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Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

August, 2004

August 31, 2004

PARSING THE PENTAGON'S SPY SCANDAL

The big stories of the past few days, as usual, are all related: the spy-mole(s?) inside Donald Rumsfeld's inner circle, the Republican National Convention, and Bush's continuing AWOL saga while his surrogates attempt to smear Kerry for his war and protest record.

On the spy-mole story, I have a confession. I don't know what to make of it. We are only a few days into this complex tale, so it's difficult to get perspective on how far and wide this scandal goes. (For some introductory sources, see below.)

Three key points strike me:

It's not even clear what the issue is here. Is the scandal that one of the DoD's high-up analysts, with influence in the shaping of Iraq and Iran policy, might have passed top-secret information to the Israeli government? (Although why that route would have been taken, when the Mossad has a firm relationship with American intelligence, remains a mystery.)

Or, as the investigation proceeds, are we heading in a deeper direction? Could it be that the FBI is closing in on a whole rat's nest of off-the-books, neo-con foreign policy initiatives that involve key elements in the Middle East puzzle? Could the operation involve the same players that, in effect, got the U.S. into a war with Iraq, and want to get us into an attack on Iran, for motives that benefit other countries in that area of the world, with American soldiers serving as spearpoints ?

Not clear. This is like opening an onion, with lots of layers. Stay tuned.

BEWARE OF FOREIGN "FRIENDS"

The old proverb -- "Whether the stone hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the stone, it isn't good for the pitcher" -- is apt. Bush&Co. is going to take a big hit here as this scandal unfolds. The "war-on-terror" administration not only can't capture -- and up until recently didn't seem all that interested in -- Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader responsible for 9/11, but it's got classified information leaking to foreign powers from the office of the third highest civilian official in Rumsfeld's Defense Department.

If the heat gets too intense, I'd look for Doug Feith's quick resignation, and maybe even Rumsfeld's. Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, ran the PNAC-dominated Office of Special Plans (OSP) -- which cooked the "intelligence" that provided the phony justifications for invading Iraq. During that same time, apparently, at least one and maybe more underlings were passing on classified information on Iran to Israel. And possibly to Ahmed Chalabi, the sleazy leader of the Iraqi exiles who may well have been a double-agent for Iran.

Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked with the OSP -- and who resigned, appalled at the lax controls there and by the heavily politicized "intelligence" work being done under Feith's direction -- has reported that Israeli officials often would be invited into Feith's offices, without having gone through any of the required sign-in procedures. It was no secret that Iraqi exiles apparently also had easy access, foremost among them Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress.

This Administration was very big on buttering up those whom it considered its allies in the South Asia/Middle East region. Let us not forget that the Saudi Arabian ambassador, two months before the Iraq invasion was launched, was shown the top-secret war maps. Bob Woodward reports that the map's classification was "TOP SECRET NOFORN. The NOFORN meant NO FOREIGN -- classified material not to be seen by any foreign nation."

Bush&Co. are total incompetents, as the above examples make clear, and may well have done immeasurable damage to America's national security. I suspect the spy/mole scandal at the Pentagon is only the tip of a very large and nasty-smelling iceberg.

Question: Will the Kerry Campaign drop the ball again, or will they finally pick up this one and run with it? You'd think they'd go for the jugular here, since Bush is campaigning on who can best protect America's national security. Go, John!

(Note: Few of the leading media outlets played this story big on Monday. Not a good sign. Surely, this story has legs. Doesn't it?)

WHO DONE IT? WHY NOW?

Final point. Since these days everything that happens is connected, in some fashion, to the election campaign (such as the "compromise" solution in Najaf that permitted the Mahdi Army to walk away with weapons, in order to get Iraq fighting off the front pages before the Republican Convention started), we have to ask: Who initiated the probe? And why is it coming to a head now?

The initiators might have been elements within the CIA -- seeking revenge on Bush&Co. for the outing of one of their own agents (Valerie Plame) by White House officials, and for having to take the bad-intel blame for the OSP's shoddy work. Maybe that's true. Too early to tell.

But the timing question may also provide a clue. Maybe Rove knew that this huge spy-mole story was about to pop, and decided to: 1) cut it off at the knees, before all the links to the Israelis and Iranians could be tied down; and/or, 2) get the dirt out now, and hope it would have blown over long before Election Day. Better than having the whole scandal erupt in late-October.

Again, not clear.

All of the above is conjectural analysis, based on the little that's out there in the way of clear, verified information. Make up your own mind. To get a better sense of what's going on, and what it may all be about, I recommend the following sources:

A ROGUE OPERATION?

A rich take-off spot is Juan Cole's "Pentagon/Israel Spying Case Expands: Fomenting a War on Iran.". Cole, who has deep contacts throughout the Middle East and South Asia, sees the scandal as "an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud [neo-con] faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran... Fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv."

For an important sidebar, check out "Iran-Contra II? Fresh Scrutiny on a Rogue Pentagon Operation" in the current Washington Monthly. Three well-connected reporters -- Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen, Paul Glastis -- spent six months working on this convoluted, shadowy tale. It involves intrigue, double-dealing and shady participants. "In particular," they write, "the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more-senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up." In short, a rogue operation of neo-con hardliners.

Also, check out Digby's "Rogue Elements":

Once again we see a marked "impatience" with the unfortunately cumbersome working of democratic government. That this may have happened for the second time in twenty years featuring many of the same people [from the Iran-Contra scandal] is a pretty clear indication that letting bygones be bygones will not do when dealing with this sort of traitorous, undemocratic behavior. The stakes are a hell of a lot higher now that they are crashing airplanes into NYC skyscrapers.

If there is an immediate lesson to be gleaned by the people, perhaps the simplest is that when you have a stupid and easily manipulated man at the head of the government, his minions and courtiers spend all their time jockeying for position and finding shortcuts to get their way. If Kerry happens to win, he really must bite the bullet and see that this is investigated and people are brought up on charges. It's completely unbelievable that these same players came back into government and ran their game all over again. Unbelievable.

See also the New York Times piece, "Officials Say Publicity Derailed Secrets Inquiry," by David Johnston and Eric Schmitt, about one version of the timing question.

SPIES AND SLIME

In short, this Pentagon scandal is big stuff, and could drag BushCheney down into the political vortex -- unless they decide immediately to cut their losses, sacrifice whoever needs to take the fall (pardon them later), and hope it all dies down. Get on this, John! The media might not do it for you.

To counter the Bush AWOL and spy scandals, we surely can expect that as more such bad stuff hits the Bush fan, there is going to be much more slime and smear (from the Swift Boat crew, and other 527 outfits loaded with cash and a host of talking-point lies) headed Kerry's way. The GOP thinking may be: If we're going to go down, we're going to take him down with us. Then we'll both be covered in filth, and maybe they'll stick with the devil they know than risk going with the new guy.

That seems to be the level of Hell that Rove is comfortable with in this campaign. God help us!

August 26, 2004

Big Lies, RNC Protests, Computer-Voting, and Najaf

It's still too early to tell how damaging the Smear Boat Vets lies will be on Kerry's momentum. Maybe not at all, especially as the entire episode seems to be imploding in Karl Rove's face as the GOP ties are revealed, the testimony is retracted, more and more witnesses emerge to back up Kerry's story, and the editorials from the right, left and center urge a halt to such mendacity.

But the Big Lie technique (which also will be on view at the upcoming Republican National Convention) is not designed to do anything other than muddy the waters and get voters to start wondering about the attacked politician.

The hope was that Kerry's support would be significantly weakened by the time Bush accepts the crown at the RNC Coronation -- I mean, Convention -- in New York City. And, as a corollary byproduct of the Smear Boat brouhaha, the nation's voters would be distracted and therefore wouldn't be paying much attention to the weakening economy and lack of new-job creation, to the unfolding Abu Ghraib scandal (the reports blaming everyone from Rumsfeld down to the local commanders), to the change in the overtime law that will hurt many middle-class families, to the deteriorating situation in Iraq, and so on.

Finally, on the Smear Boat story -- and then we'll move on to the RNC convention and other matters -- here's Salon's Scott Rosenberg, with some analysis of note:

Facts are nearly irrelevant here; this is about punching John Kerry and seeing whether he punches back, and how hard. If he fails to punch back, he's exposed as a sissy who's not tough enough to defend America. If he does fight back, the Bushies simply point at him -- as they have already begun to -- and claim that he's lost it, he's "wild-eyed" and unreliable and unfit to be president.

It's exactly what every Democratic strategist knew was coming. It's cunning, and inevitable, and low. And I think the only answer for the Kerry campaign is to call Bush out, directly, on its lowness. The trouble, of course, is that as long as you're responding to fraudulent Swift Boat Veteran ads you're allowing Bush to dominate the agenda. You need to punch back hard, and only then move on.

George Bush is acting like a latter-day Joseph McCarthy -- albeit one smart enough to use shadowy surrogates for his dirty work and retain semi-plausible deniability. So the best way to stop him, I'm convinced, is to stand up and call out his campaign's slime for what it is. (The new Kerry TV ad, "Old Tricks," begins to take on this job.)...

There will be at least two major stories coming out of New York when the RNC opens. One is what is happening in the hall -- a stealth convention, showcasing the more moderate elements, who have little say-so in Bush&Co.'s actual policies, while hiding from view most of those extremists really in charge -- and the other is what's happening outside, on the streets.

Inevitably among hundreds of thousands of protesters, there will be a few violent, anarchist types out to make mischief, along with GOP provocateurs in the crowd instructed to smash windows, attack police and so on. Rove already has plans in place to use whatever violence ensues -- whether provoked by the police and provocateurs or actual demonstrators -- as ammunition with which to bash Kerry and the Democrats. ("See, these are the pro-Kerry hoodlums who will take over and destroy your property and peace-of-mind unless you vote for the law-and-order Bush/Cheney ticket.")

Lots of good articles and blogs around this very topic.

Rick Perlstein's Village Voice essay, "Get Mad. Act Out. Re-Elect George Bush," has been getting big play. In it, Perlstein raises a fascinating question: "If resistance against Bush actually plays into Bush's hands, is it really resistance?"

In addition, Perlstein sees the basically formless demonstration as woefully short-sighted, especially in its lack of a coherent political/communciations strategy.

If you leave questions of what you are communicating—to the cops, to the watching public—entirely up in the air, you are not really doing politics at all...

It would have taken all of [the Rev. Martin Luther] King's powers of Christian love, I think, not to laugh in these people's faces. King would never ever simply say, "We need to do what our conscience tells us is important to do," and somehow leave it at that. King planned his insurgencies with the strategic care of a military general, and with the characteristic obsessions of a top-drawer publicist: no risk of arrest, of violence—even when arrest or violence was welcomed, embraced for its communicative power—was ever left to chance. (Today's protesters revel in their embrace of improvisation, as if it were a good in itself.) And he never left the field of battle satisfied with mere moral victory, that his side had demonstrated more righteousness than the other. He always had a concrete political goal, that concrete goal but a step toward his continually evolving transcendent goals...

It is only inane arrogance that gives someone the confidence to pronounce that, magically, "people will understand." They might not understand at all. Instead, what they might understand is: "Bush is better than anarchy in the streets." It ain't fair. But if it all goes down as unplanned, there'll be a whole lot more unfairness coming down the pike in the next four years.

DAYS OF SILENCE

Over at Corrente, The Farmer, more or less agreeing with the Perlstein thesis, offers an intriguing alternative to raucous mischief:

To be honest, if I had my way, if I were even remotely influential in such matters, I'd call for a silent protest in New York. Absolute silence. Let the GOP come to New York and wander around in a stone dead silence. Blacken your windows New Yorkers. If you do go out on the streets wear black arm bands. Don't go out at night to bars or shows or restaurants. Boycott. It's your city and it's your money. Close your galleries and your shops or hang a black flag in the window as a symbolic gesture. Declare a day of mourning. Just stay home. It won't kill you.

Let the confetti pumped from the RNC shredder machine blow through the streets like so many leaves tumbling along the mainstreet of a plague bit ghostown. If drunken herds of fly-by-night goobers in cowboy hats and Free-Republic tee shirts want to stumble up and down Broadway or the lower east side at two am so be it. Let em do it all by themselves. Chill them with the sounds of silence. That would be the spookiest most powerful message I think New Yorkers and political activists could deliver. If the noisiest city in the world went stone cold quiet - well, you get my drift. Unfortunately I know thats way too much to hope for (especially at this point) and especially after reading what RP has to say.

And unfortunately the minute one single storefront window is broken or one single limousine leaving Rockefeller Plaza is delayed in traffic by a die-in, the bow-wow-wowsers and clangor horns and high steppers of television "news" theater cabaret will go into gran-mal seizures of seismic propotions. A bellowing whooping deafening squall. Red Meat! And you know that's exactly what they want. And you all know whose butchered rosy flanks will be served up at their cheery little corporate TV media buffet.

HAYDEN SAYS LET IT RIP

Over on the other end of the spectrum, there's old leftie Tom Hayden urging protesters to let it rip. In his "Dissent Must Come Alive in New York," Hayden concludes that a rip-roaring protest might convince those who like order above all that this is what America might look like everyday if Bush gets another term.

Adding to the preconvention tension is the floating rumor that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's campaign strategist, is laying a trap for the protesters, counting on the very fact of disorder to bolster the president's image as a strongman. In this view, protesters are supposed to behave themselves lest they throw the election to Bush.

I say Karl Rove is overrated. Despite untold campaign funds, he couldn't win a majority for Bush in 2000. His script for Iraq called for an easy "mission accomplished." His tax cuts were supposed to generate a jobs boom. Social issues like gay-lesbian marriage were to fuel a permanent Republican majority in Congress. Nominating Bush in September, uptown from Ground Zero, was to be as triumphal as entering the new Baghdad. Clearly, Rove's script is in tatters.

Defending the GOP convention as if it is the Green Zone in Baghdad may not instill national confidence in the commander in chief. A confrontation in New York could be a sign that four more years of this president's policies will destabilize our country as needlessly as his Iraq adventure and trillion-dollar tax cuts for the wealthy. Many voters could conclude that Bush, if he wins in 2004, will plunge the country into strife not seen since the '60s.

ALL OF N.Y. WILL BE DEMONSTRATING

Steve Gilliard, who will be out in the streets of "Angertown" covering the protests, provides a different perspective, concentrating on the massive demonstrations that will be organized by labor and non-violent groups. Here he talks directly to Perlstein about his article:

Cops and firefighters are likely to be out in the streets protesting as well. There is much less of a challenge to authority than what was going on in Chicago, 1968. Also, many people [then] were spoiling for a fight, on both sides.

Now, if it was the kids running the show, as it was in 1968, bad things might happen. But the people running the protests here are a lot older and a little smarter.

If the A31 [anarchist] people want to get arrested, fine. Who takes them seriously. After all, Rove has been using that Hitler entry on Move On for months. He wants to use them, fine. The problem for Rove is the Union protests, the organized stuff coming from the black church, NOW, NARAL and the serious people, not rich kids from the burbs. They will just get abused from New Yorkers and laughed at as they go to jail.
The people you quoted can barely shave and bathe, much less organize some kind of protest. Besides, their ranks have cops all over them.

If you had some serious protest planned, would you be in the papers bragging about it? I wouldn't.

Also, as the Yahoo article indicates, the hostility is not just limited to goofy kids with bad fashion sense. It's widespread, from the pages of the New Yorker to people in the street. A sense of betrayal lingers in the air, even if people can't nail it down specifically.

There's a feeling that the convention is the reason to let people know exactly how much we don't really like Bush. Some may see this as ingratitude, but it's really anger at being screwed like a plank of wood on This Old House. It's not just angry kids. It's much of the city, and the reasons are hardly obscure. Wayne Barrett lists 10 ways Bush has screwed New York.

COMPARING N.Y. & CHICAGO

Digby's tack is somewhere in the middle, and predicts how the mass-media will play the protests if violence gets out of hand:

"I'm all for protesting as a tactic if it's organized to make a political point. As emotional catharsis or an exercise of tribal identity it only hurts the ball club. I'm hoping that the NYC protest story is one entertaining and pointed "Billionaires For Bush" style political theatre, not anarchy in the streets.

If the worst happens, it should be noted, however, that one of the reasons that the 1968 [Democratic] convention anarchy was helpful to Nixon was that there had been a succession of real riots in various cities. There had been huge protests in the streets and on campus. There was tangible social upheaval in the country that made the confrontation with police at a political convention all the more dramatic. Nothing like that kind of civil unrest exists today (yet) so the backdrop that made the convention protests such a powerful image for Nixon to exploit as the "law and order" candidate isn't there.

The best Bush can hope for is to make it a matter of "values." I don't know how much punch that really has, but it is true that the media loves to go all Claude Rains on us whenever there's the tiniest hint of resistance to the bourgeois values that everybody pretends to hold (while they watch porn and pop prescription drugs.) If violence breaks out or someone does something too edgy you can bet that we'll be treated to another huge dose of phony sanctimony from the millionaire celebrity press corpse.

CREATIVE LEVEL OF PROTESTS

As for me here at The Crisis Papers, I hope and pray for mammoth demonstrations and protests, those that by their creativity and determined wit will garner widespread media attention to the issues behind public revulsion at Bush&Co.'s high crimes and misdemeanors.

Widespread violence would permit the GOP-friendly mass media to focus there, rather than on the issues, and could influence key middle-class swing voters in the toss-up states.

I hope for the former, but I've participated in enough demonstrations to know two things: there are crazies in any political demo just itching to provoke and battle the cops; and, there often are, and there certainly will be in New York, provocateurs in the employ of reactionary forces (read: Rove), anxious to make the nightly news-focus the violence and not the issues.

Two final items:

1. The siege of Najaf appears to be winding down with a seeming "victory" for U.S. policy. Here's Juan Cole's wise analysis on the battle itself -- a militarily unwise one for al-Sadr's militia to have initiated and in the way it was fought -- and on Sadr's future as a key Iraqi leader.

...Muqtada and his main aides have disappeared from the shrine, as I had predicted they would. As I suggested, there are probably underground tunnels. Muqtada has plenty of safe houses in Iraq, since he eluded Saddam for four years, and he won't be easy to find if he doesn't want to be found.

My guess is that the Sadr Movement will now go into an active, long term guerrilla resistance. They will hope that bombings and assassinations will give heart to the public and provide a model for resisting what they see as the occupation. They will hope for an Algeria-style end game, in which the Americans and British are tossed out of Iraq. The drawback for the Mahdi Army is that they are just untrained Shiite ghetto youth, with perhaps a few older vets among them, and their ability to wage an effective guerrilla struggle is untested. So far they have fought far more stupidly than the resistance fighters in the Sunni Arab areas, attempting to take and hold territory and behaving like a mainstream army but without the necessary skill set.

If they move in this direction, they will at least have moral support of a wide range of Sunni and Shiite clerics, who jointly called for all Muslims to support the resistance to what they call the US occupation of Iraq. The signatories include prominent figures in the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, in Lebanon's Shiite Hizbullah, and in Yemen's Sunni fundamentalist movement. Most of the clerics signing the call want an Islamic state in their country, with Islamic law the law of the land, and so can be called fundamentalists.

But most of them are not radicals in the sense of wanting a violent and immediate revolution. Some, like Yusuf Qaradawi, explicitly permitted Muslims to fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the US military or alongside it. But Qaradawi and the others see Iraq in a different light, as an Arab, Muslim society that has been colonized by an outside force, the U.S.

The low intensity guerrilla fighting in Amara against the British base, which left at least 12 dead and 54 wounded there, may be a sign of things to come. There were also clashes in the southern oil port of Basra.

"SUM OF A GLITCH"

Here, almost lost in the fog from the Swifties and the Olympics, are two other important articles that should be receiving widespread attention:

1. Citizen resistance to voting on easily corruptible computer-voting machines, those with no verified paper trail for accurate re-counts, have won victories in a number of large states, among them Ohio and California. But most citizens in most states will wind up casting their ballots by those machines, and therein lies the opportunity for Rovian mischief in counting those votes.

Check out "Sum of a Glitch," a new article by Black Box Voting's Bev Harris -- one of the leading activists and researchers on the whole touch-screen voting issue -- in In These Times.

In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman requested was denied. Three months after the election, the vendor shrugged. “Something happened. I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark Kelley of ES&S.

When I began researching this story in October 2002, the media was reporting that electronic voting machines are fun and speedy, but I looked in vain for articles reporting that they are accurate. I discovered four magic words, “voting machines and glitch,” which, when entered into a search engine, yielded a shocking result: A staggering pile of miscounts was accumulating. These were reported locally but had never been compiled in a single place, so reporters were missing a disturbing pattern.

I published a compendium of 56 documented cases in which voting machines got it wrong.

How do voting-machine makers respond to these reports? With shrugs. They indicate that their miscounts are nothing to be concerned about. One of their favorite phrases is: “It didn’t change the result.”

Except, of course, when it did

Harris then meticulously documents some of the most egregious errors. Scary stuff.

NAJAF AND AL-SADR'S FUTURE

2. The situation in Najaf seems to be resolving, with what can be played by Bush&Co. as a seeming "victory." Here's Juan Cole, with a more sanguine view of what transpired there, how the al-Sadr militia made a politically unwise decision to take on the U.S. frontally in Najaf, and what major role Sadr will play in the guerrilla war against U.S. occupation.

...Muqtada and his main aides have disappeared from the shrine, as I had predicted they would. As I suggested, there are probably underground tunnels. Muqtada has plenty of safe houses in Iraq, since he eluded Saddam for four years, and he won't be easy to find if he doesn't want to be found.

My guess is that the Sadr Movement will now go into an active, long term guerrilla resistance. They will hope that bombings and assassinations will give heart to the public and provide a model for resisting what they see as the occupation. They will hope for an Algeria-style end game, in which the Americans and British are tossed out of Iraq. The drawback for the Mahdi Army is that they are just untrained Shiite ghetto youth, with perhaps a few older vets among them, and their ability to wage an effective guerrilla struggle is untested. So far they have fought far more stupidly than the resistance fighters in the Sunni Arab areas, attempting to take and hold territory and behaving like a mainstream army but without the necessary skill set.

If they move in this direction, they will at least have moral support of a wide range of Sunni and Shiite clerics, who jointly called for all Muslims to support the resistance to what they call the US occupation of Iraq. The signatories include prominent figures in the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, in Lebanon's Shiite Hizbullah, and in Yemen's Sunni fundamentalist movement. Most of the clerics signing the call want an Islamic state in their country, with Islamic law the law of the land, and so can be called fundamentalists. But most of them are not radicals in the sense of wanting a violent and immediate revolution. Some, like Yusuf Qaradawi, explicitly permitted Muslims to fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the US military or alongside it. But Qaradawi and the others see Iraq in a different light, as an Arab, Muslim society that has been colonized by an outside force, the US.

The low intensity guerrilla fighting in Amara against the British base, which left at least 12 dead and 54 wounded there, may be a sign of things to come. There were also clashes in the southern oil port of Basra.

BUSH'S "START VALUE"

Finally, Charles Pierce at The American Prospect has a marvelous article that borrows from the Olympics gymnastics competition to make a powerful, satiric point about George W. Bush.

Due to an error by those mysterious folks in blazers who sit there like the politburo used to sit, Yang was given a start value that was too low. Great huffing and blowing ensued, and Trautwig -- who assuredly has a job at FOX whenever he needs it -- made sure to give the Korean an I-told-ya-so kick two nights later when Yang screwed up in the high-bar competition

Anyway, I like the start value. I think it's an interesting, charmingly egalitarian concept. For example, let's say you want to stay president of the United States. For most of the first 40 years of your life, you're a conspicuous ne'er-do-well, even in a family notable for them....

You are backed in several business ventures, all of which crater, but out of which you are helped from the wreckage by many of the people who were your stake horses to begin with. You do well selling your percentage of a baseball team to one of your family's best friends. You become governor of Texas and then, despite receiving half a million votes less than the other guy, you become president of the United States after nearly a decade of relative peace and prosperity.

For a year or so, you serve no apparent function in the office. However, a really bad thing happens, and the country and the world rally to your cause. Over the next three years, you squander almost all of that goodwill. A war into which you had to euchre the nation goes terribly bad. The economy remains narcoleptic. And then it's time to run for president again. You don't exactly stick the landing, but you throw your arms in the air and give the judges your best and biggest smile. But you know you have trouble.

Why?

Start values.

Start value on the life was only a 9.315. All that money. All that influence. Not a very complicated routine at all.

Start value on the business career was only about a 9.175. There's no such thing as a high-risk maneuver if you're not going to be allowed to fail.

Start value on the political career was a little higher, 9.58, but only because you never showed you wanted to do the routine at all. Still, though, low risk. You blew the landing in 2000, but the other guy did worse.

Start value on the presidency, well, here's where it gets tricky. The original one -- based on that decade of peace and prosperity -- was about a 9.0. Then the really bad thing happened, and the judges ratcheted it up to a 9.7, which came down gradually as almost everyone got behind you, and the judges adjusted it again to a 9.5. But the routine came apart in midair, and there's some ungainly flailing right now as the routine reaches its most critical elements, next week in New York, where an awful lot of people are going to wonder when in the hell all the plates fell off the sticks.

August 24, 2004

GOP Skulduggery, Slime, Spin and Sleaze

OK, after these opening paragraphs, this blog will be a Swift Boats-free zone. Enough already. The point seems to be that the GOP's initial sliming did its work, throwing outrageous charges into the air, just to see if some of them would stick in the public mind. They did for a few days, but then it turned out that the Kerry Campaign was able to locate even more eyewitnesses to the senator's bravery in river-boat Vietnam action, and the Bush Campaign found itself being denounced from the political left, right and center for continuing its sleazy character-assassination. (For a trenchant summing up, see Juan Cole's "Bush's Superficial Wounds in the Vietnam Era").

So yesterday, Bush tried to call a halt to the whole issue. He didn't say anything about the Swift Boat liars and order them to stop their mendacious ads. Instead, he denounced all ads by all independent organizations commenting on political issues. The ads coming from MoveOn.org and other such liberal organizations really roast the Bush campaign, and Rove wants them to go away. They won't. So prepare for even worse slime, sleaze and spin from Rove and his surrogates. Especially since the poll numbers in more toss-up states are falling again for Bush.

We won't know until probably October -- when the near-final polls come out -- whether Bush&Co. are seriously going to follow through on their legal preparations to "postpone" the election. Or, if Bush's electoral prospects look truly bleak, whether they will move to "red alert" and initiate a state-of-emergency in certain voting regions on Election Day.

They've already prepared a legal memorandum that, if the GOP-controlled Congress approves, would give the Executive the power to "limit the movement" of citizens under certain election-day scenarios -- that is, voters might be permitted to cast votes in, say, Kansas, but not in California. More significantly in this scenario, a candidate (guess which one) could win the presidency on the basis of the votes cast. See here and here.

In the meantime, there is the sticky issue of computer-voting machines and the lack of a way to verify the tallies, since there is no verified-voting paper trail provided by most of the machines.

But why would the companies who manufacture those touch-screen voting machines not want to provide such a paper trail? Well...the major companies are owned by rabid Republicans, and, often, they are the same companies hired to tally the votes! And they refuse to let anyone examine their software that counts the votes.

Now, according to Corrente's Lambert, it turns out that the situation is even worse than we thought. The companies that certify the voting technologies of those machines also are Republican-leaning. According to Associated Press reporter Bill Poovey, in a story entitled "Secretive Testing Firms Certify Nation's Vote Count Machines":

A Colorado company under contract to ensure that the nation's touch-screen voting machines are accurate has been a substantial contributor to Republican candidates and groups.

At Greenwood Village-based CIBER, employees and some spouses have donated more than $72,000 to GOP candidates and groups during the 2001-2002 and 2003-2004 election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Democratic donations linked to the firm were $3,000 during that time.

"What should raise eyebrows is that our U.S. government and state governments allow this to happen," she said. "There's been nothing done to dissuade the perception that there's partisan control over the voting process."

CIBER isn't the only company in the voting machine business at which people are actively involved in politics. Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Ohio-based Diebold Inc., the parent of electronic voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, has helped raise funds for President Bush. O'Dell attracted attention last year after sending a letter to Ohio Republicans to raise money for the GOP, noting his commitment to "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

Douglas Weber, a researcher for the center, called CIBER's donations to Republicans "substantial."

"They're not one of the major donors. But they do give a substantial amount of money," he said.

The Center for Responsive Politics found $5,750 worth of campaign contributions from Wyle Laboratories for this year's election. All of [Wyle] money went to Republicans, including $1,500 to President Bush.

OK, now, [writes Lambert] let me see...

The voting machine manufacturers are Republicans...

The voting machine testers are Republicans...

The testing process is entirely secret....

The voting machine software is entirely secret...

Swing states Ohio (home of Diebold) and Florida (fraud in 2000, already) are using electronic voting machines that are manufactured, tested, and run by Republican firms...

No! They would never do that!

More, at another item from Corrente -- that estimable, six-person blogging collective -- on the same topic:

The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November.

Despite concerns over whether the so-called touchscreen machines can be trusted, the testing companies won't say publicly if they have encountered shoddy workmanship.

They say they are committed to secrecy in their contracts with the voting machines' makers - even though tax money ultimately buys or leases the machines.

"I find it grotesque that an organization charged with such a heavy responsibility feels no obligation to explain to anyone what it is doing," Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic voting expert, told lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

The system for "testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent," Shamos added.

Failures involving touchscreens during voting this year in Georgia, Maryland and California and other states have prompted questions about the machines' susceptibility to tampering and software bugs.

Also in question is their viability, given the lack of paper records, if recounts are needed in what's shaping up to be a tightly contested presidential race. Paper records of each vote were considered a vital component of the electronic machines used in last week's referendum in Venezuela on whether to recall President Hugo Chavez....

More than a decade ago, the Federal Election Commission authorized the National Association of State Election Directors to choose the independent testers.

On its Web site, the association says the three testing outfits "have neither the staff nor the time to explain the process to the public, the news media or jurisdictions." It directs inquiries a Houston-based nonprofit organization, the Election Center, that assists election officials. The center's executive director, Doug Lewis, did not return telephone messages seeking comment.

The election directors' voting systems board chairman, former New York State elections director Thomas Wilkey, said the testers' secrecy stems from the FEC's refusal to take the lead in choosing them and the government's unwillingness to pay for it.

He said that left election officials no choice but to find technology companies willing to pay.

"When we first started this program it took us over a year to find a company that was interested, then along came Wyle, then CIBER and then SysTest," Wilkey said of he standards developed over five years and adopted in 1990.

"Companies that do testing in this country have not flocked to the prospect of testing voting machines," said U.S. Election Assistance Commission chairman DeForest Soaries Jr., now the top federal overseer of voting technology.

A 2002 law, the Help America Vote Act, created the four-member, bipartisan headed by Soaries to oversee a change to easier and more secure voting.

Soaries said there should be more testers but the three firms are "doing a fine job with what they have to work with."

Wilkey, meanwhile, predicted "big changes" in the testing process after the November election.

I can imagine...[writes Lambert]

But critics led by Stanford University computer science professor David Dill say it's an outrage that the world's most powerful democracy doesn't already have an election system so transparent its citizens know it can be trusted.

"Suppose you had a situation where ballots were handed to a private company that counted them behind a closed door and burned the results," said Dill, founder of VerifiedVoting.org. "Nobody but an idiot would accept a system like that. We've got something that is almost as bad with electronic voting." (via ##AP).

Is your hair on fire yet? [Lambert asks] If I had any, mine would be.

[Weiner here] All the more reason to get through to your legislators in Congress, DEMANDING that this whole shoddy, shaky, possibly corrupt computer-voting scheme be put in hold for at least this election. The only way we'll have an honest, non-suspicious vote in November is to have paper ballots, hand-counted.

In any case, vote absentee in advance, by paper ballot. Keep your receipt.

Finally, back to the Middle East/East Asia scholar Juan Cole for his Monday take on the U.S. attack on Najaf. The entire piece, "Egyptian Mufti: Volcano of Anger Over Najaf," is well worth the read; here are some key paragraphs:

...Some of my readers have suggested to me that it doesn't matter what Americans do, since Muslims hate them anyway.

This statement is silly. Most Muslims never hated the United States per se. In 2000, 75 percent of Indonesians rated the US highly favorably. The U.S. was not as popular in the Arab world, because of its backing for Israel against the Palestinians, but it still often had decent favorability ratings in polls. But all those poll numbers for the US are down dramatically since the invasion of Iraq and the mishandling of its administration afterwards. Only 2 percent of Egyptians now has a favorable view of the United States.

It doesn't have to be this way. The US is behaving in profoundly offensive ways in Najaf. U.S. military leaders appear to have no idea what Najaf represents. I saw one retired general on CNN saying that they used to have to be careful of Buddhist temples in Vietnam, too. I almost wept. Islam is not like Buddhism. It is a far tighter civilization. And the shrine of Ali is not like some Buddhist temple in Vietnam that even most Buddhists have never heard of.

I got some predictably angry mail at my earlier statement that the Marines who provoked the current round of fighting in Najaf, apparently all on their own and without orders from Washington, were behaving like ignoramuses. Someone attempted to argue to me that the Marines were protecting me.

Protecting me? The ones in Najaf are behaving in ways that are very likely to get us all blown up. The US officials who encouraged the Mujahidin against the Soviets were also trying to protect us, and they ended up inadvertently creating the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Such protection, I don't need.

And:

Radical Islamist terrorism is a form of vigilantism. Angry young Muslim men see their own governments doing nothing about Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians, and bowing to US adventures like Iraq, and they grow disgusted. They have no hope of getting their governments to do anything about what they see as profound injustices. So they form small groups of engineers or other professionals and take matters into their own hands.

That is exactly the kind of phenomenon [Egyptian mufti] Gumaa is warning against. He is right about the volcano of anger.

August 20, 2004

IF A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST...

When I first joined the San Francisco Chronicle, in the early 1970s, I found myself drawn to the wire room. I enjoyed being in the presence of the clickety-clakking teletype machines, spitting out real-time news from the various wire services -- AP, UPI, New York Times, Washington Post, Agence-France Press, Reuters and so on.

I got to read all the latest reports and commentaries on the disaster that was the Vietnam War, the unfolding Watergate scandal, and so on. It was an illuminating experience, but not just because I was on the "inside" of the news industry, reading first what we were about to publish -- and, more importantly, NOT publish -- in a few hours.

All this in the way of an introduction to today's opening point: What isn't published -- especially what isn't published on the front pages, or don't appear as lead items on TV newscasts -- often is much more revelatory of what's really happening than what the editors and publishers decide the citizens should see and hear.

Just one recent example, among many: John Kerry and George Bush were campaigning in Portland last week. Kerry drew 50,000 to the shores of the Willamette River to hear his talk. About 2000 cherry-picked guests got to hear Bush speak. Guess what story got the big play in the national news that evening? You guessed it.

Kerry appears at venues and events that are open to the public. Sure, his campaign staff makes sure that there are lots of union folks and vets in the audience, but anybody can come. Kerry is often faced with Bush-campaign hecklers, trying to drown him out.

Bush appears only at events where no spontaneity is possible, since those in attendance must sign "loyalty oaths" that they support his candidacy. Those regarded as suspicious -- wearing a Kerry pin might do it -- are summarily turned away. At the so-called "Ask the President" sessions that are included in some of Bush's events, he gets puff-ball questions from the adoring faithful.

How many citizens who read their papers and watch the news are aware of the numerical and partisan makeup of the crowds that attend their speeches? Precious few, I would guess, based on how the conglomerate-owned media slants the coverage.

Still, despite this media bias, and the vast amounts of slime and sleaze emanating from Karl Rove's dirty-tricks department, Bush continues to slide in the polls in many of the toss-up states, and Kerry continues slowly to climb, actually leading in a good number of those states.

Glory be! The citizenry are finally coming around to an "enough-is-enough" frame of mind.

For the rest of this column, here are some wonderful items from some of my favorite fellow bloggers.

The Swift Boat Vets for Bush slime-campaign is imploding, thanks to the over-the-top lies, the sleazy backgrounds of the leading spokesmen, the Republican bigwigs who are financing their operation. You can read the dirty details at the esteemed Josh Marshall, Digby, and Steve Gilliard.

Kerry, as his political history attests, is a scrapper. So, finally, he's taking the gloves off and is starting to hit back. Check out his speech Thursday to the International Association of Fire Fighters; here are the key relevant paragraphs:

Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn’t interested in the truth – and they’re not telling the truth. They didn’t even exist until I won the nomination for president.

But here’s what you really need to know about them. They’re funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They’re a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the President won’t denounce what they’re up to tells you everything you need to know—he wants them to do his dirty work.

Thirty years ago, official Navy reports documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is. And I still carry the shrapnel in my leg from a wound in Vietnam.

As firefighters you risk your lives everyday. You know what it’s like to see the truth in the moment. You’re proud of what you’ve done—and so am I.

Of course, the President keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: “Bring it on.”

I’m not going to let anyone question my commitment to defending America—then, now, or ever. And I’m not going to let anyone attack the sacrifice and courage of the men who saw battle with me.

Just a hunch on my part, but I think Xymphora may be a tad angry at the media, especially over the recent "apologies" by the New York Times and Washington Post for hyping the Administration's WMD bullbleep prior to the Iraq invasion.

The problem with these newsprint confessions is not that they are craven, insufficient and self-serving, which of course they are. The problem is that, on the whole, they do not correct the pre-war mistakes, but actually further them. The Post would have you believe that its 'failure' before the war was its inability/reluctance to punch holes in Bush's WMD claims.

Right. I marched in Washington against the war in February 2003 with about 400,000 people, and I can pretty much guarantee that not more than a handful of those people gave a shit about whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That's because we knew what the Post and all of these other papers still refuse to admit - this whole thing was never about weapons of mass destruction. Even a five-year-old, much less the literate executive editor of the Washington Post, could have seen, from watching Bush and his cronies make his war case, that they were going in anyway.

For God's sake, Bush was up there in the fall of 2002, warning us that unmanned Iraqi drones were going to spray poison gas on the continental United States. The whole thing—the 'threat' of Iraqi attack, the link to terrorism, the dire warnings about Saddam's intentions - it was all bullshit on its face, as stupid, irrelevant and transparent as a cheating husband's excuse. And I don't know a single educated person who didn't think so at the time.

The story shouldn't have been, 'Are there WMDs?' The story should have been, 'Why are they pulling this stunt? And why now?' That was the real mystery. It still is."

We all knew. There were no weapons of mass destruction. It was always a lie, and a supremely obvious lie. The Washington Post and the New York Times didn't just report the lie, they participated in it. To put it in legal terms, they aided and abetted the gross breach of international and American law that the Bush Administration pulled on the American Congress and people by tricking them into an unnecessary and disastrous attack on Iraq. The apologies or explanations are self-serving and deceitful.

Neither Judith Miller nor the editors of the Times are as stupid as we are supposed to think they are, and the editors of the Post just had to read their own articles by Walter Pincus, published but hidden deep within the paper, to see what was really going on.

... Bush has managed, with the help of his crooked 9-11 commission, to portray the weapons fiasco as a problem of intelligence. This is nonsense, as the intelligence was completely irrelevant.

...Bush was going to go to war regardless of what his intelligence said or didn't say, and the Post and the Times knew it. Despite this, they published article after article repeating and reinforcing the warmongering lies of the Bush Administration. There are four real journalists in the United States who wrote on this issue: Seymour Hersh, Walter Pincus, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay. Everyone else is either a traitor or just a waste of space. If you think you get the truth reading either the Washington Post or the New York Times, you are a fool.

GOP officials and secretaries of states around the country are moaning and groaning that they simply aren't able to alter their recount policies this close to the November election. So this August 18th story about the recount going on now in Venezuela is instructive; from the Corrente blog (scroll down to "Dept. of Cheap Ironies"):

The referendum was carried out on touch-screen voting machines, which produced a paper receipt of each vote, much like an ATM. Voters then deposited the receipts into a ballot box. Amid charges that the electronic machines were rigged, the monitors will be checking the results from the machines against the paper ballots to make sure there are no major discrepancies. The paper ballots will be checked at election offices while votes recorded in the machines will be examined at an army base.
(via The Globe and Mail)

There are several moves afoot to try to head off the looming computer-voting scandal. Given that the GOP controls the Congress, neither is likely to pass, but they're worth discussing and moving on anyway.

The American public would not put up with another suspect, vote-counting election in November, after the disputed one in 2000 -- and maybe some Republicans might come over and join the call for a transparent vote-count.

One initiative involves a bill that will be submitted to Congress after the August vacation, entitled the "Federal Paper Ballot Act of 2004 - Insist on Hand Counted Paper Ballots." The essence:

(1) All votes for federal offices shall be cast on paper ballots.

(2) All votes for federal offices shall be hand counted at the polling places where the votes were cast, and the manual count shall constitute the official count of the votes.

(3) Manually-tallied precinct totals for all federal offices shall be prominently posted at the polling places before the ballots are transported to the central facility.

(4) In any jurisdiction where votes for federal office are also counted by machine, the machine totals for federal offices shall be posted at the location where the votes are machine-counted.

(5) All absentee votes for federal offices shall be counted by hand, and the totals shall be posted at the central election office.

(6) This act is effective on the date of enactment.

The other is a petition beginning to circulate that would bar the Congress from certifying the electors from any state where there is no voter-verified paper ballot trail. Here are the key paragraphs (by e-mail from Nina Moliver, Moderator, NotMyPresident@yahoogroups.com):

...A bill to require official paper trails for all electronic voting has been held up in committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida and brother of the Republican presidential candidate, has blocked all efforts to install a voter-verified paper trail for Florida’s machines.

Even international monitors, film crews and teams of lawyers on Election Day will be unable to prevent inaccurate electronic election results from being sent to the state and certified.

As a result, we face the very real possibility that for the second presidential election in a row, vote tampering and disenfranchisement will stop the winner of the election from taking office.

We hereby call on all Senators and Congresspeople who support democracy to PLEDGE to REJECT ELECTORS from ALL STATES where :

1. Votes have been cast and counted in a direct-recording electronic voting system with no voter-verified paper ballot trail or with such a trail that has not been counted and used to provide the official election results, AND

2. Where, with no verifiable recount done, the outcome of the vote tally is either very close or is significantly different from that which was reasonably expected on the basis of exit polls or the most recent public opinion polls.

For absolutely vital posts about the deteriorating situation in Najaf in particular, and Iraq in general, check out:

Juan Cole's, "What Does Muqtata al-Sadr Want?", and Kos' Failing to Understand Guerrilla War".

Pick Out the Flip-Flopper Department

Want to see an egregious Bush flip-flop? Check out David Sirota's "THEN & NOW: Bush & the Great Lakes:

THEN:

Even though experts say "diverting any water from the Great Lakes region sets a bad precedent" Bush "said he wants to talk to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien about piping water to parched states in the west and southwest." He said, "A lot of people don't need [the water], but when you head South and West, we do need it."
- AP, 7/19/01; Bush statement, 7/18/01

NOW:

"We've got to use our resources wisely, like water. It starts with keeping the Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes Basin. You might remember what my opponent said earlier this year about Great Lakes water diversion. He said it would be a delicate balancing act. It sounds just like him. My position is clear: We're never going to allow diversion of Great Lakes water." - Bush, 8/16/04

Which Candidate Understands the Real Threat?

Check out Atrios' ##delicious dissection of Bush, hell-bent for years for a missile defense shield, while Kerry wanted and still wants to focus on terrorism and al-Qaeda

August 17, 2004

WHY U.S. ATTACKED NAJAF

Despite all of Bush&Co.'s attempts to change the subject, to get the American people distracted from the unfolding disaster in Iraq, events on the ground inevitably bring us back to that country. Any day that happens is not a good day for George W. Bush.

And it doesn't look like it's going to be a good election campaign in that regard for him either.

Kerry can snipe from the outside about the war-plan and the incompetence of the Administration and its generals, but Bush actually has to produce enough victories to convince the American voters that the U.S. has "turned the corner" in Iraq.

If what's happening in Najaf these days is any indication, that ain't gonna happen.

Per usual, the U.S. has clubfooted itself into a horrific situation. They may kill a huge number of insurgents in Najaf -- and their supporters in other cities and towns in Iraq -- but by launching a major assault on this most holy city in Shi'ite Islam, they have succeeded in uniting most of Iraq's Muslims against them. When nationalism joins with religious fervor, the end game is near.

The U.S. and its interim Iraqi force has attacked inside the huge Valley of Peace Cemetery -- the sacred ground in which Shi'ite Muslims want to be placed after death -- ruining large parts of it, thus desecrating a holy site. (Analogy: Imagine how Americans might feel if the Arlington National Cemetery was bombed by attacking, occupying forces.)

As of this writing late-Monday, the U.S. has not yet attacked inside the Imam Ali Mosque, one of the holiest of shrines in all of Islam, but it's only a matter of time before major damage is done there. (Interim Iraq Prime Minister Allawi says he won't sent Iraq troops into the mosque either, but I wouldn't count on that. Someone is going in there to take control of that sanctuary from the insurgents.) What that happens, it's likely that virtually all of world Islam will be lined up behind the nationalist struggle in Iraq, which is battling, as they see it, to free their country from the occupying Western Christian defilers.

So why, then, did the U.S. take this seemingly self-destructive step? I'm no expert on the Arab world, but I can offer some educated guesses. If you want deep, daily insight on what's happening in Iraq -- from a longtime expert in the Middle East, well connected and well-versed in Arabic -- be sure to check in regularly with Juan Cole. See also Gary Leupp's article, "The Attack on Najaf: The Ultimate Stupidity".

THE KEY IS IN AMERICA, NOT IRAQ

The first supposition is that the attack derives, as with everything in Iraq these days, from the presidential campaign in America. Short version: Better now than two months from now, as U.S. voters are making their final decision.

Expanded version: Bush&Co. must stabilize the security situation in Iraq, so as to give the appearance to U.S. voters that things are "under control" in that country. In order to do that, Allawi, our man in Baghdad, must appear to be fully in charge of his people. Ergo, Muqtada al-Sadr must be wiped out, both as a military force and as a political force.

The problem is that you can't have both. The more Sadr's militant militia is attacked, the more popular the Sadr movement becomes as a political force -- the only one with any organized armed forces willing to stand up, openly, to the military behemoth that is America. (And if Sadr is killed, he will be regarded as a martyr by the faithful, and his movement will grow even larger and more determined.)

But Bush&Co. apparently believe that it's worth taking the political heat -- and the American troops' deaths and maimings -- now, rather than closer to the November election. If their gamble pays off, they figure, nobody will remember what happened in the dog days of August.

GAMBLING BIG-TIME FOR HIGH STAKES

Make no mistake about it, the Bush Administration is rolling the dice here, and the stakes are enormous: the future of Iraq, who will speak for Shi'ite Islam in that country, the viability of the U.S.-friendly interim government, Iran's growing role in the region, the American election.

Will the gamble work? Conceivably, it could -- enormous firepower slaughtering the heart of the Mahdi Militia. But my guess is not. The U.S. has poked its bumbling military finger into the Islamist hornet's nest in Iraq, and, one way or another, it is going to get stung badly, again and again, by outraged Islamic nationalists, both Shi'ite and Sunni. They have an unlimited supply of nationalist warriors, and great patience; the U.S. is constrained by political realities, and hampered by the fact that, as in Vietnam, its soldiers don't really know why they're there.

In short, it's possible that the U.S. military may win something in the short run that they can call a victory in Najaf, and elsewhere, but they will lose the larger war in and for Iraq. Because, as was the case in Vietnam, this is not a military battle but a political one -- where the opposition sees the fight as a war of national liberation for its own land and honor.

For Bush and his friends, it's about control, oil, a military foothold in the region, altering the politics of the Middle East. It's losing hand for the U.S. any way you look at modern nationalist history.

BUSH'S TROOP DEPLOYMENT PLOY

The scariest news these days is that the next wars are being slowly, carefully, planned for.

How else to read the report that the U.S. is going to pull 100,000 of its troops from Europe and elsewhere and send them home, for eventual redeployment. Despite all the military denials that this is anything more than good military planning, giving Pentagon officials more "flexibility" ( for what?), "in case of need" (where?), it seems clear that there is much more here than meets the eye.

Let's be blunt. The U.S. military is stretched mighty thin these days, given Rumsfeld's desire to keep the force lean and mean for rapid deployment to hot spots around the globe. Iraq troop strength is insufficient, likewise in Afghanistan; he's having to use the National Guard and Reserve troops as an "unofficial draft," and is using "stop-loss" procedures to keep troops who have served their time from going home. No wonder there aren't many re-ups in the Guard and Reserves and among those who have served in Iraq.

The Pentagon needs bodies. It's activating more Guard troops; it's stepping up its recruitment campaigns (great scenes of two such Marine recruiters trolling for new recruits in "Fahrenheit 9/11"); it's calling up former soldiers -- even some in their 60s; it's withdrawing 3500 troops from South Korea and moving them to Iraq; and you can bet on it that, only AFTER the election, the Selective Service System will be ready to administer a re-activated draft of young men and women, perhaps as early as June of 2005.

TAKE THAT, GERHARDT!

That need for bodies partially explains Bush's plan to close numerous bases in Europe -- plus doing so not-so-subtly "punishes" the Germans for not supporting the war in Iraq -- and redeploy a good many of them to areas closer to military flashpoints, such as Russia's former satellite states near the Caucuses: good staging areas for South Asia. And, if the U.S. can hang on to its bases in Iraq, it will have good staging areas for the Middle East.

In short, the U.S. will be well-positioned to "rapidly deploy" to wherever the U.S. has growing geopolitical interests, that is to say where the oil is.

The neo-conservative ideologues, the same ones that got the U.S. into Iraq, are keeping a low profile these days -- so as not to call attention to themselves and their cockamamie imperialist ideas as the election campaign heats up -- but they are still in powerful positions in the Pentagon, White House and State Department, and their goals are still the same.

They're still set on remaking the geopolitical and strategic map of South Asia and the Middle East -- to control the oil flow in those regions, to protect the U.S.'s major Mideast ally Israel, to bring Bush's version of "democracy" and "free-market capitalism" into "backward" Arabic and Caucuses countries. This will be done, it is hoped, not by occupying those states, at least not for long, but by setting up easy-to-influence, U.S.-friendly governments that will do America's bidding.

To do that, America needs a credible threat of the use of force. Taking 100,000 troops out of Europe and having them ready for quick action in Iran or Syria or Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia or wherever is definitely helpful in creating that credible threat. Stay tuned for the fireworks.

Question for the Day: Now that Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez survived his recall election -- he got nearly 60% of the vote -- how many days do you think will transpire before the Bush Administration initiates a covert attempt to overthrow him in a "popular" coup? A clue: Venezuela has LOTS of oil.

Enough from me. Some really good blogging going on. Check out our Recommended Blogsites.

No time left to do other than to suggest that you might well want to start off with Digby, the aforementioned Juan Cole ), Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Corrente, Kos, Steve Gilliard -- and last but by no means least, Crisis Papers' own Ernest Partridge.

August 12, 2004

Rove-Induced Nervousness

It's only mid-August, but the election campaign is on for real. And there's something about Karl Rove's political strategy that makes me nervous.

The national polls and those in state after state -- including several of the toss-up states -- show Kerry either ahead, even with Bush, or moving up. Yet the GOP is doing little more than solidifying its base. It doesn't seem to feel, as do the Kerry folks, that their candidate needs to tack to the middle in an attempt to pull in the more moderate, uncommitted voters.

It must be clear to Rove that the Republicans can't win the election by just playing to and energizing their rock-hard base -- which might yield them 35-40% of the vote -- so why are they engaging in this seemingly self-defeating strategy? That's what makes me so nervous.

Oh, I suppose one could say that they're just as incompetent in campaigning as they are in running the war in Iraq -- however, Rove and his minions may be dumb, but they ain't stupid.

No, what worries me is that, even though in some ways they seem more and more desperate, their play-to-the-base strategy suggests that they have something up their sleeve, something they figure will provide them the votes they need without having to go out and court them.

What could those "surprises" be? Let's re-examine the major possibilities.

COUNTING THE VOTES

In most states, touch-screen voting machines will be used, with no verified-voting backup in case there has to be a recount. It's long been demonstrated that it's easy for programmers to fiddle with the computer vote-counting software -- or hackers can do it -- and not be detected. This might well have happened in the 2002 election.

As Stalin said, it's not who votes that count, but who counts the votes; in most cases, the same companies that manufacture the computer-voting machines (the three main ones are owned by arch-Republicans) tally the results.

Plus, voting rolls have been purged in several key areas of thousands of minority voters who likely would go for the Democrats. Or tricks have been employed to remove Democratic voters from the rolls, such as sending in fictitious change-of-address forms to county registrars.

So maybe Rove&Co. figure they're set in those states that do not seem to care about the integrity of the voting process -- where the voting officials, believe it or not, also are major players in the BushCheney campaign structure. Florida is one of several examples; remember Gov. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris in 2000?

REVVING UP THE SLIME MACHINE

Rove figures their surrogate dirty-tricks groups can slime Kerry big-time, thus reducing the Democratic candidate's momentum. Take the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, for example -- which should be renamed Swift Boat Veterans Who-Never-Served-With-Kerry for Bush -- who are bought and paid for by Republican bigwigs, to question Kerry's war heroism. (For a sharp rebuttal, see Republican Jim Rassman's story, "Shame on the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush" in the Wall Street Journal.)

Rove is a great believer in the Big Lie Technique: doesn't matter how outrageous it is, just keep telling it, just keep pounding it, and after awhile, the citizenry begin to believe it -- or at least hear it so often that they begin to wonder about the reality of the other candidate's honesty and motives.

Even Bush-supporting Senator John McCain, the Republican war-hero who spent half a dozen years in Hanoi prison during the Vietnam War, couldn't stomach those lying attacks by the Swift Boat vets, and said so in no uncertain terms. He urged Bush to disavow such tactics, but (surprise!) Bush declined. McCain said those slimy tactics were used on him by the Bush campaign in 2000, when he was moving up in the polls. So now -- you guessed it -- the slime machine is going after McCain, questioning his patriotism, his war-record, and even his years as a POW.

This GOP sliming is par for the course. They have no scruples, and no shame. They did it to Georgia Senator Max Cleland in the 2002 race (the Vietnam war vet, who left three limbs in that country, lost after shameful GOP advertising questioned his patriotism), they did it to Senator McCain in the 2000 campaign (and now again in 2004), and they're attempting to do it with the Smear Boat Veterans for Bush in the current race.

Another plus for Rove: These slime attacks on Kerry, and Teresa Heinz Kerry, force the Democrats to waste precious time, money and staff on combating the smear, when those resources could be used in going after Bush's sorry record domestically and overseas.

The negative for the GOP is that it reminds voters of Bush's AWOL status -- see Paul Lukasiak's voluminously-researched "Deserter" article -- during his Texas Air National Guard days. Which may lie at the heart of the major slime attack on Kerry, hoping that by tarnishing the Dem candidate's war record, the issue of military service will be a wash for both candidates.

TERRORIZING THE MASSES

There may or may not be any actual al-Qaida plans for a major terrorist attack between now and November, but Bush&Co. figure it's a win-win regardless of what transpires.

If there is a major, 9/11-level attack -- and I, for one, believe it is entirely possible -- Rove is poised to manipulate the citizenry's fear, as was done after 9/11. Bush&Co. once again will urge Americans to rally around their government as their best protection against more terrorism, and the GOP will play the don't-change-horses-in-the-middle-of-a-war theme. Many citizens, in their insecurity, may gravitate toward that position.

If there is no major al-Qaida attack (don't forget that the "intelligence" that started the whole thing is nearly four years old) we'll hear Bush&Co. bragging about how well they've protected us from the bad guys, so don't-change-horses-in-the-middle-of...well, you get it.

In either case, they've ratcheted up the population's fear level -- a technique they've been using for years now. You can actually correlate the terror alerts by going to the dips in Bush's poll numbers: major slippage, Ridge or Ashcroft emerge to issue another non-specific terror alert; Bush doing better in the polls, no terror alerts. Amazing how that works.

What Kerry might be able to count on is the citizenry's suspicion that they are being manipulated endlessly by the boy-who-cried-wolf gang at the White House. And, if there is an al-Qaida attack, voters may well realize that Bush's reckless foreign policies in the Middle East -- and by his war of choice in invading and occupying Iraq -- have made America less secure, not more secure, and aided al-Qaida in recruiting more suicidists willing to attack American interests abroad and targets inside the U.S.

OSAMA-MAN TO THE RESCUE

As a New Republic story made clear last month, the Pakistanis have been put on notice by the U.S. that they are to produce bin Laden or some of his high-ranking lieutenants before the election. The U.S. wanted someone major caught before or during the Democratic National Convention; sure enough, the Pakistanis produced a wanted al-Qaida operative right on schedule, just before Kerry's acceptance speech.

Rove seems to feel that producing Osama or his key aides will indicate to the public that the "war on terrorism" is being won under Bush's leadership, so why change horses in...you know the drill.

The negative for the Bush Campaign is that we're all a bit wiser now. The war in Iraq became even more of a disaster AFTER Saddam Hussein's capture than it was before, so getting the top honcho doesn't guarantee anything. The U.S. keeps killing or capturing al-Qaida and other terrorist organization's agents and leaders, but it doesn't seem to stop the groups from reforming and carrying out major bombings and assassinations.

Producing Osama or some of his top aides just before the election might well make voters ask why if it could be done now, why couldn't it have been done a lot easier when the U.S. was chasing al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan? The big hunt was on and then, suddenly, the U.S. forces were ordered to prepare to attack Iraq, a country with no ties to 9/11 and one that posed no immediate threat to its neighbors or to the U.S.

In short, the capturing or killing of Osama would smack of pre-election manipulation, and might well remind many Americans of the incompetency of Bush's handling of the so-called "war on terror."

A WEE POSTPONEMENT

We know that Ridge and Ashcroft have been asked to begin researching the possibilities of "postponing" the election in the event of major terrorist attacks.

If Bush's numbers keep falling, and/or the Plame indictments hit high up the White House ladder, and/or the jobless "recovery" continues to wreak its havoc on the economy, and/or Bush's AWOL history will finally resonate with the press and public, and/or the Torture memos asserting Bush's right to rule by decree reveal even more White House horrors, and/or the Iraq situation sinks even further into the disaster category, and/or...(take your pick as to which other scandal will surface) -- if all or some of those bubbling vats explode, RoveCheneyBush and the rest of the group may just decide that having an election on November 2 may not be such a good idea after all.

Using terrorism, or the "severe threat" of terrorism, as a justification, the Bush Administration might attempt to invoke martial law, indefinitely postpone the election (maybe until the never-ending "war on terror" is over), and Bush&Co. would continue to rule.

Hard to believe that the American people -- even the military -- would go along with this fascist blueprint, but you never know how desperate the Bushies are to hang onto power and whether they'd be willing to risk the public insurrection that would follow. Certainly, by their actions, we know THEY have thought about the possibility of postponing the vote.

Just typing those five possible Rove "surprises" got my heart racing. What may save us is the growing anger and activism of the American people -- Democrats, Independents, even many solid conservative Republicans. Let us continue to build that unshakeable desire and momentum, and get this country turned around.

For some top-flight stories on the ill-advised Bush decision to appoint Porter Goss as the new head of the CIA -- who, even if he were the right person for the job, might well serve only for few months, at a time when the intelligence community already is in turmoil -- check out: Fred Kaplan's "Spies Like Goss: How Much of a Hack Is Bush's CIA Nominee?, Ray McGovern's "Cheney's Cat's Paw, Porter Goss, As CIA Director?", and David Corn's "A Soft Scold from Goss."

August 5, 2004

MOVIN' INTO THE ORANGE

Are the current heightened security alerts a total political scam, to distract from the growing Kerry-Edwards momentum and to get the citizenry once again in a frightened, support-the-government frame of mind? Or is there really something to the four-year-old reports, bolstered by claimed recent "evidence," that al Qaida is planning to unleash a major attack inside America sometime soon?

With all the previous boy-crying-wolf alerts that have come before and amounted to nothing, the American people are somewhat justified in disregarding this one as more of the same political manipulation whenever Bush&Co. need to create a headline and up the fright mode. Plus, in the same period when New York supposedly is endangered by al-Qaida terrorists, the Bush Administration re-opens the Statue of Liberty to public entry in New York harbor. What's that all about?

Unlike many of my progressive colleagues, I happen to think a major terrorist attack may well be in the final planning stages -- something, of course, that the Bush Administration would not be unhappy to see transpire, as they believe it would serve their electoral purposes.

But an attack could backfire on the GOP campaign, as Bush policies abroad -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, the tortures and abuses, etc. -- have ensured that terrorists have more incentive to attack us, rather than less. In that sense, the U.S. citizenry is less secure because of Bush's disastrous, bumbling war in Iraq (and the attendant tortures and humiliations of Muslim detainees) and his unconscionable pullback from trying to arrange a viable Israel/Palestine peace settlement.

It's not America's freedoms and culture that are to blame for our current insecurities -- polls in the Mideast indicate it's Bush's foreign/military policies that create the overwhelming distrust and hatred of this country. If Kerry and Edwards were smart, they'd try to separate themselves from those policies as much and as quickly as they can, and start verbally attacking Bush big time. But, in some key areas, they aren't, and Kerry-Edwards may pay an electoral price for that.

BUSH'S PHONY INTEL REFORM

Follow the bouncing bullbleep. The 9/11 Commission issues a report calling for a major overhaul of the entire intelligence structure, appointing a Cabinet-level director in the White House to head it up, with power of the purse-strings and hiring-and-firing authority; without that clout, the Commission said, the director would be a figurehead.

Kerry immediately endorses the proposal. Bush hems and haws for a few days, but, seeing that the issue is playing for Kerry, then says he agrees, and the spin goes out that Bush has come around to the Commission's position and will appoint such national intelligence director.

But Bush's proposal will not give the new director the clout-tools (budget and hiring/firing authority), and would not be in the White House. Bush would appoint the new director as a figurehead -- akin to adding a new, large deck chair on the Titanic -- and make him or her dependent on the political desires of the White House.

Also, it turns out, that if that person was in the White House, he or she would need Senate approval, and would be privy to activities and decision-formation that BushCheney wouldn't want made public, and that wouldn't do.

In other words, the usual flip-flopping and manipulative-spin from the Bush Administration. But it may not fly this time. If there is to be such a new director, that person needs to be independent (a 10-year appointment? why not a shared-directorate of a Democrat and a Republican?), and have the political strength to get things done, which only comes with budgetary and hiring/firing authority.

Go get 'em, John-John!

MORE REVELATIONS ON AWOL. SCANDAL

Paul Lukasiak, whose discoveries about Bush's AWOL scandal could well rock the election campaign and wind up propelling John Kerry into the White House, is one modest guy.

After my most recent blog, where I quoted from "Bush AWOL: Bush Absent Without Leave While Others Went to Their Deaths," in Corrente,-- a story that detailed Lukasiak's research into Bush's military records -- he emailed me. Lukasiak was upset that I had called him an "expert on decoding old military records," when he really was "just some guy from Philadelphia."

Usually, they wind up describing me as a "researcher" because I did the research, and that is accurate enough. But "expert" goes a bit too far, IMHO.

I do have some small amount of knowledge of punch card data structures from 30 plus years ago---but just by looking at the data lines found in the payroll records, there are obvious patterns that anyone could detect.

I spent a couple of months reading the statutes, DoD regulation, and Air Force policies and procedures, and spent a great deal of time figuring out the rest of the payroll records and "points records" themselves. Having acquired a certain amount of knowledge, the nature and the meaning of the pattern in the payroll data became self-evident.

In other words, all I did was what any reasonably intelligent person could do. The only difference is that I'm the guy who did it. But that doesn't make me an "expert", and I'm really afraid that people will think that I'm presenting myself as something that I'm not."

I couldn't let that rest, so I wrote him back: "You have done what no other journalist or investigator seems to have done -- or perhaps even was capable of doing: dug deep into G.W. Bush's TANG records to form a definitive conclusion on the central question of his service. For this, America is much in your debt."

I asked if he'd mind responding to a few questions about his research and conclusions. His illuminating answers are below.

1. I first inquired what military personnel with whom he'd shared his research had to say about his revelations.

Lots of military personnel have read my stuff, and I get two general reactions --- absolute approval, or complete condemnation ("You don't know what you are talking about" kind of stuff.) With the latter group, I politely write back asking them for specific examples of where I misstated a fact. I've yet to hear back from any of them with such an example.

2. Corrente had posted quotes from Dr. Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-appointed official in the Defense Department, saying that, if Lukasiak's conclusions were correct, Bush would be in legal trouble as absent without leave. Korb said he would look over the relevant documents. Has he yet?

Korb is less than enthusiastic about getting involved in this issue. I have spoken with him, and he is desperately trying to find ways to avoid saying that "bush was AWOL" or words to that effect --- although he acknowledges that is what the records show. I am waiting to hear back from Korb, because I do want to represent his views in a far less sensationalized manner than appeared in RawStory in a footnote to www.glcq.com/missed_weekends.htm...

[From that footnote:] "According to Dr. Lawrence Korb (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics during the Reagan administration) who examined the payroll records, based on those records in fiscal year 1973, Bush failed to meet his training requirements as established in law and Air Force policy. Dr Korb also noted, however, that Bush had accumulated more than the required number of training credits in fiscal year 1972. Although under Air Force regulations training credits earned in one fiscal year could not be applied toward training requirements in a subsequent fiscal year, Dr. Korb stressed that as a practical matter, Guardsmen would on rare occasions be granted permission by their commanders to accumulate Active Duty training credits in advance in one fiscal year, and apply them to training requirements for the next fiscal year. Dr. Korb also stated that advance permission was required to accumulate these credits in order for this 'informal exception' to the policy and procedures of the Air Force to be permitted.

"All of the points credited to Bush for training in fiscal year 1972 were earned prior to April 17, 1972. According to every biographical account of this year in Bush's life, he was not offered the position with the Blount campaign until May of 1972. Thus, it is clear that even Dr. Korb's 'informal exception' to the laws and policies governing Bush's training requirements was not applicable to the issues that arise from his payroll records."

3. Even though it was unfair and a nearly-impossible task, I asked Lukasiak to try to sum up his conclusions in one paragraph, "one that the American citizenry immediately would grasp, and might be useful in considering whether to vote for Mr. Bush in November." (I have broken up his one long paragraph into more readable chunks; emphasis is supplied.)

One paragraph? Four months of research distilled to one paragraph? Here goes...

An examination of U.S. Statutory Law, Department of Defense Regulations, and Air Force policies and procedures from the early seventies proves that the George W. Bush and his spokesmen have consistently misrepresented the nature and extent of his obligations as a member of the United States Armed Forces.

When considered within their proper legal and policy context, the Bush records effective rebut the White House claim that Bush "fulfilled his duty." When considered as a whole, these documents reveal that Bush spent the last two years of his six-year Military Service Obligation in an active effort to avoid fulfilling the obligations and commitments he incurred upon entering the Texas Air National Guard.

They also show that while some Texas officials aided and abetted Bush's efforts (and others apparently acquiesced to what was happening), there is no reason to question the character of Alabama officials, or Air Reserve Forces personnel as a whole. Finally, the only conclusion that can be reached from an examination of Bush's records for the period after he quit the Air National Guard is that the Air Force attempted to take punitive measure against Bush, but that political pressure prevented those measures from being carried out.

4. Did he receive any official or other reaction from the Bush Administration or Republican Party?

No. Other than that weird noise in the telephone….but my aluminum hat keeps me safe!

The man has a cool sense of humor, in addition to his amazing, "just-some-guy-from-Philadelphia" research skills.

MEDIA TIMIDITY

So, who will be the first mainstream journalist or newspaper/TV network to have the courage to run with Lukasiak's updated findings, and thus put the AWOL Scandal right back into the heart of the presidential campaign?

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Will that journalist come from the right: Bill O'Reilly at Fox? Not bloody likely. Or the right-center: Tom Brokaw or Tim Russert at NBC, Dan Rather at CBS, Peter Jennings at ABC? Probably not.

So where is the so-called "liberal media" that supposedly controls the information flow in America? Why isn't this updated story on the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post or Boston Globe or Los Angeles Times? Or on "60 Minutes"? If one of those would run with this story, in a major way, the Kerry Campaign might feel more emboldened to start raising the AWOL issue frontally rather than just sniping away by implication.

The partial answer why the media giants haven't touched the Lukasiak findings, is that we, the citizens, haven't demanded it, haven't clamored for it, haven't taken the action that needs to be taken to get it.

But at least Paul Lukasiak is out there, digging in the minutiae of military records to unearth the truth. Add Lukasiak to the pantheon of investigative and analytical heroes that includes Daniel Ellsberg, John W. Dean, Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne Jr., Molly Ivins, Arianna Huffington, Jim Hightower, Josh Marshall, William Rivers Pitt, and a host of others banging away for truth inside and outside the establishment media circles.

Thanks to them, we might actually get our government back in November from those reckless, incompetent ideologues that, unless they're stopped in November, could take the country down with them.

Enough from me. There are so many great bloggers out there with so many insightful commentaries. Too many to reference here this time. Go to our Recommended Blogsite list, and check out some or all of these blogs, daily. Get in the flow of the news, as it happens.

Then take your anger into the campaign arena and make sure Bush gets his pink slip in November. Electorally outsourced.

August 3, 2004

BUSH'S AWOL SCANDAL ABOUT TO BLOW

There are lots of pressure-cooker pots building up steam on the Bush Scandal Stove. I think the Democrats have figured out which one is about to blow first.

If I'm right, the Dems hyped their candidate's war-record at the Convention not only to demonstrate that Kerry would make an effective commander-in-chief, but also because they believe Bush's AWOL scandal is about to explode big-time.

Check out this story by Lambert, "Bush AWOL: Bush Absent Without Leave While Others Went to Their Deaths," in the July 31, 2004 Corrente).

Rove dumped a huge load of documents in recent months, which he was sure would reveal nothing incriminating about Bush's National Guard service, and besides none of the mainstream journalists know how to read the military codes and jargon anyway. He didn't count on an internet investigator named Paul Lukasiak, who is an expert on decoding old military records.

The story documents how Lukasiak has come to the conclusion in the headline, based upon a careful reading of Bush's own supposedly "cleansed" records.

When informed of the findings, Lawrence J. Korb -- Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics under Ronald Reagan from 1981-1985 -- concluded:

Given proof that Bush missed five months of Guard training sessions, [Korb] said that Bush would be considered AWOL.

"If you don't show up, you're absent without leave, by definition," Korb said.

No more than ten percent of sessions could be missed without them being made up, he asserted. He added that President Bush should have been mandated to serve active duty if he missed even two months of service in a fiscal year -- "24 months of active duty minus the amount of active duty already served -- you would be put on active duty and sent wherever they needed you," he said.

At the time Bush was serving in the Texas Air National Guard, Korb himself was serving in the Naval Reserve, the Navy's equivalent of the National Guard, where he served from 1966 to 1985. He dismisses suggestions that the Guard was being lenient about service at the time.

"At that time they were very strict about [Guard/Reservists] fulfilling their obligations -- and we don't like to say it, because this was a way to avoid the draft and going to Vietnam."

He was unable to examine Bush's payroll records at his home on Friday, but is expected to formally confirm that Bush had failed to complete his required duty in 1972, therefore rendering him AWOL, at his office Monday.

A Reagan-official saying this -- dynamite! As soon as this story hits the mainstream media outlets -- which one will have the guts to go first? -- a whole lot of something is going to hit a mighty big fan.

And the Dem strategy at the convention will yield an enormous political jackpot.

Xan at Corrente also posts a fascinating story of the FBI once again (remember Coleen Rowley?) cracking down on a whistleblower within its ranks. ("Too Homegrown to be a Terorrist?"). This agent, Mike German, told how the bureau squelched an investigation of American militia-type terrorists, who might be forging an alliance with foreign terrorists. Well worth reading.

Also in Corrente: Lambert's insightful piece ("The Big Bounce") about a quickie survey taken in Cincinatti by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. He polled 20 swing-voters in a GOP focus group, 14 of whom had voted for Bush in 2002. After hearing Kerry's convention speech, only four of those say they'll vote for Bush. That's in Ohio -- Republican heartland country!

The momentum is swinging to Kerry, as more and more Republicans -- the elite generals and former Reagan/Bush1 staffers, as well as ordinary rank-and-file -- peel away from the corrupt, reckless, incompetent Bush&Co. administration.

Over at ##Kos, ToqueDeville has a must-read commentary, "Everyone Should Take Action on Computerized Voting Machines," that states the case for the danger of massive voting fraud in November, and what can be done about it.

Quick summary:

Kerry's numbers won't mean anything with computerized voting machines. Nor will those of dozens of Democratic House and Senate candidates.

People steal elections. They will if they can. With computer voting, they can and there's no way to stop it or prove that it happened.

WE MUST DEMAND A DECERTIFICATION OF COMPUTER VOTING MACHINES.

What will it take? Last night I saw Michael Moore and Bill Maher begging Ralph Nader not to run. They should have been begging Tom Daschle and Nancy Pelosi to get off their fucking asses and demand that these voting machines be taken out.

Everyone, please. This is the November surprise: Bush is down 7 points in Ohio. And yet somehow wins by 3. Compliments of ES&S and Diebold.

Keep raising money by all means. But for the sake of democracy itself, it's time to raise hell on computerized voting machines.

And from [Ronnie Dugger's article in] The Nation:

On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

The result could be the failure of an American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted." Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [see Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17].

For those who still question whether Republicans will do ANYTHING to win an election, check out this item, reproduced by ##Atrios. If this was the Nixon crew then, what do you suppose Rove and the boys would be capable of now?

The blog item reproduces the tale of the Nixon Plumbers -- White House hoods led by G. Gordon Liddy to harm or even assassinate investigative journalist Jack Anderson, who was regarded as much too nosy by the Nixon folks.

Here's the audio link to the conversation between investigative journalist Mark Feldstein, who's written a book about Anderson, and NPR's Brian Naylor. And here's the money quote:

They discussed various ways they were going to kill him. First, they talked about putting LSD in his drink. The trouble was as Mormon and a teetotaler, he didn't drink alcohol. So that was out. So then they talked about making him crash in an automobile accident, but they would have to go to the CIA and use a special car for that. So finally G. Gordon Liddy volunteered to kill Anderson himself personally by knifing him, slitting his throat, and staging it as a mugging that would look like a Washington street crime. At the last minute, this assassination plot was aborted, and a few weeks later, the men were arrested in the Watergate break-in and never had a chance to put their plan into operation.

Read the whole item, it will scare the bejusus out of you, even knowing that Liddy and the other Plumbers went to jail for other misdeeds in the Watergate Scandal. (Liddy, by the way, had Watergate schemes to kidnap anti-Vietnam-war leaders organizing outside the GOP convention, and even to drop them from helicopters over the ocean.) Real nice, solid-Republican guys.

Check out Digby for commentary on this important, doesn't-make-sense story by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer, "Administration Now Opposes Inspections as Part of Nuclear Treaty ."

Yeah, that's right. Nuclear weapons that could wind up in the hands of terrorists would no longer be inspected under the Administration plan. You figure it out. It's just nuts. Is Bush overdosing on his anti-depressants?

Moving on to uranium, Juan Cole briefly takes us through the history of the phony Niger-yellowcake-uranium story, now that the Italian fraudster Rocco Martino has admitted he is the source of the false stories and forged documents that Bush and Blair used to hype the "nuclear threat" from Saddam's Iraq.

For even more on this important, convoluted story -- and its ties to the Plamegate scandal, where "two senior Administration officials" outed a CIA agent by name -- see the blog by Josh Marshall who has been working on this story for the past six months.

Finally, after reading my new Crisis Papers essay, "Letter to European Friends: America's Weird Election Dance," you shouldn't be surprised that I'm posting these comments by Jonathan Schell, from his article "Strong and Wrong" in The Nation:

"I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a secretary of defense who will listen to the best advice of the military leaders. And I will appoint an attorney general who will uphold the Constitution of the United States."

I know, I know: It's essential to remove George W. Bush from the White House, and Kerry is the instrument at hand. I fully share this sentiment. But I am not running for anything, and my job is not to carry water for any party but to stand as far apart from the magnetic field of power as I can and tell the truth as I see it. And it's not too early to worry about the dangers posed by the Democrats' strategy.

In the first place, they have staked their future and the country's on a political calculation, but it may be wrong. By suffocating their own passion, they may lose the energy that has brought them this far. They have confronted Bush's policy of denial with a politics of avoidance. Bush is adamant in error; they are feeble in dedication to truth. If strong and wrong is really the winning formula, Bush may be the public's choice.

In the second place, if Kerry does win, he will inherit the war wedded to a potentially disastrous strategy. If he tries to change course, Republicans -- and hawkish Democrats (Senator Joe Lieberman has just joined in a revival of the Committee on the Present Danger) -- will not fail to remind him of his commitment to stay the course and renew the charge of flip-flopping. But the course, as retired Gen. Anthony Zinni has commented, may take the country over Niagara Falls. Then Kerry may wish that he and his admirers at this year's convention had thought to place a higher value on his service to his country when he opposed the Vietnam War.

Comments anyone? Click here crisispapers@comcast.net to reach us.

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Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

August, 2004

August 31, 2004

August 26, 2004

August 24, 2004

August 20, 2004

August 17, 2004

August 12, 2004

August 5, 2004

August 3, 2004

A Reagan-official saying this -- dynamite! As soon as this story hits the mainstream media outlets -- which one will have the guts to go first? -- a whole lot of something is going to hit a mighty big fan.

And the Dem strategy at the convention will yield an enormous political jackpot.

Over at ##Kos, ToqueDeville has a must-read commentary, "Everyone Should Take Action on Computerized Voting Machines," that states the case for the danger of massive voting fraud in November, and what can be done about it.

Quick summary:

And from [Ronnie Dugger's article in] The Nation:

Finally, after reading my new Crisis Papers essay, "Letter to European Friends: America's Weird Election Dance," you shouldn't be surprised that I'm posting these comments by Jonathan Schell, from his article "Strong and Wrong" in The Nation:

Comments anyone? Click here crisispapers@comcast.net to reach us.

More Bernard Weiner Blogs

Home | Crisis Papers Blogs | Best of the Web | Dissenting Internet | Features | Contact Us

Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

August, 2004

August 31, 2004

August 26, 2004

August 24, 2004

August 20, 2004

August 17, 2004

August 12, 2004

August 5, 2004

August 3, 2004

A Reagan-official saying this -- dynamite! As soon as this story hits the mainstream media outlets -- which one will have the guts to go first? -- a whole lot of something is going to hit a mighty big fan.And the Dem strategy at the convention will yield an enormous political jackpot.

Over at ##Kos, ToqueDeville has a must-read commentary, "Everyone Should Take Action on Computerized Voting Machines," that states the case for the danger of massive voting fraud in November, and what can be done about it.Quick summary:

And from [Ronnie Dugger's article in] The Nation:

Finally, after reading my new Crisis Papers essay, "Letter to European Friends: America's Weird Election Dance," you shouldn't be surprised that I'm posting these comments by Jonathan Schell, from his article "Strong and Wrong" in The Nation:

Comments anyone? Click here crisispapers@comcast.net to reach us.

More Bernard Weiner Blogs

Home | Crisis Papers Blogs | Best of the Web | Dissenting Internet | Features | Contact Us

A Reagan-official saying this -- dynamite! As soon as this story hits the mainstream media outlets -- which one will have the guts to go first? -- a whole lot of something is going to hit a mighty big fan.

And the Dem strategy at the convention will yield an enormous political jackpot.

Over at ##Kos, ToqueDeville has a must-read commentary, "Everyone Should Take Action on Computerized Voting Machines," that states the case for the danger of massive voting fraud in November, and what can be done about it.

Quick summary: