Gilligan's source. Kelly was hauled before the parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee for a grilling but convinced committee members he had not provided statements ascribed to him by Gilligan. The committee chairman, MP Donald Anderson wrote a letter to Secretary of State Jack Straw confirming the committee's judgment and adding their view that, "Dr. Kelly had been poorly treated by his government..."

Kelly told his wife he felt he had been betrayed. We did not understand the depth and duplicitous nature of that betrayal until further reviewing testimony at the Hutton inquiry, particularly that of Richard Hatfield, Director of MoD Personnel.

Hatfield had no personnel management experience when he was appointed to that job in June of 2001. He had been Policy Director of MoD and a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee. On July 7th Hatfield met with Kelly to review (and get Kelly's approval) of a clarification the MoD intended to issue to clarify inaccurate information in Gilligan's report without naming Kelly. What Hatfield knew, but did not tell Kelly, was that MoD intended to confirm Kelly's name as the source to the press if any reporter mentioned his name after the charade of a "Q & A" session designed to lead to Kelly.

When Kelly learned of this deception it must have infuriated him. Indeed, if it had been Hatfield's body that was "found dead in the woods" Dr. Kelly might have been a prime suspect in the death.

Another BBC reporter, Susan Watts, claimed on the evening program Newsnight, that Kelly made statements to her indicating he had lied to the MoD about statements he made to reporters. Later, after Kelly's death, Watts had to back off from that allegation when the inquiry reviewed transcripts of a taped conversation Watts had with Kelly (without Kelly knowing it was being taped) and hearing an enhanced version of the tape recording.

However, in the interim the media, led by Tom Mangold, who claimed to be "Kelly's best friend" and until very recently was himself a BBC reporter, claimed Kelly was so shamed by being branded a liar that he killed himself.

However, that was belied by Kelly's actions and communications right up to the morning of the day he disappeared (July 17th). He did not at all appear to be depressed and was looking forward to returning to Iraq to continue the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

However, he did communicate in an e-mail the day before his death that there were "many dark actors playing games." Ironically, that e-mail was to Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter and CFR stalwart who probably was one of those dark actors. Miller, along with two other women was a close confidante of Kelly's. The second was Olivia Bosch, a long-time functionary of the CFR's sister organization in the U.K. the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA). The third was a U.S. Army intelligence agent named Mai Pederson.

In part two of the article, we suggested that Kelly's mistreatment by MoD had made him a resentful employee and, with all his dangerous knowledge, a prime candidate for elimination.

However, information new to this writer since that article provides a much stronger motive for the assassination of Dr. Kelly.

For several months, Kelly had been communicating with Victoria Roddam, a commissioning editor for Oneworld Publications based in Oxford. One week before Kelly's death, she had sent him an e-mail that said in part, "I think the time is ripe now more than ever for a title which addresses the relationship between government, policy and war-I'm sure you would agree." They had been discussing Kelly authoring a book to be published by Victoria's company.

Another document found among Kelly's effects at his home and removed by police was an undated hand-written note from Roddam with a list of suggested topics to be included in the book, any one of which would have sent the elite in several countries into a containment mode.

One such topic was the ethics of biological warfare, a sticking point that could be responsible for a string of deaths of world-class microbiologists in various countries.

A second one was the involvement of corporations in biological warfare.

A third was the role of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries in biowarfare as well as prevention and containment.

Yet another was the connection between Russia and Iraq with WMD.

Victoria had also listed a look at the proliferation in the arms trade as well a look into the Royal United Services Institute-Whitehall.

Finally, in the document there was a cryptic one-line reference to the rules of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA).

Recall Kelly was a neophyte member of the RIIA and likely would not have known what rules, if any, the organization had on members authoring books on sensitive subjects. He probably would have inquired disclosing his intentions. He also may have discussed it with his fellow member and confidante, Olivia Bosch.

It would have been in character for him to discuss the project with Judith Miller and perhaps seek her advice as she had authored several books on topic. He may even have discussed it with his spiritual advisor Mai Pederson.

At any rate, Kelly's and Victoria's project was no longer a secret (if it ever was). And now David Kelly has joined the growing list of world-class microbiologists who have met mysterious deaths and/or been murdered.

DAVID KELLY AND VICTORIA'S SECRET

Some more Miller dots that may connect

Some more Miller dots that may connect (none / 0)

See this collection of articles posted on Global Research regarding Operation Rockingham- the British version of Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans.

The day before he died- July 16th, 2003- David Kelly testified before parliament that he liased with the Rockingham cell- a misinformation organization charged with promoting reasons to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam.

Dr. David Kelly was an international expert on WMDs, biological weapons and had been preparing to return to Iraq. A British reporter, Andrew Gilligan, testified on July 9th that David Kelly was the source of his leak that the British were "sexing up" the information on Iraq's capabilities to manufacture and deliver nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction.This was just 3 days after the revelation by Wilson. Kelly was hauled before the Joint Intelligence Committee members of MoD and intimidated. The foregone conclusion was the Kelly felt so betrayed and humiliated that he killed himself. Evidence never corroborated the official cause of death.

According to author Jim Rarey here

Judith Miller was in frequent contact with David Kelly and had been in communication with him on the eve of his death. Kelly wrote to Miller about his testimony before parliament and made the now-famous line about "dark actors playing games". Rarey concludes that Miller was one of those "dark actors". Miller and two other women were close confidantes of Kelly's. One was Olivia Bosch and the third was U.S. army intelligence agent named Mai Pederson.

Miller has ties to the Council on Foreign Relations, Bosch ties to the U.K. sister organization of the CFR- Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA.)

Daily Kos :: Comments UPDATE: Judith Miller's Sources: The Usual Suspects

Daily Kos: What's Wrong With the Economy?

Jobless Recovery with loss of 3.4 million high-paying jobs between 2000-2003 (Bush put a "Enron style" stop in the statistics after 2003)

What's Wrong With the Economy?
by bonddad
Sat Jul 30th, 2005 at 11:15:32 CDT

Cross-Posted at My Left Wing

On one hand, the US economy's overall statistics are great. GDP has grown over 3% for the last 8 quarters. Unemployment stands at 5%. Inflation is contained. The economy seems to have adjusted to oil's price increases. The recent earnings season has been a roaring success, with most companies in the S & P 500 meeting or beating expectations. In short, things look good.

However, something is restraining the financial markets. While the overall charts aren't bad, they aren't good either. Instead of strong uptrending patterns and movement, there is almost an almost daily fight with the bulls winning - barely. Instead of long candles, the charts are full of up 20 one day, down 12 the next candle patterns. Clearly there is some reservation on behalf of traders. So, what gives?

* bonddad's diary :: ::
*

There are two overall macro reasons. First is oil, which is the source of energy for the economy, is rising. It currently trades in a 57-62 range. In his recent Congressional testimony, Greenspan noted the economy so far has accepted this increase well. The problem is the at some point, the economy may have problems absorbing these costs. We know this point exists; we just don't know where.

Secondly, interest rates are rising. There is an old Wall Street adage: Don't fight the Fed. Buy stocks when interest rates are decreasing and sell them when interest rates are increasing. The cost of money dictates business behavior. This rule has been around for ages and still holds today.

However, these two trends do not explain the whole picture. The US economy is experiencing a fundamental shift in employment not captured by a single statistic, but which is evident from a reading of a group of statistics. Hence, it is beyond the realm of our 30-second sound bite news reporting or most "deny-side" economists. Thankfully, several adept researchers at several Federal Reserve banks have caught the change.

First, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US has lost 3.4 million high-paying jobs between 2000-2003 (the last year they have statistics). Comprising that total are:
100,000 Information and data processing jobs
200,000 Broadcast and telecommunications jobs,
205,000 Computer System Designer jobs,
2.8 million manufacturing jobs and
121,000 publishing jobs which include software.

The US economy has yet to create a sufficient number of jobs to replace those lost. While the unemployment number is 5%, this number does not capture the whole picture. The unemployment rate only counts people who have looked for work in the last 4 weeks. The number does not count disaffected workers and people who have given-up looking for a job. As a result, the labor participation rate - which measures the percentage of people employed out of the total labor force working - is still low. The labor force participation rate was 67.1% in January 2000. It currently stands at 66%.

Wage growth statistics solves this apparent contradiction in the employment numbers. If unemployment were as low as the unemployment numbers indicated, then wages would be increasing. This is simple supply and demand. Lower or constricted supply increases a commodity's price. However, wages are not growing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average earnings increase from 2000-2004 was 3.86%, 3.22%, 3.12%, 1.71% and 2.39% respectively. However wages have to be compared to inflation to determine the real rate of wage growth. For the same years, annual inflation was 3.4%, 2.8%, 1.6%, 2.3% and 2.7% respectively. When inflation is subtracted from wages, overall wage growth becomes .46%, .42%, 1.52%, -.59% and-.31% respectively for 2000-2004. The fact that wages have not grown indicates the labor participation rate is the correct measure of employment.

Why this drop? Back in 2003, there were several people at the Federal Reserve who wrote and/or talked about the idea of a jobless recovery. Two people - Erica L. Groshen and Simon Potter wrote a paper called Has structural Change Contributed to a Jobless Recovery? This paper provides the missing pieces explaining the overall labor situation.

The paper's fundamental hypothesis is simple and derives from the basic concept of the business cycle. During a recession, companies lay-off workers. When the economy starts to expand, the business will hire workers to fill demand, but only if the industry is still economically viable. If however the industry is in overall decline, it won't hire workers, and instead continue to lay-off workers.

The report concludes that several industry's have experienced a net decline in employees during the 2001 recession and subsequent expansion. Some of these industries are electronic equipment, securities and commodities brokers, communications and air transportation and transportation services.

In summation, the US economy is in the process of restructuring. We don't know yet who the clear winners and losers are. There is no clear dynamic new industry emerging on the horizon. However, this gives the Democrats a great opportunity. We can offer ideas for creating the industries of the 21st century. Several examples would be alternate energy, stem cell research and applications and US infrastructure upgrades. However, he have to act and start to talk about these issues.

Daily Kos: What's Wrong With the Economy?

Daily Kos: Kossack got Help - Blog Power

Heartwarming story of blog power! Teenage daughter runs away from home. Father asks DailyKos posters for help. Fliers are printed and distributed across the town, police is "encouraged" to pay some attention to his case by hundreds of e-mails.. Girl is found and returned home thanks to a cop seeing a flier and recognizing her - law

Kossack got Help Update
by Krum
Sat Jul 30th, 2005 at 07:28:41 CDT

Thursday night at 10:30 pm I received a phone call from Lizzie's mother, Berta, who informed me that Lizzie had been found and is safe. She is currently staying at her stepfather's house in San Francisco. This evening I received an email from a police officer from San Rafael with whom I have been communicating regarding the case:

* Krum's diary :: ::
*

Mr. Oates, I returned to work today and found your e-mail. I assume you heard that Ofcr. ______ of our department located your daughter in the downtown area of our city last night. He recognized her from a flyer. She was subsequently returned to Berta. She was cited for running away from home. Although this is not a criminal violation, there are some consequences associated with it. Such as community service. Ofcr. _______

Wow! This just blew me away! The most awesome thing is that the Officer recognized Lizzie from a flyer that he had seen, a flyer that had to have been placed by a Kossack! I have to say that you have all really made a difference!

I felt a little embarrassed the other day that the story of my daughter's disappearance was receiving so much attention, but it also cemented the realization that there are a lot of good folks out there. I have to tell you that the responses, the advice, the offers of assistance, and the support that we received deeply touched everyone who knows and loves Lizzie.

I have been in touch with many of you offline, and am sorry that I haven't replied personally to everyone, but the response was overwhelming. There were so many warm sentiments, sensible suggestions, and offers of help, and it is just so wonderful to know that this effort makes a difference.

Like many of you I have grown cynical and a tad irritated over the cruel antics I have witnessed over past few years, and in many ways for this very reason I have somewhat lost touch with my own humanity. (isn't it ironic?) Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting windmills and I forget to nurture and listen to the very ones that I am committed to. When struggle produces only alienation and separation, something is out of balance. I yam that I yam, and I will continue to voice my opinions and fight for what I believe in, but not without considering first the effect that my actions have on those that I love. This week I feel that the circle of those that I love has widened immensely.

Daily Kos: Kossack got Help Update

Rigorous Intuition: The Fallujah Ghetto

Bush is not Hitler, and the United States is not Nazi Germany, so stop saying that.

I'm talking to you, Boston Globe:

Returning Fallujans will face clampdown

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- The US military is drawing up plans to keep insurgents from regaining control of this battle-scarred city, but returning residents may find that the measures make Fallujah look more like a police state than the democracy they have been promised.

Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned.

...

One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.

...

[Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team] asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, " 'What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?' All this Oprah [stuff]," he said. "They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, 'I'm with you.' We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe."

...

Most Fallujans have not heard about the US plans. But for some people in a city that has long opposed the occupation, any presence of the Americans, and the restrictions they bring, feels threatening.

"When the insurgents were here, we felt safe," said Ammar Ahmed, 19, a biology student at Anbar University. "At least I could move freely in the city; now I cannot."

And from a transcript of Tom Brokaw's final broadcast last week, this:

REPORTER: "So far the plan is for most of the city's 250,000 residents to return in stages and first only a few thousand will be let in. They'll be fingerprinted, given a retina scan and then an ID card, which will only allow them to travel around their homes or to nearby aid centers which are now being built. The Marines will be authorized to use deadly force against those breaking the rules....Tom?"

BROKAW: "Richard, what's the latest on the election?"

An audio clip of the above exchange can be heard here, courtesy of Alex Jones.

I've had my problems with Jones, largely down to his style, which could give paranoia a bad name. My all too Canadian reserve has found him clownish, and caused me to back away as though cornered by a loud-mouthed hysteric at an office party, who'd broken his promise to have just one. More seriously, I've thought Jones somewhat indiscriminate with his sources and the facts.

But damn, if he isn't right more often than not.

Rigorous Intuition: The Fallujah Ghetto

Greg Weiher: Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto

A woman who lived through it said “What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures . . . ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for . . . not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self worth . . . an ordinary life.”

What history is this? Is it the imagined history of Fallujah, one that will be spoken and ultimately written after the city is thoroughly scourged by the American Marines? There are similarities. There are the hospitals that have been closed or cut off by the Americans, the firing on ambulances, the difficulty of getting food and medicines, the senseless killing of innocents, the isolating of the outcasts behind barbed wire and a hail of bullets.

It could certainly be the history of the Intifadas in Israel for all of the same reasons, not to mention the tanks and invincible arms of the occupiers, the lop-sided casualty counts, the appropriation of property, and the obdurate futility of seeking an ordinary life in the West Bank and Gaza.

In fact, it is a description of the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the persecution of its occupants. What strikes me most about this description is exactly that it has so much in common with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and America’s treatment of the Iraqis.

The Israelis and the Americans ply their bright, polished justifications for grinding down those left vulnerable by history. America styles herself the City on the Hill, the indispensable nation. But there is nothing here that rises above clich�. Germany celebrated its future as the Thousand Year Reich, too. It boils down to nothing newer than armies marching across the corpses of hapless victims. It recalls nothing so strongly as Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

It is such a worn and tawdry story.

Greg Weiher: Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto

First Wind Farm in National Forest Planned

What a stupid idea! Why don't they put those towers in the town's parking lots!!! -- law

The evergreen trees of the Green Mountain National Forest in southern Vermont could soon be dwarfed by 370-foot-tall wind turbines. A company wants to build up to 30 of the turbines in the forest in what would be the first-ever wind power project on U.S. Forest Service land. The project would produce enough electricity to power 14,000 to 16,000 homes.

The Forest Service is expected to take up to 18 months to decide whether to approve the project by Deerfield Wind LLC.

Environmental groups have strongly opposed moves to open more federal lands to people who want to extract energy from them, whether oil, natural gas or coal. But wind energy, a relatively benign and pollution-free way to make electricity, is a different story.

"We're not against wind power. We think that renewable energy is a promising and useful thing," said Richard Andrews of the group Green Mountain Forest Watch. But he said his group has yet to take a position on the proposal.

There are other concerns, including whether the project will disrupt the habitat of black bears or migratory birds in the forest.

"The Forest Service doesn't have well developed protocols on wind power development," said Gina Owens, district ranger for the U.S. Forest Service

But she added that it is borrowing guidance from the Bureau of Land Management, which last month released a set of policies governing wind power development on its vast land holdings in the West.

In general, the BLM policy says wind power development is to be encouraged, and calls for changes designed to do so on parcels in nine western states.

AT&T Worldnet Service - U.S. National News - First Wind Farm in National Forest Planned

Houston Muslims denounce terrorism

Houston Police Ranked Best On Relations With Arabic, Muslim Community

POSTED: 3:38 pm CDT July 29, 2005

HOUSTON -- Houston-area Islamic groups joined a nationwide campaign to denounce terrorism, Local 2 reported Friday.

The public service announcements hit the airwaves Thursday. The campaign is called "Not in the Name of Islam."

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, released it to build understanding.

"Muslims are not only victims of the terrorists attacks but also have to deal with the stigmatization of being blamed for the heinous crimes of a minuscule minority." Said Rodwan Saleh, with the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.

Houston's Islamic leaders joined together to applaud a religious ruling against terrorism and religious extremism.

"We want to let all of Houston citizens know that we stand behind peace and justice and we are absolutely against any terrorism or any terrorism actions in this city." Saleh said.

Nearly 1 million people around the country have signed a petition supporting American Muslims.

"The terrorists actions are not in the name of Islam and Muslims do not want their religion seized by criminals, said Kaleem Siddiqui, with CAIR Houston. "They commit these acts cowardly and they call themselves Muslims. We absolutely condemn that and oppose it."

Houston was recently rated the No. 1 city in the country by the Vera Institute for police having good relationships with the Arabic and Muslim community.

Common Ground Common Sense

Why won't Gatorade, Dasani intervene on heat deaths ?

graham4anything suggests:

Have some public service announcements, and mention the Sports-drink company is donating 1000s and 1000s of bottles a day, think how much good publicity they would get

why not have some progressive org' buy a nespaper ad, and publish the owners name and photo along with a brief summary of the horrible things they have allowed to happen?

Sort of like the way PETA works when they infiltrate an animal warehouse or farm and take photos and videos.

There are other ways to put pressure on them too. For example, find out what church they attend, and distribute fliers on their cars while they are in service--or do it to all the local churches, and ask why they aren't working to make conditions more humane.
*




A boycott of their products if you can find out where they sell their different products and then distribute the flyers

The newspaper ad's are great ideas

Shame them...have healthy drinking water (not damaged by insecticides), you would think some type of Gator-Ade could be shamed into free goods. That is just the type of thing these workers should drink so they don't dehydrate.


Common Ground Common Sense

Editorials - Editorial: Death in the fields - sacbee.com

Editorial: Death in the fields
July heat proves fatal to farm workers
[3 dead]

Meanwhile in the Legislature, AB 805 would legally require more breaks and better shading for workers when the temperature reaches 95 degrees. The bill by Judy Chu, D-Monterey Park, has cleared the Assembly and awaits a vote before the Senate's Appropriations Committee.

Basic protections for these workers aren't unreasonable. Statistically, farm labor is one of the deadliest jobs in the state. The policy question is whether these protections need to be detailed in laws or provided by the employer based on common sense and common decency. Any law is effective only if it is obeyed. Workers with Zamorio-Rodriguez told the Times that an existing law - a half-hour meal rest - was broken on the day that he died.

As a practical matter, it will be difficult if not impossible for the arm of government to reach into every bell pepper field and vineyard in the Valley. At some point, the farmers themselves must look after their workers - not because they have to, but because it is the decent thing to do.

But if farm employers will not act to protect their workers, then the state will have no choice but to attempt to do so. That is the lesson of this July, a month that has brought shame to the Valley and to an industry that can do better.

Editorials - Editorial: Death in the fields - sacbee.com

Deaths Rally Farm Laborers

# Three men have died after working in the recent intense heat of the Central Valley, sparking a demand for more safeguards.

By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer

ARVIN, Calif. — There was no eulogy for Salud Zamudio-Rodriguez after his death in the fields here.

In the 24 years since he left his village in rural Mexico, family and co-workers said, he made but one lasting impression. Whether picking lemons in Riverside County, grapefruit in the Coachella Valley or oranges in Tulare County, he moved like a machine up and down the rows, they said.

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But two weeks ago, in the 105-degree sun of a brutal July, he could not keep up with the tractor that was dictating his pace in a bell pepper field near this Kern County town.

Co-workers said that for more than two hours, the tractor doubled its speed in a dash to finish the last pick of one field so the grower could begin a fresh field the next morning.

Zamudio-Rodriguez, 42, was so spent that a few minutes before the shift ended on the afternoon of July 13, he broke away from the machine and collapsed.

As the others were boarding their vans to go home, he began to shake violently from heatstroke.

"We watched him dying in the field," said Soledad Reyes, 43, who had been working next to him.

The bell pepper field belonged to Donald Valpredo, a longtime cotton and vegetable grower in the Bakersfield area. Valpredo called the worker's death a tragedy. He declined to comment on allegations by the co-workers that the crew had been pushed to go faster.

"There's an investigation and we are trying to cooperate. I don't think it's fair for me to say anything else without all the facts," he said.

"What's proper for me to say is our sympathies and regrets go to his family and friends," he said.

Even before Zamudio-Rodriguez's funeral Saturday, two more farmworkers died in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Both had worked in temperatures of about 108 degrees. The body of a melon picker was found July 14 next to a patch of ripe cantaloupes in west Fresno County. The body of a grape picker was found a week later beneath the shade of a vine in Kern County.

Deaths Rally Farm Laborers

Daily Kos: One-sided stories, by GOP decree

One-sided stories, by GOP decree
by kos
Fri Jul 29th, 2005 at 17:52:12 CDT

As I wrote earlier this morning, Roll Call's Lauren Whittington wrote a story about the GOP's negative ad campaign against Sen. Byrd.

What's particularly egregious about the Roll Call piece is that her Republican source demanded Whittington not talk to any other sources and she agreed, a gross violation of standard journalistic practices. Furthermore, Whittington failed to disclose that arrangement in the story, which ended up being a one-sided affair at the insistence of the Republicans. Whittington essentially wrote a GOP press release for them in a journalistic publication.

On April 5, 2005, the NY Times made the same mistake. They had to apologize for it. Then, a couple of days later, Okrent (then the NYT's thankfully departed ombudsman), wrote:

Last Wednesday, a lengthy Editors' Note on Page A2 scooped a scoop I had planned on the toxicity of scoops. The note addressed irregularities in a March 31 front-page article by Karen W. Arenson, ''Columbia Panel Clears Professors of Anti-Semitism.'' The Times, the note explained, had been given a one-day jump on other media in exchange for its agreement not to ''seek reaction from other interested parties.'' While acknowledging that this was in violation of Times policy, the note said ''editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public.'' It concluded, ''Without a response from the complainants'' -- the students who had brought the anti-Semitism charges -- ''the article was incomplete; it should not have appeared in that form.''

Samuel Glasser, a reader in Port Washington, N.Y., who identifies himself as a former reporter and editor with three major newspaper chains, spoke for many: ''The idea that editors and reporters would even have to be told not to do such a thing in the first place, let alone that they would 'forget' the policy, defies belief.''

The Washington Post is also guilty.

Complying with "ground rules" set by Bush administration officials, The Washington Post published a July 26 article that presented the White House's arguments for withholding documents written by Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. during his tenure as the Justice Department's deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush -- without any Democratic rebuttal.

Under a purported embargo, which the Post said prevented reporters from revealing the administration's decision until midnight -- "too late" to contact Democrats for a response -- staff writers Peter Baker and Charles Babington quoted anonymous White House officials spinning the decision regarding the documents. But while other contemporaneous print media reports noted Democrats' previously stated arguments for full disclosure of the documents, the Post omitted them for the second day in a row.

Any journalist that agrees to such groundrules is not only violating one of the chief tenets of journalistic practices, but also deserves all the scorn that can be dished their way. Roll Call's Lauren Whittington is worthy of such contempt. (Email her, or call Roll Call at 202.824.6800.)

Daily Kos: One-sided stories, by GOP decree

G-SAVE; THE NEW MARKETING TOOL!

G-SAVE; THE NEW MARKETING TOOL! by leesfirst on Fri Jul 29th

Changing the title from "War on Terror" to "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism" is soooo transparent. One blogger on another web-site called it G-Save! As we all can guess it is a title supposed to save Bush/Blair Butts from being blamed as the cause of rising terrorism by their invasion of Iraq and nation-building policies! As usual the news networks, in their appointed rolls of Pioneers or Rangers, are promoting a play by play 24 hour a day report from London, AD NAUSEAM! Do we really care to hear every witness report of the arrests or every little facet they can dig up? Wouldn't a brief report each hour serve to inform the public? We need to email them once again! There are close to 1800 soldiers dead and more than one London Bomber is on the loose in Iraq. How about not avoiding reports on Iraq? Does this go against G-SAVE?

Today in Iraq http://icasualties.org/oif/

07/29/05 DoD Identifies Army Casualty

07/29/05 Aljazeera: Philippine diplomats pulled out of Iraq

07/29/05 Reuters: Suicide bomber kills 25 in northern Iraq

07/29/05 CENTCOM: DETAINEE DIES AT CAMP BUCCA

07/29/05 CENTCOM: TASK FORCE BAGHDAD SOLDIER DIES IN VEHICLE ACCIDENT

07/29/05 CENTCOM: TWO MARINES KILLED IN CYKLA (confirmed

07/29/05 Suni System: Iraqi Translator Killed

07/29/05 Suni System : Seven beheaded bodies found near Iraqi capital

07/29/05 Fond du Lac Reporter: First Fond du Lac soldier dies in Iraq

07/29/05 Detroit Free Press: Detroiter killed in Iraq wanted to be FBI agent

07/29/05 AP: Two U.S. Marines killed in clash in western Iraq

In his campaign Bush said he would not be interested in "nation building", but the Neocons, power and his ego overrode that idea. George Bush can call his war any name he wants ,but all evidence points to the same result, it is a never-ending quagmire! You can't overrun a people with your ideas on how they should be governed. How can you claim non-interference and send your Secretary of Defense ten or more times over to Iraq, plus all the other visits from your government officials, all pressuring the new government to do it your way. Woodrow Wilson had the correct idea, "You cannot tear-up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil that is not native to it!!" I'll add especially by invading a nation under false pretenses, destroying the cities, killing their people, torture and abuse, and by out and out coercion of a new government!

Daily Kos :: Comments Open Thread

Planet Lila

UPDATE: 2003UB313 is now officially dubbed Eris by the IAU, as of september 2006 -- law

The planet, with the current temporary name 2003UB313, was discovered in an ongoing survey at Palomar Observatory's Samuel Oschin telescope by astronomers Mike Brown (Caltech), Chad Trujillo (Gemini Observatory), and David Rabinowitz (Yale University). We have proposed a name to the IAU and will announce it when that name is accepted. For those speculating that the name proposed is "Lila" based on the web site name I must warn you that that is really just a sentimental dad's early morning naming of a web site for his three week old daughter and one should not take it too seriously!

It is bigger than Pluto!!!

Usually when we find these we don't know their size for certain, only lower limits. The lower limit to this object is the size of Pluto. This object is at least the size of Pluto and likely a bit larger.

Planet Lila

Daily Kos: NASA FINDS TENTH PLANET

NASA scientists have found what they are calling a tenth planet because of it's size, at least the size of Pluto, and perhaps much larger.

NASA SCIENTISTS DISCOVER TENTH PLANET

From NASA JPL News RELEASE: 05-209

A planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of our solar system

Daily Kos: NASA FINDS TENTH PLANET

How Caligula would look like today

A slightly altered reconstruction from the Vatican

Daily Kos: My Name is John Bolton, and I'm Here to Stop The Diplomacy

My Name is John Bolton, and I'm Here to Stop The Diplomacy
by Hunter
Fri Jul 29th, 2005 at 22:27:32 CDT

It's been a long, winding road of "misstatements", forged intelligence, botched diplomacy, and spectacular tales of obsessive "kick-down" middle management vengeance, but it's looking like a recess appointment of John Bolton as America's U.N. Ambassador is likely to happen in the next few days. Current reports are citing officials inside the White House saying Bush wants to get it over with before he leaves for his summer vacation. (No, I'm not kidding. It's like he's a kid packing for camp or something.)

I have mixed feelings about such an appointment. Well, not really -- at this point, I mostly welcome it, and I think most administration critics have been coming to roughly the same conclusions. If you're out to prove spectacular Bush administration incompetence and corruption, Bolton is the yellowcake-dusted gift that keeps on giving. I've grown almost fond of the rhythm of the news cycle, in which once a month or so we find out a new diplomatic effort that Bolton managed to either fantastically botch or intentionally sabotage (Libya, North Korea, nonproliferation efforts, anything remotely having to do with Iraq WMD claims). Every few months, we are treated to news reports describing another administration official who hates his ever-loving guts (Powell and Condi have both allowed themselves to be obliquely marked as being anti-Bolton, in addition to the parade of officials that testified at his hearings. Take a hint, much?)

Daily Kos: My Name is John Bolton, and I'm Here to Stop The Diplomacy

My Left Wing :: Election Reform Troll Rated

Election Reform Troll Rated
by: lawnorder - July 29, 2005

On the "other" site. Sigh... There is no point in giving the link since this is not a whine about the site that shall remain nameless or the ones who troll rated me. I have got troll ratings before, it's not that.

This is just frustration with the Democrats and liberals who roll their eyes at any mention of Diebold and Elections. WTF ? I get a paper receipt for a $1 burger but requesting a paper receipt for my vote makes me crazy ?!??

The issue is serious and simple enough: As the current voting equipment stands there is no way to detect tampering after the fact. Hence no way to prove any fraud in 2006. All we have to protect US from fraud in 2006 is < cough > Republican Integrity < cough >

And whoever believes on the GOP's honorable intentions and ethics after all that's happened in the past 4 years is also apt to believe Ed McMahon will make us millionaires in 2006.

I give up. I'm at a point that I don't want to donate money, write letters to the editor or work for GOTV efforts anymore
Diaries :: lawnorder :: Election Reform Troll Rated
Why vote ?
If the candidate you are voting for doesn't want to be bothered to make sure the vote you gave him is counted, why vote on him ?

Stay at home. The GOP won't be able to fake attendance to the polls. Send both GOP and DNC a message: I will only vote when you can prove my vote counted.

Sure, GOP will win and bring more mysery to US, but isn't that what happened in every election since 2000 ?

Why would minorities trust us ?
I'm hardly alone. Some people in the minority leaderships are considering NOT pushing their supporters to vote on election day.

I don't blame minorities for being disenchanted with voting. As a Harvard study has been warning us since 2000:


Democracy Spoiled: National, State, and Local Disparities in Disfranchisement Through Uncounted Ballots

Executive Summary


* Whether A Vote Is Counted Depends On Where It Is Cast. The findings in this report point to significant variations...
* Spoilage Rates Vary Greatly From State To State And County To County. In the 2000 election, almost 2 million votes went uncounted - about 2 percent of all ballots cast - and the percent of uncounted ballots ranged from less than 1% to over 4% depending on the state.. even states with moderate or low overall spoilage rates contained counties with high rates of uncounted ballots; in some counties, over 12% of the ballots cast went up in smoke
* * Spoilage Rates Are Most Prevalent In Counties With High Concentrations Of Minority Voters. Of the 100 counties with the highest spoilage rates, 67 have black populations above 12%. Of the top 100 counties with the lowest spoilage rates, the reverse is true - only 10 had sizeable black populations, while the population of 70 of the counties was over 75% white. There is also a strong correlation between uncounted ballots and black population; specifically, as the black population in a county increases, the uncounted ballot rate correspondingly increases.


So I'm thinking of pulling a Sunni move myself. When they saw there would be very few polling stations in their area they decided to skip the election.

Why give legitimacy to a travesty like today's paperless anti-minoirity travesty of voting ?

Poll
Don't vote until elections are fixed
- Is stupid and self defeating
- Is self defeating but so are all other Dem actions so lets go for it
- Is a good idea
- Don't even think about it

My Left Wing :: Election Reform Troll Rated

Daily Kos: Dodging a health Bullet

One cannot, in the words of our Declaration, meaningfully have "the pursuit of happiness" when a single medical incident can financially destroy a lifetime's work.

Teacherken writes:

So far I have had my physical with extensive blood tests, two stress tests, one with multiple x-rays plus the injection of the radioactive material, and a preliminary consultation with the Gastroenterologist who will do the colonosocopy.

[why this for political blogs?]

Assuming that and the followup check on cholesterol are all okay, what has it cost me? To date, $80 in co-pays, looking at another $40, for a grand total of $120. The cost of all these visits, consultations and procedures will probably be in the high 4 or low 5 figure range. Let's assume conservatively 10,000. Would I have even had the physical if I had had to pay full freight? Probably not.

Think how many people who do not have health insurance do not have the chance to dodge the bullet that I have just had. They do not receive the information they need to make the changes that can lengthen their lives. Hypertension and high cholesterol are conditions that do not necessarily give physical symptoms until the onset of the heart attack or the stroke.

The biggest single cause of personal bankruptcies for people who are not wheelers and dealers is medical catastrophes. We have made access to bankruptcy more difficult. We have not addressed the increasing number of those lacking medical insurance. We see companies like Wal*Mart try to keep employee hours down so that they don't have to offer benefits like health insurance, and when they do force the employee to pay most of the freight. We have seen companies move or locate auto production to Canada to avoid the costs of medical benefits to the employees, because Canada has a single payer national health care system.

One cannot, in the words of our Declaration, meaningfully have "the pursuit of happiness" when a single medical incident can financially destroy a lifetime's work.

I am a teacher. Those who read what I post know that for me I am passionate about education, and have called it the ground zero of our political battles. I must, however, give equal billing to our unfair situation with respect to healthcare. My recent experience makes that clear to me.

I dodged a bullet. My medical insurance enabled me to know I was at risk and to make changes. I was not bankrupted by the process. That I have such access and others do not is unfair, unjust, even immoral.



Daily Kos: Dodging a Bullet

Daily Kos: Will Moves at Justice Affect CIA Leak Case?

Will Moves at Justice Affect CIA Leak Case?
by SusanHu [Subscribe]
Fri Jul 29th, 2005 at 10:38:45 CDT

Update [2005-7-29 12:48:48 by SusanHu]: At end of diary.

Front-paged at BoomanTribune.com.


FACTS:

1. Bush appointee Deputy Attorney General James Comey -- who appointed U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald to investigate the CIA leak case -- is leaving the Justice Dept. for a "private sector" job. (Chicago Tribune)
2. Pres. Bush has nominated Timothy Flanigan, senior vice president and general counsel of Tyco International (Chicago Tribune), to replace Comey.
3. "[T]he only control Fitzgerald's Justice handler [Comey, then his successor] has is to fire him," (WSJ July 29, 2005 Washington Wire, sub.)

MY QUESTIONS: Why is Comey leaving, and how would Flanigan's controversial appointment affect the leak case?

I haven't been able to find so much as a hint that Comey is leaving Justice because his December 2003 appointment of Fitzgerald -- a longtime friend and co-worker (WSJ, sub.) in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office -- rankled the Bush administration.

Daily Kos: Will Moves at Justice Affect CIA Leak Case?

Judith Miller's WMD reporting - New York Times war reporting - Hunt for WMD

The Source of the Trouble - By Franklin Foer

Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller’s series of exclusives about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—courtesy of the now-notorious Ahmad Chalabi—helped the New York Times keep up with the competition and the Bush administration bolster the case for war. How the very same talents that caused her to get the story also caused her to get it wrong.

On May 21, the editors arrayed contrasting images of the banker turned freedom fighter turned putative Iranian spy. Here he is smirking behind Laura Bush in the House of Representatives gallery as the president delivers his State of the Union address. There he is looking bleary and sweaty, after Iraqi police stormed his home and office in the middle of the night. An analysis by David Sanger went so far as to name names of individuals who had associated themselves with the discredited leader of the Iraqi National Congress. The list, he wrote, included “many of the men who came to dominate the top ranks of the Bush administration . . . Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith, Richard L. Armitage, Elliott Abrams and Zalmay M. Khalilzad, among others.”

The phrase “among others” is a highly evocative one. Because that list of credulous Chalabi allies could include the New York Times’ own reporter, Judith Miller. During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein’s ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Chalabi and his allies—almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

Miller is a star, a diva. She wrote big stories, won big prizes. Long before her WMD articles ran, Miller had become a newsroom legend—and for reasons that had little to do with the stories that appeared beneath her byline. With her seemingly bottomless ambition—a pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders—she cut a larger-than-life figure that lent itself to Paul Bunyan–esque retellings. Most of these stories aren’t kind. Of course, nobody said journalism was a country club. And her personality was immaterial while she was succeeding, winning a Pulitzer, warning the world about terrorism, bio-weapons, and Iraq’s war machine. But now, who she is, and why she prospered, makes for a revealing cautionary tale about the culture of American journalism.

On a summer afternoon in the early eighties, Judy Miller invited her exercise-averse boyfriend Richard Burt, then the Times’ defense reporter, to watch her swim laps in the Washington Hilton pool. Afterward, lounging in the sun, Miller veered into one of her favorite lines of conversation: Does chemical or nuclear warfare inflict the most damage? Burt, who would go on to become an assistant secretary of State in the Reagan administration, has a serious cast of mind. But even he was taken aback by Miller’s dark thoughts. “I remember being struck that there are not many people sitting around on a beautiful day thinking about weapons of mass destruction,” he says.

Miller’s dramatic way of looking at the world may have something to do with her family’s show-business background. During the forties and fifties, her father, Bill Miller, ran the Riviera nightclub in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Famed for its retractable roof, the Riviera staged shows by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tito Puente. When the state highway commission ordered the Riviera condemned in 1953, Miller made his way to Vegas, proving his impresario bona fides by reviving the careers of Elvis Presley and Marlene Dietrich.

Judy Miller arrived in the Times’ Washington bureau in 1977, as part of a new breed of hungry young hires, prodded in part by the sting of losing the Watergate story to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. “She was unlike the other guys there. That’s why they brought her to the paper,” says Steven Rattner, another old boyfriend, who eventually left his Times gig to become an investment banker.

Installed amid colleagues—they were almost all men—who’d spent decades working their way up the paper’s food chain, Miller stood out immediately for her sharp elbows... Defenders are few and far between. And even the staunchest ones often concede her faults. Bill Keller told me in an e-mail, “She has sharp elbows. She is possessive of her sources, and passionate about her stories, and a little obsessive...

At Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, studying for a master’s in public affairs, she traveled to Jerusalem in 1971 to research a paper. “I became fascinated with the Israeli and the Palestinian dispute, and spent the rest of the summer traveling for the first time to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon,” Miller told me in an e-mail. (Miller responded by e-mail to some questions and ignored others.) “By the end of the summer, I was hooked.” As a correspondent for The Progressive and National Public Radio, she turned her academic interest into a professional one, traveling to the region and cultivating a network of highly placed sources. Nina Totenberg, a colleague from NPR, recalls a party in the mid-seventies at which Jordan’s King Hussein caught a glimpse of Miller across the room and howled, “Juuuuddddy!”

“Kiiiinnnggg,” she responded.

In 1983, the Times put her Middle East experience to use by installing her as its Cairo bureau chief, allowing her to range from Tripoli to Damascus. Paradoxically, powerful Middle Eastern men, with their fervent sexism, actually represented an opportunity for female reporters. Viewing the women with utter condescension, these monarchs and dictators had no fear of granting them extraordinary access. They would pontificate without worries of repercussions. Miller had ready access to many Mideast potentates. As she shuttled between meetings with Hussein, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat in 1984, her colleagues joked about the “Miller Plan” for peace...

Miller also racked up the sort of adventure tales that correspondents love to dispense after a dram or two of whiskey. She witnessed a hanging in Sudan, flew across Afghanistan in a rickety Northern Alliance helicopter held together in places by duct tape. “Judy is a smart, relentless, incredibly well-sourced, and fearless reporter,” says Keller. “It’s a little galling to watch her pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists who have never ventured into a war zone.."

By the late nineties, she was focused largely on the nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Her dispatches from the region frequently contained nightmare scenarios. One piece, co-written with William Broad, warned that “a pilotless plane spraying 200 pounds of anthrax near a large city might kill up to a million people—if the winds were right, if no rain fell, if the nozzles did not get clogged, if the particles were the right size, if the population had no vaccinations, and so on.” It might have seemed like a risk too far-fetched to mention, but she felt compelled to mention it. The country at the time seemed to be enjoying the equivalent of that sunny day at the Hilton. The economy was booming, and the biggest problem seemed to be managing prosperity—and a president’s personal failings. “Remember, everyone was obsessed with the White House sex story,” says New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who was invited by the paper to join Miller in an investigation unit to examine Al Qaeda. Goldberg found her an impossibly difficult colleague. But he also realized her value. “She happened to be prescient about the rise of the global jihad. And it was her unpleasant hyper-aggressiveness that enabled her to help force a very important story—the possibility of a marriage between WMD proliferators and global jihadists—closer to the top of the agenda.”

Before September 11, Miller, with her anxieties about anthrax attacks, could seem like Chicken Little; afterward, she seemed more liked Cassandra, the only one who’d been right. And this fact gave her tremendous power at the paper. Eight months before the attacks, she published a piece documenting Al Qaeda’s WMD ambitions—part of a series that later earned her (along with several colleagues) a Pulitzer. Germs, a book about bioterrorism co-written with two Times colleagues, appeared less than a month after the attacks and soon hit the best-seller list. She began making regular appearances on CNN and PBS, becoming a public face of the paper—a celebrity that grimly solidified when she received a hoax letter at her desk containing a white, powdery substance resembling anthrax.

What’s more, she had spent several decades acquiring access to Washington’s Middle East experts, some of whom suddenly wielded tremendous influence in the Bush administration. Miller’s many doubters at the Times were effectively silenced. She had emerged as one of the paper’s biggest stars, with the kind of “competitive metabolism” that new editor Howell Raines—he’d taken over from Joseph Lelyveld the week before 9/11—made into a crusade. According to a friend of Raines’s, as well as one of Miller’s colleagues at the paper, the editor pulled her aside after the attacks. “Go win a Pulitzer,” he told her.

For the next two years, she supplied the paper with a string of grim exclusives. There was the defector who described Saddam Hussein’s recent renovation of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There was her report that a Russian virologist might have handed the regime a particularly virulent strain of smallpox. To protect themselves against VX and sarin, she further reported, the Iraqis had greatly increased the importation of an antidote to these agents. And, most memorably, she co-wrote a piece in which administration officials suggested that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons. Vice-President Dick Cheney trumpeted the story on Meet the Press, closing the circle. Of course, each of the stories contained important caveats. But together they painted a horrifying picture. There was just one problem with them: The vast majority of these blockbusters turned out to be wrong....


Judith Miller's WMD reporting - New York Times war reporting - Hunt for WMD

The Miller/Fitzgerald Backstory: She blabbed about one of his cases

The Miller/Fitzgerald Backstory - By Josh Marshall

Don't forget: This isn't the first time Plame prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has tangled with Judy Miller while investigating a leak out of the Bush White House.

A little more than a year ago, I reported on TPM how Fitzgerald had quite aggressively investigated another Bush White House leak in late 2001 and early 2002. Fitzgerald had been investigating three Islamic charities accused of supporting terrorism -- the Holy Land Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation, and the Benevolence International Foundation. But just before his investigators could swoop in with warrants, two of the charities in question got wind of what was coming and, apparently, were able to destroy a good deal of evidence.

What tipped them off were calls from two reporters at the New York Times who'd been leaked information about the investigation by folks at the White House.

One of those two reporters was Judy Miller.


Jul 07, 2005 -- 01:14:08 AM EST
Now, the way I found out about all this originally was entirely fortuitous. While reporting on a completely unrelated story, I was interviewing a Washington foreign policy hand. And after some time talking we get to exchanging notes and speculating about the Plame investigation. My biggest interest was in finding out just how straight a shooter Patrick Fitzgerald was and whether there was reason to think he'd mount a tough and independent investigation, given the fact that he'd been appointed by John Ashcroft's No.2 at the Justice Department.

My conversation partner told me he didn't have much doubt Fitzgerald would be aggressive. And he pointed to his knowledge of the earlier investigation. In his view (though I was never quite clear why), in the earlier case, the folks at the White House had actually had fairly clean hands. But Fitzgerald had gone after them in a big way. (See more details here.)

Given that backstory, he didn't think Fitzgerald would go easy on the White House if there was a case to be made. And largely on that basis, I've always assumed Fitzgerald's inquiry would be the real thing.

TPMCafe || Politics, Ideas & Lots Of Caffeine

Grover Norquist has ties to Islamic Institute and David Horowitz doesn't like it

I have known Grover Norquist for almost twenty years as a political ally. Long before I myself was cognizant of the Communist threat – indeed when I was part of one of those Fifth Column networks – Grover Norquist was mobilizing his countrymen to combat it. In the early 1980s, Grover was in the forefront of conservative efforts to get the Reagan Administration to support the liberation struggles of anti-Communists in Central America, Africa and Afghanistan.

It is with a heavy heart therefore, that I am posting this article, which is the most complete documentation extant of Grover Norquist’s activities in behalf of the Islamist Fifth Column. I have confronted Grover about these issues and have talked to others who have done likewise. But it has been left to Frank Gaffney and a few others, including Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson, to make the case and to suffer the inevitable recriminations that have followed earlier disclosures of some aspects of this story.

FrontPage magazine.com :: A Troubling Influence by Frank J Gaffney Jr.

John Bolton's Yellowcake - by Ray McGovern

Boltonization: how does [the Downing Street Memo] kind of "fixing" play out?

Insights leap out of recently declassified e-mail messages from the office of Undersecretary of State John Bolton, archdeacon of politicization. I was particularly struck to learn from the Washington Post that Bolton's principal aide and chief enforcer, Frederick Fleitz, is actually a CIA analyst on loan to Bolton. In this light, his behavior in trying to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy is even more inexcusable. CIA analysts, particularly those on detail to policy departments, have no business playing the enforcer of policy judgments, have no business conjuring up "intelligence around the policy.

E-mails released more recently show Fleitz acting as stalking horse for Bolton to make sure the intelligence fit the policies Bolton was pushing. Fleitz is furious that State Department intelligence experts feel it their duty to demur on Bolton/Fleitz judgments regarding the efficacy of missile export controls against China. Fleitz, whose home office at CIA is the one which gave us "high confidence" judgments on the presence of WMD in Iraq, apparently ordered up analysis from CIA to suit his boss' strongly held judgment that the controls on exports to China were deficient.

Not surprisingly, Bolton liked the analysis that was served up by Fleitz' CIA colleagues and told him to pass it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But State's intelligence analysts had the temerity to do their job, and attached a cover memo taking the opposite position, viewing the export controls positively. Questioned on this by Senate staffers last week, Fleitz admitted that his experience in his CIA home office gave him a personal stake in how the analysis was treated. This is doubly inappropriate.

folks like Fleitz "cherry-picked" by folks like Bolton to "support" policy in wholly inappropriate ways. That top CIA officials allow the Boltons of this administration to get away with that shows CIA managers to be weak, witting, and willing accomplices in this corruption of the intelligence process.

Enter the Yellowcake

The Fleitz technique is one way to Boltonize intelligence, but there are other ways to counter attempts by intelligence analysts to "tell it like it is," when "like it is" needs to be "fixed" around a policy. Just go around the analysts.

An instructive example of this can be seen by harking back to a key juncture in the saga on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," in which Bolton achieved his aims by simply cutting State Department intelligence analysts out of the flow.

Painful as it is to bring up the embarrassing canard about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, that sad chapter illustrates how Bolton operates when he knows he cannot bully intelligence community analysts to come up with the desired "analysis." Before President Bush's key speech on Oct. 7, 2002, setting the stage for Congress' vote on the war three days later, then-CIA director Tenet personally intervened to prevent the president from using spurious "intelligence" on the alleged attempts to acquire "yellowcake" (slightly enriched uranium) from Africa.

Just two months later, however, this canard reappeared in an official State Department "Fact Sheet" dated Dec. 19, debunking Baghdad's submission to the UN Security Council accounting for Iraqi weapons programs. The "Fact Sheet" directly cited the "yellowcake" deal as proof that Saddam Hussein was lying to the United States about his nuclear program (which had been "reconstituted" only in the rhetoric of Bolton's patron, Dick Cheney).

Small problem: State's intelligence analysts had long shared CIA's skepticism about that report. Indeed, in the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002, they had branded it "dubious."

What accounts for new life being injected into this canard? We learned some time ago from a former senior Bush State Department official that the impetus came from Bolton's office. And now we have documentary proof, thanks to a State Department Inspector General investigation, the results of which were shared with a congressional subcommittee. In sum, when Bolton realized that the Iraq-Niger report itself left most analysts holding their noses (even before it was established that it was based on crude forgeries), his office inserted the bogus story into the official State Department "Fact Sheet" without clearing it with the department's own intelligence analysts. Easy.

This strongly suggests that it was also no accident that a month later the yellowcake fable found its way into the president's State of the Union address. Bolton's rogue operation ensured the subsequent embarrassment of one and all when the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, declared the reports "not authentic," forcing both White House officials and George Tenet to apologize.

Bolton kept his head down during all this, doing all he could to disguise his involvement in the "Fact Sheet" misadventure. Indeed, the House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security found that "the State Department deliberately concealed unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, in the creation of a fact sheet that falsely claimed that Iraq sought uranium from Niger."

In a letter of Sept. 25, 2003, State told the subcommittee that "Bolton did not play a role in the creation of this document." However, subcommittee investigators subsequently obtained access to a State Department inspector general report that showed that Bolton not only ordered that the fact sheet be created, but also received updates on its development.

Later, Bolton fell back on his default modus operandi: the by-now-familiar attempts to fire for their insolence analysts, managers, senior UN officials – it doesn't matter. Late last year, Bolton led a one-man, one-country vendetta aimed at preventing the well-respected ElBaradei from getting another term as director of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. That quixotic campaign was unprecedented in its vindictiveness and won the U.S. no friends.

And this is the president's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations. Remarkable.

Ray McGovern is a Former CIA analyst and founder of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

He admits the CIA knew the Gulf of Tonkin incident was bogus. He admits they knew most of MacNamara's claims were bogus. Everyone kept waiting for someone else to come clean and no one did. They were always able to rationalize their inaction. He doesn't want that to happen again.

John Bolton's Yellowcake - by Ray McGovern

JINSA Online -- Home Page

About JINSA

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is a non-profit, non-partisan educational organization committed to explaining the need for a prudent national security policy for the United States, addressing the security requirements of both the United States and the State of Israel, and strengthening the strategic cooperation relationship between these two great democracies.

Founded as a result of the lessons learned from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, JINSA communicates with the national security establishment and the general public to explain the role Israel can and does play in bolstering American interests, as well as the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel.

JINSA Online -- Home Page

Arianna on Miller

..division over Miller is nothing new… it predates her transformation into media martyr by many months. For an early look at this riff, check out Howard Kurtz' May 2003 reporting on the way Miller ferociously fought to keep Ahmad Chalabi, her top source on WMD, to herself and the anger it caused at the paper. And also the paper's extraordinary mea culpa from May 2004, in which its editors admitted that the Times' reporting on Iraq "was not as rigorous as it should have been" -- yet steadfastly refused to even mention the less-than-rigorous reporter whose byline appeared on 4 of the 6 stories the editors singled out as being particularly egregious. "It looks," the Times' public admission concluded, "as if we, along with the administration, were taken in." And yet just two month earlier, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller called Miller, who was one of the main reporters "taken in" a "smart, well-sourced, industrious and fearless reporter." Nothing about her less than "rigorous" reporting. Nothing about her reliance on Chalabi being less than "well-sourced."

Any discussion of Miller's actions in the Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal must not leave out the key role she played in cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq and in hyping the WMD threat. Re-reading some of her pre-war reporting today, it's hard not to be disgusted by how inaccurate and pumped up it turned out to be. For chapter and verse, check out Slate's Jack Shafer. For the money quote on her mindset, look to her April 2003 appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where, following up on her blockbuster front page story about an Iraqi scientist and his claims that Iraq had destroyed all its WMD just before the war started, Miller said the scientist was more than a "smoking gun," he was the "silver bullet" in the hunt for WMD. The "silver bullet" later turned out to be another blank -- and the scientist turned out to be a military intelligence official.

Amazingly, however, even as her reporting has been debunked -- and her sources discredited -- Miller has steadfastly refused to apologize for her role in misleading the public in the lead up to the war. Indeed, in an interview with the author of Bush's Brain, James Moore, she, in the words of Moore, "remained righteously indignant, unwilling to accept that she had goofed in the grandest of fashions", telling him: "I was proved fucking right."

As recently as March 2005, in an appearance at Berkeley, she stubbornly refused to express regret. Indeed, she showed that she shares a key attitude with the Bush administration: an unwillingness to admit mistakes when faced with new realities. She even compared herself to the president, saying that she was getting the same information he was getting… and suggested that since he hadn't apologized, why should she? Maybe she's angling for the Tenet treatment: promote faulty intel, get a Medal of Freedom. Miller also echoed the words of Don Rumsfeld ("You go to war with the Army you have") when she justified her flawed reporting on WMD by saying "You go with what you've got". Really? Wouldn't it be better to wait until what you've got is right?

It's nice that Bill Keller is visiting Judy in jail giving updates about how hard this is for her, having to be away from her family and friends. But it would be even nicer if we'd had some acknowledgement from Miller of her complicity in sending 138,000 American soldiers away from their family and friends. And, unlike Miller, they won't be returning home in October. Indeed, as of today, 1,785 of them won't be returning home at all.

This story gets deeper with every twist and revelation, including the reminder (via Podhoretz) that Fitzgerald had a previous run in with Miller over her actions in a national security case, and the speculation (via Jeralyn at Talk Left) that Fitzgerald is considering seeking to put Miller under criminal contempt, rather than the civil contempt she's now under.

But one thing is inescapable: Miller -- intentionally or unintentionally -- worked hand in glove in helping the White House propaganda machine (for a prime example, check out this Newsweek story on how the aluminum tubes tall tale went from a government source to Miller to page one of the New York Times to Cheney and Rice going on the Sunday shows to confirm the story to Bush pushing that same story at the UN).

So, once again, the question arises (and you can't have it both ways, Frank): when it comes to this scandal, do you want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or do you want the truth -- except for what Judy Miller wants to keep to herself?

Arianna Online Forums - Arianna's theory on Plame outing

Two Ways to Look at Rove Controversy

There are two important and distinct lenses through which Karl Rove's possible connection to the leaking of a CIA operative's name must be viewed -- the legal and the political.

The investigation into who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to the media has recently focused on Rove, one of President Bush's closest advisers, after reports surfaced that Rove had spoken to a Time magazine journalist about Plame.

The legal portion of the story is largely in the hands of the special prosecutor investigating the leak, Patrick Fitzgerald. The outcome will rely on the facts of the case and Fitzgerald's judgment. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, continues to assert his client's innocence and that Rove is neither a target nor a subject of the investigation. Luskin has also emphasized that the purpose of Timereporter Matthew Cooper's phone call to Rove was to discuss welfare reform and that Rove had no intention of bringing up the Wilson/Plame story until Cooper raised the issue.

Political Fallout Grows
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The political lens provides an entirely different view as best exemplified by the contentious briefing Scott McClellan provided for reporters Monday at the White House, where he was asked more than 30 questions about Rove's involvement in the story and all he was able to offer up was a refusal to comment on an ongoing investigation.

The most important thing to watch going forward is how members of the president's party respond to the swirling controversy. If some Republicans begin to get nervous that the Rove controversy may cause them problems moving their agenda forward, they may begin to speak a bit off-message.

The Republican message, for now, is to label the questions surrounding Rove as purely partisan in nature and to assert that he was simply trying to steer a reporter away from what he saw as a story based on a false premise from a questionable source -- Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador who had been critical of the White House.

Whatever else one thinks, these facts are not in dispute:

A. Rove's attorney has acknowledged that he talked about Plame with Cooper, without mentioning her name, days before Robert Novak's column publicly revealed her identity.

B. Rove (and Rove via McClellan) has repeatedly suggested that he had nothing to do with this story at all.

C. The White House has suggested that any person found to have anything to do with the improper leaking of Wilson's name to the press would be fired.

Some Republicans with standing believe he'll have to make a full and unfettered accounting for his actions, and soon.

Saying he didn't "say her name" or was trying to "wave off" Cooper is, for many, hairsplitting. It may save Rove from legal trouble, but it certainly does not get him free and clear of the political responsibility.

Another sign of potential trouble for Rove is that part of what makes an inside-the-beltway Washington story resonate outside-the-beltway is if it is easily understood by Americans going about living their busy lives.

This story line seems pretty simple: Guy hits administration on Iraq, so the White House potentially breaks the law (or, at least, breaks the rules of decorum in Bush's White House) and gives up his wife, the CIA agent.

Legalese aside, early on in this process, Rove and the White House went out of their way to make it appear as if Rove had absolutely nothing to do with the Plame story.

It now seems clear that he did indeed have some involvement in getting the story into circulation -- or, at least, in spreading awareness about Plame.

Dancing on that fine line between legally and politically questionable behavior is a completely legitimate line to dance on and one that should be noted by the press.

Of course, if no new information comes to light beyond Cooper's e-mail to his editor, the glare of the media spotlight could be quickly refocused on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Rehnquist could possibly announce his retirement or Bush may soon name a nominee to fill Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's seat.

Rove has a lot of friends and he understands exactly where the mindset of political Washington is right now, but it isn't clear how far those two advantages will carry him going forward.

Still, the panting on the Left that they may be within reach of bringing down the "architect," as Bush has called him, seems a bit of an overreach. As soon as Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., issues a press release demanding Rove's security credentials be removed -- or Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., calls for a congressional investigation -- the seriousness and legitimacy of the story seem to be cheapened a bit as it gives way to being the political football of the news cycle.

On the other hand, there are a lot of questions that aren't being answered just yet.

Did Rove mislead his colleagues? Where did he get the information? If he is not the target or subject of the investigation, who is? Can he continue to operate effectively or will everything he says publicly be seen through this lens? And that's just to name a few mysteries yet to be solved.

AT&T Worldnet Service - Political News - Analysis: Two Ways to Look at Rove Controversy

Poll: Many Doubt White House Cooperation in CIA Leak Probe

Just a quarter of Americans think the White House is fully cooperating in the federal investigation of the leak of a CIA operative's identity, a number that's declined sharply since the investigation began. And three-quarters say that if presidential adviser Karl Rove was responsible for leaking classified information, it should cost him his job.

Skepticism about the administration's cooperation has jumped. As the initial investigation began in September 2003, nearly half the public, 47 percent, believed the White House was fully cooperating. That fell to 39 percent a few weeks later, and it's lower still, 25 percent, in this new ABC News poll.

This view is highly partisan; barely over a tenth of Democrats and just a quarter of independents think the White House is fully cooperating. That grows to 47 percent of Republicans -- much higher, but still under half in the president's own party. And doubt about the administration's cooperation has grown as much among Republicans -- by 22 points since September 2003 -- as it has among others.
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There's less division on consequences: 75 percent say Rove should lose his job if the investigation finds he leaked classified information. That includes sizable majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats alike -- 71, 74 and 83 percent, respectively.

At the same time, in September 2003 more Americans -- 91 percent -- said someone who leaked classified information should be fired. The question at that time did not identify Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and one of George W. Bush's closest advisers, as the possible source of the information.
Should Karl Rove Be Fired If He Leaked Classified Information?
Yes No
All 75% 15%
Republicans 71 17
Independents 74 17
Democrats 83 12

A Time magazine reporter, Matthew Cooper, said this weekend that Rove told him that the wife of a former ambassador was a CIA officer, without giving her name. Cooper testified last week before the grand jury investigating the matter, saying his source had released him to do so.

Bush today appeared to raise the bar on a dismissable offense, saying he'd fire anyone who committed a crime. Previously the administration said anyone who'd disclosed the CIA agent's identify would be removed, without specifying a criminal act.

Miller

This poll finds majority support for another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, who's gone to jail rather than disclose her confidential source in the case. Sixty percent say she's done the right thing, ranging from 49 percent of Republicans to about two-thirds of Democrats and independents.

That view comports with an ABC News/Washington Post poll in May that found majority support for the use of confidential sources by news reporters -- 53 percent in general, rising to 65 percent if it's the only way to get an important story.

Serious

The leak investigation is seen as a meaningful issue: About three-quarters call it a serious matter, and just over four in 10 see it as "very" serious. These are down slightly, however, by five and six points respectively, from their level in September 2003.

Fifty-three percent are following the issue closely -- a fairly broad level of attention. Those paying close attention (who include about as many Republicans as Democrats) are more likely than others to call it very serious, to say the White House is not cooperating, to say Rove should be fired if he leaked, and to say Miller is doing the right thing.

Methodology

This ABC News poll was conducted by telephone July 13-17, 2005, among a random national sample of 1,008 adults. The results have a three-point error margin. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by ICR-International Communications Research of Media, Pa.

http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/986a1CIALeak.pdf

AT&T Worldnet Service - Political News - Poll: Many Doubt White House Cooperation in CIA Leak Probe

At the GOP School for Scandal, Monica trumps Rove

By Steve Stajich

You hear it at least once a week: The plaintive moan of a fellow American befuddled by our nation’s odd sense of priorities. It comes out this way: “I can’t believe they tried to impeach Clinton for Monica and yet this gets nothing!”

“This” being, among other things, the WMDs, the Iraq invasion, 25,000 Iraqi civilians dead, Halliburton’s theft of American tax dollars, Bush family connections to Saudis or cartels, the plundering of the environment, armor and supplies for fighting troops, Bush’s military service records, connections to the Swift Boat monkeys -- I’ll stop here to save space.

Now, of course, it’s Karl Rove. With the heat (“Hello, Kyoto…?”) causing more people to sit in the shade and dwell on things, folks are asking “How did they whip up impeachment proceedings against Clinton on an act of oral gratification, and now there’s no pressure on Rove or the White House that protects him?”

I don’t have the answer, exactly… but it might be worthwhile to compare the events side by side, and see why Clinton and Monica brought on impeachment hearings while the Bush White House enjoys an unlimited supply of “Get Out of Everything FREE” cards.

National Security

This first one’s a no-brainer. Rove blowing the cover of a CIA operative only means possible death to that agent, death to other agents around that agent, and compromised missions that might include more death. However, a nation that allows its President to enjoy extramarital oral sex without punishment would be saying to its youth “Your parents and their parents before them were sexually repressed, but you don’t have to be.” And that message would destroy us from the inside out. So you had to at least try to impeach Clinton.

Breaking the Law

So far, Rove and Bush have made it clear they’re only interested in arguments pertaining to a crime. The press is helping them by repeating over and over again, “While Rove may not have committed a crime…”. But Bill Clinton did commit a crime: He had consensual sex outside of marriage and enjoyed it. Even in his book, there’s next to nothing about guilt over Monica. You must have guilt about extramarital sex. That’s a law that I’m sure is written down somewhere.

Stopping Government

Rove’s lying and his boss protecting Rove’s lying and the both of them being right out in front of the world doing it on videotape merely reinforces the existing image the world has of the current administration and their regard for the acuity of the citizens they serve. But Clinton earnestly tried to keep his sexual activities a secret. He pounded his fist and said, “I never did this, I never did that…” and brought government to a halt. Instead, he should have done what the current administration does: Caught in a lie, you carry on with your invasions and proceed as though nothing is wrong. The media will help you by setting the whole thing to dramatic music and graphics, literally drowning out any hew or cry regarding phony intelligence.

Heat and Other Thermal Properties

Karl Rove is a weasel, and weasels aren’t sexy. In popular vernacular, they’re not “hot,” Clinton was hot, but he broke the threshold of thermal pain for us when it turned out he was, in fact, as sexually active as we all dreamed he was. He was a fireball, and that’s powerful. So naturally, he was hosed down to a cooler temperature by the Republicans. Let me rephrase that: We all know he was hosed by the Republicans.

Santa Monica Mirror

http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=23663

I don't believe Condi is too involved. If someone would know how serious it is to reveal an undercover agent's name it would be her, Bush's NSA. Besides, Bolton's testimony to the IG only showed up after Biden's letter to her.. Which leads me to believe she is the one who cleared it's release... But the guy has a point -- law

Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal
The Source Beyond Rove
ROGER MORRIS, Former NSC staffer - July 27, 2005

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime's chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator's ties to Al Qaeda.

Rice's demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson's now famous expos� of the fraud, the administration's immediate retaliatory "outing" of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President's supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak-altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely �or deliberately ignored-in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, Condoleezza Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush's rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame's identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.


* * *

The evidence of Rice's complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice's unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn't simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice's deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President's, Rice's, and the regime's inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity-in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all.

News no. 14128 from www.uruknet.info :: informazione dall'Iraq occupato :: news from occupied Iraq - ch

Who is behind the Forged Niger Documents ?

CGCS posters wonder if Karl could have provided the forged Niger documents? (Via Michael Ledeen Karl Rove's only full-time foreign-policy advisor is Michael Ledeen)

Like he did to CBS to discredit Dan Rather?

Like he did to the Swift Boat liars to discredit John Kerry?

Like he did to South Carolina voters to discredit McCain?

QUOTE(heritage @ Jul 29 2005, 10:33 AM)
Posted Jul 29 2005, 11:40 AM Post #482

KARL ROVE, MICHAEL LEDEEN SPIES PROCURED FORGED NIGER DOCUMENTS
Posted by C. Hallmark on Thursday July 28

http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=23663

KARL ROVE and VARIOUS SPIES HE IS LINKED TO

Karl Rove's only full-time foreign-policy advisor is Michael Ledeen, a rabid anti-Arab, pro-Israel activist. The FBI is investigating Ledeen for procuring forged documents (shown here) on nonexistent WMD, which George Bush used to justify his war on Iraq. When Joseph Wilson exposed the farce, Rove helped "out" Wilson's CIA wife. Did Ledeen procure the documents for Rove, and how might he have done that? The story includes multinational stool pigeon Rocco Martino, Italian spy Francesco Pazienza, wanted CIA spy Robert Seldon Lady, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who's under charges of giving US secrets to Israel.



Common Ground Common Sense

Did Michael Ledeen Circulate The Niger Forgeries For Karl Rove?

Did Michael Ledeen Circulate The Niger Forgeries For Karl Rove?
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/july/article328.html

By Thomas Keyes
July 23, 2005

Is Michael Ledeen somehow involved in the ongoing investigations into the provenance of the Níger forgeries, the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s name as a covert CIA operative and the delivery of classified materials to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by Larry Franklin?

Michael Ledeen is a long-time Jewish Zionist activist who cherishes great animosity towards Iraq and Iran, making this known at every turn, as can be seen by looking through his articles at National Review Online, where he is a staff writer. He is also a member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), two influential Washington think tanks. He has close connections with Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who also headed the Pentagon’s now-disbanded Office of Special Plans (OSP), an ad hoc bureau formed for the purpose of manufacturing a casus belli for the recent invasion of Iraq. Ledeen has a long-standing relationship with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the dissident Iranian arms dealer who was involved in the Iran Contra Scandal. Ghorbanifar has been identified by the CIA as a forger of intelligence documents. Michael Ledeen is also a full-time advisor to Karl Rove on international affairs.

Michael Ledeen is alleged to be a member of Propaganda Due, a secretive Italian espionage group whose work parallels that of the Servizi di Informazione e Sicurezza (SISMI), the official Italian intelligence service. Other members of Propaganda Due include Ghorbanifar and Italian President Silvio Berlusconi.

Ghorbanifar has admitted discussing regime change in Iran with Harold Rhodes and Larry Franklin, both of whom worked for the OSP under Feith, in a meeting arranged by Michael Ledeen. Larry Franklin was recently indicted for passing classified information to AIPAC. AIPAC has also suspended two of its own members, Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen, in connection with the scandal, but the suspensions may have been for appearances only, to make it look as if AIPAC doesn’t condone espionage.

Anyone who has followed the matter of the forged Niger documents will know that they were delivered to the CIA by Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist for the magazine Panorama, owned by Berlusconi. She supposedly received them from a private intelligence broker by the name of Rocco Martino, who is also a member of Propaganda Due. These were the forgeries that were denounced by Mohamed el-Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) on March 7, 2003, the eve of the invasion. Burba had travelled to Niger, concluding that the documents were forgeries, but was instructed to pass them on to the CIA anyway. The CIA either believed or was pressured into pretending to believe that the documents were genuine.

So it’s quite possible that Michael Ledeen masterminded the planting of the forgeries, with the proven services of Ghorbanifar and under the tutelage or Karl Rove, with or without the connivance of George W. Bush. If this view is correct, Ledeen got Ghorbanifar to create the fraudulent documents, and Berlusconi had Martino float them with Burba, all within the framework provided by Propaganda Due.

So when Joseph Wilson IV wrote his op-ed in the New York Times, giving the lie to the contention that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Niger, he may have been undoing the carefully executed handiwork of Karl Rove’s henchman Michael Ledeen. Naturally, Rove may have wanted to retaliate. If it was not Rove, it may have been someone near him or some other official in the White House. And when el-Baradei denounced the forgeries, it would have been another wrench in the machinery. So it stands to reason that someone like John Bolton would seek to retaliate against el-Baradei by trying to prevent his election for a third term at the IAEA.

The big issue, of course, is not whether Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby or someone else closely associated with them leaked Valerie Plame’s name to the media to get vengeance on Wilson. The violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is a relatively minor offense when compared with mounting the whole battery of deceptions and intrigues that underlay the invasion of Iraq, and now seems to be aimed at Iran. It’s not even important that Michael Ledeen, who is an Israeli agent in spirit, if not also in fact, is exposed and denounced. The important thing is to bring down the whole misbegotten machine, and remove George W. Bush from office.

Hopefully, the present investigations will get the ball rolling.

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

About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far.

I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents.

Common Ground Common Sense

Daily Kos: Breaking: Spiked CBS Niger Story Leaked to Salon

Breaking: Spiked CBS Niger Story Leaked to Salon
by pontificator [Subscribe]
Tue Sep 28th, 2004 at 23:13:47 CDT

CBS -- the Cowardly Broadcasting System, refuses to run a story showing that we went to war based on a lie:

* pontificator's diary :: ::
*

One measure of the debacle is a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment that millions of viewers now will now not see: a hard-hitting report making a powerful case that in trying to build support for the Iraq war, the Bush administration either knowingly deceived the American people about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities or was grossly credulous. CBS news president Andrew Heyward spiked the story this week, saying it would be "inappropriate" during the election campaign.

The importance that CBS placed on the report was evident by its unusual length: It was slated to run a full half hour, double the usual 15 minutes of a single segment. Although months of reporting went into the production, CBS abruptly decided that it would be "inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," in the words of a statement that network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards gave the New York Times.

Daily Kos: Breaking: Spiked CBS Niger Story Leaked to Salon

KARL ROVE and VARIOUS SPIES HE IS LINKED TO : SF Bay Area Indymedia

Karl Rove's only full-time foreign-policy advisor is Michael Ledeen, a rabid anti-Arab, pro-Israel activist. The FBI is investigating Ledeen for procuring forged documents (shown here) on nonexistent WMD, which George Bush used to justify his war on Iraq. When Joseph Wilson exposed the farce, Rove helped "out" Wilson's CIA wife. Did Ledeen procure the documents for Rove, and how might he have done that? The story includes multinational stool pigeon Rocco Martino, Italian spy Francesco Pazienza, wanted CIA spy Robert Seldon Lady, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who's under charges of giving US secrets to Israel.




KARL ROVE and VARIOU...
rocco_martino.jpg, image/jpeg, 348x392

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

Karl Rove's foreign-policy advisor, Michael Ledeen, proclaimed "the rightness of the fascist cause" in 1972. In 1984 he got George Bush Sr to appoint Iranian arms merchant/Iranian spy/Israeli spy Manucher Ghorbanifar as a middleman in the scandalous Iran-Contra affair. Ledeen has been a fixture in Washington and Israel ever since, advocating a modern version of the Crusades against Islamic nations. Based on what he has said and written, I believe Ledeen is insane.

Michael Ledeen, Rove's "brain," is one of the leading advocates for a US attack on Iran. The Washington Post quoted Ledeen as saying that Rove told him, "Anytime you have a good idea, tell me." I guess that means we can look forward to the Bush team drumming up a war with Iran. [For more, see articles by Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post -- the main man of the mainstream media pursuing the Rove Scandal.]

George Bush Jr., when he assumed the presidency in 2000, already knew that he was going to settle the family score with Saddam Hussein. His "brain," Rove, quickly enlisted Ledeen to trump up a causus belli.

EARLY 2000: ROCCO MARTINO AND THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Rocco Martino is a 66-year-old Italian gentleman SEE PHOTO who worked on and off for the Italian SISMI (analogous to the CIA) for many years and who also peddled the same information to various spy organizations and publications -- a convicted felon and international stool pigeon, just the kind of associate Rove and Ledeen needed.

After being fired by SISMI (for receiving stolen checks, among other things), he convinced the French intelligence in 2000 that he knew all about Africa and the trafficking of conventional and nonconventional arms. To avoid stepping on the toes of Italian intelligence, the French gave him a contact, or handler, in Brussels. Martino's handler in Brussels asked him to obtain every type of news or reference to contraband uranium from Niger ("NYE-jer), a former French colony in the Sahara desert (not to be confused with ex-British Nigeria in W. Africa), where mining was under the jurisdiction of two companies controlled by the gigantic French mining company Cogema.

#file_1#

Martino soon was knocking at the door of the embassy of Niger in Rome, where he met an Italian functionary (a "lady," by most reports -- but this was no lady, as we shall see). Martino provided the French with documents showing that Iraq may have been planning to expand trade with Niger. In fact, the first set of documents did not refer to uranium, and the trade plans were probably the typical sort of relationship Arab oil states had with a whole range of third-world countries.

Martino was surprised when he saw that the French immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion and thought that the documents indicated an Iraqi interest in uranium. (We now know that Iraq had no nuclear program.) "We need additional confirmation and more detailed information," said the French secret service. Martino set out to satisfy his French patrons with additional documents.

JANUARY 2001 BREAK-IN AT NIGER EMBASSY

At night, between the first and second of the January 2001, a mysterious thief came to the embassy of Niger in Rome and into the residence of the counselor in charge. It turned out that some letterhead and seals (see photocopy) were missing. A second dossier on Niger-Iraq trade soon came into Martino's hands, one that included references to uranium trafficking. Martino claims he got it from embassy personnel and that he thought it was authentic.

Martino passed it on to the French secret service, who had paid for it, and also to Panorama [a magazine owned by Bush ally and Italian president Silvio Berlusconi], which assessed it by dispatching a female reporter to Niger. Panorama also turned the file over to the US Embassy in Rome for cross-checking in the US.

The female journalist soon told Martino that the trip to Niger had not produced any real confirmation, and also the French confirmed to Martino that the reports he had passed on to them were groundless. In other words, Bush's war rationale was debunked way back in 2001 by amateur and professional sleuths.

Furthermore, it was a very amateurish forgery, not likely produced through official channels by any state intelligence agency with their vast resources. However, it was soon resuscitated as the Bush administration, in its first year, ramped up its public relations campaign for war.


ROME MEETING IN DECEMBER 2001

Michael Ledeen organized a meeting in Rome to gather evidence to support the planned war. Present were:

1. Michael Ledeen, Karl Rove's foreign policy advisor and organizer of the meeting

2. Nicolo Pollari, head of the the Italian equivalent of the CIA, or SISMI

3. Italy's Minister of Defense, Antonio Martino (no relation apparently to the spy Rocco Martino), Pollari's boss

4. Larry Franklin, an American who presently is being prosecuted in the US for giving classified information to an Israeli front group, AIPC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) -- which some would call "spying," even though he has not been charged with espionage

5. Harold Rhode: member of Dick Cheney's Office of Special Plans, protege of Ledeen, go-between with Iraqi exile and CIA asset (at the time) Ahmed Chalabi.


Ledeen already had a longstanding friendship with Francesco Pazienza, an Italian felon and forger who had been kicked out of the official Italian intelligence organization SISMI but who had found a new home in the renegade intelligence agency P-2 (Propaganda Due). Pazienza apparently was not present but definitely was known to the Italians as well as Ledeen.

Ledeen also was a personal friend of Pollari, who, like Ledeen, is a master of bridge, the card game (Ledeen writes columns on it). There are close ties between Pollari's official intelligence organization, SISMI, and Pazienza's unnofficial one, P-2. In fact, P-2 recruits from SISMI.

This little group dusted off Martino's discredited second dossier on Iraq-Niger trade, with the uranium references. The Bush administration now had its causus belli.

CAUSUS BELLI: A PIECE OF CRAP [SEE PHOTOCOPY]

#file_2#

The accompanying figure shows a bit of the cobbled-up intelligence report on stolen letterheads, forged by amateurs -- most likely Ledeen's friend, Francesco Panzienza. This document, which can be viewed at the Israeli site http://www.4law.co.il/Le838k.html, is the "evidence" on which George Bush sent almost two thousand young Americans and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians to their deaths.


SPRING 2002: JOE WILSON TO NIGER

Former US Ambassador (to Gabon) Joseph Wilson made the trip, apparently at the suggestion of the CIA and his wife, who worked in the CIA, to determine the authenticity of the charges in Martino's documents, even though the CIA already could see they were forgeries. Even the Panorama reporter could have saved him the trouble. Wilson reported back to the CIA that there was no proof that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger.

FALL 2002: USING THE CRAP

In London, Tony Blair spoke on September 24, 2002, for the first time on the attempts of Saddam Hussein to obtain uranium from Africa. And some time later Bush began to drive in the nail using the same argument. Remember, Martino had delivered the phony dossier this was based on to the US embassy in Rome over a year before. The US State Department and CIA rejected it and even Panorama had debunked it. The Pentagon, too, knew it was false, of course, but the Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle Defense Policy Board axis plus Bush and Cheney and their respective aides, Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby (both now subjects of interest to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and his grand jury in Washington, DC), went with it anyway.

THE REST IS HISTORY: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein...

...recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Sixteen little words in Bush's January 2003 State of the Union message that will be remembered in history with more honorable presidential words like, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (FDR). Bush was going on the forged documents procured by Rocco Martino, debunked by all pertinent experts, and debunked by Joseph Wilson. The US overcame Iraqi opposition -- temporarily (resistance became "suicide," now wonders, for whom?) -- mainly by bombing civilian structures rather than fighting, beginning on March 19, 2003

Wilson's outraged response to using, for murder, evidence he had debunked got his family, or at least his wife, targeted by that amoral husk of a man, Karl Rove, who, along with I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby (Cheney's chief aide) outed Valerie Wilson to Robert Novak, Judith Miller (the jailed New York Times reporter and pro-war hawk), Matthew Cooper (Time's reporter who has jeopardized Rove in a criminal investigation), and numerous other journalists. Most, like Miller and Cooper, wisely resisted Rove's bait.

IMP OF IMPS: MICHAEL LEDEEN'S DAUGHTER SMILES IMPISHLY IN IRAQ [PHOTO]

#file_3#

The war is not just about oil, Israel's fears/ambitions, or US hegemony. There are contracts and contractors in Iraq. Modern-day carpetbaggers with briefcases descended like a plague of scorpions on the poor, bloodied, bombed-out, grieving people of Iraq. They included the daughter of the war's chief banshee -- Simone Ledeen, Michael's young daughter -- shown in the photo, greeting with an impish smile another occupier at the Baghdad airport -- getting ready to lord it over the Iraqis as she tries out her new MBA working for the CPA. Caption: "The creatures step out of the tripods." Maybe it'll help to pay off those student loans -- huh?, Michael.


LEDEEN FELLOW-TRAVELER FRANKLIN FACES A COURT TRIAL

At Ledeen's (Rove's brain) meeting with Italian intelligence in December 2001 was one Larry Franklin.

The FBI caught Franklin, 58, meeting two agents of AIPAC, Israel's US "lobby," in an Alexandria, VA, restaurant in June 2003. AIPAC employees, including the agents, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, had been under FBI surveillance for a couple of years. The FBI was surprised by Franklin's appearance and began investigating him, too. The FBI arrested Franklin, a Pentagon analyst on Iran and an Air Force Reserve colonel, on May 4, 2005, for illegally disclosing highly classified information to AIPAC -- spying for AIPAC, in other words. He is free on bond and is expected to plead innocent at his trial.

Why hasn't the FBI arrested the AIPAC agents, Rosen and Weissman, or anyone at the AIPAC? Who in the Bush administration is blocking justice in this case?

For that matter, why hasn't the FBI interviewed Rocco Martino, the acknowledged and admitted procurer of the phony Niger uranium documents? They are known to be investigating the phony documents.

The United States has had no qualms about getting audacious in Italy by having the CIA abduct an Egyptian cleric, Abu Omar, off the streets of Milan in February 2003, for "exceptional rendering," aka "torture," in Egypt. This open violation of Italian sovereignty was supervised by the CIA's station chief in Milan, Robert Seldon Lady, formerly of the New Orleans area.

Lady Is No "lady": ROBERT SELDON LADY

It is my belief that the "Italian functionary," or "a lady," that Martino referred to was actually a Lady, Robert Seldon Lady Sr, the same guy who headed up the torture abduction of Abu Omar.

Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro has just obtained arrrest warrants for 6 more CIA spies in addition to the original 13 that included Robert Lady, in connection with the abduction.

Robert Seldon Lady, 51, lived in Abita Springs, Lousiana, until 2001, when he left for the Milan post. He still has an address in New Orleans, according to Cryptome http://cryptome.org/lady-eyeball.htm. He and his wife Martha own a villa in the Italian countryside near Penango (Asti) and Turin, where they hoped to retire before he went on the lam. Born in Honduras, he was an affable New York City cop in the 80s who infiltrated leftist groups. He is something of an electronics hacker (at least of cell phones). And now he is a wanted felon in Europe.

During the operation, Lady apparently worked directly with the commander of the 31st Security Police Squadron, Lt. Col. Joseph Romano, USAF, at the Aviano Air Base in Italy. Lt. Col. Romano, who currently works at the Pentagon, also is sought by Italian prosecutors for questioning. At the time, Romano worked under Brig Gen R. Michael Worden, commander of the 31st Fighter Wing, who also should have to answer some questions.
The Italian prosecutor could release the photographs of the kidnap-torture perps at any time. This case -- Robert Lady's kidnapping of Abu Omar -- could become a very big story because of its possible effects on relations between nations.

KARL ROVE and VARIOUS SPIES HE IS LINKED TO : SF Bay Area Indymedia

PHXnews.com | KARL ROVE, MICHAEL LEDEEN SPIES PROCURED FORGED NIGER DOCUMENTS

KARL ROVE and VARIOUS SPIES HE IS LINKED TO

Karl Rove's only full-time foreign-policy advisor is Michael Ledeen, a rabid anti-Arab, pro-Israel activist. The FBI is investigating Ledeen for procuring forged documents (shown here) on nonexistent WMD, which George Bush used to justify his war on Iraq. When Joseph Wilson exposed the farce, Rove helped "out" Wilson's CIA wife. Did Ledeen procure the documents for Rove, and how might he have done that? The story includes multinational stool pigeon Rocco Martino, Italian spy Francesco Pazienza, wanted CIA spy Robert Seldon Lady, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who's under charges of giving US secrets to Israel.

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

Karl Rove's foreign-policy advisor, Michael Ledeen, proclaimed "the rightness of the fascist cause" in 1972. In 1984 he got George Bush Sr to appoint Iranian arms merchant and Iranian/Israeli double-agent Manucher Ghorbanifar as a middleman in the scandalous Iran-Contra affair. Ledeen has been a fixture in Washington and Israel ever since, advocating a modern version of the Crusades against Islamic nations. Based on what he has said and written, I believe Ledeen is insane.

Michael Ledeen, Rove's "brain," is one of the leading advocates for a US attack on Iran. The Washington Post quoted Ledeen as saying that Rove told him, "Anytime you have a good idea, tell me." I guess that means we can look forward to the Bush team drumming up a war with Iran. [For more, see articles by Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post -- the main man of the mainstream media pursuing the Rove Scandal.]

George Bush Jr., when he assumed the presidency in 2000, already knew that he was going to settle the family score with Saddam Hussein. His "brain," Rove, quickly enlisted Ledeen to trump up a causus belli.

EARLY 2000: ROCCO MARTINO AND THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Rocco Martino is a 66-year-old Italian gentleman SEE PHOTO who worked on and off for the Italian SISMI (analogous to the CIA) for many years and who also peddled the same information to various spy organizations and publications -- a convicted felon and international stool pigeon, just the kind of person Ledeen's associates needed.

After being fired by SISMI (for receiving stolen checks, among other things), he convinced the French intelligence in 2000 that he knew all about Africa and the trafficking of conventional and nonconventional arms. To avoid stepping on the toes of Italian intelligence, the French gave him a contact, or handler, in Brussels. Martino's handler in Brussels asked him to obtain every type of news or reference to contraband uranium from Niger ("NYE-jer) -- a former French colony in the Sahara desert (not to be confused with ex-British Nigeria in W. Africa), where mining was under the jurisdiction of two companies controlled by the gigantic French mining company Cogema.

#file_1#

Martino soon was knocking at the door of the embassy of Niger in Rome, where he met an Italian functionary (a "lady," by most reports -- but this was no lady, as we shall see). Martino provided the French with documents showing that Iraq may have been planning to expand trade with Niger. In fact, the first set of documents did not refer to uranium, and the trade plans were probably the typical sort of relationship Arab oil states had with a whole range of third-world countries.

ANUARY 2001 BREAK-IN AT NIGER EMBASSY

At night, between the first and second of the January 2001, a mysterious thief came to the embassy of Niger in Rome and into the residence of the counselor in charge. It turned out that some letterhead and seals (see photocopy) were missing. A second dossier on Niger-Iraq trade soon came into Martino's hands, one that included references to uranium trafficking. Martino claims he got it from embassy personnel and that he thought it was authentic.

Martino passed it on to the French secret service, who had paid for it, and also to Panorama [a magazine owned by Bush ally and Italian president Silvio Berlusconi], which assessed it by dispatching a female reporter to Niger. Panorama also turned the file over to the US Embassy in Rome for cross-checking in the US.

The female journalist soon told Martino that the trip to Niger had not produced any real confirmation, and also the French confirmed to Martino that the reports he had passed on to them were groundless. In other words, Bush's war rationale was debunked way back in 2001 by amateur and professional sleuths.

Furthermore, it was a very amateurish forgery, not likely produced through official channels by any state intelligence agency with their vast resources. However, it was soon resuscitated as the Bush administration, in its first year, ramped up its public relations campaign for war.

ROME MEETING IN DECEMBER 2001

Michael Ledeen organized a meeting in Rome to gather evidence to support the planned war. Present were:

1. Michael Ledeen, Karl Rove's foreign policy advisor and organizer of the meeting

2. Nicolo Pollari, head of the the Italian equivalent of the CIA, the SISMI

3. Italy's Minister of Defense, Antonio Martino (no relation apparently to the spy Rocco Martino), Pollari's boss 4. Larry Franklin, an American who presently is being prosecuted in the US for giving classified information to an Israeli front group, AIPC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) -- which some would call "spying," even though he has not been charged with espionage

5. Harold Rhode: member of Dick Cheney's Office of Special Plans, protege of Ledeen, go-between with Iraqi exile and CIA asset (at the time) Ahmed Chalabi.

Ledeen already had a longstanding friendship with Francesco Pazienza, an Italian felon and forger who had been kicked out of the official Italian intelligence organization SISMI but who had found a new home in the renegade intelligence agency P-2 (Propaganda Due). Pazienza apparently was not present but definitely was known to Italian intelligence agents, including Rocco Martino, as well as to Ledeen.

Ledeen also was a personal friend of Pollari, who, like Ledeen, is a master of the card game bridge (Ledeen writes columns on it). There are close ties between Pollari's official intelligence organization, SISMI, and Pazienza's unnofficial one, P-2. In fact, P-2 recruits from SISMI.

This little group dusted off Martino's discredited second dossier on Iraq-Niger trade, with the uranium references. The Bush administration now had its causus belli.

CAUSUS BELLI: A PIECE OF CRAP [SEE PHOTOCOPY]

#file_2#

The accompanying figure shows a bit of the cobbled-up intelligence report on stolen letterheads, forged by amateurs -- most likely Ledeen's friend, Francesco Panzienza. This document, which can be viewed at the Israeli site http://www.4law.co.il/Le838k.html, is the "evidence" on which George Bush sent almost two thousand young Americans and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians to their deaths.

SPRING 2002: JOE WILSON TO NIGER

Former US Ambassador (to Gabon) Joseph Wilson made the trip, apparently at the behest of the CIA, to determine the authenticity of the charges in Martino's documents, even though the CIA already could see they were forgeries. Even the Panorama reporter could have saved him the trouble. Wilson reported back to the CIA that there was no proof that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. The US government knew there was no proof.

FALL 2002: USING THE CRAP

In London, Tony Blair spoke on September 24, 2002, for the first time on the attempts of Saddam Hussein to obtain uranium from Africa. Bush soon began to drive in the nail using the same argument. Remember, Martino had delivered the phony dossier this was based on to the US embassy in Rome over a year before. The US State Department and CIA rejected it and even Panorama had debunked it. The Pentagon, too, knew it was false, of course, but the Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle Defense Policy Board axis plus Bush and Cheney and their respective aides, Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby (both now subjects of interest to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and his grand jury in Washington, DC), went with it anyway.

THE REST IS HISTORY: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein...

PHXnews.com | KARL ROVE, MICHAEL LEDEEN SPIES PROCURED FORGED NIGER DOCUMENTS

Daily Kos: It's Okay to Impersonate the Secret Service

Funny, I would think such a masquerade could have dire implications for the security of those the Secret Service are charged with protecting...but what do I know? I thought outing CIA operatives was a bad idea too...

It's Okay to Impersonate the Secret Service
by BarbinMD
Fri Jul 29th, 2005 at 15:53:16 CDT

Although they aren't saying why, Federal Prosecutors will not press charges against the Bush volunteer who impersonated a Secret Service agent to oust "The Denver 3" from a Bush event last year.

Federal prosecutors have declined to press charges of impersonating a Secret Service agent against a White House volunteer who forcibly ousted three people from a speech by President George W. Bush in Denver on March 21.

The announcement was made without explanation today in a letter from the Secret Service to Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar and Reps. Mark Udall and Diana DeGette, all Democrats who had asked for the agency to investigate the incident.

Funny, I would think such a masquerade could have dire implications for the security of those the Secret Service are charged with protecting...but what do I know? I thought outing CIA operatives was a bad idea too...

Daily Kos: It's Okay to Impersonate the Secret Service

Daily Kos: How Republican Senators are spending their time.

REPUBLICANS' FOCUS THIS YEAR:

Radical Judges, Over 30 Days: The Republican majority used over 30 days of the Senate's time to pick a fight over radical judges and to find jobs for five people who were already gainfully employed. [Congressional Record]

Bankruptcy, 9 Days: The Republican majority used 9 days of the Senate's time to pursue special interest legislation that benefited few Americans. [Congressional Record]

Class Action, ��4 Days: The Republican majority used 4 days of the Senate's time to pursue special interest legislation that benefited a narrow minority. [Congressional Record]

Putting Aside Our Country's Defense, 3 Days: 'Senate Republican leaders decided Tuesday that a gun manufacturers' liability bill is more important than next year's $441.6 billion defense authorization bill. With Democrats expressing amazement that there could be any higher legislative priority in a time of war than the annual defense bill that includes money for pay and benefits, operations and maintenance, and weapons' purchases and research, Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Senate Republican leader, decided Tuesday that a bill protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits over the illegal use of firearms was a higher priority.' [Army Times, 7/26/05]

http://reid.senate.gov/record2.cfm?id=241798

Daily Kos: How Republican Senators are spending their time.:

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The Counterterrorism Blog: London Attacks Should Remind Us of “Blackhawk Down”

As the investigation into the 7/7 and 7/21 terror attacks in London continues to make headway, we are now learning that at least some of the suspects have links to and are from Somalia. This really should not be surprising, as we have known Somalia has been a hotbed of Islamic radical violence for many years, and has been an African base of operations for al-Qaeda in the past.

Americans have tragically fought Muslim extremists in that fractured, war torn land in the not-so-distant past. The infamous “Blackhawk Down” incident has been claimed as an al-Qaeda victory by Osama bin-Laden; notwithstanding the fact that probably a hundred times as many Somali Islamic radical jihadists died at the hands of those outnumbered brave American soldiers as the other way around. Some al-Qaeda “victory.”

What is a victory for al-Qaeda is the fact that Somalia remains a country without real civilization controlled by warlord factions ruling by the gun. The fact Somalia is mostly Muslim, controlled by violent warlord thugs who are Muslim, and violence and lawlessness is widespread throughout the country, perhaps should say something to other African countries flirting with the idea of doing business with radical jihadists.

The London attacks will no doubt have European Intelligence and law enforcement authorities looking more closely at their immigrant Somali populations for the hopefully small number who have succumbed to the side of extremism and violence. American authorities should reinforce their efforts in that regard, as well. Along those lines, perhaps this is a good time to recall a January 12, 2005 Supreme Court decision, JAMA v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which I described in a CT Blog article dated January 27.

That decision allows the US Government to deport Somali illegal aliens under final removal orders back to Somalia, even though there is no organized, central government there to accept them back. The decision would apply to other similar countries, but the case specifically dealt with Somalia. Ironically, and interestingly, in April ICE attempted to deport Keyse Jama, the Somali criminal alien who was the subject of the noted Supreme Court case. The Government got Jama all the way back to Somalia, but conditions at the airport were so insecure and unsafe, the escorting security officers could not safely deposit him on the ground, so they turned around and brought him back to the US. I discussed that issue in another Blog article dated April 25."

The Counterterrorism Blog: London Attacks Should Remind Us of “Blackhawk Down”: "

The bomb and Karl Rove

Asia Times:
Like every important government crisis, the outing of undercover Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Valerie Plame by the President George W Bush's chief political adviser, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, perhaps among others, must be seen in many contexts at once.. Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Sidney Blumenthal of the Salon website point to the broader story of Rove's habitual practice of defending his political clients by smearing their competitors and detractors. Blumenthal titles his piece "Rove's War" and Fineman speaks of "The World According to Rove". Frank Rich of the New York Times, on the other hand, suggests that the most important war to look at is the one in Iraq. He says that the injustice to the Wilsons and even to the CIA is secondary: "The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds." In other words, what's important is not the "war" but the war.

Surely, they are all right. It's true that the harm to the Wilsons cannot be compared to the deaths of thousands in the misbegotten conflict, but it's also true that the resolution of the scandal is likely to have a lasting impact on American politics, and even on the American system of government. Perhaps the most important political question is whether the Bush administration is to be held accountable for any of its actions, or whether it now enjoys complete impunity and a free field of action to do whatever it likes - from waging war to designing and presiding over systems of torture to breaking domestic law. There are also other contexts to consider.

If Rich is right that the scandal is really about the Iraq War, then we have to ask what the war was about. The administration's chief answer is weapons of mass destruction and, more particularly, nuclear weapons. The atomic signature is scrawled all over the scandal. It is present, of course, in the uranium the president falsely said Iraq was seeking from Niger. And Plame, as it turns out, worked for the CIA on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. To defend its nuclear lies, the administration destroyed a (possible) source of nuclear truth.

The smear campaign thus did double damage in the nuclear-weapon field: it propped up, however briefly, the erroneous justification for the war, while shutting down authentic information on the broader problem. The nuclear issue popped up again in a State Department memo former secretary of state Colin Powell brought with him on Air Force One shortly after Wilson's op-ed piece appeared. It is now famous because the memo disclosed Plame's identity as Wilson's wife. Less noticed is that the bulk of the memo was devoted to rebutting the Niger uranium allegation.

This must be one of the most rebutted claims in history. Before Wilson ever spoke up, it had been disproved by several government agencies; the director of the UN's Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei; and, of course, the State Department. (As for Powell, in February 2003 he had told the UN Security Council, "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.")

Whatever else the scandal is, it is also an episode in the six-decade history of the nuclear age. In the wake of the Cold War, many people imagined that nuclear danger had disappeared. A decade of utter neglect followed. Then, in 1998, the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests launched the two countries on a nuclear arms race. Soon other countries, including North Korea and Iran, were knocking at the door of the nuclear club. But it wasn't until September 11 that the neglected peril reared up again in the public mind - and returned to the center of policy. The fictional danger of an Iraqi bomb bursting in an American city was, of course, the chief justification for the war, but it was more than that. It was the linchpin of the broader policy of preventive military strikes - necessary, the president said, to forestall the hostile states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. In his words, "As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed."

At the root of the policy was a radical reconception of the way to stop proliferation. Hitherto, the policy had been to address it by negotiation and disarmament treaties. Now it was to be addressed by military force. The decade of neglect had led to the most severe collision of nuclear policy with nuclear reality since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The Iraq war was the result, though not the only one. While the US military was looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, it was in effect ignoring them in North Korea, which reportedly was either acquiring or expanding a nuclear arsenal, and in Iran, which was pressing forward down the nuclear path. It's worth recalling that the Vietnam War, too, was in part the product of misguided nuclear strategy. Policymakers, well aware that they could not win a nuclear "general war" with the Soviet Union in the Central European theater, hoped instead to win a "limited war" with conventional arms on the "periphery". When it went wrong, the consequence was the Watergate crisis, born directly of Richard Nixon's fury at antiwar protesters.

That chain of reasoning died with the Cold War, but nuclear danger lived on to produce new and possibly more dangerous illusions. The worst is that the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their associated technology and know-how can be stopped, or prevented in advance, by arms. Once that conclusion was accepted, mere hints of danger, wisps of fact and speculations became actionable, bomb-able. But if there is one thing in this world that cannot be bombed out of existence, it is an illusion. And illusions, when rigidly defended, breed encounters with the law. Thus did a mistaken revolution in nuclear policy, proceeding under the guise of the "war on terror", produce the lies that produced the war that produced the whistleblowing that produced the smears that produced the blown cover that produced the cover-up that produced the legal investigation that produced the political and legal crisis that now swirls around Karl Rove.

Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.

citizenspook: TREASONGATE: The Controlling Law - Big Trouble For The White House Staff.

Someone on the Huffington post recommended this blog. But I need an interpreter from Lawyerish to English!

I am soo confused!


The controlling law for Treasongate has been greatly ignored by the main stream media and the blogosphere. This article seeks to clarify the controlling law.

To determine the controlling law, all one needs to do is read the non-disclosure agreement Karl Rove and all of the members of the Bush administration with security clearance signed which included the following statement:

"I have been advised I have been advised that any unauthorized disclosure of classified information by me may constitute a violation, or violations, of United States criminal laws, including the provisions of Sections 641, 793, 794, 798, 952 and 1924, Title 18, United States Code, the provisions of Section 783(b), Title 50, United States Code, and the provisions of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982."

Sanctions for a breach of the non-disclosure agreement are provided for by Executive Order, but those sanctions are ancillary to the United States Code provisions cited in the paragraph above which stand alone.

Please notice that the Title 18 United States Code statutes are separate statutes that precede the first mention of the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act". The complicated "Intelligence Identities Protection Act" of 1982 which has been exclusively discussed by the media is not controlling. Rove and company may be guilty of violating that act, but prior United States Code statutory law and Federal case law, specifically 18 USC 793 as interpreted by United States v. Morison (and related cases) has been breached and should lead to convictions under the facts known to the public at large. 18 USC 793 provides for a maximum of ten years in prison to those convicted under this statute.

Analysis of the law and precedent regarding 18 USC 793 indicates that the facts known to the public in the Plame case may be sufficient to guarantee convictions because the statute does not require that the information leaked be "classified". Certainly, the information leaked in the Plame case was classified as "SECRET" in a State Department memo circulated from and to White House staff, but that classification is not necessary for convictions under sections of Title 18 statutes.

citizenspook: TREASONGATE: The Controlling Law - Big Trouble For The White House Staff.

SOS Kinderen Irak

A site with tons of articles and links on the early days of the war: 10/2002 - 9/2003

SOS Kinderen Irak

List of Experts on Islam, Islamism, and the Middle East - Middle East Forum

Here ia an interesting and revealing tie that Miller has that I have never read about. She was at one time listed as an "expert" for the Middle East Forum http://web.archive.org/web/20021203010504/http://www.meforum.org/experts.php

(gotta love the wayback machine)

At some point she stopped being listed, it looks like in 2003.

The forum is headed by Daniel Pipes (danielpipes.org) and is involved with Campus Watch and other like minded organizations who have rather clear political purposes as one can tell just from viewing the other "experts" (e.g. Joseph Farah, Martin Kramer, William Kristol).

I just think this casts an interesting light on Miller's viewpoint.

Posted by: todd at July 29, 2005
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/judy-miller-how-deep-do_4845.html#comments

List of Experts on Islam, Islamism, and the Middle East - Middle East Forum
Judith Miller
Militant Islam, Biological warfare
miller@nytimes.com

The Huffington Post | The Blog - My comments on Judy miller post

MeemaSue: Miller's source must be Colin Powell
I don't think so. The WH would love to place the blame on Powell IMHO. They even tried to say he was the one who leaked the INR memo with Valerie's CIA status.

Moe:Keep digging on WHIG
Fitzgerald is! From an old talkleft post (full of juicy details): This Chicago Tribune article of March 5, 2004 is chock full of clues, so I'm quoting quite a bit of it: The federal grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed ..records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/011403.html

Mr.Murder: Chalabi's office raided
A drunken US official blabbed to Chalabi, who blabbed to Iran: US had the code for Iran's messages. The damage Chalabi's blabbing did is immense, even bigger than the Plame leak: Churchill allegedly let an entire UK city (Coventry) be bombed to protect the same kind of information and not let Germans suspect their code had been broken

sam: Anybody want to take bets on how quickly these two scandals converge?
I wondered the same thing. Judy and Chalabi's name show up quite often...
There were FIVE intel leaks from the WH - Are some of them related ?
http://lawnorder.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/14/102829/370

PAR: thks for recommending my post at kos!
I have others related to Judy /Chalabi and Plame you may like:
Iran Code Break, leaked by Bush himself ?
http://lawnorder.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/16/35528/5257

Redefining TREASON, the GOP way
http://lawnorder.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/25/5826/34936

Plame and David Kelly attacked in the same week
http://lawnorder.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/24/4544/49231

And here's another place that Miller's name is deeply involved: David Kelly's last days

# July 6th 2003 - Wilson publishes "What I didn't find in Africa
# July 9th 2003 - Dr Kelley named as mole to BBC story
# July 10th 2003 - Novak starts working on his article about Wilson / Plame
# July 14th 2003 - Robert Novak, a Right-Wing pundit and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times publicly "outs" Valerie Plame as a CIA operative
# July 17th 2003 - Dr. David Kelly e-mails Judy Miller. Six hours later he starts out on his usual afternoon walk. About 18 hours later, searchers found his body, left wrist slit, in a secluded lane on Harrowdown Hill

So Judy Miller was one of the last persons to hear from David Kelly...From this link
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/3/17138/30618

All of this brings to mind another story that Judith Miller may have played a larger role in than her readers realize. You may recall the story of David Kelly, the British scientist and expert in WMD, who committed suicide in July 2003 while being investigated as the possible source for a BBC story that suggested (of all things) that the Blair government had doctored the intelligence about Saddam's WMD programs.

Judith Miller filed a story about Kelly on July 21, 2003:
Scientist Was the 'Bane of Proliferators'. The article painted a sympathetic portrait of Kelly and hinted that he believed Saddam did indeed maintain a WMD program despite the fact that no evidence of it had yet been found. Nothing in the article suggested that Miller had had contact with Kelly, nor that she had ever known him. Her story concluded with this passage:

Dr. Kelly's wife, Jan, said he had been under enormous pressure, but in e-mails sent hours before his death, he gave no hint of that, telling an associate, for instance, that he looked forward to returning to Iraq.

Thanks to news articles written by others we know more about Kelly's e-mails than Judith Miller revealed to readers of The New York Times... and more importantly, we know that Kelly wrote at least one e-mail that Miller failed to write about.

Jamie Macaskill, for example, filed a story in The London Sunday Mail on July 20, 2003 entitled: Dark Actors Playing Games:

SUICIDE scientist Dr David Kelly warned a friend that "dark actors" were working against him just hours before his death.
Dr Kelly revealed his fears shortly before killing himself after being dragged into the row over the Government's justification for war in Iraq.
In an email to American author Judy Miller, sent just before he left his home for the last time, he referred to "many dark actors playing games".
But, according to Miller, Dr Kelly gave no indication he was depressed or planning to take his own life.
He told her he would wait "until the end of the week" before deciding his next move following his traumatic appearance before a House of Commons select committee...

In fact, Judith Miller apparently knew David Kelly rather well. She had quoted him in several of her earlier articles going back to 1998, and according to the Globe article referenced above, Kelly had helped her write her book about Weapons of Mass Destruction published several years before.

One would have thought that Miller would have regarded her relationship with Kelly as well as her contact with him just before his death as "scoop" material. Instead she failed to let her readers even know that she had enjoyed a long and close association with him. Even more odd, she left out the provocative e-mail he had written her just prior to his death while writing about a more innocuous one sent to an "associate."

I find Miller's behavior in the Kelly story rather odd, to say the least. Unlike the Plame story, Miller did ultimately write about Kelly, but she camouflaged her own involvement and left much of what she knew out of the piece. I can't pretend to know what role Miller played in the Plame saga, but I am now wondering whether she is being looked at as a possible accessory, rather than as a journalist who is protecting her sources. If that is the case, her efforts to rally the journalistic community to her aid represent a cynical charade.

The Huffington Post | The Blog

Daily Kos: Arianna takes on Judy Miller

Arianna takes on Judy Miller
by kos
Fri Jul 29th, 2005 at 11:38:03 CDT

Those who think Judith Miller is some kind of hero, let's not forget who we are talking about. Arianna reminds us:

Foer cites military and New York Times sources as saying that Miller's assignment [to the unit searching for WMDs in Iraq] was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET Alpha unit became a "Judith Miller team." Another officer said that Miller "came in with a plan. She was leading them... She ended up almost hijacking the mission." A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this way: "It's impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better."

What did Miller do to create such an impression? According to Kurtz, she wasn't afraid to throw her weight around, threatening to write critical stories and complain to her friends in very high places if things didn't go her way. "Judith," said an Army officer, "was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat.

In one specific instance, she used her friendship with Major General David Petraeus to force a lower ranking officer to reverse an order she was unhappy about. (Can we stop for a moment and take the full measure of how unbelievable this whole thing is?)

Miller also had a special, ten-year relationship with Ahmed Chalabi, which led to the MET Alpha unit, which had no special training in interrogation or intelligence, being given custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Sultan. Miller was even allowed to sit in on the initial questioning of Sultan -- a turn of events that didn't go down well with some Pentagon officials.

Miller apparently ended up developing an especially close relationship with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzalez, the leader of the MET Alpha unit. Along with puffing him up in some of her dispatches -- once describing his "meeting tonight with Mr. Chalabi to discuss nonproliferation issues" -- Miller took the unusual step of taking part in the ceremony where Gonzalez was promoted, actually pinning his new rank to his uniform (has the bizarreness of all this hit you yet?).

Sometime in the last five years, Miller ceased being a journalist and turned into a full-fledged propagandist.

Daily Kos: Arianna takes on Judy Miller

Daily Kos: OH-02: some thoughts on blog & politics

1. The netroots have made this race, not the DCCC or any other Democratic Party organ. This race is giving lie to the notion that we can't compete everywhere. This is the most Republican district in Ohio, and we're competitive. And it didn't take that much money to make it competitive.

it may take more money to close the deal, but we're giving lie to the notion that we ought to simply surrender certain districts because they are 'too Republican'.

2. This race will have campaigns seeing dollar signs again. I've been working to disabuse campaigns of the notion that the netroots is one big ATM machine. While organizations like MoveOn and probably DFA can raise big money with a few emails, blogs really can't. Remember, the OH-02 race is the only one on the calendar right now, so we're better able to concentrate our efforts. Campaigns shouldn't expect the same come 2006.

given the money raised, and how few people have raised it, Atrios is right -- a few people can make a difference.

Daily Kos: OH-02: some thoughts

Daily Kos: GOP spin on Roberts starting to unravel

Newsweek is looking pretty stupid right now.

Long story short, Roberts played a big role in stealing the election in Florida in 2000, despite Newsweek assertions to the contrary.

U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts played a broader behind-the-scenes role for the Republican camp in the aftermath of the 2000 election than previously reported -- as legal consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for arguments before the nation's highest court, according to the man who drafted him for the job.

Ted Cruz, a domestic policy advisor for President Bush and who is now Texas' solicitor general, said Roberts was one of the first names he thought of while he and another attorney drafted the Republican legal dream team of litigation ''lions'' and ''800-pound gorillas,'' which ultimately consisted of 400 attorneys in Florida.

Until now, Gov. Jeb Bush and others involved in the election dispute could recall almost nothing of Roberts' role, except for a half-hour meeting the governor had with Roberts. Cruz said Roberts was in Tallahassee helping the Bush camp for ''a week to 10 days,'' and that his help was important, though Cruz said it is difficult to remember specifics five years after the sleep-depriving frenetic pace of the 2000 recount.

But one thing was certain, Cruz told The Herald: "There was no one better for the job."

And given his lies about membership in the Federalist Society, more and more questions are coming to the forefront. Throw in GOP fears that Roberts may actually have to answer questions about abortion, and suddenly we can't help but be increasingly suspicious about this nomination.

Daily Kos: GOP spin on Roberts starting to unravel

Daily Kos: California Says Goodbye to Diebold

California Says Goodbye to Diebold
by RandyMI [Subscribe]
Fri Jul 29th, 2005 at 12:06:45 CDT

Once in a while, we get to hear a little bit of electoral sanity. California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson has, after extensive testing, has kicked Diebold out of California.

* RandyMI's diary :: ::
*

After possibly the most extensive testing ever on a voting system, California has rejected Diebold's flagship electronic voting machine because of printer jams and screen freezes, sending local elections officials scrambling for other means of voting.
"There was a failure rate of about 10 percent, and that's not good enough for the voters of California and not good enough for me," said Secretary of State Bruce McPherson.

If the machines had been used in an actual election, the result could have been frustrated poll workers and long lines for thousands of voters, said elections officials and voter advocates on Thursday.

Again, California could be a trendsetter.

Rejection of the TSx by California, the nation's largest voting system market, could influence local elections officials from Utah to Mississippi and Ohio, home of Diebold corporate headquarters, where dozens of counties are poised to purchase the latest Diebold touchscreen.

But here in the "Heartland of America", Ohio stays true to Diebold.

State elections officials in Ohio say they still have confidence in the machines.

"Absolutely," said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for the Ohio Secretary of State's Office.

I just love Red America, backwards and corrupt to the very end.

Daily Kos: California Says Goodbye to Diebold

Daily Kos: ENERGY BILL = ACCESS TO BOMB GRADE URANIUM

ENERGY BILL = ACCESS TO BOMB GRADE URANIUM
by Senator Russ Feingold [Subscribe]
Fri Jul 29th, 2005 at 12:19:25 CDT

There were a lot of reasons to vote against the final version of the fiscally irresponsible energy bill in the Senate today. The bill does little to help consumers or lower gasoline prices and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. That's not to mention the billions of dollars in tax breaks and other subsidies to the oil and gas industry, which is reaping record profits while consumers are paying more and more at the pump.

But one thing that happened to the bill in the conference committee was particularly startling to me today. A provision was tucked into the 1,700 page energy bill conference report that would ease export restrictions on bomb-grade uranium. This was a provision I and a majority of my colleagues in the Senate opposed last month but it was included in the final bill.

At a time when national security should be our highest priority, it is indefensible that such a reckless attitude is being taken about a material that we should be working to safeguard from those who wish to do us harm.

Daily Kos: ENERGY BILL = ACCESS TO BOMB GRADE URANIUM

Daily Kos :: Comments Abu Ghraib Cover-Up Unraveling

What's going to stop an impatient soldier ? (4.00 / 7)

It is ALSO a crime what they are doing to young, inexperienced soldiers!

Studies show that the combination of a approval from authority, pressure and impunity can make torturers of almost 70% of "above average joe" people, i.e. college students...

What chance have recently graduated High School students who already have a predisposition to follow orders ?

Cabinet Magazine Online - The De-Demonization of Evil: Banality, Arendt, Sartre

The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, for instance, conducted a series of experiments where average individuals were instructed to administer electroshocks to research subjects when the latter failed to perform simple tasks. These research "subjects," placed in cubicles not unlike the famous glass booth sheltering Eichmann from attacks by former victims during his trial, were paid actors who feigned physical pain when receiving the "electroshocks," which in reality carried no current. Milgram found that most individuals willingly administered near-lethal doses of electricity if such action was prescribed in the research guidelines: "After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine...: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process."9 In response to his amazement and the intense media storm over his experiments, Milgram's wife wryly remarked, "so there are a bunch of Eichmanns in New Haven."

And it shows... (4.00 / 6)

Iraq Affecting Mental Health of Troops - Yahoo! News

Thirty percent of U.S. troops surveyed have developed stress-related mental health problems three to four months after coming home from the
Iraq war, the Army's surgeon general said Thursday...

The 30 percent figure is in [sharp] contrast to the [usual] 3 percent to 5 percent diagnosed with a significant mental health issues immediately after they leave the war theater, according to Col. Elspeth Ritchie, a military psychiatrist on Kiley's staff. A study of troops who were still in the combat zone in 2004 found 13 percent experienced significant mental health problems.

Military sent me back a murderer (4.00 / 7)

I sent you a good boy and you sent me back a murderer

The mother of one of the soldiers involved in the notorious My Lai massacre is reported to have said to the Army, "I sent you a good boy and you sent me back a murderer." Her accusation is really a question: what is it about certain wars that can transform some of America's young people into monsters trapped in a moral inversion? The horrific stories from Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay must have the parents of guilty soldiers pondering this question anew.

If being anti-child-sodomy is now considered the partisan position, then I'm going to be the biggest f---ing partisan on the planet.. - Hunter

by lawnorder on Fri Jul 29th, 2005
Daily Kos :: Comments Abu Ghraib Cover-Up Unraveling

FRAMESHOP: The War Frame is Over

Frameshop: The Frame is Over

Americans have been patient with President Bush's "War on Terror" approach to National Security, but it is now clear to everyone that this concept is not working.

The failure of President Bush's "War on Terror" is much larger than the violent stalemate that has trapped our soldiers in Iraq. The "War on Terror" has failed profoundly as an act leadership.

As a result of President Bush's "War on Terror," many Americans now feel that the country is significantly less safe, that our nation's financial resources have been squandered, and that our government has undermined the very Constitution that we all admire.

The "War on Terror" has made our allies suspicious of our intentions, and our enemies more focused and creative.

The "War on Terror" has caused doubt in our most idealistic and dedicated citizens: those who view the military as the highest form of service.

The "War on Terror" has increased tensions between branches of government and between political parties.

The "War on Terror" has led to scandal and unethical behavior at the very heart of our political system.

One might concede that all of these problems would be acceptable if Americans now felt an overwhelming sense of security as a result of the "War on Terror." But Americans do not feel that.
...

Americans want a new vision for national security. Americans want to be part of the project of protecting their nation and inspiring our allies.

The first step in this direction is to throw out the language and tone of President Bush's "War on Terror," and then to develop a new way of talking and thinking about the national security problems that we face as a nation.

The "War on Terror" is just one way to talk about those problems. And its time is over.

Over the course of the next few days, Frameshop will be rolling out a new frame for national security that uses an entirely new set of terms and ideas to discuss the dangers and solutions we face as a nation.

This new frame is about much more than winning elections. It is about the safety and security of our family, our nation and our world.

The old frame is over.

FRAMESHOP: Frameshop: The Frame is Over

I fear Bush's mob are like roaches

I fear Bush's mob are like roaches (4.00 / 25)

Only nuclear war might kill them... maybe.

We need huge ammounts of RAID to get rid of them

Republican
Asses
In
Detention

The Raid Roach Control Program
Works Great at Controlling:

• American Republicans
  
• Chalabi's Brown-Banded Roaches
  
• UK Roaches
  
• PNAC Roaches
  
• Carpet crawling sycophants
  
• Saw-Tooth Gitmo  Beetles
  
• K-street Centipedes
  
• Pundit Earwigs
  
• Oil Millipedes
  
• Pharma Pillbugs
  
• Condi Rice Weevils
  
• Halliburton Silverfishes
  
• MSM Sowbugs
  
• Murdoch Spiders
  

Daily Kos :: Comments BREAKING: State Dep't Admits it Lied...and So Did Bolton

USATODAY.com - Airport chiefs: Proposed screener cuts a bad idea

Airline passengers will face longer airport security lines starting this fall if Congress goes through with plans to cut up to 13% of the nation's checkpoint screeners, a top Transportation Security Administration official said Thursday.

Thomas Blank, TSA's acting deputy administrator, said the Homeland Security Department is fighting a Senate spending measure that would cut 6,000 of the agency's 45,000 screeners.

The House voted to cut 2,000 screeners in the budget that takes effect Oct. 1, Blank told a Capitol Hill hearing.

Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees Homeland Security funding, disputed Blank's figures and said the House is not cutting any screeners but is cutting unnecessary management costs.

Airport directors predicted enormous lines if 6,000 screeners are cut as air travel hits record levels.

"There's no one who's going to get through a checkpoint in 10 minutes," William DeCota, aviation director at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports, said afterward.

Ben DeCosta, manager of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, said the TSA told him Tuesday that the airport would lose several hundred screeners under the Senate plan.

USATODAY.com - Airport chiefs: Proposed screener cuts a bad idea

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

CNN.com - Some pull 'Doonesbury' over Rove moniker - Turd Blossom

n the strip, Bush and an aide are lamenting the problems the administration has had over allegations that Rove leaked the name of a CIA officer to reporters.

Bush says, "Karl's sure been earnin' his nickname lately."

The unnamed aide says, "Boy Genius? I'm not so sure sir ..."

Bush then says, "Hey Turd Blossom! Get in here."

The term is said to be one of several nicknames Bush uses for Rove, one of his closest allies and who is widely credited for Bush's election in 2000 and re-election in 2004. The mainstream U.S. media have rarely mentioned the nickname, but it has gained traction in the international press and on the Internet.

CNN.com - Some pull 'Doonesbury' over Rove moniker - Jul 27, 2005

USATODAY.com - Poll: USA doubts Iraq success, but not ready to give up

In the poll:

For the first time, a majority of Americans, 51%, say the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — the reason Bush emphasized in making the case for invading. The administration's credibility on the issue has been steadily eroding since 2003.

By 58%-37%, a majority say the United States won't be able to establish a stable, democratic government in Iraq.

About one-third, 32%, say the United States can't win the war in Iraq. Another 21% say the United States could win the war, but they don't think it will. Just 43% predict a victory.

Still, on the question that tests fundamental attitudes toward the war — was it a mistake to send U.S. troops? — the public's view has rebounded. By 53%-46%, those surveyed say it wasn't a mistake, the strongest support for the war since just after the Iraqi elections in January...

Strong fears that a family member might become a victim of terrorism spiked in the survey, rising to their highest level since October 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

USATODAY.com - Poll: USA doubts Iraq success, but not ready to give up

BBC: Japanese develop 'female' android

"Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet." A cyber version of the blow-up doll ? -- law

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.

She can flutter her eyelids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe.

Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University says one day robots could fool us into believing they are human.

Repliee Q1 is not like any robot you will have seen before, at least outside of science-fiction movies.

She is designed to look human and although she can only sit at present, she has 31 actuators in her upper body, powered by a nearby air compressor, programmed to allow her to move like a human.

"I have developed many robots before," Repliee Q1's designer, Professor Ishiguro, told the BBC News website, "but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence."

Designed to look human

Before Repliee Q1, Professor Ishiguro developed Repliee R1 which had the appearance of a five-year-old Japanese girl.

Its head could move in nine directions and it could gesture with its arm. Four high-sensitivity tactile sensors were placed under the skin of its left arm that made the android react differently to differing pressures.

Repliee Q1 (Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro)
Scientists think that, one day, robots could fool us into believing they were human
....
we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman



BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Japanese develop 'female' android

Sunset for the GOP ?

American political parties, like great empires, often seem strongest at the moment before they fall. Just as the principles and ideas that have built the new order triumph, their relevance and practicality begin to fade as new conditions emerge. Yet true believers will cling ever-tighter to the old ways of thought, and those who cling tightest are granted the greatest moral authority. Meanwhile, the constituencies that the ascendant party once rallied to its cause become powers unto themselves: parochial, imperious, demanding, and hard to discipline. Soon party leaders begin to confuse the agenda of their constituencies with the interests of the nation, and the act of governance becomes less a crafting of solutions than a division of the spoils.

This is the state of the GOP today, but it also describes the condition of the Democrats two-and-a-half decades ago. It can be hard to remember these days just how powerful and dominant the Democratic Party was in 1976. Like the Republicans in 2000, they had just elected as president a moderate, evangelical Southern governor, defeating the successor to a morally flawed president by promising to restore integrity to the Oval Office. Like the GOP today, the Democrats found themselves in control of all three branches of the federal government--the Democrats had near-veto-proof majorities in both chambers of Congress--as well as the majority of state legislatures. Organized labor, its power not yet decimated, was squarely in the Democratic camp, while the corporate lobbying sector offered significant support for the simple reason that Democrats ran everything. Just as the GOP in 2000 tended to look at the Clinton administration as an unfortunate detour on the road to a permanent Republican majority, so Democrats in 1976 looked back on the Nixon years as a temporary aberration from the natural order in Washington, one Democrats had and always would dominate. It wasn't just that the party was powerful; the Democrats, returning to the capital in the winter of 1977, thought their principles put them on the right side of history, and the country had come back around to seeing things their way.

But for all the party's political power and institutional strength, it was in an intellectual rut, returning again and again to ideas that had long ago stopped working...

Fast-forward a couple of decades, swap a few particulars, and the same patterns fit the current state of the Republican Party in Washington. The GOP came in to office in 2001 with control of all branches of government, and with a similar confidence in their long-term prospects. Over the last few years, such party operatives as Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and Tom DeLay have cowed Democrats with chesty, blustering talk about a "permanent majority." But like the Democrats circa '76, Republicans entered Washington three years ago under an ideological banner that had already lost its relevance to most Americans.

Twenty years earlier, a policy agenda of tax cuts and smaller government made practical sense for the country. Reagan succeeded in cutting taxes, and his successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, eventually got government spending under control. By the 2000 election, upper-bracket tax rates had been steady for two decades at a rate far lower than they were through most of the previous 50 years, and the federal government's share of GDP was 18.4 percent, well below where it had been during the Reagan administration. While short-term, broad-based tax cuts still made sense as a recession-fighter, the big challenges America faced--chiefly the unrecognized danger of terrorism and the coming retirement of the baby boom generation--could not be solved with further tax and spending cuts. If anything, the opposite would be called for.

But this budgetary reality had little effect on the movement conservatives who by 2001 dominated the Republican Party. Instead, they embraced the small-government/low taxes paradigm even more tightly, with a moralistic fervor not unlike that which moved liberals in the 1970s to a ferocious defense of big government and high taxes against all logic. Politically, cutting taxes provided for Republicans a unifying force similar to that which spending had provided the Democrats: It was the one policy that almost every part of the often-fractious GOP coalition--libertarians, cultural conservatives, multinationals, small business owners, investors in Wall Street, the energy sector--could agree on. And for the party's strategists, tax cuts were the route to a permanent GOP majority. The promise of a new rate reduction every year--first rate reductions, then dividend cuts, then corporate breaks--would keep K Street pliable. And eventually, a shift in the tax burden from the wealthy and corporations onto the backs of the middle class would (or so the theory held) cool voter demand for more government, thereby undermining the Democrats' reason for being...

Meanwhile, as tax receipts have plummeted, federal spending has increased by more than 6 percent per year since 2000. Most, if not all, of this spending--for the military, for homeland security, and for prescription drugs for seniors--was necessary and had broad public support. Yet it has panicked conservatives, who cannot accept the historical reality that, as Sebastian Mallaby wrote in these pages last month, when advanced societies grow wealthier, the share of GDP devoted to government inevitably increases ("The Deficit Conquers All," September 2004).

Instead of facing this reality, the average congressional Republican has acted like a preacher hooked on prostitutes, publicly inveighing against the sin while personally wallowing in it. There is no greater measure of spending indiscipline than "earmarks," targeted spending provisions attached to appropriations bill. The number of earmarks has tripled since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1994.

Further crippling the GOP's spending discipline has been the same tendency that affected the Democrats two decades ago: confusing the agendas of its favored interest groups with the interests of the public at large. Where the Democrats created ineffective public works bills and the ludicrous SynFuels program, the Republicans have put forth an energy bill that has collapsed under the weight of its own energy-sector subsidies, and a Medicare prescription-drug benefit so indulgent of the pharmaceutical and HMO lobbies that barely a quarter of seniors support the bill. Meanwhile, energy costs remain high, Medicare premiums are rising, and polls show that on energy and health-care issues, voters prefer Democrats to Republicans by wide margins...

"Party Down" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

"Party Down" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Like the Democrats of [the 70's], the current version of the Republican Party is supremely powerful but ideologically incoherent, run largely by and for special interests and increasingly alienated from the broader voting public. Today's GOP is headed for a profound crackup. The only questions are when, exactly, the decline will start--and how long it will last.

Like the Democrats during the 1970s, today's GOP is hidebound and out of touch.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

In late July, on a gauzy, impossibly hot Washington evening, I met a friend of mine in a quiet sushi restaurant a few blocks from the White House. My friend, a conservative aide to an even more conservative senator, is from the suburbs of Atlanta; his favorite word is "ignorant," by which he means some combination of insufficiently educated and totally deluded, and which he usually uses to describe Bill Clinton's foreign policy, or his ex-girlfriend, or a particularly memorable English professor. On this particular night, though, he was using it, liberally, to describe the Republican congressional approach to policy-making, on issue after issue.

I hadn't expected this line from him. My friend is the kind of tough-minded partisan who screens dates for political affiliation and who says that whenever he gets weeping calls from retired constituents about too-expensive prescription drugs, he thinks to himself, "You should have saved more then, shouldn't you?" A year ago, he was gearing up for a life on the Hill; now, he's taking the LSAT and planning for law school. He won't vote for Bush this year, either, a choice he says was "unthinkable" 12 months ago.

"What's infuriating," he told me, "is that it's hard to know what the party stands for beyond defending a bunch of interests. I mean, look at the leadership--who do you have? Frist? Hack. DeLay? Hack. Hastert? Total hack. I can't figure out if the administration are hacks or just don't care. John Kerry's running on budget deficits--that's supposed to be our fucking issue." He started slamming his hand against the table. "In 15 years, the whole federal budget blows up because of Medicare, this ridiculous prescription-drug benefit that no one even likes, our taxes go through the roof, and the economy breaks down. And this time, it's gonna be our fault."

This has been the summer of Republican discontent--a rare moment of finger-pointing and introspection after some in the party began to examine the sum product of four years in power, and concluded that, judging by their own principles, the GOP should have done much, much better: In late May, the libertarian Cato Institute hosted a conference on the legacy of the Republican revolution of 1994, a decade later. Dick Armey, the retired House Majority leader who helped engineer the 1994 takeover, was the keynote speaker, and he was decidedly glum. The party, he said, has reverted to "doing the wrong things so we can get reelected to the right thing." Newt Gingrich, who followed Armey, told the audience that their revolution had reached a tipping point in the late 1990s, when it had traded in ideology for interest groups. These were criticisms that Gingrich and Armey had been voicing privately for months, but such a public airing had a bracing effect. "When you want to talk to people outside of government to get perspective on how you're doing in terms of conservative principles, you talk to Gingrich, you talk to Armey, and maybe there's a third guy, but I can't think of him right now," a senior aide to a conservative Southern congressman told me in August. "People paid attention."

Within a month, the floodgates seemed to open. The right-wing pundit Robert Novak wrote a June column blasting "runaway spending" by Republicans in Congress. In a July speech before the National Press Club, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, often described as a possible '08 presidential candidate, tore into his party for a legislative attitude where "nothing can get done unless every Congressman has something to take back to his district." Meanwhile, on the Hill, internecine squabbles had stalled major legislation on energy, tax reform, and highway funds. The Wall Street Journal, interviewing House Speaker Dennis Hastert about the legislative logjam, caught him in a contemplative mood: "The American people don't want us pointing fingers," he told the paper. "They want us to do something."

Yet as Congress closed shop for the summer, divisions between Republicans had meant the House couldn't pass a 2005 budget, a depressing signal of failure. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who disapprove of the job being done by Congress, which had been hovering around 40 for the past five years, leapt to 52. Several polls taken in the spring and early summer showed that voters preferred Democratic positions to Republican ones on every single domestic policy issue. And the grinding, bloody fight in Iraq had some of the war's strongest GOP proponents throwing up their hands in disgust at the administration's failure to plan for the post-Saddam occupation. Indeed, by late summer, a few Republicans who could politically afford to--such as retiring Rep. Doug Bereuter (R-Neb.)--were openly questioning the wisdom of the whole venture, as were a majority of the American people.

With John Kerry still leading most campaign polls, conservative despair began to take on a more hysterical tone, and epic scope. "The era of small government is over," warned David Brooks in The New York Times, shortly before the Republican national convention. "We'll let slip a thinly disguised secret," wrote Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard. "Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing." Even Pat Buchanan, in his vampy style, warned of a coming "civil war" within the party.

Such open hostility subsided during the GOP convention, damped down by the balloons and the president's rising poll numbers. Still, the summer's feud was like a peek inside a volcano: It offered a glimpse of the eventual eruption. The attacks on the party and its leaders came, scattered but forceful, from all parts of the GOP; though most critics shared a bill of complaint, each faction had its own recipe for salvation. The Armey-Novak conservatives wanted the party to renew its commitment to the small-government principles of 1994 and 1980. Brooks and the moderates looked to 1904, to the strong government conservatism of Theodore Roosevelt. Both groups were wishing for a kind of soul transplant: If the party could just reclaim its essence, they hoped, the current drift might be resolved.

But both of these historical analogies are hopeful fantasies about what the GOP might someday become, not reasonable guesses at the near future. The truth is, for all its apparent strength, the modern Republican Party has worked itself into a position of profound and growing decay. Worried Republicans are right to look to the past to help sort out their future. But the right date isn't 1994 or 1904. It's the late 1970s--and the party to look at isn't the Republicans, but the Democrats. Like the Democrats of that period, the current version of the Republican Party is supremely powerful but ideologically incoherent, run largely by and for special interests and increasingly alienated from the broader voting public. Today's GOP is headed for a profound crackup. The only questions are when, exactly, the decline will start--and how long it will last.

"Party Down" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The Truth About Abu Ghraib

FOR 15 MONTHS now the Bush administration has insisted that the horrific photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the result of freelance behavior by low-level personnel...

The court evidence strongly suggests that Gen. Miller lied about his actions, and it merits further investigation by prosecutors and Congress. But the Guantanamo commander was not acting on his own: The interrogation of Mr. Qahtani, investigators found, was carried out under rules approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002. After strong protests from military lawyers, the Rumsfeld standards -- which explicitly allowed nudity, the use of dogs and shackling -- were revised in April 2003. Yet the same practices were later adopted at Abu Ghraib, at least in part at the direct instigation of Gen. Miller. "We understood," Maj. DiNenna testified, "that [Gen. Miller] was sent over by the secretary of defense"....

The only good news in this shameful story is that a group of Republican senators, though resisting justified Democratic demands for an independent investigation, are attempting to reform the policy of abuse to which the administration still adheres. Six GOP senators led by John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) have backed an amendment to the defense operations bill that would exclude exceptional interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay and ban the use of "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment for all prisoners held by the United States. The administration contends that detainees held abroad may be subject to such abuse. Attempts by the White House and Mr. Warner to block or gut the legislation failed, and on Tuesday the GOP leadership pulled the defense bill from the floor rather than allow a vote. The administration probably will spend the next month trying to quell this rebellion of conscience and good sense. The nation would be better served if President Bush instead accepted, at last, the truth about Abu Ghraib.

The Truth About Abu Ghraib

Daily Kos: Abu Ghraib Cover-Up Unraveling

Abu Ghraib Cover-Up Unraveling
by muledriver [Subscribe]
Thu Jul 28th, 2005 at 23:07:06 CDT

WP: The Truth About Abu Ghraib

FOR 15 MONTHS now the Bush administration has insisted that the horrific photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the result of freelance behavior by low-level personnel and had nothing to do with its policies. In this the White House has been enthusiastically supported by the Army brass, which has conducted investigations documenting hundreds of cases of prisoner mistreatment in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but denies that any of its senior officers are culpable. For some time these implacable positions have been glaringly at odds with the known facts. In the past few days, those facts have grown harder to ignore.

More below

* muledriver's diary :: ::
*

In statements to investigators and in sworn testimony to Congress last year, Gen. Miller denied that he recommended the use of dogs for interrogation, or that they had been used at Guantanamo. "No methods contrary to the Geneva Convention were presented at any time by the assistance team that I took to [Iraq]," he said under oath on May 19, 2004.

....

The court evidence strongly suggests that Gen. Miller lied about his actions, and it merits further investigation by prosecutors and Congress. But the Guantanamo commander was not acting on his own: The interrogation of Mr. Qahtani, investigators found, was carried out under rules approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002. After strong protests from military lawyers, the Rumsfeld standards -- which explicitly allowed nudity, the use of dogs and shackling -- were revised in April 2003. Yet the same practices were later adopted at Abu Ghraib, at least in part at the direct instigation of Gen. Miller. "We understood," Maj. DiNenna testified, "that [Gen. Miller] was sent over by the secretary of defense."
....

The White House and Pentagon have gotten away with their stonewalling largely because of Republican control of Congress. When the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, GOP leaders such as Sen. John W. Warner (Va.) loudly vowed to get to the bottom of the matter -- but once the bottom started to come into view late last year, Mr. Warner's demands for accountability ceased.

And this from Newsweek

There is also evidence of a possible Pentagon cover-up. According to Taguba's report, which was first revealed in The New Yorker, a previous Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, somehow failed to note last fall that MPs were being asked to facilitate interrogation. In addition, a mounting body of other evidence around the world suggests that abuses did not stop there or even in Iraq, that the Geneva Conventions protecting prisoners of war from beatings and humiliation were being routinely flouted in an environment where, as at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, almost anything can happen because almost no one is held accountable. In Afghanistan, the abuse of prisoners seems to have led to at least three deaths at U.S. interrogation facilities. According to U.S. military pathologists, two Afghan detainees died of "blunt force injuries" to "the lower extremities" and "legs" at Baghram in December 2002 and another Afghan prisoner died at a U.S. military camp in Kunar province in June 2003. Yet 18 months after the first deaths, a military investigation is still incomplete, and no broad inquiry like the Taguba probe has been launched into conditions at Baghram, according to a military spokesman in Kabul.

.....

Many critics say the Bush administration routinely uses the global war on terrorism as a blanket justification for all sorts of human-rights violations. "The United States is running a gulag, a series of detention centers around the world where international legal standards are not having sway," says Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch. "They opened the door to a little bit of torture, and a whole lot of torture walked through." Nigel Rodley, who was the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and has written an authoritative book, "The Treatment of Prisoners Under International Law," dismisses Rumsfeld's claims that the Geneva Conventions have been observed. Rodley says that even some interrogation practices the Pentagon acknowledges using are "clearly violations both of international human-rights law and international humanitarian law as codified in the Geneva Conventions." He adds that the problem "goes back to the whole process of essentially creating legal black holes where people are held in the dark and secret reaches of state power. When that happens it breeds a sense of impunity and people do things that they shouldn't do.

One American intelligence officer admitted as much, telling NEWSWEEK: "The U.S. government and military capitalizes on the dubious status [as sovereign states] of Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and aircraft carriers, to avoid certain legal questions about rough interrogations. Whatever humanitarian pronouncements a state such as ours may make about torture, states don't perform interrogations, individual people do. What's going to stop an impatient soldier, in a supralegal location, from whacking one nameless, dehumanized shopkeeper among many?"

Daily Kos: Abu Ghraib Cover-Up Unraveling

apologies to the Beatles...from smirkingchimp.com

I am he, the nominee, you all agree, would be a real disaster.

See how I spin my past with a grin, see how I jive..

I'm lying.

Shitting on a flunky, waiting for his mind to change.


Corporations own me, screaming in the hallway.

Though I've been a naughty boy, I will admit no wrong.

I hate the UN, bu$h hates the UN,

I am John Bolton - cuckoo, f you.

This commitee's stacked,

I'm sitting pretty ...

Little duckies in a row.

Gee now that guy,

Dumb loser from Ohio,


Sees how I've done.

I'm lying, I'm lying.

(By Sharon Jumper ?)

Daily Kos :: Comments AP: State Dept Says Bolton WAS Interviewed:

Thumb or middle finger ?

I blew up the pic 5X in photoshop

Note the wrist is in the same vertical line as the "thumb". The only way for this to happen makes the "thumb" look like it is at the edge of the hand and the remaining fingers have to be at an angle.

But the still shows a "bulk" at the edge of the hand, with the "thumb" in the middle and the remaining fingers are horizontal, not in an angle (which would force the thumb to be at an angle, not vertical, in a normal "thumbs up")

Video and details below
Daily Kos: Bush to press: Go Cheney yourself! Press: Yes master!

Daily Kos: Open Thread

Iraq Affecting Mental Health of Troops - Yahoo! News

Fighting in an illegal war for lies does that to your hed... -- law

WASHINGTON - Thirty percent of U.S. troops surveyed have developed stress-related mental health problems three to four months after coming home from the
Iraq war, the Army's surgeon general said Thursday.
ADVERTISEMENT

The survey of 1,000 troops found problems including anxiety, depression, nightmares, anger and an inability to concentrate, said Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley and other military medical officials. A smaller number of troops, often with more severe symptoms, were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a serious mental illness.

The 30 percent figure is in contrast to the 3 percent to 5 percent diagnosed with a significant mental health issues immediately after they leave the war theater, according to Col. Elspeth Ritchie, a military psychiatrist on Kiley's staff. A study of troops who were still in the combat zone in 2004 found 13 percent experienced significant mental health problems.

Soldiers departing a war zone are typically given a health evaluation as they leave combat, but the Army is only now instituting a program for follow-up screenings three to six months later, said Kiley, speaking to reporters at a breakfast meeting.

Screenings of 1,000 U.S. soldiers who returned from Iraq to their home bases in Italy last year found that three to four months later, 30 percent of them had some mental health difficulties — a much greater incidence than expected. Kiley attributed that to post-combat stress problems taking time to develop once the danger has passed.

Only about 4 percent or 5 percent of troops coming home from combat actually have PTSD, but many others face problems adjusting when they come home, Kiley said.

Such problems are sometimes more acute in members of the National Guard, who return to a civilian job when they leave active military duty, Ritchie said.

Iraq Affecting Mental Health of Troops - Yahoo! News

Republicans Ready to Slime Fitzgerald

Under the harsh but savvy tutelage of Karl Rove, Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated their adherence to a venerable cliché: In politics, as in sports and warfare, the best defense is always a good offense—and the more offensive, the better. It’s an effective strategy, as John Kerry and many other hapless victims have learned, and at this point also a highly predictable one.

Circled in a bristling perimeter around the White House, the friends and allies of Mr. Rove can soon be expected to fire their rhetorical mortars at Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the White House exposure of C.I.A. operative Valerie Wilson. Indeed, the preparations for that assault began months ago in the editorial columns of The Wall Street Journal, which has tarred Mr. Fitzgerald as a “loose cannon” and an “unguided missile.”

Evidently Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, will lead the next foray against the special prosecutor. This week the Senator’s press office announced his plan to hold hearings on the Fitzgerald probe. That means interfering with an “ongoing investigation,” as the White House press secretary might say, but such considerations won’t deter the highly partisan Kansan.

Of course, it was Mr. Rove’s aggressively partisan style that first sparked the scandal now threatening to ruin him, back when he and other Bush administration officials “outed” Ms. Wilson in an attempt to discredit her dissenting husband during the summer of 2003. Had they not decided to leak classified information for partisan purposes, there would be no grand jury pondering indictments today.

Such ironies won’t discourage the Rove Republicans from pursuing the scorched-earth strategy that has served them so well, however. Nor will those politicians and pundits pause to consider how odd their complaints about an overreaching special prosecutor will sound, emanating from once-fervent supporters of former independent counsel Kenneth Starr and his Whitewater legal jihad.

From their perspective, it’s all part of the same cynical game. If Mr. Starr was subject to sharp criticism, then Mr. Fitzgerald should be a legitimate target, too. They won’t remember how they once decried Mr. Starr’s critics for “obstructing justice.”

NYO - Joe Conason

Daily Kos: Feingold Nails it on Iraq

Bush has consistently argued that Iraqi troops become more reliable and effective with each passing engagement. This argument infers that, over time, the Iraqi security forces will be more capable to defeat the insurgency. Feingold offers a great counter to this one sided argument, as well as the "fight them abroad" line:

Just recently, President Bush told the country that "with each engagement, Iraqi soldiers grow more battle-hardened and their officers grow more experienced." Unfortunately, the same is true of the foreign fighters. Iraq has become a prime on-the-job training ground for jihadists from around the world - terrorists who are getting experience in overcoming U.S. countermeasures, experience in bombing, and experience in urban warfare - they may well be getting a better education in terrorism than jihadists received at al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan. And they don't just have skills - they now have contacts. They are building new, transnational networks, making the most of Al Qaeda's new model of supporting loosely affiliated franchise-type organizations. Press reports suggest that the CIA is calling this emerging threat the "class of '05 problem." Mr. President, all of us, on both sides of the aisle, should be thinking about how to ensure that there is no similar class of '06.

It would be nice to believe that these terrorists will be swept into Iraq only to be annihilated by U.S. forces. But that kind of "roach motel" approach to fighting is hardly a strategic vision. At its best, it is wishful thinking - and more wishful thinking is just what our Iraq policy and our strategy for fighting terrorism do not need. I agree wholeheartedly with the President that we must not waver in our commitment to defeating the terrorist networks that wish to do us harm. And I know, as he must know, that these networks exist around the world. Fighting terrorists in Baghdad does not mean that we won't have to fight them elsewhere, and, sadly, we need only look at the headlines over the past few weeks to find the terrible evidence of this hard fact.

Feingold has challenged the administration to come up with a timetable for Iraq, to which the administration has argued that a concrete timetable only strengthens the insurgency because they know we are leaving. Feingold offers a refreshing common sense retort to this angle:

Finally, Mr. President, I want to talk about the most common criticism leveled at anyone who invokes the phrase "timetable" in talking about our military deployment in Iraq. The charge goes something like this: if the insurgents know when we plan to go, they will simply hunker down and lie in wait for the time when we are no longer present in large numbers, and then they will attack.

Well, Mr. President, if that were the insurgents' plan, why wouldn't they cease all attacks now, lay low, let everyone believe that stability has been achieved, and spring up again once the security presence in Iraq is dramatically reduced? If we really believe the argument that any kind of timetable is a "lifeline" to the insurgents, then why wouldn't they try to induce us to throw them that lifeline?

We cannot know all the reasons behind the choices made by the diverse elements waging Iraq's insurgency. But one thing is clear: ultimately, we will withdraw from Iraq, and it will not be secret when we do. Does the Administration believe that the insurgents will be entirely defeated at that point? Is it really our policy to stay in Iraq until every last insurgent and every last terrorist is defeated? Recently Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made news when he said that the insurgency could well last a decade or more, and that ultimately, "foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency," rather it is going to be defeated by the Iraqis themselves. I think this analysis makes good sense - especially given the fact that our very presence in Iraq is helping to recruit more foreign jihadists every day. But the Secretary's candor made waves, because for long, costly months we lacked clarity on this critical point regarding just what the remaining U.S. military mission is in Iraq. Is it to defeat the insurgency, or is it to give the Iraqis the tools to do that themselves?

This guy is a consistent breath of fresh air. If anyone wants to read the full text look here. Keep it up Russ!

Daily Kos: Feingold Nails it on Iraq

International Terrorism: The Poor Man's Warfare

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
International Terrorism : The Poor Man's Warfare
Terrorism has no widely accepted Definition, and is
normally dependent upon your point of view, as well as
which side of the conflict you support. Western nations are
reluctant to recognize terrorism in any way that could be
construed as legitimate warfare.
The United States is facing growing international
terrorism, particularly from state and drug cartel
sponsored terrorist groups. International terrorism is
increasingly referred to as a form of warfare, placed at
the low end of the spectrum of warfare known in the United
States as Low Intensity Conflict. The Law of Armed Conflict
excludes many terrorists as lawful combatants, because
their targeting practices are not in compliance with the
law.
Terrorism is often described as mindless, senseless,
or irrational violence. However that is not the case,
terrorism is objective oriented and normally well
choreographed to obtain maximum media coverage. The
strategic objectives of international terrorism are to: (1)
Gain publicity and support for their cause, (2) Disrupt
social, political, and economic interaction among western
nations, (3) Force the polarization of society, (4) Punish
non-compliant civilians and government agents, (5)
Intimidate and harass authorities to force concessions, (6)
Provoke government overreaction, (7) Eliminate instrumental
targets, (8) Provide for organizational needs. The gross
inability of the international community to agree on even
the definition of terrorism is indicative of why terrorism
is so successful. The United States is as much to blame as
any nation with our continually oscillating policies of
support depending on what benefits us the most.
Terrorism is a form of successful warfare that is
growing because it is achieving it's goals. We may
disapprove of it, but terrorists can assemble plausible, if
not logical arguments in defense of their actions. Why
should they play by the systems rules, when those rules
were established to support the system they are fighting.
When the Law of War deprives them of exercising their right
to fight for what they believe in, the only way they can,
with any hope of survival till the eventual achievement of
their goal, they will never abide to it. Terrorism will not
conform to international standards, we must adapt to it.
Recognizing terrorism as warfare is the first step,
developing an ef fective doctrine to combat it is the
second.
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM : THE POOR MAN'S WARFARE
OUTLINE
Thesis Statement. Terrorism is a form of warfare and needs
to be recognized as such.
I. History of Terrorism
A. Greek / Roman
B. French Revolution
II. Definition of Terrorism
A. Zona Rosa Analogy
B. Vice President's Task Force Definition
III. Criminality of Terrorism
A. Inability of Law to Deal With Terrorism
B. Domestic Record of Law
C. Lack of International Judicial System
D. Extradition and Political Exemption
E. Asylum
F. Closing the Loopholes
IV. Growth of International Terrorism
A. Casualties
B. Targeting
C. Access to Media
D. Economical Warfare
E. Distribution of Attacks
V. Impact of International Terrorism
A. A Matter of Perception
B. Achievement of Psychological and Political Results
C. Strategic Objectives
D. Reasons For Success
VI. Growing Threat of International Terrorism
A. Spectrum of Warfare
B. Objective Oriented

International Terrorism: The Poor Man's Warfare

FOX: Bolton Inaccurately Filled Out (translation LIED ON) Senate Panel Questionnaire

As kossack NYC Sophia says You know it's bad when Fox reports it... -- law
WASHINGTON — While John Bolton (search) has enjoyed renewed scrutiny because of an alleged role in the investigation into who leaked a CIA officer's name to the press, the State Department acknowledged Thursday night that President Bush's pick to be ambassador to the United Nations did inaccurately state his role in another probe.

A spokesman said that Bolton had in fact been questioned by the State Department inspector general, contrary to his response in a questionnaire filled out for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (search) during the confirmation process.

"Mr. Bolton was not interviewed as part of the [Special Counsel Patrick] Fitzgerald investigation. When Mr. Bolton completed the forms during the confirmation process, he did not recall being interviewed by the State Department's inspector general. Therefore his form as submitted was inaccurate. He will correct it," State Department spokesman Noel Clay said.

Just hours earlier, the State Department said Bolton had filled out the questionnaire truthfully and accurately.

"Mr. Bolton, as part of the nomination process, supplied an answer to the question that asked whether or not a nominee as been interviewed or asked to supply any information in connection with any administrative, including an inspector general congressional or grand jury investigation, within the past five years, except routine congressional testimony," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

"Mr. Bolton, in his response on the written paperwork, was to say 'no.' And that answer is truthful then and it remains the case now."

But Bolton was interviewed by the State Department's inspector general as part of a joint investigation with the CIA following the administration's acknowledgement that its assertion Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger was wrong. The president cited the Iraq-Niger connection two years ago in his State of the Union address justifying an invasion.

In March, ranking Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman asked Rep. Christopher Shays, chairman of a House subcommittee on national security, to look at why Bolton's role in the creation of a State Department fact sheet about the bogus Iraq-Niger connection was concealed.

It is still possible that Bolton was questioned in the CIA leak probe and was truthful about that matter in the questionnaire. He submitted the questionnaire in March, and could have been approached by investigators after.

Fitzgerald is leading the investigation into who outed CIA officer Valerie Plame (search) to reporters two years ago. A classified State Department memo from June 2003 discusses Plame's identity, and may have been how the leaker or leakers learned who she was. Bolton was then working for the State Department as undersecretary for arms control.

FOXNews.com - Politics - Bolton Inaccurately Filled Out Senate Panel Questionnaire

Bolton had CENTRAL role on Niger story

Go back to the Waxman letter submitted to Chris Shays about John Bolton and the Niger/Uranium matter in early March 2005.

Here is the relevant excerpt:

Concealment of a State Department Official's Role in the Niger Uranium Claim

In April 2004, the State Department used the designation "sensitive but unclassified" to conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton.. in the creation of a fact sheet distributed to the [UN] that falsely claimed Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

On December 19, 2002, the State Department issued a fact sheet entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council." (9) The fact sheet listed eight key areas in which the Bush Administration found fault with Iraq's weapons declaration to the United Nations on December 7, 2002. Under the heading "Nuclear Weapons," the fact sheet stated:

The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.
Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?

It was later discovered that this claim was based on fabricated documents. (10) In addition, both State Department intelligence officials and CIA officials reported that they had rejected the claim as unreliable. (11) As a result, it was unclear who within the State Department was involved in preparing the fact sheet.

On July 21, 2003, I wrote to Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for an explanation of the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, in creating the document. (12) On September 25, 2003, the State Department responded with a definitive denial: "Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John R. Bolton, did not play a role in the creation of this document." (13)

Subsequently, however, I joined six other members of the Government Reform Committee in requesting from the State Department Inspector General a copy of an unclassified "chronology" on how the fact sheet was developed. (14) This chronology described a meeting on December 18, 2002, between Secretary Powell, Mr. Bolton, and Richard Boucher, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Public Affairs. According to this chronology, Mr. Boucher specifically asked Mr. Bolton "for help developing a response to Iraq's Dec 7 Declaration to the United Nations Security Council that could be used with the press. According to the chronology, which is phrased in the present tense, Mr. Bolton "agrees and tasks the Bureau of Nonproliferation," a subordinate office that reports directly to Mr. Bolton, to conduct the work.

This unclassified chronology also stated that on the next day, December 19, 2002, the Bureau of Nonproliferation "sends email with the fact sheet, 'Fact Sheet Iraq Declaration.doc.'" to Mr. Bolton's office (emphasis in original). A second e-mail was sent a few minutes later, and a third e-mail was sent about an hour after that. According to the chronology, each version "still includes Niger reference." Although Mr. Bolton may not have personally drafted the document, the chronology appears to indicate that he ordered its creation and received updates on its development.

The Inspector General's chronology was marked "sensitive but unclassified." In addition, the letter transmitting the chronology stated that it "contains sensitive information, which may be protected from public release under the Freedom of Information Act" and requested that no "public release of this information" be made. (15) In fact, however, the chronology consisted of nothing more than a factual recitation of information on meetings, e-mails, and documents.

Now, the State Department Inspector General may have gone through an entire investigation of Mr. Bolton and his office in trying to assess his and the office's involvement with the Niger fact without ever speaking to Bolton.

BUT WOULDN'T THAT BE EMBARRASSING?! Could Bolton really state -- after an IG investigation of his office and his role -- that he was uninvolved with an IG investigation over the last five years.

And yet, John Bolton responded NO on the questionnaire.

Compliance problem. Compliance problem.

At minimum, a dozen red flags.

The Washington Note: John Bolton and the State Department Inspector General: SMOKING GUN?

Daily Kos: Need A Laugh?

Need A Laugh? - by Armando - Thu Jul 28th, 2005 at 17:13:22 CDT

Powerline:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Lance [Eric Stoltz for those who don't remember the names of characters] must have sold them the choco from the Hartz Mountains. (Pulp Fiction reference.)

Daily Kos: Need A Laugh?

Telegraph | News | 'He was law-abiding. We blame the government for his death'

Standing outside his dead cousin's home yesterday, Alex Pereira was an angry man.

'He was murdered. Everybody knows that, everybody can see that,' Mr Pereira, 28, said. 'It's not as if Jean has been killed by one of the bombings, but even if he had been, we, his family, would not blame the Muslims but blame the British government for starting all this.'

As far as Mr Pereira was concerned, 'all this' meant the turmoil in Iraq and the on-off violence of Afghanistan. Whatever his attitude was before his 27-year-old cousin Jean Charles de Menezes was shot five times in the head on a Tube train on Friday, now it has hardened irreparably.

'I heard last week that there are 25,000 innocent people dead in Iraq, people who have paid the price for this war.

'Well, now the British are paying the price too. And now a Brazilian has paid the price for Iraq."

Mr Pereira agreed that his cousin had never been in trouble, but had been taught by life in the violent environment of Sao Paolo to obey certain survival laws.

"He knew that if a policeman says stop, then you stop. In Brazil, if you don't stop, they shoot you in the back, just like the British police shot him now, in the back of the neck."

He dismissed the idea that his cousin would have ignored a police challenge or that he would not have understood it, pointing out that Mr de Menezes had lived in London for three years and four months, the first nine months of which were spent learning English at a school in south London.

"He came first as a tourist, but then decided to stay as a student and then to work. He told me he had a five-year residency. he said his cousin was law-abiding and had co-operated with police on four occasions on which he had come into contact with them.

Three times, he had been stopped on his 90cc moped and once at Brixton station, his usual stop, when a police sniffer dog showed interest in his bag.

"He was asked to open it by the police and he did so. I do not believe he ran. I do not believe he jumped over station barriers, not unless they show me the pictures and there are many cameras there."

Alerted by his cousin Vivian on Friday evening that Mr de Menezes was missing, he had not known for sure of Jean's death until lunchtime on Saturday, when a police officer called him.

"They found a friend's number on Jean's mobile phone and his friend told them about me and they found my number on the phone too and they rang me.

"At first they tried to pretend; they said 'He might be dead', but when I got to the place in Greenwich where they told me to go, they couldn't pretend any more."

Telegraph | News | 'He was law-abiding. We blame the government for his death'

Daily Kos: Bush to press: Go Cheney yourself! Press: Yes master!

Leno and others show the clip: Bush flips the press, then denies it saying it was a thumbs up (no way, unless he doesn't have a human hand). Corporate press takes it on the ass gladly and repeats the thumbs up explanation:

John Godfrey (Dow Jones Newswire) writes, "I was in the scrum of reporters at the event. Bush did not flip anyone off. He was clearly giving a thumbs up in response to a question shouted from the crowd.

WH even calls Americablog to explain it wasn't a "bird", it was a thumbs up (seriously)

But Scotty does NOT deny it (stonewalls instead)

Daily Kos: Bush to press: Go Cheney yourself! Press: Yes master!

Bush Flips Out, press laps it up

Leno and others show the clip: Bush flips the press, then denies it saying it was a thumbs up (no way, unless he doesn't have a human hand). Corporate press takes it on the ass gladly and repeats the thumbs up explanation.


http://www.texasturkey.us/images/bushflips.mov
Quicktime Video 1.2MB '1
Quicktime Required


Americablog comments:
Guess maybe Jesus isn't his favorite philosopher. I have no problem with him flipping the bird to the press, but don't pretend you're holier-than-thou Christian man then start saying "fuck you" to the media. This man is no conservative Christian.

onegoodmove: John Godfrey (Dow Jones Newswire) writes, "I was in the scrum of reporters at the event. Bush did not flip anyone off. He was clearly giving a thumbs up in response to a question shouted from the crowd." I called John to verify the email was from him and to ask him if there was any doubt in his mind, he said there was not. I forgot to ask him if he's sighted.
Posted by Norm at July 27, 2005 11:45 PM.


onegoodmove: Bush Flips Out

The GOP is Certain to Win in 2006, Unless... a miracle happens: Dems start to care about it

As things now stand, a Democratic win in 2006 is as likely as a vote for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty in the Soviet 'elections' of 1930. And for the same reason: the party in power ..counts the votes.. .. whether or not the past elections were stolen, the voting technology ..now in place.. will allow .. whoever.. [has] access to the back-door .. [to get] any election result that they might desire.. [without leaving behind any trace of wrongdoing]

The GOP is Certain to Win in 2006, Unless...



Here's the very bad news - the Democrats will almost certainly lose in 2006 and again in 2008, for three essential reasons: (a) the GOP and the Bush junta simply cannot afford to lose, (b) they can prevent their defeat no matter what the voters have to say about it (as they have in the last three elections), and (c) apparently the Democratic Party, the media, and law enforcement are unable and/or unwilling to do anything about it.

A GOP win in 2006 and 2008 seems simply inevitable - as inevitable as LBJ's re-election, Nixon completing his second term, and the endurance of the Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa. By this I mean that all this would have come to pass but for some extraordinary and unforeseen developments. Nothing less will budge the GOP from the White House and the Congress.

After all, their 'private sector' supporters count and compile the votes with secret software – and do so with no official independent means of validation. These facts about voting in the United States are publicly known and undisputed. And yet, despite compelling and unrefuted evidence of voting fraud, no one, except some determined citizen groups and a small minority of members of Congress, seems willing to do anything about it.

So the GOP will win for three essential reasons. Let's take them in order:

1. The GOP and Bush, Inc. cannot afford to lose

If the Democrats take control of just one house of Congress in 2006, they will gain the powers of Congressional investigation – the right to issue subpoenas to witnesses and for essential documents, and the right to require witnesses to testify under oath, which carries with it the threat of criminal conviction for perjury. And be assured that should the Democrats take charge of congressional investigations, chaired by such prosecutorial hawks as Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, the worm-cans would be opened.

To be sure, Congressional Democrats have recently held unofficial hearings on the 2004 voting irregularities in Ohio, on The Downing Street Memos, on media reform, and on the Karl Rove scandal. But these have all been rather toothless affairs, boycotted by the Republicans, with all testimony volunteered and none under oath. Official Congressional investigations would be a whole other story.

For there is good reason to suspect that the Bush Administration is less a government than it is a crime syndicate, which, thanks to a compliant Congress and Justice Department, has to date done its dirty work without fear of investigation or prosecution. Among the possible crimes that are crying for investigation: war profiteering, Congressional bribery and corruption, election fraud, war crimes, and of course the 'outing' of a covert CIA operation - an act which Bush's own father described as treasonous.

Accordingly, the loss of either house of Congress would not merely send the Busheviks back into private life: it might send many of them straight to federal prison. And the prospects for the GOP malefactors would be still worse if the Democrats reclaimed the White House in 2008, and with it the criminal investigation and prosecution powers of the Justice Department.

Nor is the threat of criminal prosecution the only concern. In addition, with a Democratic victory, the GOP oligarchs would be required to give back the keys to the federal candy store. With a return to fiscal sanity, the super-wealthy might once again be required to pay a fair share of federal taxes. Legislation might be passed to cut back on corporate welfare, to further reform campaign financing, and to reduce the influence of the lobbyists. Furthermore, the corporate foxes would be chased out of the regulatory hen-houses – the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, etc. - thus restoring to these agencies their intended function of protecting the public interest.

In sum, from the point of view of the Republicans, continuing control of the Congress in 2006 and of the White House in 2008 is not simply desirable – it is absolutely mandatory.

2. The GOP can prevent their defeat, no matter what the voters have to say about it

As things now stand, a Democratic win in 2006 is as likely as a vote for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty in the Soviet 'elections' of 1930. And for the same reason: the party in power (more precisely its supporters in private business) counts the votes.

The GOP is Certain to Win in 2006, Unless..., by Ernest Partridge - Democratic Underground: "

Daily Kos: Jesicca Simpson Calls Bullshit on Iraq War Censorship

Jesicca Simpson Calls Bullshit on Iraq War Censorship
by Steven D [Subscribe]
Thu Jul 28th, 2005 at 11:16:12 CDT

Yes, that Jessica Simpson, the one who many critics love to lambaste for her portrayal of an empty headed, hedonistic material girl on the reality show about her and hubby Nick Lachey. Seems she has more substance to her than many (myself included) thought possible:

JESSICA SIMPSON wants to know where missing footage of her and husband NICK LACHEY's harrowing trip to Iraq got to - because she thinks Americans would like to see just how bad conditions are there.


The pop singers-turned-reality TV couple travelled to the war-torn nation to visit US troops as part of a recent ABC TV variety special, and they were both left shellshocked by what they saw.

But all the controversial moments and harrowing footage of the trip didn't appear in the fun-filled TV show.

* Steven D's diary :: ::
*

Simpson says, "It was unbelievable. They didn't show a lot of what really went on with the enemy attacks and the shelling. There was so much stuff that went on and somehow the tapes got mysteriously misplaced.


"It put everything in perspective for me. It really did teach me the definition of sacrifice. I can't even fathom being out there right now. I was ready to come home."


Now it isn't surprising to me that ABC, part of the Disney megaplex of infotainment companies, decided not to run footage of the actual war that just happened to intrude on Nick and Jessica's reality while the cameras were rolling.

Remember, this is the same American media that chickened out on running an expose on Bush's wmd lies because the CBS brass didn't want to appear too political. The same media that sat complacently for months rather than pursue the Plame scandal until 2 of their "colleagues" were threatened with jail time. They are the stoutest hearts, our media. At every turn when offered the choice of investigating the abuses of power going on right under their noses, or bowing down to Karl Rove -- well, we know which choice they've usually made now, don't we?

No what I find surprising, and heartening, is that a media created celebrity such as Simpson, whose career literally rests (in my opinion) on continuing to be the 21st Century's first "It Girl" has chosen to speak out about the censorship. She was in Iraq, saw the violence and risk our troops are being exposed to on a daily basis, and believes that's the type of thing Americans would want (and ought) to see. I don't know about you, but Jessica just won over a new fan.

I hope this story gets a little play. It certainly ought to, don't you think?

Daily Kos: Jesicca Simpson Calls Bullshit on Iraq War Censorship

Daily Kos: Ari's Lies/Condi's Truth Telling: An Analysis

You can think of it this way:

Imagine that on Friday, July 11, 2003, Condoleezza Rice was handing out oranges in the aft section of Air Force One and someone absentmindedly stuffed one into his pocket. On Monday, that someone remembered the orange, pulled it from his pocket, and showed it to Ari Fleischer.

And Fleischer, after glancing down at the orange, calmly looked up and with a straight face said, "That's not an orange. That's an apple."

Today, more than two years later, it's still an apple.

Apples and Oranges

Monday, July 14, 2003, was Ari Fleischer's last day as White House press secretary. He entered the James S. Brady Briefing Room to a round of applause, smiled broadly, and after a few wry quips said, "let's begin." His game face snapped back into place.

Fleischer responded smoothly and blandly -- business as usual - as question after question about "Africa" and "uranium" and "the State of the Union" missed the mark. But Fleischer's rhythm was about to be broken:

Q: You referred to it, Ari, as a minor element, but it was important enough to delete in the October speech, a reference to this.

"October." Fleischer focused, took a second to be sure he'd heard that one right:


MR. FLEISCHER: A reference to what?

Q: A reference to Iraq's alleged attempt to get the uranium from Niger. In that case, the CIA Director asked Mr. Hadley to delete it, and it was deleted. Should that not have raised all kinds of red flags come January, when a similar reference pops up in the speech? Should not Mr. Hadley or someone from the White House made sure to check this out with the CIA?

Bull's-eye. Time to get paid.


MR. FLEISCHER: It was a different reference in the State of the Union speech...that Iraq is...seeking uranium from Africa. That's because there was additional reporting from the CIA, separate and apart from Niger...So it's an apple in Cincinnati and an orange in the State of the Union...

Q: Ari, to follow-up...the apple was a reference in a draft to the October speech to a specific quantity of uranium from Niger. To take another apple, the draft of the State of the Union speech -- according to Dr. Rice's briefing on the plane on Friday -- included references to quantity and place, and we were told that that was Niger, they were taken out.

MR. FLEISCHER: She was referring to Cincinnati in that. I talked to her afterwards, and she was referring to Cincinnati when she said that.

Q: When she said that on the plane?

MR. FLEISCHER: Yes.

Q: Wow, that wasn't clear at all.

You can think of it this way:

Imagine that on Friday, July 11, 2003...


Daily Kos: Ari's Lies/Condi's Truth Telling: An Analysis

Rice Asked if Bolton Testified in Leak Case - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - A Democratic opponent of John Bolton asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday whether the nominee for U.N. ambassador had testified to a grand jury about the leak of CIA operative's identity.

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say they want to determine whether Bolton was truthful when he wrote on a questionnaire for his confirmation hearing that he has not been interviewed in any recent investigations.

In a letter to Rice, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., referenced an MSNBC report from July 21 that Bolton was among State Department undersecretaries who "gave testimony" about a classified memo that has become an important piece of evidence in the leak investigation.

Biden asked Rice to tell the committee "whether Mr. Bolton did, in fact, appear before the grand jury, or whether he has been interviewed or otherwise asked to provide information by the special prosecutor or his staff in connection with this matter."

Several Bush administration officials have been interviewed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his quest to determine who leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame to reporters and whether any laws were broken.

Plame is the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of
President Bush's
Iraq policy.

A message left with the State Department was not immediately returned on Wednesday.

California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has asked the State Department for two different versions of the memo from its bureau of intelligence and research that discussed Plame, a congressional aide said. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because of the investigation's sensitivity.

The memo could have been the way someone in the White House learned — and then leaked — the information that Plame worked for the CIA and played a role in sending Wilson to Africa to explore whether Iraq was interested in obtaining uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

Part of the questionnaire Bolton filled out in March asked him whether he was "interviewed or asked to supply any information in connection with any administrative (including an inspector general), congressional or grand jury investigation within the past five years."

"He indicated in his form that he had not," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif.

She said it is unclear whether Bolton lied on his questionnaire because senators do not know if he testified before or after he signed the document — or at all.

Rice Asked if Bolton Testified in Leak Case - Yahoo! News

Military, Bush team clashed on questioning -report - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Senior U.S. military lawyers strong disagreed in 2003 with an administration legal task force's conclusion that
President Bush had authority to order harsh interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the New York Times reported.

Citing newly disclosed documents, the Times said in its Thursday editions that despite the protests, the task force concluded that military interrogators and their commanders would be immune from prosecution for torture under federal and international law. The reason was the special character of the fight against terrorism.

The Times said that memorandums written by several senior uniformed lawyers in each of the military services took a sharply different view and warned that the position eventually adopted by the task force could endanger American military personnel.

The memorandums were declassified and released last week in response to a request from Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), a South Carolina Republican, the newspaper said.

One memorandum written by the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Jack. Rives, said several of the "more extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law" as well as military law, the Times said.

The Rives memorandum also said the use of many of the interrogation techniques "puts the interrogators and the chain of command at risk of criminal accusations abroad," the Times reported.

The Times said the memorandums provide the most-complete record to date of how uniformed military lawyers were frequently the chief dissenters as government officials formulated interrogation policies.

Military, Bush team clashed on questioning -report - Yahoo! News

Panel: Bush Was Unready for Postwar Iraq - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - An independent panel headed by two former U.S. national security advisers said Wednesday that chaos in
Iraq was due in part to inadequate postwar planning.

Planning for reconstruction should match the serious planning that goes into making war, said the panel headed by Samuel Berger and Brent Scowcroft. Berger was national security adviser to Democratic President Clinton. Scowcroft held the same post under Republican Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush but has been critical of the current president's Iraq and Mideast policies.

"A dramatic military victory has been overshadowed by chaos and bloodshed in the streets of Baghdad, difficulty in establishing security or providing essential services, and a deadly insurgency," the report said.

"The costs, human, military and economic, are high and continue to mount," said the report, which was sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent foreign policy group.

Two years after a stunning three-week march on Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi military forces have been unable to secure and rebuild the country, and reconstruction has fallen victim to a lack of security, the report said.

The White House has reacted to similar criticism in the past by saying there was significant postwar planning.

Panel: Bush Was Unready for Postwar Iraq - Yahoo! News

We did not need to use a secret military tribunal to stop the Millenium Bomber

by switzerblog:

Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian who was arrested in 1999 with materials and a plan to bomb LAX airport on New Year's 2000, was sentenced today to 22 years in prison. He was useful for a while in providing information, but has refused to assist the US any further in recent months.

It's important that he was caught by our border guards (yay us!), and that he's locked away. But what's more important is the way his trial was handled. He is no less a terrorist than Mohamed Atta - just less successful. And he's much more of a terrorist than Jose Padilla, who has not and likely will not see an attorney because he's an "enemy combatant". 9/11 didn't change who or what these people are, it only seemed to change who we are, and that makes me sad.

It seems to make the judge in the Ressam case sad, too. His incredibly powerful words while sentencing Ressam are below, with no further comment from me.

The message I would hope to convey in today's sentencing is twofold:

First, that we have the resolve in this country to deal with the subject of terrorism and people who engage in it should be prepared to sacrifice a major portion of their life in confinement.

Secondly, though, I would like to convey the message that our system works. We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel, or invoke any proceedings beyond those guaranteed by or contrary to the United States Constitution.

I would suggest that the message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart. We can deal with the threats to our national security without denying the accused fundamental constitutional protections.

Despite the fact that Mr. Ressam is not an American citizen and despite the fact that he entered this country intent upon killing American citizens, he received an effective, vigorous defense, and the opportunity to have his guilt or innocence determined by a jury of 12 ordinary citizens.

Most importantly, all of this occurred in the sunlight of a public trial. There were no secret proceedings, no indefinite detention, no denial of counsel. {emphasis switzer's}

The tragedy of September 11th shook our sense of security and made us realize that we, too, are vulnerable to acts of terrorism.

Unfortunately, some believe that this threat renders our Constitution obsolete. This is a Constitution for which men and women have died and continue to die and which has made us a model among nations. If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.

It is my sworn duty, and as long as there is breath in my body I'll perform it, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We will be in recess.

Daily Kos: The sunlight of a public trial

Genetic flaw leaves felines without sweet tooth

Don't know about that. My late cat was definitely very fond of sweets... -- law

Researchers found a dysfunctional feline gene that probably prevents cats from tasting sweets.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Cats are notoriously finicky eaters, as millions of pet owners can attest.Now, there's a scientific theory explaining, at least in part, why cats have such snobby eating habits: genetics.

Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and their collaborators said Sunday they found a dysfunctional feline gene that probably prevents cats from tasting sweets, a sensation nearly every other mammal on the planet experiences to varying degrees.

Researchers took saliva and blood samples from six cats, including a tiger and a cheetah and found each had a useless gene that other mammals use to create a 'sweet receptor' on their tongues. The gene in question does not produce one of the two vital proteins needed to form the receptors.

'Because cats can't taste sweets, they're cranky,' joked Joseph Brand, Monell's associate director and an author of the paper being published Sunday in the inaugural issue of the Public Library of Science's journal Genetics.

The Public Library of Science aims to make such research freely available online and was launched out of frustration with rising subscription costs of prestigious research print journals, some of which cost more than $11,000 (euro9,060) a year.

Instead of charging a subscription fee, the nonprofit organization charges authors $1,500 (euro1,235) per paper submitted.

Brand said the 'pseudogene' in cats is probably a big reason why they are carnivores that get by on a high-protein, 'Atkin's-like' diet.

'Its sense of taste has driven it to become a meat eater,' Brand said. 'Losing their sweet receptor has probably changed their dietary habits.'....

All mammals have receptor cells on their tongues that send taste signals to the brain to process. The receptor cells are clustered together as taste buds. Each human taste bud is comprised of 50 to 100 receptor cells representing the five major taste sensations: salty, sour, sweet, bitter and umami, the taste of the food additive MSG and fermented soy products, among other foods"

It's not a war anymore

Rob blogs:

Turns out that all those soldiers getting shot in Iraq aren't actually fighting a war after all. They're fighting a 'struggle.'

The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups...

I'm game. Let's widen the focus from just the failed military policies to the far broader range of political, tactical and ethical failures surrounding our adventure in Iraq. Ought to be a healthy and vigorous discussion. In any case, it's not a war anymore, so stop bitching about all those lost limbs, will you?"

Washington recasts terror war as 'struggle'

Feith now says that "if America's efforts were limited to "protecting the homeland and attacking and disrupting terrorist networks, you're on a treadmill that is likely to get faster and faster with time." DUH!!! -- law

"It is more than just a military war on terror," Steven Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview. "It's broader than that. It's a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative."

New opinion polls show that the American public is increasingly pessimistic about the mission in Iraq, with many doubting its link to the counterterrorism mission. Thus, a new emphasis on reminding the public of the broader, long-term threat to the United States may allow the administration to put into broader perspective the daily mayhem in Iraq and the American casualties

Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview that if America's efforts were limited to "protecting the homeland and attacking and disrupting terrorist networks, you're on a treadmill that is likely to get faster and faster with time." The key to "ultimately winning the war," he said, "is addressing the ideological part of the war that deals with how the terrorists recruit and indoctrinate new terrorists.