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http://del.icio.us

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You can easily use free, web-based tools to create a podcast, as opposed
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Slapcast.com – Allows you to publish 3 audio files as podcasts,
whether by uploading an MP3 file or calling a 1-888 number to record
your podcast. After 3 podcasts, you have to pay $4.95 a month or
subscribe to their service. Still, not a bad way to get started.

http://slapcast.com/

Clickcaster.com - Allows you to record/publish your podcasts,
then sell them. Requires an account.

http://clickcaster.com

Odeo Studio – Allows you to create MP3 audio via a Web interface.
You can also upload sound files, as well as record via phone. Includes
syndication, etc.

http://studio.odeo.com/create/home

OurMedia – If you insist on using Audacity and/or other tools,
then you should consider OurMedia and Internet Archive. I use both for
publishing my audio.

http://www.ourmedia.org/help/publish-audio

Internet Archive – Very easy to contribute audio if you’ve
created it already (that is, you have an MP3 saved on your computer).
Follow instructions to create an account and then use the
CC Publisher tool, or go to the web site below to contribute.

http://www.archive.org/contribute.php

Use any
one of the 13 services mentioned to publicize your podcasts, or, search
them for podcasts to listen to

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CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data

Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 12, 2003; Page A01

A key component of President Bush’s claim in his State
of the Union address last January that Iraq had an active nuclear
weapons program — its alleged attempt to buy uranium in Niger — was
disputed by a CIA-directed mission to the central African nation in
early 2002, according to senior administration officials and a former
government official. But the CIA did not pass on the detailed results
of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies,
the officials said.

The CIA’s failure to share what it knew, which has not been
disclosed previously, was one of a number of steps in the Bush
administration that helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve
of the war in Iraq, when the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector
told the Security Council that the claim was based on fabricated
evidence.

A senior intelligence official said the CIA’s action was the result
of “extremely sloppy” handling of a central piece of evidence in the
administration’s case against then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But,
the official added, “It is only one fact and not the reason we went to
war. There was a lot more.”

However, a senior CIA analyst said the case “is indicative of larger
problems” involving the handling of intelligence about Iraq’s alleged
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its links to al
Qaeda, which the administration cited as justification for war.
“Information not consistent with the administration agenda was
discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously
scrutinized,” the analyst said.

As the controversy over Iraq intelligence has expanded with the
failure so far of U.S. teams in Iraq to uncover proscribed weapons,
intelligence officials have accused senior administration policymakers
of pressuring the CIA or exaggerating intelligence information to make
the case for war. The story involving the CIA’s uranium-purchase probe,
however, suggests that the agency also was shaping intelligence on Iraq
to meet the administration’s policy goals.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), former chairman of the Select Committee on
Intelligence and a candidate for president, yesterday described the
case as “part of the agency’s standard operating procedure when it
wants to advance the information that supported their [the
administration’s] position and bury that which didn’t.”

Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had
been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA
in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the
country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S.
officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the
event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition
that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.

During his trip, the CIA’s envoy spoke with the president of Niger
and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi
effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA
that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the
envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because
the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong,” the former U.S.
government official said.

However, the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador’s
report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the
credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were
shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that
Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken
place, a senior administration said.

“This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends,” a
senior intelligence official said, describing the agency’s view of the
mission. “He relayed back to us that they said it was not true and that
he believed them.”

Thirteen months later, on March 8, Mohamed ElBaradei, director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, informed the U.N.
Security Council that after careful scrutiny of the Niger documents,
his agency had reached the same conclusion as the CIA’s envoy.
ElBaradei deemed the documents “not authentic,” an assessment that U.S.
officials did not dispute.

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation have
described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi
agents and officials in Niger. The documents had been sought by U.N.
inspectors since September 2002 and they were delivered by the United
States and Britain last February.

The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of
nongovernment experts that is reviewing the handling of Iraq
intelligence, is planning to study the Niger story and how it made its
way into Bush’s State of the Union address on Jan. 28. In making the
case that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program, Bush declared
that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

That same month, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice also mentioned Iraq’s alleged
attempts to buy uranium, and the story made its way into a State
Department “fact sheet” as well.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the
Government Reform Committee and a leading administration critic, wrote
the president June 2 asking why Bush had included the Niger case as
part of the evidence he cited against Iraq. “Given what the CIA knew at
the time, the implication you intended — that there was credible
evidence that Iraq sought uranium from Africa — was simply false,”
Waxman said.

The CIA’s decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by
questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency
briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts
to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney’s
staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus
for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.

Cheney and his staff continued to get intelligence on the matter,
but the vice president, unlike other senior administration officials,
never mentioned it in a public speech. He and his staff did not learn
of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an
administration official.

When the British government published an intelligence document on
Iraq in September 2002 claiming that Baghdad had “sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa,” the former ambassador called the
CIA officers who sent him to Niger and was told they were looking into
new information about the claim, sources said. The former envoy later
called the CIA and State Department after Bush’s State of the Union
speech and was told “not to worry,” according to one U.S. official.

Later it was disclosed that the United States and Britain were
basing their reports on common information that originated with forged
documents provided originally by Italian intelligence officials.

CIA Director George J. Tenet, on Sept. 24, 2002, cited the Niger
evidence in a closed-door briefing to the Senate intelligence committee
on a national intelligence estimate of Iraq’s weapons programs, sources
said. Although Tenet told the panel that some questions had been raised
about the evidence, he did not mention that the agency had sent an
envoy to Niger and that the former ambassador had concluded that the
claims were false.

The Niger evidence was not included in Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell’s Feb. 5 address to the Security Council in which he disclosed
some intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs and links to al
Qaeda because it was considered inaccurate, sources said.

Even so, the Voice of America on Feb. 20 broadcast a story that
said: “U.S. officials tell VOA [that] Iraq and Niger signed an
agreement in the summer of 2000 to resume shipments for an additional
500 tons of yellow cake,” a reference to the uranium. The VOA, which is
financed by the government but has an official policy of editorial
independence, went on to say that there was no evidence such shipments
had taken place.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

 Nicholas Kristof:

 When I raised the Mystery of the
Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at
me. The gist was: “You *&#! Who cares if we never find
weapons of mass destruction, because we’ve liberated the Iraqi
people from a murderous tyrant.”

But it does matter, enormously, for American
credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.:
“That is what this war was about.” I rejoice in the
newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S.
government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their
conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at
home and around the world. Let’s fervently hope that tomorrow we
find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve
gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984
prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several
dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile
biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to
dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda.

Those are the things that President Bush or his aides
suggested Iraq might have, and I don’t want to believe that top
administration officials tried to win support for the war with a
campaign of wholesale deceit. Consider the now-disproved claims by
President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from
Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The
New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so
amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.
I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a
year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation
of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was
dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at
the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department
that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had
been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister
whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of
office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program
was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The
envoy’s debunking of the forgery was passed around the
administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President
Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. “It’s
disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were
bamboozled because they knew about this for a year,” one insider
said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from
Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq’s
biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and
American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence
of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually
emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the
early 1990’s. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the
transcript of Mr. Kamel’s debriefing was leaked because insiders
resented the way politicians were misleading the public.

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in
the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in
the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were
skeptical about Iraq’s W.M.D., “they were encouraged to
think it over again.” “In this administration, the pressure
to get product `right’ is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the
Secretary of Defense],” Mr. Lang said.

He added that intelligence experts had cautioned
that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that
the Shiite clergy could be a problem.

“The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome,” he said.

“The intelligence that our officials was given
regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated,” Senator
Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt
and, sadly, exactly right: “Intelligence was manipulated.”
The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the
Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in
Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan’s policies.
Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.

New York Times.

 December 18, 2006

Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment By MICHAEL MOSS

font size=”3″One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad. American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep. The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared. Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual. The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading. But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents. At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible. “Sick, very. Vomited,” he wrote July 3. The next day: “Told no more phone calls til leave.” Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution. The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq, where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats. “Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” said Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, on grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. “While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.” A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s detention operations in Iraq, First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, said in written answers to questions that the men had been “treated fair and humanely,” and that there was no record of either man complaining about their treatment. Held as ‘a Threat’ She said officials did not reach Mr. Vance’s contact at the F.B.I. until he had been in custody for three weeks. Even so, she said, officials determined that he “posed a threat” and decided to continue holding him. He was released two months later, Lieutenant Fracasso said, based on a “subsequent re-examination of his case,” and his stated plans to leave Iraq. Mr. Ertel, 30, a contract manager who knew Mr. Vance from an earlier job in Iraq, was released more quickly. Mr. Vance went to Iraq in 2004, first to work for a Washington-based company. He later joined a small Baghdad-based security company where, he said, “things started looking weird to me.” He said that the company, which was protecting American reconstruction organizations, had hired guards from a sheik in Basra and that many of them turned out to be members of militias whom the clients did not want around. Mr. Vance said the company had a growing cache of weapons it was selling to suspicious customers, including a steady flow of officials from the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The ministry had ties to violent militias and death squads. He said he had also witnessed another employee giving American soldiers liquor in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs. On a visit to Chicago in October 2005, Mr. Vance met twice with an F.B.I. agent who set up a reporting system. Weekly, Mr. Vance phoned the agent from Iraq and sent him e-mail messages. “It was like, ‘Hey, I heard this and I saw this.’ I wanted to help,” Mr. Vance said. A government official familiar with the arrangement confirmed Mr. Vance’s account. In April, Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance said, they felt increasingly uncomfortable at the company. Mr. Ertel resigned and company officials seized the identification cards that both men needed to move around Iraq or leave the country. On April 15, feeling threatened, Mr. Vance phoned the United States Embassy in Baghdad. A military rescue team rushed to the security company. Again, Mr. Vance described its operations, according to military records. “Internee Vance indicated a large weapons cache was in the compound in the house next door,” Capt. Plymouth D. Nelson, a military detention official, wrote in a memorandum dated April 22, after the men were detained. “A search of the house and grounds revealed two large weapons caches.” On the evening of April 15, they met with American officials at the embassy and stayed overnight. But just before dawn, they were awakened, handcuffed with zip ties and made to wear goggles with lenses covered by duct tape. Put into a Humvee, Mr. Vance said he asked for a vest and helmet, and was refused. They were driven through dangerous Baghdad roads and eventually to Camp Cropper. They were placed in cells at Compound 5, the high-security unit where Saddam Hussein has been held. Only days later did they receive an explanation: They had become suspects for having associated with the people Mr. Vance tried to expose. “You have been detained for the following reasons: You work for a business entity that possessed one or more large weapons caches on its premises and may be involved in the possible distribution of these weapons to insurgent/terrorist groups,” Mr. Ertel’s detention notice said. Mr. Vance said he began seeking help even before his cell door closed for the first time. “They took off my blindfold and earmuffs and told me to stand in a corner, where they cut off the zip ties, and told me to continue looking straight forward and as I’m doing this, I’m asking for an attorney,” he said. “ ‘I want an attorney now,’ I said, and they said, ‘Someone will be here to see you.’ ” Instead, they were given six-digit ID numbers. The guards shortened Mr. Vance’s into something of a nickname: “343.” And the routine began. Bread and powdered drink for breakfast and sometimes a piece of fruit. Rice and chicken for lunch and dinner. Their cells had no sinks. The showers were irregular. They got 60 minutes in the recreation yard at night, without other detainees. Five times in the first week, guards shackled the prisoners’ hands and feet, covered their eyes, placed towels over their heads and put them in wheelchairs to be pushed to a room with a carpeted ceiling and walls. There they were questioned by an array of officials who, they said they were told, represented the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency. “It’s like boom, boom, boom,” Mr. Ertel said. “They are drilling you. ‘We know you did this, you are part of this gun smuggling thing.’ And I’m saying you have it absolutely way off.” The two men slept in their 9-by-9-foot cells on concrete slabs, with worn three-inch foam mats. With the fluorescent lights on and the temperature in the 50s, Mr. Vance said, “I paced myself to sleep, walking until I couldn’t anymore. I broke the straps on two pair of flip-flops.” Asked about the lights, the detainee operations spokeswoman said that the camp’s policy was to turn off cell lights at night “to allow detainees to sleep.” A Psychological Game One day, Mr. Vance met with a camp psychologist. “He realized I was having difficulties,” Mr. Vance said. “He said to turn it into a game. He said: ‘I want you to pretend you are a soldier who has been kidnapped, and that you still have a duty to do. Memorize everything you can about everything that happens to you. Make it like you are a spy on the inside.’ I think he called it rational emotive behavioral therapy, and I started doing that.” Camp Rule 31 barred detainees from writing on the white cell walls, which were bare except for a black crescent moon painted on one wall to indicate the direction of Mecca for prayers. But Mr. Vance began keeping track of the days by making hash marks on the wall, and he also began writing brief notes that he hid in the Bible given to him by guards. “Turned in request for dentist + phone + embassy letter + request for clothes,” he wrote one day. “Boards,” he wrote April 24, the day he and Mr. Ertel went before Camp Cropper’s Detainee Status Board. Their legal rights, laid out in a letter from Lt. Col. Bradley J. Huestis of the Army, the president of the status board, allowed them to attend the hearing and testify. However, under Rule 3, the letter said, “You do not have the right to legal counsel, but you may have a personal representative assist you at the hearing if the personal representative is reasonably available.” Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel were permitted at their hearings only because they were Americans, Lieutenant Fracasso said. The cases of all other detainees are reviewed without the detainees present, she said. In both types of cases, defense lawyers are not allowed to attend because the hearings are not criminal proceedings, she said. Lieutenant Fracasso said that currently there were three Americans in military custody in Iraq. The military does not identify detainees. Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel had separate hearings. They said their requests to be each other’s personal representative had been denied. At the hearings, a woman and two men wearing Army uniforms but no name tags or rank designations sat a table with two stacks of documents. One was about an inch thick, and the men were allowed to see some papers from that stack. The other pile was much thicker, but they were told that this pile was evidence only the board could see. The men pleaded with the board. “I’m telling them there has been a major mix-up,” Mr. Ertel said. “Please, I’m out of my mind. I haven’t slept. I’m not eating. I’m terrified.” Mr. Vance said he implored the board to delve into his laptop computer and cellphone for his communications with the F.B.I. agent in Chicago. Each of the hearings lasted about two hours, and the men said they never saw the board again. “At the end, my first question was, ‘Does my family know I’m alive?’ and the lead man said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Mr. Vance recounted. “And then I asked when will we have an answer, and they said on average it takes three to four weeks.” Help From the Outside About a week later, two weeks into his detention, Mr. Vance was allowed to make his first call, to Chicago. He called his fiancée, Diane Schwarz, who told him she had thought he might have died. “It was very overwhelming,” Ms. Schwarz recalls of the 12-minute conversation. “He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, and was kind of turning to me for answers and I was turning to him for the same.” She had already been calling members of Congress, alarmed by his disappearance. So was Mr. Ertel’s mother, and some officials began pressing for answers. “I would appreciate your looking into this matter,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois wrote to a State Department official in early May. On May 7, the Camp Cropper detention board met again, without either man present, and determined that Mr. Ertel was “an innocent civilian,” according to the spokeswoman for detention operations. It took authorities 18 more days to release him. Mr. Vance’s situation was more complicated. On June 17, Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American military’s detention unit, Task Force 134, wrote to tell Ms. Schwarz that Mr. Vance was still being held. “The detainee board reviewed his case and recommended he remain interned,” he wrote. “Multi-National Force-Iraq approved the board’s recommendation to continue internment. Therefore, Mr. Vance continues to be a security detainee. We are not processing him for release. His case remains under investigation and there is no set timetable for completion.” Over the following weeks, Mr. Vance said he made numerous written requests — for a lawyer, for blankets, for paper to write letters home. Mr. Vance said that he wrote 10 letters to Ms. Schwarz, but that only one made it to Chicago. Dated July 17, it was delivered late last month by the Red Cross. “Diana, start talking, sending e-mail and letters and faxes to the alderman, mayor, governor, congressman, senators, Red Cross, Amnesty International, A.C.L.U., Vatican, and other Christian-based organizations. Everyone!” he wrote. “I am missing you so much, and am so depressed it’s a daily struggle here. My life is in your hands. Please don’t get discouraged. Don’t take ‘No’ for answers. Keep working. I have to tell myself these things every day, but I can’t do anything from a cell.” The military has never explained why it continued to consider Mr. Vance a security threat, except to say that officials decided to release him after further review of his case. “Treating an American citizen in this fashion would have been unimaginable before 9/11,” said Mike Kanovitz, a Chicago lawyer representing Mr. Vance. On July 20, Mr. Vance wrote in his notes: “Told ‘Leaving Today.’ Took shower and shaved, saw doctor, got civ clothes back and passport.” On his way out, Mr. Vance said: “They asked me if I was intending to write a book, would I talk to the press, would I be thinking of getting an attorney. I took it as, ‘Shut up, don’t talk about this place,’ and I kept saying, ‘No sir, I want to go home.’ ” Mr. Ertel has returned to Baghdad, again working as a contracts manager. Mr. Vance is back in Chicago, still feeling the effects of having been a prisoner of the war in Iraq. “It’s really hard,” he says. “I don’t really talk about this stuff with my family. I feel ashamed, depressed, still have nightmares, and I’d even say I suffer from some paranoia.” Home * World * U.S. * N.Y. / Region * Business * Technology * Science * Health * Sports * Opinion * Arts * Style * Travel * Jobs * Real Estate * Automobiles * Back to Top Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company * Privacy Policy * Search * Corrections * RSS * First Look * Help * Contact Us * Work for Us * Site Map

The DCCC just tabbed Chris Van Hollen to take Rahm Emanuel’s place. Pachacutec and Howie are very encouraged by his appointment. I’ve done a bit of asking around today. Chris Van Hollen won his primary in 2002 against a better financed Democrat, and then went on to beat incumbent Republican Connie Morella. He gets some praise from progressives for his policy positions, has been a strong fundraiser and is reputed to be a helluva nice, down to earth guy. Just telling you what I’ve heard, and I’m hopeful all of this will prove to be on the mark…read on

I no longer care who, if anyone pulls Bushs’ strings. The responsibility for this uncontrolled chaos in the Middle East is his, whether he likes it or not. This lunatic is bringing us close to world war. He’s obsessed. He’s fixated. He’s compulsive. And impulsive. The Democrats AND the Republicans had better figure out how to contain this madman. Quick.

NOT BAD

Howard Zinn Speaks to Democracy Now By: Nicole Belle @ 2:10 PM – PST Submit or Digg this Post Amy Goodman is one of the best interviewers in the country. Today, Howard Zinn speaks to the uses of history and how it applies to the “War on Terrorism”. You can download the program (about 1 hour long) here. Howard Zinn’s brilliant book “People’s History of the United States” should be on your reading list.

Just an abdication of any sense of journalism. Tip O’Neill is twirling in his grave.
Three things that are most troubling about this goddamned case lately: 1: Lawrence O’Donnell at the end of this summer, all of a sudden declares on Olbermann’s Countdown program that it’s all over(the Fitzgerald case) and that it was much ado about nothing (possibly in reference to Armitage’s confession/reveal that he was blabbing about Valerie Wilson as well around that time) 2: Bob Woodward’s complete skullduggery about this sickening political payback/blowback and his public, blatant disregard for honest disclosure about his direct involvement in this possible illegal act while simultaneously mocking it in the press. 3: That Washington Post Op-Ed after the Armitage reveal. Worst day in their history.
Disgusting.

JT
New York Herald Sun

On June 3, 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) — campaigning for the presidency — proposed expanding the Army by 40,000 troops. Bush quickly slammed the proposal as unnecessary and counter-productive:

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Our path to ‘victory’ ends in defeat – Mark Morford Wednesday, December 13, 2006 The good news is, we’re all back in harmony. All back on the same page. No more divisiveness and no more silly bickering and no more nasty and indignant red state/blue state rock throwing because we’re finally all back in cozy let’s-hug-it-out agreement: The “war” in Iraq is over. And what’s more, we lost. Very, very badly. Sure, you sort of sensed from the beginning that we couldn’t possibly win a bogus war launched by a nasty slew of corrupt pseudo cowboys against both a bitterly contorted Islamic nation and a vague and ill-defined concept that has no center and no boundaries and that feeds on the very thing that tries to destroy it. It was sort of obvious, even if half the nation was terrifically blinded by Bush administration lies and false shrieks of impending terror. But now it’s official. Or rather, more official. Now it’s pretty much agreed upon on both sides of the aisle and in every Iraq Study Group and by every top-ranking general and newly minted defense secretary-designate and in every facet of American culture save some of the gun-totin’ flag-lickin’ South. We lost. And what’s more, we have no real clue what to do about it. After all, it’s not easy to accept. It’s the thing we cannot easily hear, the thing most Americans, no matter what their political stripe, just can’t quite fathom because we’re so damned strong and righteous and handy with a gun, and because we are the superpower and the God among men and the bringer of light to the world and therefore we never lose. Except, you know, when we do. It’s not like we were overpowered. We weren’t outmanned or outgunned or outstrategized, hence we weren’t defeated in any “traditional,” kick-ass, take-names, sign-the-peace-accord way. It wasn’t because our can’t-lose military didn’t have the latest and greatest killing tools of all time, the biggest budget, the most heroic of baffled and misled young soldiers sort of but not really willing to go off and fight and die for a cause no one could adequately explain or justify to them. We still have the coolest, fastest planes. We still have the meanest billion-dollar technology. We still have the most imposing tanks and the most incredible weaponry and the badass night-vision goggles with the laser sights and the thermal heat-seeking readouts and the ability to track targets from 2 miles away in a dust storm. It doesn’t matter. What we don’t have is any idea what we’re doing, not anymore, not on the global stage. We lost this “war” and we lost it before we even began because we went in for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong planning and with all the wrong leadership who had all the wrong motives based on all the wrong greedy self-serving insular faux cowboy BS that your kids and your grandkids will be paying for until about the year 2056. Maybe you don’t agree. Maybe you say, “Wait, wait, wait, it’s not over at all, and we haven’t lost yet. Isn’t the fighting still raging? Can’t we still ‘win’ even though we’re still losing soldiers by the truckload and thousands of innocent Iraqis are being brutally slaughtered every month and isn’t Dubya still standing there, brow scrunched and confounded as a monkey clinging onto a shiny razor blade, refusing to let go and free us from the deadly trap, ignoring the Iraq Study Group and trying to figure out a way to stay the course and never give in and “mission accomplished” even as every single human around him, from the top generals to crusty old James Baker to the new and shockingly honest secretary of defense, says we are royally screwed and Iraq is now a vicious and chaotic civil war and it’s officially one of the worst disasters in American history?” Oh wait, you just answered your own question. Yes, technically, the war is still on. The fighting is not over. And, yes, you can even say we (brutally, tactlessly) installed ourselves with sufficient ego to give us a modicum of violent, volatile control over the gulf region’s remaining petroleum reserves — which was, of course, much of the point in the first place. But the nasty us-versus-them, good-versus-evil ideology is over. Ditto the numb sense of Bush’s brutally simpleminded American “justice.” Any lingering hint of anything resembling a truly valid and lucid and deeply patriotic reason for wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives and roughly an entire generation’s worth of international respect? Gone. What’s left is one lingering, looming question: How do we accept defeat? How do we deal with the awkward, identity-mauling, ego-stomping idea that, once again, America didn’t “win” a war it really had no right to launch in the first place? After all, isn’t this the American slogan: “We may not always be right, but we are never wrong”? It’s still our most favorite idea, the thing our own childlike president loves to talk most about, burned into our national consciousness like a bad tattoo: We always win. We’re the good guys. We’re the chosen ones. We’re the goddamn cavalry, flying the flag of truth, wrapped in strip malls and Ford pickups and McDonald’s franchises. Right? Wrong. If Vietnam’s aftermath proved anything, it’s that we are incredibly crappy losers. We deny, we reject, we evade, ignore and refuse responsibility until it becomes so silly and surreal that even the staunchest warmonger has to cringe in embarrassment. At this point, it seems nearly impossible for America to accept defeat with anything resembling perspective and dignity and the understanding that maybe, just maybe, we ain’t all that saintly or perfect and maybe God really isn’t necessarily on our side after all, because if God took sides, she wouldn’t actually be, you know, God. But what happens to a country if it loses the thing that supposedly defines it most? If we don’t have our bogus “victory,” if we don’t always win, if we don’t have a sense of righteousness so strong and so inflated and so utterly impenetrable that even when it seems like we’ve lost, we still stumble through some sort of offensive end zone victory dance, well, what’s left? What, conscience? Humility? Humanitarianism? Or how about the realization that we could maybe, just maybe, learn to be defined by something other than rogue aggressiveness and the vicious need to win? Something like, say, a mindful, flawed, difficult but oh-so-incredibly-essential move toward that most challenging and rewarding of human ideals: peace? Yeah, right. Who the hell wants that?

So, let’s do a recap on the Very Serious junior senator from Connecticut. About a year ago Lieberman wrote: Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. In March Lieberman was still claiming that things were getting better. In June he said: I believe, that we will be able to withdraw a significant number of our men and women in uniform from Iraq by the end of this year and even more by next year. And I express that optimism based on the election and formation of the new Iraqi unity government, the increasing capacity of the Iraqi security forces to protect their own people, and the commitment of the new government to disarm the sectarian militias. In July he said: So I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops, and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home. A little later in July he said: BRIDGEPORT — U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman believes the U.S. will withdraw a “solid” contingent of its military forces in Iraq by the end of the year because of gains made by the Iraqi armed forces. “There really has been progress made by the Iraqi military,” Lieberman said Tuesday during a meeting with the Connecticut Post’s editorial board. “Two-thirds of it could stand on its own or lead the fight with our logistical support.” The three-term U.S. senator said he believes a complete withdrawal is possible by late 2007 or early 2008. Apparently all of that is no longer operative and now he’s standing with St. John McCain calling for more troops. Joe Lieberman, wrong about everything, yet still a very serious person. -Atrios 11:50 AM

By: Pachacutec

Your government, looking out for the not-so-little guy:

The Justice Department announced new rules yesterday that will make it harder for prosecutors to bring criminal charges against companies, bending to intense pressure from business groups that claim the government has overreached in its pursuit of financial malfeasance.

In presenting the revised rules, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty called the changes a substantial and direct response to a lobbying drive by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, among others.

Since devastating bankruptcies at Enron and WorldCom prompted Congress to pass a stringent corporate accountability law four years ago, business interests increasingly have pushed back on efforts to police their operations, arguing that the government has imposed too many costs on companies with too few benefits for investors.

I’m sorry, did you mention the US Chamber of Commerce?  Let’s have a look at the US Chamber’s CEO, Tom Donahue:

If it were possible to pick one person as the representative for American business in Washington, Thomas Donahue is that man.  He is the President and CEO of the United States Chamber of Commerce, the most important business lobbying group in the country.  He is also on the Board of Directors and the Audit Committee of Sunrise Senior Living, and was caught selling stock ahead of the revelations of accounting problems.  That is a serious no-no for any board member or any business executive.  It’s deeply unethical and possibly illegal, because it’s stealing from investors.  If there’s any indication that the business lobby under Republican rule became unbelievably corrupted, look no further than Thomas Donahue, the man that the business community picked to represent them to the Republican power structure.

I’m a small businessman, and the big business lobbies of big pharma, the US Chamber of Commerce and all the rest do not represent me.  They work against my interests and pump a steady stream of lying economic happy talk out through the media.  Net neutrality is good for me, but the telcos and cable companies want to sell me out to extract extra money from big corporate citizens who can pay for better access and accessibility online.  American big business is against universal health care while those of us doing the hiring and growing in the grass roots business community are much more for it.  Big business wants to stifle innovation to protect its markets from little business guys like me. To hell with them.  You want to see what their big corporate welfare does for American jobs and prosperity?  Look no further than the US auto industry.

We don’t need less accountability on our big multinational corporations.  We need more.  Milton Freidman is dead.  Companies have more stakeholders than just shareholders.  Companies that do business in the US are not just global citizens, they are accountable to US citizens.  In earlier times, you had to have property to have a say in government.  That supposedly changed.  But now, government is owned almost outright by multinationals writing laws against the interests of the people in the dark of night for bad actors in Congress – Democrats and Republicans -  to pass as is, without debate, in exchange for campaign contributions and lucrative lobbying jobs for their families, friends and even themselves.

It’s up to us to stop it.  What’s happening to the little guy?  I’m guessing there’s a clue in the fact that late mortgage payments increased in the third quarter of this year.

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The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists — well-intentioned though they may be — need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one’s beliefs in light of conflicting evidence is a defining attribute of the Bush movement that shouldn’t be replicated).

Karl Rove isn’t all-powerful; he is a rejected loser. Republicans don’t possess the power to dictate the outcome of elections with secret Diebold software. They can’t magically produce Osama bin Laden the day before the election. They don’t have the power to snap their fingers and hypnotize zombified Americans by exploiting a New Jersey court ruling on civil unions, or a John Kerry comment, or moronic buzzphrases and slogans designed to hide the truth (Americans heard all about how Democrats would bring their “San Francisco values” and their love of The Terrorists to Washington, and that moved nobody).  It simply isn’t the case that we are doomed and destined to lose at the hands of all-powerful, evil forces.

All of the hurdles and problems that are unquestionably present and serious — a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression and election fraud tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising games — can all be overcome. They just were.

Bush opponents haven’t been losing because the deck is hopelessly stacked against them. They were losing because they hadn’t figured out a way to convey to their fellow citizens just how radical and dangerous this political movement has become. Now they have, and as a result, Americans see this movement for what it is and have begun the process of smashing it. 

That work is far from over, but it can be achieved — unquestionably – by those willing to fight for that result and who figure out how to perusade a majority of American of the rightness of their views.  That’s exactly how our democracy is supposed to work.

Nancy Pelosi addresses America and sets the tone for the next two years. She promises to to change course not only in Iraq but here at home and also reach out the the Republicans. Add to that subpoena power and you have a combination better than cocaine and prostitutes ala Rep. Wexler.

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Bill Clinton Body Slams Fox News – Part 1

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Chris Wallace is a smirking punk and always has been
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albert park circuit, Melbourne- F1 GP 06

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By: John Amato @ 10:43 AM – PDT  

Bush, in all his Presidential glory, is surprised by how the Iraqi people can withstand this level of violence. I mean, the study from Johns Hopkins is fake in his eyes and our forces going in there to attack a country that didn’t attack us had nothing to do with any civilian casulaties. He won’t commit to his earlier 30,000 figure and says a lot of innocent civilians have lost their lives. Simply fraking amazing.

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MALVEAUX: Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure and do you consider this a credible report?

BUSH: No, I don’t consider it a credible report, neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and it troubles me and grieves me and I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to…you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate. And it’s now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel–you know–at peace.

Attytood:

I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.—Who is “tolerating” that? Bush is — from the comfort of his treadmill in the White House gym — and Cheney and Rumsfeld, maybe. But do you honestly think that any mother trying to raise a family on the streets of Baghdad tolerates it? And the evidence is overwhelming that they don’t tolerate it one bit. Why do you think that a whopping 71 percent of Iraqis want America to leave in the next year?

If you want to know why the Media is fucked up

And why Jon Meachem is justifiably facing my ire this morning then look at this.

Look no further than Newsweek’s cover this week by geographical region:

A cover story about Annie Leibovitz. Nothing personal against her, but JEEBUS!!

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posted by Attaturk at 6:46 AM

Government denies charges that Bush helped oil companies in Iraq

WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — On May 22, the U.N. Security Council gathered in New York to approve a resolution lifting sanctions on Iraq, creating a Development Fund for the country and providing limited immunity to corporations involved in oil and gas deals there for the next four years. The resolution directed that proceeds from future sales of Iraqi oil and gas be placed in the development fund and allowed the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to disburse the funds in consultation with the interim Iraqi administration.

That same day at the White House, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13303, which appears to give immunity from any judicial process to every entity with direct or indirect interests in Iraqi petroleum and related products. “The threat of attachment or judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein … constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” reads the executive order. It continues, “… any … judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void.”

Executive Order 13303 went unnoticed outside the government until July, when it was spotted by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank.

Since then, accusations have been flying over whether or not the Bush administration has given blanket immunity to the oil industry in Iraq. “The Executive Order is a blank check for corporate anarchy,” Tom Devine, legal director of the non-profit Government Accountability Project, wrote in a July 2003 assessment of the order for the Institute. “Its sweeping, unqualified language places industry above domestic and international law for anything related to commerce in Iraqi oil.”

“Translated from the legalese, this is a license for corporations to loot Iraq and its citizens,” Devine added.

The U.S. Treasury Department argues that Bush’s executive order simply protects the Iraqi people and the oil funds expected to be used to rebuild the country.

Taylor Griffin, a Treasury spokesman, told the Center for Public Integrity that because of Iraq’s foreign debt —estimates, which do not include compensation to Kuwait for the first Gulf War, vary between $100 billion and $130 billion—the administration did not want any loopholes that would allow people to sue Iraq. Bush’s executive order was necessary for the country to avoid long legal struggles, such as those between the Philippine government and former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos over funds in Swiss banks, he added.

“The executive order only protects revenue from the Development Fund for Iraq. We knew we were going to issue regulations … and we had to be broad,” Griffin said. “The Iraqi people need that money,” Griffin continued. “We wrote it broad to protect all of the money.”

Administration officials said critics’ concerns about such issues as blanket immunity for oil spills will be addressed in the Treasury Department’s regulations on how to implement Executive Order 13303 through its Office of Foreign Assets Control. Griffin said the regulations were being drafted, but he could give no timetable on when they would be ready.

Where U.N. Resolution 1483 provides immunity only until the first point of sale, Executive Order 13303 appears to give immunity from extraction to payment of taxes, according to some advocacy groups and legal experts. There is no time frame in the order. In the case of an oil spill, Resolution 1483 does not protect from a lawsuit, while Section 1 of the executive order states that any “judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void.” According to Devine, this removes any enforcement for civil and criminal liability with respect to protected activities covered by the executive order.

“EO 13303 waives the entire system of administrative law under Federal Acquisitions Regulations for government contracts,” Devine wrote in his critique of the order. “It cancels liability for civil fraud in government contracts under the False Claims Act … the nation’s most effective anti-fraud statute. In short, the EO is a blank check for pork barrel spending.”

Advocacy groups say the administration needs to change the language of the executive order if it has other intentions. “This executive order can only be read to cancel the rule of law for the oil industry,” Devine said in August. Jamin Raskin, a constitutional law professor at American University, echoed Devine’s concerns in comments to the Los Angeles Times, saying the language “seems to destroy the prospect of any enforcement of civil or criminal liability.” He suggested the executive order may go the way of the administration’s military tribunals, which were sharply refined by regulation after public protest.

—André Verlöy

HH: I just have never seen them on PBS. But nevertheless, Joe, what I want to talk about is reverse Turnip Days, moments where candidates were not candid, and I think it hurt them. I want to start with an episode I find odd not finding it here in Politics Lost, which is the Florida recount, and the disastrous attempt by Gore and Lieberman to throw out the ballots of the military. Was that not the sort of authentic moment where we saw the soul of the modern Democratic Party on display?

JK: I think that the Florida recount in general…well, first of all, you’re right about that. I mean, too often, the default position, especially in the left wing of the Democratic Party, is to not respect the military sufficiently, and to assume that anytime the United States would use force overseas, we would be wrong

.

And people wonder why liberals are popularly perceived as being cowards.

Here we have alleged liberal Joe Klein being confronted by alleged human Hugh Hewitt with a comment that the Democratic Party’s [black]“soul” was on display when it argued that illegal ballots cast after election day shouldn’t be counted (for good reason, as it turned out.) Does Joe Klein argue that the the Republicans staged fake uprisings and attempted to get the Cuban community to rise up (among many other things) thus showing that using the Florida debacle as an illustration of the “soul” of a party wasn’t really a smart thing to do? No. Does he point out that the Republican party has a funny way of showing its “soul” when it supports torture? No. Does he laugh in Hugh Hewitt’s supercilious face? Of course not.

He agrees with Hewitt. Indeed, this line is his foremost Scotty McClellanesque robotic talking point lately, called into use no matter what the question about the Democrats, whether it’s about “soul” or nuclear war. Is there anyone in DC who can deprogram this guy? Or, at least officially relabel him a conservative so he an no longer be used as a liberal or “left of center” counterbalance on talking heads shows? Then he’ll be able to officially join the right wing noise machine and he can take Hewie to the Conservative Prom.

Here are some highlights of Joe’s bumps and grinds. It’s true that he teases poor Hewie with some feints toward Democrats by saying the Swift boaters were wrong and a few other things, but he always comes back with a big gyrating bounce right where it counts:

JK: No, no. Hugh, in the past year, I’ve stood for the following things. I’ve taken the following positions. I agreed with the President on social security reform. I supported his two Supreme Court nominees, and I support, even though I opposed this war, I support staying the course in Iraq, and doing whatever we have to do in order to stabilize the region.

HH: All right. There are two critical aspects…

JK: So where do you put me on the spectrum?

HH: I’m going to put you as an old liberal with some hope of coming around.

JK: You know, I keep on getting hammered by the left.

HH: Oh, I know, but they’re crazy now, Joe, as you write in this book. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. Your descriptions of the Democratic Party made me chuckle. It’s lost. It’s off the cliff.

JK: It made me cry.

[...]

JK: Well, you know, I also run in the kind of faith based circle. In fact, one of Bush’s nicknames for me is Mr. Faith Based.

HH: Well, that’s good.

JK: And at the very end of the book, I acknowledge Bill Bennett as giving the best advice on how to judge a presidential candidate.

HH: At a Christian Coalition meeting. Yeah, it’s a great anecdote.

JK: And Bill’s a good friend of mine. But I’ve kind of got to give these guys cover. You don’t want to be praised by what you call a traditional liberal, do you?

[...]

JK: But can I just say this about the President? You were saying this before the break. Let me say that of all the major politicians I’ve covered in presidential politics in the last two or three times around, he is the most likely to stick with an issue, even if the polls are bad, and to govern from the gut as you said. I don’t always agree with the decisions that he makes, but I think he is an honorable man, and when I’ve criticized him, I’ve tried to criticize him on the substance, and certainly not on his personality, because I really like the guy.

[...]

HH: When Michael Moore shows up in Jimmy Carter’s box, the presidential box…

JK: Disgraceful!

HH: Disgraceful?

JK: Utterly disgraceful. I mean, one of the problems that I have with being called a liberal by someone like you is that there are all these people on the left in the Democratic Party who are claiming to be liberals, and I don’t want to be associated with them.

HH: And Michael Moore is one of them?

JK: Oh, yeah. I mean, Michael Moore is reprehensible.

HH: How about when Al Gore shouted he betrayed us, he betrayed us? Was that reverse turnip time?

JK: Yeah, I thought that was pretty terrible. I mean, I think that Democrats have gotten so frustrated by their inability to win elections, that they’re beginning to get pretty harsh and stupid.

HH: What’s going on at the Daily Kos, and at Atrios, and these left wing bloggers? Do you read them?

JK: Only when they attack me, which is just about every day.

HH: Yes, they do. So what’s happened…

JK: You know, last Sunday on Stephanopoulos, I said that we can’t keep…that we have to keep the nuclear option on the table when dealing with Iran, if for no other reason than to make them worry a little bit, that we might be so crazy as to use it. That gets translated the next day by a number of left wing bloggers into me supporting a nuclear attack on Iran.

HH: Well, doesn’t the Democratic Party have to distance itself from this fever swamp?

JK: Well, I think the Democratic Party has to, and I think the Republican Party has to distance itself from Creationists, and extremists on their side. You know, I was up with Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire last week, and someone asked him about intelligent design. And he said I think it’s a perfectly fine philosophy, it just shouldn’t be taught in science classes, because it has nothing to do with science. And those are the kind of politicians…I’ve always really respected Newt, because he’s a man of honor, and he is a real policy wonk, and he really cares about stuff.

HH: We’re out of time. Joe, will you come back when you’re done with the hectic of the book tour?

JK: Sure.

HH: Because I would love to continue this on. In fact, as often as you want, you’ve got the open invitation to be our responsible Democrat on the show, because they’re hard to find.

Joe loves you too big guy. You know just what to say to guy like him.

For the record, I can’t speak for everyone in the left blogosphere, but I can say that I criticized Klein’s comment about leaving nuclear war on the table as being insane because you don’t want pre-emptive war (especially nuclear)on the table, not because I thought he actually wanted nuclear war. I think the first is stupid and insane, and the second is stupid, insane and evil. Klein wants it known that he is only stupid and insane and I’m happy to grant him that. Evil would require some actual substance.

Update: And, btw, he goes out of his way to support, of all things, gun control, which has pretty much been jettisoned by the Democratic Party. I’m beginning to think he’s a paid agent of Richard Mellon Scaife. Everything he says, whether in “favor” of Democrats or against them is Karl Rove’s dream.

.
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Trapped in the Wrong Paradigm: Three Handy Rules

[Update added at the end.]

In connection with several critical issues, I have recently been discussing one overall theme. I will put it in bold letters all by itself, so that I’m clear with regard to what I’m talking about here:

When you argue within the framework and using the terms selected by your opponent, you will always lose in the end. Even if you make a stronger case about one particular issue, your opponent still wins the larger battle — because you have permitted the underlying assumptions and the general perspective to remain unchallenged.

Here are recent examples I’ve analyzed in detail:

One: The war in Iraq has been “bungled” and executed “incompetently.” It remains a matter of considerable astonishment to me that even very strong opponents of the invasion and occupation of Iraq still make the argument in this form. This entirely avoids the fundamental and most critical point: Iraq was no threat to us, and our leaders knew it. Therefore, the war and invasion were and are immoral and absolutely unjustified.

I repeat: the entire war and occupation are immoral. If you criticize the Bush administration on the grounds that it “bungled” the war, this leaves one, and only one, inevitable implication: if they had prosecuted the war and occupation “competently,” then you would have no complaints whatsoever. That is: you think the invasion and occupation of Iraq were justified and moral. If that’s what you actually think, you belong in the Bush camp. You’re arguing over managerial style, and about issues that are entirely trivial.

Be clear on the ultimate result: you’ve given the game away completely, because you leave the moral argument for the war entirely in the hands of Bush and his supporters. They could not ask for more because, in the end, the moral agument is the most important one. [I have made this point before: "The worst criticism to be offered about the catastrophe in Iraq by most members of the political establishment is that it was handled 'incompetently.' They are unable to say that our invasion of Iraq was immoral at the core, because they refuse to surrender the belief that we act for the 'right reasons' and on behalf of history's 'ultimate solution,' which only we have. We may execute the plan remarkably poorly, but it can never be doubted that we had 'good intentions.'"]

My position is the exact opposite: since the war and occupation are entirely immoral, the results would be infinitely worse if they had prosecuted this fatal error “competently.” I suppose proponents of the “competence” argument mean that we would have put more troops in place immediately, that security would thereby have been significantly improved, and the like. That’s a lovely fantasy for some perhaps, but that’s all it is. It’s a fairy tale because it ignores the history and culture of Iraq itself — which, I remind you, was a fabricated country dreamed up in London after World War I, by British government personnel who for the most part knew nothing whatsoever about the region they so heedlessly rearranged.

Moreover, the British tried the “competence” route for years after World War I, and it failed completely. After a great deal of bloodshed and mayhem, they finally left — and nothing remotely approaching a Western “democracy” had been established. But if they had succeeded, and if we were to “succeed” in that manner today, we would have an example of the British Empire at its most “efficient”: a puppet government in thrall to the U.S., under our control in all the ways that matter, and doing our bidding entirely. Is this what people mean by “competence” and “success”? If so, stop talking about “freedom” and “democracy.” Talk about the glories of Empire, and be done with it. (I ruefully note that just such a puppet government is likely to be what we end up with in any case, but probably after much more mayhem and death than occurred during the British episode.)

Better yet, reject that paradigm altogether, and use a much more accurate one. The war and occupation were and are completely wrong, and nothing will ever make them right. End of story.

Two: It’s important to “get the intelligence right” the next time. I’ve discussed this at length — here (about Seymour Hersh’s latest Iran article), and here (about the irrelevance of intelligence), in particular. See this entry, too, for an especially valuable excerpt from Gabriel Kolko on this subject (“The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century.”).

Once again, I put the major point in bold letters all by itself:

Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of “secret information.” Such “secret information” is almost always wrong — and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.

The second you start arguing about intelligence, you’ve given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a “grave” and “growing” threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you’re debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin. This is the point I’ve made with regard to Iran repeatedly. The administration’s plans are entirely clear: they intend to attack Iran. The only questions are when, and what the specific “excuse” will be.

That’s why I again explained my vehement, unqualified opposition to an attack on Iran in the current circumstances — and see this earlier essay for the longer argument. Just as I don’t care whether Iraq had WMD or not, I don’t care whether Iran has nuclear weapons or not — not with regard to the decision to launch an attack. Even if Iran should have nuclear weapons — and again, even if they are actually pursuing them, they will not have them for five to ten years or longer — that is not a sufficient reason to go to war. Moreover, the consequences of an attack on Iran will certainly be devastating, and perhaps catastrophic — and not least for our own security and safety.

To repeat: the decision to go to war is one of policy, and the intelligence — whatever it is alleged to show — is irrelevant. Don’t argue in terms of intelligence at all. If you do, you’ll lose. The administration knows that; many of its opponents still haven’t figured it out, even now.

Three: The press will always transmit and amplify government propaganda, and this is especially true with regard to war propaganda. This is so axiomatic that I admit it is quite beyond me how anyone could even question it. The execrable performance of the New York Times and Judith Miller, as well as that of the rest of the mainstream media, in the runup to the invasion of Iraq is now very well-known, and it has been documented in painful detail. But as I had occasion to point out some months ago, the sins of the Times during that period included much more than the dutiful propagandistic stenography of Miller. And as that same post discusses, the Times has already fallen for the administration’s propaganda about the supposed threat that Iran represents in toto. If the Times has since recanted its view that “Iran has a nuclear weapons program…” — which the Times offered as an absolutely uncontested fact last October — it has done so in a manner that escaped my notice entirely and, I suspect, everyone else’s. In fact, I’m certain the Times’ view on this question hasn’t altered a bit.

The reason I’m reviewing these issues once again is the following. Frank Rich is very often an unusually perceptive and accurate commentator. But for two Sundays in a row, he has fallen into the first and third of the traps described just above. I’m sure he’s fallen into the “intelligence” trap as well, but he hasn’t discussed that issue recently. If anyone has an example of Rich getting that one wrong too, please let me know.

I suppose it’s only to be expected that Rich feels a certain degree of loyalty to his employer, and to the press in general. But given the recent overall performance of the mainstream media and its subservience to those in power, the following passage is staggering in its credulousness. In discussing the ultimate goal of the administration’s concerted attack on the NYT and the ludicrously dishonest charge that the Times is guilty of treason, Rich writes:

The administration has a more insidious game plan instead: it has manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year. There are momentous stories far more worrisome to the White House than the less-than-shocking Swift program, whether in the chaos of Anbar Province or the ruins of New Orleans. If the press muzzles itself, its under-the-radar self-censorship will be far more valuable than a Nixonesque frontal assault that ends up as a 24/7 hurricane veering toward the Supreme Court.Will this plan work? It did after 9/11.

As my earlier post about how the Times has already swallowed the administration line about Iran indicates, Rich is some months late, and this ship sailed a long, long time ago. As Rich himself points out in more detail in his column, the Swift story was considerably less than news. It was hardly the Pentagon Papers Redux. In fact, it took very little courage to publish the story at all, unless you regard standing up to the administration’s cheap bullying as notably courageous. The fact that the administration lobbied the Times as hard as it did to prevent publication had nothing to do with alleged damage to “national security,” and everything to do with the Bush gang’s preference for committing its numerous crimes in very dark corners, and in a manner completely unknown to the public. The overreaching and utterly unjustified attacks on the Times have been so successful only because of the huge megaphones held by numerous rightwing propagandists and their enablers in the press — and because of the press’s own long-standing cowardice, even and perhaps especially in its own defense.

Our press has muzzled itself for many years, and it already engages in massive self-censorship. “Will this plan work?” Rich wonders. It already has worked and it continues to work now, many times over.

Later in his column, Rich commits the first error noted above:

Now more than ever, after years of false reports of missions accomplished, the voters need to do what Congress has failed to do and hold those who mismanage America’s ever-expanding war accountable for their performance in real time.

In last week’s column, Rich made the same mistake even more obviously:

[Frist] and his party, eager to change the subject in an election year, just can’t let go of their scapegoat strategy. It’s illegal Hispanic immigrants, gay couples seeking marital rights, cut-and-run Democrats and rampaging flag burners who have betrayed America’s values, not those who bungled a war.

Ah, if only they hadn’t “bungled” that war! Then the glories of Empire would have been ours!

The prevailing framework is so insidious precisely because it is so pervasive. It is the cultural atmosphere we all swim in; these are the terms that everyone uses all the time. But if you oppose the administration’s policies, you use them at your great peril.

To recap:

Don’t ever talk about a war and occupation that were “bungled” or that were run “incompetently.” The war and occupation were fundamentally immoral. They were and are entirely unjustified. If you argue on their terms, you grant their major premise: that the war was moral and right. Game to the Bush gang.

When major decisions of policy are being debated, don’t get drawn into a discussion about intelligence, whether it’s “good” or not, and what it supposedly shows. It’s irrelevant with regard to the decision to go to war. The decision to invade Iraq was made long before the intelligence was “fixed” — and the intelligence was fixed to rationalize a decision that had already been made, and it was used as the propaganda to justify the invasion to the American public and to the world.

The press is in thrall to the powerful, and to government in general. If you oppose the administration’s policies, the press is not your friend. It is the government’s friend, and it does the government’s bidding. If you want to find out the truth as fully as you can, look outside the mainstream press. With extremely rare exceptions, mainstream media outlets largely transmit government propaganda. They may question it at the edges, but the main story the government wants told will be faithfully transmitted.

Above all, I think we must never forget that the government and its many allies always seek to seduce us into playing their game. They want us to, because it’s their game. They know they’ll win it in the end. So don’t play their game at all.

Take the debate onto your own field. Play your game by your own rules, and use your own terms. And then we can beat the bastards.

UPDATE–OH FOR THREE: My grateful thanks to the alert reader who reminds me of Frank Rich’s column from almost a year ago, dated August 14, 2005. (It’s available here.) I remember that column very well for Rich’s major contention: that “the war in Iraq is over.” Rich meant that most domestic political support for the war had evaporated — but he very significantly minimized the carnage that would still occur before we finally got the hell out (if we ever do completely, which appears unlikely in the extreme). It was after the point that perceptive observers knew the utter futility and destructiveness (including self-destructiveness) of our humiliation in Vietnam that the worst horrors of that war occurred — and this is precisely the course we appear determined to repeat again in Iraq.

In that earlier piece, Rich also commits the intelligence error before all the world, and he does so in an especially obvious fashion. Rich discusses Bush’s critical speech of October 7, 2002, and refers to Bush’s justifications for the coming war as “a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype.” Rich mentions the supposed ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the fears that Saddam “could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.” And then he writes:

It was on these false premises – that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America – that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight.

Rich is impliedly contending that the decision to go to war was based on the intelligence. This is Bush‘s argument, and Bush’s own defense. It turned out the intelligence was wrong; sorry, and all that. But the decision was still based on the intelligence, at least in significant part.

That’s entirely false. It’s all a lie, but Rich (as well as almost all other mainstream commentators) is unaccountably reluctant to make that charge explicitly. The Bush administration made the decision first — and then invented, stovepiped, distorted and misrepresented the case for war to sell it to America, and to the world. As I recently wrote: “”The interested parties have wanted to invade Iraq and rearrange the Middle East since the calamitous presidency of George W. Bush was merely a glint in Karl Rove’s malignant eye, and even before that.” The decision to invade Iraq was made long before the phony “intelligence” case was offered to the public. And 9/11 was the tragic excuse used for a plan that had been around a very long time.

I was certain Rich had made this error as well, simply because almost everyone makes it. It’s the way the debate is always conducted. And that’s why the administration continues to get away with its criminal plans — and why we remain on track for Our Date with Armageddon.

posted by Arthur Silber at 2:20 AM  

The fifteen year old girl from Alabama that has received almost as many death threats as I have for making “this video“ was on CNN last night. (Here’s some information about Ava.)                                               Video-WMP Video-QT

The interviewer was pretty jerky, but please focus on her courage in the face of the insane ridicule this young girl has endured since she spoke out against the war.

Update:

Gina, who ran Yearly Kos has a diary up about Ava…Go check it out!
postCount(’8776′);comments  permalink9:35:18 AM  
]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/10/06/cnn-anchor-carol-lin-to-15-yr-old-ava-loweryhow-did-you-even-know-about-the-iraq-war-or-study-the-war/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/05/18/tom-friedman-is-an-assclown-thinktanker/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/05/18/tom-friedman-is-an-assclown-thinktanker/#comments Thu, 18 May 2006 03:15:57 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/05/18/tom-friedman-is-an-assclown-thinktanker/ ]]> Tom Friedman's Flexible Deadlines
Iraq's 'decisive' six months have lasted two and a half years

5/16/06

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman is considered by many of his media colleagues to be one of the wisest observers of international affairs. "You have a global brain, my friend," MSNBC host Chris Matthews once told Friedman (4/21/05). "You're amazing. You amaze me every time you write a book."

Such praise is not uncommon. Friedman's appeal seems to rest on his ability to discuss complex issues in the simplest possible terms. On a recent episode of MSNBC's Hardball (5/11/06), for example, Friedman boiled down the intricacies of the Iraq situation into a make-or-break deadline: "Well, I think that we're going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months—probably sooner—whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we're going to have to just let this play out."

That confident prediction would seem a lot more insightful, however, if Friedman hadn't been making essentially the same forecast almost since the beginning of the Iraq War. A review of Friedman's punditry reveals a long series of similar do-or-die dates that never seem to get any closer.

"The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time."
(New York Times, 11/30/03)

"What I absolutely don't understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of—I know a lot of these guys—reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it's over. I don't get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what's the rush? Can we let this play out, please?"
(NPR's Fresh Air, 6/3/04)

"What we're gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war."
(CBS's Face the Nation, 10/3/04)

"Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile."
(New York Times, 11/28/04)

"I think we're in the end game now…. I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt I think the next congressional election—that's my own feeling— let alone the presidential one."
(NBC's Meet the Press, 9/25/05)

"Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time."
(New York Times, 9/28/05)

"We've teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it's going to come together."
(CBS's Face the Nation, 12/18/05)

"We're at the beginning of I think the decisive I would say six months in Iraq, OK, because I feel like this election—you know, I felt from the beginning Iraq was going to be ultimately, Charlie, what Iraqis make of it."
(PBS's Charlie Rose Show, 12/20/05)

"The only thing I am certain of is that in the wake of this election, Iraq will be what Iraqis make of it—and the next six months will tell us a lot. I remain guardedly hopeful."
(New York Times, 12/21/05)

"I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool's errand."
(Oprah Winfrey Show, 1/23/06)

"I think we're in the end game there, in the next three to six months, Bob. We've got for the first time an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi constitution. Either they're going to produce the kind of inclusive consensual government that we aspire to in the near term, in which case America will stick with it, or they're not, in which case I think the bottom's going to fall out."
(CBS, 1/31/06)

"I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq."
(NBC's Today, 3/2/06)

"Can Iraqis get this government together? If they do, I think the American public will continue to want to support the effort there to try to produce a decent, stable Iraq. But if they don't, then I think the bottom is going to fall out of public support here for the whole Iraq endeavor. So one way or another, I think we're in the end game in the sense it's going to be decided in the next weeks or months whether there's an Iraq there worth investing in. And that is something only Iraqis can tell us."
(CNN, 4/23/06)

"Well, I think that we're going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months—probably sooner—whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we're going to have to just let this play out."
(MSNBC's Hardball, 5/11/06)

*Corrected version 5/17/06

See FAIR's Archives for more on:
New York Times
Iraq
War and Militarism

I do see a difference between Wolfowitz and Cheney, and therefore similarly between Berman/Geras and some of the assclown warbloggers who changed the logic of their argument for Iraq every five seconds.

In many ways, it's one of those differences that makes no difference, and it's not as if most of the "reasonable, decent" prowar people have all meaningfully rethought their support–as long as they continue to say, "Well, I had a moral point, and it was just the Bush Administration screwing it up", they still really don't get even a half-credit for reasonableness. Because the screwing-it-up part was in fact one of the things that many reasonable critics were observing was wrong about the war, that to go to war under the wrong circumstances at the wrong time with the wrong leadership in the wrong way with a wrong plan IS MORALLY WRONG. You can't say, "Well, I have a moral principle about this war which trumps the innumerable bad premises" any more than you can be only partially pregnant. You go to war in the wrong way, you've got a wrong war.

But I wouldn't want that point to obscure substantively different intellectual and institutional histories that informed different parts of the support for the war. The landscape that George Packer picks through carefully, for example, matters at various points both for understanding the war and for understanding its aftermath or consequences. Even for understanding how to oppose it politically. But it doesn't cancel out that people who were wrong, were fucking wrong, and that most of them, especially the reasonable, decent sorts, still lack the decency to cop to the totality of their wrongness. Which makes their claim of decency sort of silly on its face.

The farcical end of the American dream

The US press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war

By Robert Fisk

03/18/06 "The Independent"–It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping
my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam
over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the
minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith
Miller mode, the American press is supposed to be challenging the lies of
this war. So the story beneath the headline "In a Battle of Wits, Iraq's
Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of US" deserves to be read. Or does
it?

Datelined Washington – an odd city in which to learn about Iraq, you might
think – its opening paragraph reads: "Despite the recent arrest of one of
his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq,
insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, US authorities
say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation
than they do."

Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis – along, I have to admit,
with myself – have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that
al-Qai'da's Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of
"insurgency mastermind", the words that caught my eye were "US authorities
say". And as I read through the report, I note how the Los Angeles Times
sources this extraordinary tale. I thought American reporters no longer
trusted the US administration, not after the mythical weapons of mass
destruction and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the
international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. Of course, I was
wrong.

Here are the sources – on pages one and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters
Josh Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: "US officials said", "said one US Justice
Department counter-terrorism official", "Officials … said", "those
officials said", "the officials confirmed", "American officials complained",
"the US officials stressed", "US authorities believe", "said one senior US
intelligence official", "US officials said", "Jordanian officials … said"
- here, at least is some light relief – "several US officials said", "the US
officials said", "American officials said", "officials say", "say US
officials", "US officials said", "one US counter-terrorism official said".

I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the Los Angeles
Times – along with the big east coast dailies – should all be called US
OFFICIALS SAY. But it's not just this fawning on political power that makes
me despair. Let's move to a more recent example of what I can only call
institutionalised racism in American reporting of Iraq. I have to thank
reader Andrew Gorman for this gem, a January Associated Press report about
the killing of an Iraqi prisoner under interrogation by US Chief Warrant
Officer Lewis Welshofer Jnr.

Mr Welshofer, it transpired in court, had stuffed the Iraqi General Abed
Hamed Mowhoush head-first into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest, an
action which – not surprisingly – caused the general to expire. The military
jury ordered – reader, hold your breath – a reprimand for Mr Welshofer, the
forfeiting of $6,000 of his salary and confinement to barracks for 60 days.
But what caught my eye was the sympathetic detail. Welshofer's wife's
Barbara, the AP told us, "testified that she was worried about providing for
their three children if her husband was sentenced to prison. 'I love him
more for fighting this,' she said, tears welling up in her eyes. 'He's
always said that you need to do the right thing, and sometimes the right
thing is the hardest thing to do'".

Yes, I guess torture is tough on the torturer. But try this from the same
report: "Earlier in the day … Mr Welshofer fought back tears. 'I deeply
apologise if my actions tarnish the soldiers serving in Iraq,' he said."

Note how the American killer's remorse is directed not towards his helpless
and dead victim but to the honour of his fellow soldiers, even though an
earlier hearing had revealed that some of his colleagues watched Welshofer
stuffing the general into the sleeping bag and did nothing to stop him. An
earlier AP report stated that "officials" – here we go again – "believed
Mowhoush had information that would 'break the back of the insurgency'."
Wow. The general knew all about 40,000 Iraqi insurgents. So what a good idea
to stuff him upside down inside a sleeping bag and sit on his chest.

But the real scandal about these reports is we're not told anything about
the general's family. Didn't he have a wife? I imagine the tears were
"welling up in her eyes" when she was told her husband had been done to
death. Didn't the general have children? Or parents? Or any loved ones who
"fought back tears" when told of this vile deed? Not in the AP report he
didn't. General Mowhoush comes across as an object, a dehumanised creature
who wouldn't let the Americans "break the back" of the insurgency after
being stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag.

Now let's praise the AP. On an equally bright summer's morning in Australia
a few days ago I open the Sydney Morning Herald. It tells me, on page six,
that the news agency, using the Freedom of Information Act, has forced US
authorities to turn over 5,000 pages of transcripts of hearings at the
Guantanamo Bay prison camp. One of them records the trial of since-released
British prisoner Feroz Abbasi, in which Mr Abbasi vainly pleads with his
judge, a US air force colonel, to reveal the evidence against him, something
he says he has a right to hear under international law.

And here is what the American colonel replied: "Mr Abbasi, your conduct is
unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I do not care about
international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We are
not concerned about international law."

Alas, these words – which symbolise the very end of the American dream – are
buried down the story. The colonel, clearly a disgrace to the uniform he
wears, does not appear in the bland headline ("US papers tell Guantanamo
inmates' stories") of the Sydney paper, more interested in telling us that
the released documents identify by name the "farmers, shopkeepers or
goatherds" held in Guantanamo.

I am now in Wellington, New Zealand, watching on CNN Saddam Hussein's attack
on the Baghdad court trying him. And suddenly, the ghastly Saddam disappears
from my screen. The hearing will now proceed in secret, turning this
drumhead court into even more of a farce. It is a disgrace. And what does
CNN respectfully tell us? That the judge has "suspended media coverage"!

If only, I say to myself, CNN – along with the American press – would do the
same.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Think Again: Mr. Fitzgerald'’s Unanswered Questions

by Eric Alterman
November 3, 2005

According to this week's Newsweek, the nation enjoyed two historic moments last Friday. The first was special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference outlining his perjury case against "Cheney's Cheney," I(rve) Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The second – occurring simultaneously – was that "in the small dining room adjoining the Oval Office, [President Bush] was doing something uncharacteristic: watching live news on TV." Apparently, the president only watched the first 20 minutes or so of the press conference, but for a guy who famously avoids both print and broadcast news, any small step toward engagement with the "reality-based community" may be a giant step for mankind.

Alas, Fitzgerald's press conference proved a disappointment to many, in part owing to the attending reporters’ inability to ask him questions he might be likely to answer. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to speculate about where his ongoing investigation might lead, and made clear early on that he wouldn't discuss certain topics, but numerous reporters appeared more intent on creating sound bites than in garnering whatever information might be available, and instead, inspired repeat after repeat of the special prosecutor’s non-response.

Since Fitzgerald has said he has no intention of issuing a final report about this complicated matter, it remains the responsibility of the reporters themselves to fill in the many holes he left in the story. Americans still need to know just what kind of conspiracy was launched here – not merely to attack the credibility of Joe Wilson and blow the cover off his CIA agent wife, but also to fool the nation into going to war. Here are just a few of them:

Where’s Dick?

As The Washington Post’s Bart Gellman reported in his excellent exegesis of the known story so far, "Libby and Cheney made separate inquiries to the CIA about Wilson's wife, and each confirmed independently that she worked there. It was Cheney, the indictment states, who supplied Libby the detail ‘that Wilson's wife worked . . . in the Counterproliferation Division’ – an unambiguous declaration that her position was among the case officers of the operations directorate." The question we still need to ask is, "Do we know the extent of Cheney's involvement in his subordinate's decision to leak classified information and lie about it to a Grand Jury?" We know part of the answer from the indictment itself, and as Josh Marshall pointed out, "Libby had consulted with Cheney about how to handle inquiries from journalists about the vice president's role in sending Wilson to Africa in early 2002."

What's more, on the now-infamous July 12, 2003 Air Force Two flight from Washington to Norfolk, Virginia, according to the indictment, "LIBBY discussed with other officials aboard the plane what LIBBY should say in response to certain pending media inquiries, including questions from Time reporter Matthew Cooper." Who, exactly, are these "other officials?" Is one of them the vice president? As Gellman wrote in the Post, on that flight "the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson's credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source." The question we need to answer is: What else did Cheney "instruct his aide" to do? And are any of these actions indictable? Has Anybody Pled Guilty?

Another thing we still don't know is if anyone pled guilty in the case. As TNR's Ryan Lizza reported over the weekend, he asked Fitzgerald's spokesman Randall Samborn just that question. Samborn partially dodged the question, telling Lizza that there was no "public record" of any pleas. Not satisfied, Lizza put the question to "a white collar criminal defense attorney," who told him that "Guilty pleas can be taken under seal – and often are – when the person entering the plea is cooperating with the government and they do not want to tip off the other targets or there is a safety concern. Also, plea agreements could have already been reached but not formally entered in court." Where’s Phase II?

All this was wrought, in the end, by the administration's use of faulty intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In a bit of crystal ball gazing this past Sunday, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times about the Senate Intelligence Committee's failure to issue the "Phase II" section of its report on the administration's use of that intelligence, calling it a "scandal in its own right." It is, although it has largely been ignored until Murray Waas reported in The National Journal last week that Cheney and Libby were refusing to hand over to the committee certain documents, which included "the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. ‘evidence’ to the U.N. on the eve of war." As we know, Harry Reid threw this in the face of the nation on Tuesday, when he invoked Rule 21 and forced Senate Republicans to agree to form a bipartisan committee to find out why we haven't seen this "Phase II" report.

Where’s Novak?

Enough said.

Will we ever have fully satisfactory answers to questions that initially inspired the Fitzgerald investigation, as well as those it has raised in its wake? Likely not. But if reporters and news organizations decide to invest the time and money in trying to find the answers to these and other key questions, they might at least make a start at making amends to their readers, viewers and listeners for accepting administration claims at face value in the first place, and allowing the nation to be led by lies into war.

Just one request to Bill Keller and the folks at the Times, however: Could you please keep Judy Miller off the story? She’s done her part….

Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of six books, including most recently, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, just published in paperback by Penguin.
www.americanprogress.org

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-botched14mar14,0,2818335.story?coll=la-home-headlines

From the Los Angeles Times
Moussaoui Case Is Latest Misstep in Prosecutions
'There have been a lot of flubs,' a law professor says of the U.S. record in terrorism trials.
By David G. Savage and Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writers

March 14, 2006

WASHINGTON — The botched handling of witnesses in the sentencing trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is the latest in a series of missteps and false starts that have beset the Bush administration's prosecution of terrorism cases.

The government has seen juries reject high-profile terrorism charges, judges throw out convictions because of mistakes by the prosecution and the FBI suffer the embarrassment of wrongly accusing an Oregon lawyer of participating in the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

"There have been a lot of flubs," said George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg. "I think most observers would say they were underwhelmed by the prosecutions brought so far."

On several occasions, top administration officials have promised more than they delivered. For example, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced in 2002 that Jose Padilla, a Bronx-born Muslim, had been arrested on suspicion of "exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States."

Padilla was held nearly four years in a military brig without being charged. This year, as his lawyers appealed his case to the Supreme Court, the administration indicted him in Miami on charges of conspiring to aid terrorists abroad. There was no mention of a "dirty bomb."

In May 2004, the FBI arrested Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer and Muslim convert, saying that his fingerprint was on a bag containing detonators and explosives linked to the Madrid train bombings that had killed 191 people two months before. The former Army officer was held as a material witness even though officials in Spain considered the fingerprint evidence inconclusive.

Mayfield was freed after almost three weeks in custody and received an apology from the FBI, which blamed the misidentification on a substandard digital image from Spanish authorities.

In other instances, prosecutors took cases to court that proved to be weak:

• A computer science student in Idaho was accused of aiding terrorists when he designed a website that included information on terrorists in Chechnya and Israel. A jury in Boise acquitted Sami Omar Al-Hussayen of the charges in June 2004.

• A Florida college professor was indicted on charges of supporting terrorists by promoting the cause of Palestinian groups. A jury in Tampa acquitted Sami Al-Arian in December.

• Two Detroit men arrested a week after the Sept. 11 attacks were believed to be plotting a terrorist incident, in part based on sketches found in their apartment. A judge overturned the convictions of Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi after he learned that the prosecutor's key witness had admitted lying to the FBI, a fact the prosecutor had kept hidden.

David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been critical of such prosecutions, blamed pressure from the top. "The government in the war on terrorism has generally swept broadly and put a high premium on convictions at any cost," he said. "That puts pressures on prosecutors — to overcharge, to coach witnesses, to fail to disclose exculpatory evidence."

But Andrew McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Virginia, said it was unfair to blame prosecutors for the apparent witness tampering in the Moussaoui case.

"You can't really lay this at the door of the prosecution," he said. "This is a lawyer at the TSA [Transportation Security Administration] who screwed up. The rule of witnesses is pretty well known. You would think she would know you are not supposed to discuss the earlier testimony with your witnesses."

In a recent report on its terrorism prosecutions, the Justice Department called Moussaoui's decision last year to plead guilty to conspiracy charges one of its leading successes.

But U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema already has questioned whether the French citizen deserves the death penalty; Moussaoui was in jail in Minnesota on a visa violation when hijackers seized four passenger jets and caused almost 3,000 deaths by crashing them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. the Supreme Court has said the death penalty should be reserved for murderers and "major participants" in murder plots. Prosecutors are pushing for the death penalty under the theory that Moussaoui could have prevented the terrorist attacks by telling the FBI about the plot.

Terrorism cases have proved to be especially difficult for prosecutors because investigators need to disrupt plots before they come to fruition. That leaves prosecutors to make a decision on whether to bring a thin case to court. By contrast, in drug cases, police and drug agents can track suspects and arrest them when they take possession of large quantities of narcotics.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, officials feared there were terrorist "sleeper cells" throughout the nation, ready to spring into action. Since then, the determined pursuit of Al Qaeda members and sympathizers has turned up relatively few terrorists.

"The good news may be that there are not as many threatening people out there as we once thought," law professor Saltzburg said.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
Fri Mar 3, 12:07 PM ET

The Nation — Cheaters never win, my mom said. And it looks like she was right.

This week the fur flew when senior associate editor Nick Sylvester was suspended from his gig at the Village Voice. Turns out the boy wonder/music critic had fabricated reporting for his cover story "Do You Wanna Kiss Me?" on the pick-up artist's guide The Game by Neil Strauss. (You might remember Strauss from other literary merits such as ghost-writing porn star Jenna Jameson's memoir.)

The story's been pulled from the site, but it's not really worth reading, anyway. It's a pretty thin piece of trend-reporting that doesn't hold much water. Basically, Sylvester interviews a few women who have read The Game and can use it against the would-be players who try to pick them up. He then attempts to extrapolate that into something–it's not clear what–about the state of dating in New York. He interviews Strauss and uncritically swallows a lot of his garbage about picking up women–for one, he fails to be very critical of the whole "art" of picking up women at all, let alone Strauss's basic assumption that social success is measured by belt notches.

Given how flimsy the journalism is, one can't help but wonder why the whole piece wasn't cast as a short diary from a woman's perspective–but wait, guess what? Dolly, a New Yorker who writes a blog about her love life, and had recognized men running The Game on her, did pitch the Voice, in January, and never heard back. Then Sylvester was assigned the story.

Golden boy Sylvester has nothing to worry about. "I just adore that kid," acting Voice Editor Doug Simmons told Gawker . "The thought of firing him is a painful one for me. I hope this review can bring an understanding to the paper — and to Nick — about the boundaries of journalism."

Yes, cause the boundaries of journalism were so unclear before. Thank goodness Simmons cleared that one up!

What happened here doesn't quite add up. First, Sylvester's lie was painfully obvious, violating the cardinal rule of fake journalism: Don't quote real people who you've never met. (Make them up!) And stranger still is why he bothered with lying at all. He claims to have met one especially colorful pick-up artist at Bar 151 in New York, but in fact the scene he related was a "composite" of anecdotes told to him by others. So why lie? Why not just quote the people you interviewed in real-life?

Usually Sylvester writes pretentious, garbled, mumbo-jumbo name-dropping music reviews, and some have speculated that the poor kid just got in over his head. It was a Jayson Blair-esque case of too much, too soon. But even that doesn't make sense. It doesn't take genius to know that you don't make up facts in a reported story. Sylvester, who was yanked from the stage at this year's Plug Awards for reading Malcom Gladwell's New Yorker essay on profiling in lieu of presenting the award he was there to give, seems to have a problem with taking anything seriously. Maybe he thought the Voice piece was supposed to be a prank. For now, the joke's on him. He's not only been suspended from the Voice, but yesterday he was fired from his gig as an editor at indie rock go-to site Pitchfork .

But the really outrage-inducing part of all this is that Sylvester won't be up at night sweating out the difference between "fact" and "fiction" in our topsy-turvy, no-holds-barred post-modern world where right is left and up is down. He's more famous than he was before, and in the long-run, his career will be just fine. He has Simmons. He's young. He'll still get a book deal.
Rich Galen is on our Top Ten Douchebags In D.C. http://www.mullings.com/

Air America Continues Flight With Flagship WLIB NY

WLIB New York will continue to be the New York home of Air America Radio, under an agreement announced by Air America and Inner City Broadcasting. The companies report that over the next several months, Air America and Inner City will seek to enhance and extend their long-term relationship.

“We are happy to reiterate that our New York listeners will be able to continue to hear our programming,” said Air America Radio CEO Danny Goldberg.

“Inner City has always had faith in the mission of Air America,” said Vice Chairman of ICBC Broadcasting Holdings, Inc. Skip Finley.

Google Storage:

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/6173/Google_to_Offer_Online_Storage

http://meteor-blades.dailykos.com/

Meteor Blades's diary :: ::
I'm clueless as to how many of those could qualify as political. Not to mention how many of those would call themselves progressive or politically left. Nor how many frequently have something worth reading, something original, inspiring, revelatory or investigatory. Thousands, for sure.

For someone as obsessed as me, it's maddening. Speed-reading can only get you so far. But it's simultaneously wonderful. For an antique journalist and Op-Ed junkie like myself, what could be more liberating than this plethora?

Liberating and essential. We've got Guckertgate, Plamegate, Torturegate, Coingate and Spygate. We've got corruption and incompetence and unconstitutionality spread from sea to shining sea. We've got a foreign policy that makes Manifest Destiny look altruistic. With mercenaries, propagandists and lily-livered chicken-hearts dominating the megamedia, how could we have put so many pieces together without the blogs?

Not that a few good journalists haven't alerted us to a smidgen of what's going on. But, until recently, supine has been the usual position in which we've found our supposedly watchdog media. Worse still in the opinion sections. Worst of all on television. Anyone who has wanted something other than the same old talking points, something more than the same shy obeisance to an Administration out of control, something even close to a reading between the lines, has turned to blogs.

On the Op-Ed pages of the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner, I used to buy maybe 50 "citizen" pieces a year and fill the rest with the same, publisher-approved, mostly sad collection of syndicated columnists that the rest of America's newspapers published. At the Los Angeles Times, we maybe managed to get 250 citizen pieces onto the Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion pages each year, and filled the rest with syndicated writers.

For 11 years before it was absorbed by Tribune Media Services, I contributed to this narrow little world of pre-packaged opinion as editor at the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, where a staff of salespeople worked to cram 21 political columnists – including Cal Thomas, Arianna Huffington, Robert Reno, Henry Kissinger, Jesse Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Press and Armstrong Williams – into as many of the nation's 1,500 daily newspapers as possible. Foreign sales were big, too.

Three major syndicates and a handful of minor ones still run their own stables of political columnists. Ultimately, with 125 or so syndicated columnists available, about 10 dominate the dead-tree media. Right or left, they're treated like commodities. Check out the TMS page. You need a liberal or a libertarian on your Op-Ed? Just click on the mini-window.

You can depend on almost every one of these columnists never to break the formula. Never too long. Never too colorful. Definitely nothing to upset the brand. They're sold as a conservative, they'd damn sure better stay one, or they'll wind up pissing off client editors the way Huffington did when she started making her move from right to left. Predictability is essential.

Which is why I love political blogs. Unpredictable. Fresh. Unique. The standard Op-Ed is 700 words per entry. If it suits a blogger, s/he'll write 7,000 words. Or 70, plus a link to somebody's else's 7,000 words. Or a 7-word caption on a picture . Or just the picture with a comment thread so you can write your own caption. Rant, rave, rumination, reminiscence, reflection, review, rehash, research, reverie, revolt – there are simply no limits to form or style or substance. The political blogger can create a smackdown that is pure poetry, as well as exposés, dot-connections or raw speculation. S/he can write a diatribe or a dissertation. Or serve as focal point for activism. Nobody can tell the blogger what to say, what conclusions to draw. No editor is on the phone suggesting the latest effort be toned down or started over. Of course, this free-for-all means some wild-ass nonsense gets posted. And a few typos.

It also means an abundance so rich that if you're at all like me, you can't even keep up with the names of all the new progressive blogs, much less their substance. Happily, each year at this time, the folks over at Wampum help us all out by hosting the Koufax Awards.

Mary McCarthy "categorically denies" being the source of the leak on agency renditions.

"A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK…read on"

The story goes on to say:

"One of the sources, a law enforcement official close to the investigation, noted that polygraph evidence is normally inadmissible in criminal court cases because of judicial doubts about the reliability and credibility of lie-detector machines…

A lot is being said about Mary at this point without enough information available on the subject at this time. Apparently, donating to Kerry's campaign is enough of a reason to convict her. I thought Howard Kurtz was out of line on his show "Reliable Sources," when he ended a segment without giving any of his guests a chance to respond to this statement:

KURTZ: Some people noted that Mary McCarthy contributed to John Kerry's campaign. David Gergen, before we go, we're going to talk in the next half hour about the Duke rape case. You are on the board of trustees of Duke University. How do you feel the university's handling this and have you provided any advice?

What people noted this Howard?

Update: Greenwald:

Not only was Mary McCarthy branded a traitor all weekend — completey with angry protests that she was not yet imprisoned — but anyone associated with her was all but branded a traitor as well. They don't need to wait for evidence or know any facts. The administration has branded her An Enemy, so now it's time for the punishment. That is just a microcosm of the same distorted, indescribably undemocratic and plainly un-American dynamic that has guided most of the radical policies of this administration for the last five years.
postCount(’8028′);comments  permalink3:22:07 PM  
]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/25/cia-agent-categorically-denies-leaking-the-scapegoat-for-the-intimidation-witch-hunt-much/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/18/attacks-on-democrats-and-liberals-a-common-thread-among-time-columnists/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/18/attacks-on-democrats-and-liberals-a-common-thread-among-time-columnists/#comments Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:39:44 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/18/attacks-on-democrats-and-liberals-a-common-thread-among-time-columnists/ ]]>  As reported by media critic Eric Alterman, Time magazine columnist and senior writer Joe Klein declared at an April 11 event that Democrats will not succeed in upcoming elections "if their message is that they hate America — which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years." Klein's reported comments, however, represent not only the continuation of a pattern in his own writing, but in the writing of Time's stable of opinion writers — including syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer and blogger Andrew Sullivan — who regularly attack "liberals" and Democrats.
]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/18/attacks-on-democrats-and-liberals-a-common-thread-among-time-columnists/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/18/alterman-on-joe-kleins-leftists-hate-america/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/18/alterman-on-joe-kleins-leftists-hate-america/#comments Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:37:44 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/18/alterman-on-joe-kleins-leftists-hate-america/ ]]> Slacker Friday:

Joe Klein-
In his recent account of a breakfast book party at the home of Tina Brown and Harry Evans, Eric Alterman misquoted me slightly but significantly.  What I actually said was "the hate America tendency of the [Democratic Party's] left wing" had made it harder for Democrats to challenge Republicans on foreign policy.  Alterman had me castigating the "liberal wing" of the party, which I was careful not to do.  There is a crucial difference between liberals and leftists, especially on foreign policy–even though Republicans (and leftist-wingers) have successfully conflated the two over the past few decades.  The default position of leftists like, say, Michael Moore and many writers at The Nation, is that America is essentially a malignant, imperialistic force in the world and the use of American military power is almost always wrong.  Liberals have a more benign, and correct, view of America's role in the world and tend to favor the use of military force if it is exercised judiciously, as a last resort, and in a multilateral context–with U.N. approval or through NATO.  The first Gulf War, the overthrow of the Taliban and the Kosovo intervention met these criteria; Bush's Iraq invasion clearly did not.  That was the point I was trying to make at breakfast.

Eric replies:  Klein may or may not be right about his use of “left” vs. “liberal,” though I showed the item before it ran to someone who was sitting at his table, and received a note about it from another attendee who was sitting at my table and nobody noticed any inaccuracies.  This may be because it was accurate, or it may be because Klein is playing cutesy by making a distinction without a difference that nobody but him noticed.  In case he really does not know why this is the case, I’ll clarify it for him:  “Michael Moore and many writers at The Nation” are not a “wing” of the Democratic Party: They are not even in the Democratic Party, as far as I know.  (I also don’t accept that they “hate America,” well, except Alexander Cockburn.)  I know Moore was a vocal supporter of Ralph Nader in 2000 as were the people at The Nation to whom—I assume—Klein refers.  When one speaks of the “left wing” of the party—that is, people who are running for office which was the clear context of the discussion—one is clearly referring to the likes of Ted Kennedy, Russell Feingold, Barney Frank, and the late Paul Wellstone.  Those are the people whom everyone at the assembled breakfast understood Klein to be smearing, as he has done repeatedly in Time and elsewhere.  Go to my column here and Media Matters here for more examples.

I have a son. I love him more than anything in the universe. And as such, as he was growing up, I corrected him. I didn't simply accept everything he did. When he was wrong, we discussed it. When he wasn't sure what to do, I gave advice. When he screwed up, there were consequences. All with love. All with respect.

Jokers like Klein seem to think that to "love" this country means to accept everything that's done it her name without question. What you end up with when you "love" this way is a spoiled petulant brat who doesn't understand the consequences of his own actions.

How to express my love for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the concept of the Supreme Court (read books like Gideon's Trumpet and weep for what we once had), the people who ARE America (all of us, Mr. Klein)

There are no words for how I love this nation and how I grieve for how it is being distorted by corporate greed and short-sighted, belligerent policies.

It is like watching my child make mistake after mistake, alienating all of his friends, depleting his health and his finances. Would I remain quiet in the face of the love I feel for him?

No.

And so I, leftist or liberal or whatever you'd like to call it, speak out when my beloved nation suffers under the mistakes of her leaders, and when my beloved Constitution is being subverted, and the image of my beloved people is being destroyed around the world.

It is the very love we hold for our way of life and the idea, the concept, the spirit, of our nation, that compels us to speak out.

It is the love of profit, cult of personality, and blatant ass-covering, that keep people like Mr. Klein fawning at the feet of this administration and disparaging those of us who have the courage to stand up for American when she is at the height of peril – from within.

- delphine, 04.14.2006

By E&P Staff

Published: April 14, 2006 11:40 AM ET

NEW YORK As an E&P "Pressing Issues" column recently noted, rock star Neil Young is the son of a famed Canadian journalist, so it should not surprise many that he recently recorded a song in California with a very reportorial — or at least pundit — feel to it.

Young has always been a maverick politically as well as musically. Although he has recorded a few songs that drew cheers from liberals, such as "Ohio" and "Southern Man," he also drew criticism from the left for pro-Reagan comments many years ago.

Links referenced within this article column http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002312625 letters@editorandpublisher.com http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/mailto:letters@editorandpublisher.com

By Thomas E. Ricks

The Washington Post

Updated: 6:39 a.m. ET April 10, 2006
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

Running argument
There has been a running argument among specialists in Iraq about how much significance to assign to Zarqawi, who spent seven years in prison in Jordan for attempting to overthrow the government there. After his release he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan before moving his base of operations to Iraq. He has been sentenced to death in absentia for planning the 2002 assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan. U.S. authorities have said he is responsible for dozens of deaths in Iraq and have placed a $25 million bounty on his head.

Recently there have been unconfirmed reports of a possible rift between Zarqawi and the parent al-Qaeda organization that may have resulted in his being demoted or cut loose. Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that it was unclear what was happening between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda. "It may be that he's not being fired at all, but that he is being focused on the military side of the al-Qaeda effort and he's being asked to leave more of a political side possibly to others, because of some disagreements within al-Qaeda," he said.

The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.

That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.

Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.

Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.

‘No attempt to manipulate the press’
"There was no attempt to manipulate the press," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004, said in an interview Friday. "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."

Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."

U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it.

"When we provided stuff, it was all in Arabic," and aimed at the Iraqi and Arab media, said another military officer familiar with the program, who spoke on background because he is not supposed to speak to reporters.

But this officer said that the Zarqawi campaign "probably raised his profile in the American press's view."

With satellite television, e-mail and the Internet, it is impossible to prevent some carryover from propaganda campaigns overseas into the U.S. media, said Treadwell, who is now director of a new project at the U.S. Special Operations Command that focuses on "trans-regional" media issues. Such carryover is "not blowback, it's bleed-over," he said. "There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment."

The Zarqawi program was not related to another effort, led by the Lincoln Group, a U.S. consulting firm, to place pro-U.S. articles in Iraq newspapers, according to the officer familiar with the program who spoke on background.

It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.

‘Villainize Zarqawi’
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.

One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.

Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. In 2003 and 2004, he coordinated public affairs, information operations and psychological operations in Iraq — though he said in an interview the internal briefing must be mistaken because he did not actually run the psychological operations and could not speak for them.

Kimmitt said, "There was clearly an information campaign to raise the public awareness of who Zarqawi was, primarily for the Iraqi audience but also with the international audience."

A goal of the campaign was to drive a wedge into the insurgency by emphasizing Zarqawi's terrorist acts and foreign origin, said officers familiar with the program. "Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations," the same briefing asserts.

Officials said one indication that the campaign worked is that over the past several months, there have been reports that Iraqi tribal insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists, especially in the culturally conservative province of Anbar. "What we're finding is indeed the people of al-Anbar — Fallujah and Ramadi, specifically — have decided to turn against terrorists and foreign fighters," Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said in February.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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 Taylor was at the North Carolina event today and said he's never felt more ashamed of the leadership of his country.

                                           Video-WMP Video-QT soon

Taylor: Okay, I don't have a question. What I wanted to say to you is that in my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of, nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington, including the presidency, by the Senate…And I would hope — I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration, and I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself…

I'm wondering how "FOX News-I mean the Secret Service" let him in?

Full transcript
]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/07/one-man-finally-calls-the-president-on-his-bullshit/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/05/digby-calls-la-times-shaw-on-his-anti-blog-bullshit-piece/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/05/digby-calls-la-times-shaw-on-his-anti-blog-bullshit-piece/#comments Wed, 05 Apr 2006 03:14:22 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/05/digby-calls-la-times-shaw-on-his-anti-blog-bullshit-piece/ ]]> Journalist, Heal Thyself

LA Times Media critic David Shaw claims in today's paper that bloggers don't deserve the reporter's privilege because they are lazy, careless and inaccurate. In the process of explaining why, he makes a couple of whopping mistakes that one can only assume he makes because he is lazy and careless. (subscription only, sorry):

It isn't easy to define what a journalist is — or isn't. Forty or 50 years ago, some might have dismissed IF Stone as the print equivalent of a blogger, writing and puhlishing his muckraking 'I.F. Stone Weekly." But Stone was an experienced journalist, and his Weekly did not traffic in gossip or rumor. He was so highly regarded by his peers that he was widely known as "the conscience of investigative journalism."

Bloggers require no journalistic experience. All they need is computer access and the desire to blog. There are other, even important diofferences between bloggers and journalists, perhaps the most significant being that bloggers pride themselves on being part on an unmediated medium, giving their readers unfiltered information. And therein lies the problem.

When I or virtually any other journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column for example.

[...]

If I'm careless — if I am guilty of what the courts call a "reckless disregard for the truth" — The Times could be sued for libel … and could lose a lot of money. With that thought — as well as out own personal and progessional copmmittments to accuracy and fairness — very much much in mind, I and my editors all try hard to be sure that what appears in ther paper is just that, accurate and fair.

[...]

Many bloggers — not all, perhaps or even most — don't seem to worry much about being accurate. or fair. They just want to get their opinions — and their scoops — our there as fast as they pop into their brains.

[...]

But the knowledge that you can correct errors quickly,combined with the absence of editors or filters, encourages laziness, carelessness and inaccuracy, and I don't think the reporter's privilege to maintain confidential sources should be granted to such practitioners of what is at best psuedo-journalism.

[...]

Certainly, some bloggers practice what anyone would consider "journalism" in its roughest form — they provide news. And just as surely, bloggers deserve credit for, among other things, being the first to discredit Dan Rather's use of documents of dubious origin and legitimacy to accuse President Bush of having received special treatment in the National Guard.

But bloggers alos took the lead in circulating speculation that what appeared to be a bulge beneath Bush's jacket during his first debate with Sen John Kerry might have been some kind of transmission device to enable advisors to feed him answers.

No credible evidence has emerged to support such a charge.

In the first case, the Columbia Journalism Review did a thorough debunking of the blogging "journalism" in the Dan Rather case.

And there is ample evidence from real gen-u-wine accurate 'n fair jernlists that the NY Times pursued the Bush bulge story, was ready to run with it and killed it as it drew too close to the election. A NASA scientist came forward with sophisticated imaging to prove it (as Salon magazine reported at the time.) The Times' science editor Andrew Rivkin, who contributed the bulk of the reporting, had told [ombudsman]Okrent that the scientist’s assertions “did rise above the level of garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. … He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line." Certainly, the bizarre denials by the white house — that it was "bad tailoring" should have made any legitimate journalist question what was going on. This was not just idle blogging gossip.

So, in his scathing article about blogging malfeasance and inaccuracy, David Shaw missed the mark in both of his examples.

I'm only sorry that you can't link to the whole story. If there has ever been a better example of self-righteous elitism from a total fuck-up, I've never seen it. Mr Shaw makes quite the fool of himself.

Update: Here's a link to the entire article.
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Yes, CBS screwed up badly in ‘Memogate’ — but so did those who covered the affair

By Corey Pein

“The drama began when CBS posted forged National Guard documents on its Web site and, that same evening, an attentive ‘Freeper’ (a regular at the conservative FreeRepublic.com Internet site) named Buckhead raised suspicion of fraud. From there, intrepid bloggers Powerlineblog.com and Little Green Footballs, the Woodward and Bernstein of Rathergate, began to document the mounting signs of forgery.”
— Chris Weinkopf in The American Enterprise Online

“The yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took [CBS’s 60 Minutes II] down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt.”
— Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal

“NOTE to old media scum . . . . We are just getting warmed up!”
— “Rrrod,” on FreeRepublic.com

Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that’s mainstream media to you). But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule. On September 8, just weeks before the presidential election, 60 Minutes II ran a story about how George W. Bush got preferential treatment as he glided through his time in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was anchored on four memos that, it turns out, were of unknown origin. By the time you read this, the independent commission hired by the network to examine the affair may have released its report, and heads may be rolling. Dan Rather and company stand accused of undue haste, carelessness, excessive credulity, and, in some minds, partisanship, in what has become known as “Memogate.”

But CBS’s critics are guilty of many of the very same sins. First, much of the bloggers’ vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers’ lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.

Consider the memos in question. They were supposed to have been written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, now dead, who supervised Bush in the Guard. We know Killian’s name was on them. We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. We don’t know through what process they wound up in the possession of a former Guardsman, Bill Burkett, who gave them to the star CBS producer Mary Mapes. Who really wrote them? Theories abound: The Kerry campaign created the documents. CBS’s source forged them. Karl Rove planted them. They were real. Some of them were real. They were recreations of real documents. The bottom line, which credible document examiners concede, is that copies cannot be authenticated either way with absolute certainty. The memos that were circulated online were digitized, scanned, faxed, and copied who knows how many times from an unknown original source. We know less about this story than we think we do, and less than we printed, broadcast, and posted.

Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.

What efforts did CBS make to track down the original source? What warnings did CBS’s own experts provide to 60 Minutes II before air time? These are matters for the independent commission, headed by Lou Boccardi, former chief of The Associated Press, and Dick Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general. But meanwhile, the dangerous impatience in the way the rest of the press handled this journalistic tale bears examination, too.

‘IT ISN'T JUST RUSH LIMBAUGH. . .’
Three types of evidence were used to debate the documents’ authenticity after Rather and 60 Minutes II used them in the story. The first, typography, took many detours before winding up at inconclusive. The second, military terminology, is more telling but also not final. The third, the recollections of those involved, is most promising, but so far woefully underreported.

Haste explains the rapid spread of thinly supported theories and flawed critiques, which moved from partisan blogs to the nation’s television sets. For example, the morning after CBS’s September 8 report, the conservative blog Little Green Footballs posted a do-it-yourself experiment that supposedly proved that the documents were produced on a computer. On September 11, a self-proclaimed typography expert, Joseph Newcomer, copied the experiment, and posted the results on his personal Web site. Little Green Footballs delighted in the “authoritative and definitive” validation, and posted a link to Newcomer’s report on September 12. Two days later, Newcomer — who was “100 percent” certain that the memos were forged — figured high in a Washington Post report. The Post’s mention of Newcomer came up that night on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, and on September 15, he was a guest on Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes.

Newcomer gave the press what it wanted: a definite answer. The problem is, his proof turns out to be far less than that. Newcomer’s résumé — boasting a Ph.D. in computer science and a role in creating electronic typesetting — seemed impressive. His conclusions came out quickly, and were bold bordering on hyperbolic. The accompanying analysis was long and technical, discouraging close examination. Still, his method was simple to replicate, and the results were easy to understand:

Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes . . . to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the ‘authentic’ document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible.

Red flags wave here, or should have. Newcomer begins with the presumption that the documents are forgeries, and as evidence submits that he can create a very similar document on his computer. This proves nothing — you could make a replica of almost any document using Word. Yet Newcomer’s aggressive conclusion is based on this logical error.

Many of the typographic critiques were similarly flawed. Would-be gumshoes typed up documents on their computers and fooled around with the images in Photoshop until their creation matched the originals. Someone remembered something his ex-military uncle told him, others recalled the quirks of an IBM typewriter not seen for twenty years. There was little new evidence and lots of pure speculation. But the speculation framed the story for the working press.

The very first post attacking the memos — nineteen minutes into the 60 Minutes II program — was on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com by an active Air Force officer, Paul Boley of Montgomery, Alabama, who went by the handle “TankerKC.” Nearly four hours later it was followed by postings from “Buckhead,” whom the Los Angeles Times later identified as Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta. (MacDougald refused to tell the Times how he was able to mount a case against the documents so quickly.) Other blogs quickly picked up the charges. One of the story’s top blogs, Rathergate.com, is registered to a firm run by Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative fund-raiser. Some were fed by the conservative Media Research Center and by Creative Response Concepts, the same p.r. firm that promoted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. CRC’s executives bragged to PR Week that they helped legitimize the documents-are-fake story by supplying quotes from document experts as early as the day after the report, September 9. The goal, said president Greg Mueller, was to create a buzz online while at the same time showing journalists “it isn’t just Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge who are raising questions.”

In order to understand “Memogate,” you need to understand “Haileygate.” David Hailey, a Ph.D. who teaches tech writing at Utah State University — not a professional document examiner, but a former Army illustrator — studied the CBS memos. His typographic analysis found that, contrary to widespread assumptions, the document may have been typed. (He points out, meanwhile, that because the documents are typed does not necessarily mean they are genuine.) Someone found a draft of his work on a publicly accessible university Web site, and it wound up on a conservative blog, Wizbang. The blog, citing “evidence” that it had misinterpreted, called Hailey a “liar, fraud, and charlatan.” Soon Hailey’s e-mail box was flooded. Anonymous callers demanded his dismissal.

Hailey is more restrained in his comments than other document examiners more widely quoted in the press. Of course, cautious voices tend to be quieter than confident ones.

Hailey wasn’t the only one to feel the business end of a blog-mob. The head of one CBS affiliate said he received 5,000 e-mail complaints after the 60 Minutes II story, only 300 of which were from his viewing area.

The specific points of contention about the memos are too numerous to go into here. One, the raised “th” character appearing in the documents, became emblematic of the scandal, as Internet analysts contended that typewriters at the time of the memo could not produce that character. But they could, in fact, according to multiple sources. Some of the CBS critics contend they couldn’t produce the specific “th” seen in the CBS documents. But none other than Bobby Hodges, who was Colonel Killian’s Guard supervisor, thinks otherwise. He told CJR, “The typewriter can do that little ‘th,’ sure it can.” He added, “I didn’t think they were forged because of the typewriter, spacing, or signature. The only reason is because of the verbiage.”

Hodges’s doubts about the memo rest mainly on military terminology, and he has a list of twenty-one things wrong with the terms used in the CBS documents. He says he came up with the first ten in a couple of minutes. For example, he points to the use of “OETR” instead of “OER” (for Officer Effectiveness Report), and the use of the word “billets” instead of “positions.” This helped close the case for some, but probably shouldn’t have. Even preliminary digging casts some doubt on the evidence. For example, Bill Burkett was quoted in a book published last March using the term “OER,” suggesting he would’ve known better had he forged the documents as Hodges and others implied in interviews. And newspaper stories and Air Guard documents indicate that the term “billets” was indeed used in the Air Guard, at least in the mid-1980s. Such small points don’t prove anything about the memos. But they do suggest that the press should never accept as gospel the first explanation that comes along.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD
As Memogate progressed, certain talking points became conventional wisdom. Among them, that CBS’s producer, Mary Mapes, was a liberal stooge; that her source, Bill Burkett, was a lefty moonbat with an ax to grind. Both surely wanted to nail a story that Bush got preferential treatment in the National Guard. Still, there was a double standard at work. Liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush’s defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined.

The Killian memos seem to have grown out of battles that began long before last September. In early 2004, Burkett had featured prominently in a book, Bush’s War for Reelection, by the Texas journalist Jim Moore, who also co-wrote the Karl Rove biography Bush’s Brain. Bush’s War for Reelection included a story dating back to 1997, when Burkett worked as an adviser to the head of the Texas National Guard at Camp Mabry. In that role, Burkett says, he witnessed a plan to scrub George W. Bush’s file of embarrassments.

When this came out, the press naturally turned to the people Burkett had named in Moore’s book. And those men — Danny James, Joe Allbaugh, John Scribner, and George Conn — all dismissed Burkett’s story. That’s four against one, but not necessarily case closed. Most reporters omitted some basic, and relevant, biographic facts about Burkett’s critics.

For example, Joe Allbaugh was usually identified in press accounts — in The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, to name a few — as Bush’s old chief of staff. He is much more. In 1999 Allbaugh, the self-described “heavy” of the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post, “There isn’t anything more important than protecting [Bush] and the first lady.” He was made head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Bush’s victory, resigned in 2003, and went on to head New Bridge Strategies, a firm that helps corporations land contracts in Iraq.

Danny James, a Vietnam veteran and the son of “Chappie” James, America’s first black four-star general, is also a political appointee whose fortunes rose with Bush’s. He had his own reason to dislike Burkett. Burkett’s 2002 lawsuit in a Texas district court against the Guard claimed that the staff of then adjutant-general James retaliated against him for refusing to falsify reports. It was dismissed, like other complaints against James and the Guard, not on the merits, but because under Texas law the courts considered such complaints internal military matters. Without further investigation, we are stuck at he said, she said.

Many of the people defending Bush in February on the scrubbing story appeared again in September, when the alleged Killian documents appeared on CBS. Other defenders appeared as well, and rarely were their connections to the Bush camp made clear, or the basis for their claims probed.

Other pieces of context might have been helpful, too. For example, Maurice Udell, the former commander of the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, in which Bush served, first came to Bush’s defense in 2000 and was resurrected for the same cause in 2004. After Memogate he was a guest on Hannity & Colmes and was quoted in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, saying the memos were “so totally false they were ridiculous.” He also popped up in The Richmond Times-Dispatch and an Associated Press story. No one noted the cloudy circumstances of Udell’s exit from the military (probably because the relevant clips are hard to find in electronic databases). In 1985, after an Air Force investigation into contract fraud, as well as misuse of base resources, Udell was ordered to resign. The initial probe included an allegation of illegal arms shipment to Honduras, but the charge came up dry.

Context was also lacking in quotes from Bush’s old National Guard roommate, Dean Roome, who appeared with this old boss Udell on Hannity & Colmes. With one exception, Roome’s press appearances have served a singular purpose: praise the president, attack the memos. The exception was notable and often reprinted. Last February, USA Today used a quote from a 2002 interview with Roome: “Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life.” Roome says the comment was taken out of context, and emphasizes how great it was to fly with Bush.

In his office, Roome had taped up a printout of a September 16 Washington Times story in which the reporter asked Roome to speculate about who “the forger” was. Roome does not name Burkett but hints that it was he, without offering specifics. Roome also has a framed picture of President Bush signed, “to my friend Dean Roome, with best wishes.” Another picture shows Roome and Bush on a couch. Roome says it’s from this past March, when he attended a private party in Houston with Bush and about a dozen old friends. The meeting, Roome said, was a back-slapping affair, in which Bush told the group how he cherished his old friends from the Guard, Midland, and Dallas.

When the central charge is a cover-up, as it was in the CBS story, vigilance is required. Thus, the connections between Bush’s old associates should have seen print. Together the men formed a feedback loop, referring reporters to one another and promoting a version of events in which Bush’s service is unquestionable, even exemplary. With such big names and old grudges in play, journalists are obliged to keep digging.

The Memogate melee peaked in late September. On cable, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC held forth with hasty overstatements: “I’m supposed to say ‘allegedly forged.’ I think everybody in America knows these documents were forged.” His guests threw in anything that sounded good: “You know, Dan Rather’s being called on the Internet, ‘Queen of the Space Unicorns,’” said Bob Kohn, author of a book on why The New York Times “can no longer be trusted.” (The “Space Unicorn” line had first appeared on Jim Treacher’s conservative humor blog, and quickly wound up on The Wall Street Journal’s online opinion page.)

Conclusions were often hidden within questions, no matter how little evidence supported them. NBC’s Ann Curry, hosting the Today show, asked a guest, who had no way of knowing: “Was CBS a pawn in a dirty tricks effort by the Kerry campaign to smear . . . President Bush? Can we go that far?”

No, we can’t. But by the time Dan Rather announced on November 23 that he would step down from the anchor spot in March 2005, the bloggers’ perceptions had taken hold. For example, the December 6 issue of Newsweek stated, incorrectly, that Rather had acknowledged that the 60 Minutes II report “was based on false documents.” The following week the magazine’s “Clarification” was limited to what Rather had said, not to what Newsweek or anyone else could have known about the documents.

Dan Rather trusted his producer; his producer trusted her source. And her source? Who knows. To many, Burkett destroyed his own credibility when he told Dan Rather that he had lied about the source of the Killian memos. Still, many suppositions about Burkett are based on standards that were not applied evenly across the board. In November and December the first entry for “Bill Burkett” in Google, the most popular reference tool of the twenty-first century, was on a blog called Fried Man. It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign. While Burkett doesn’t like the president, many people in America share that opinion, and the sentiment doesn’t make him a forger.

Jim Moore, who relied on Burkett for much of his book on Bush, says he initially called some of the generals who worked with Burkett to check his source’s reputation — but didn’t tell them what the story was about. They all said Burkett was honest and trustworthy. When Moore called them back, and described the accusations, only one of them, Danny James, then changed his opinion, calling Burkett a liar. George Conn, the ex-Guardsman who said he didn’t remember Burkett’s story of file-scrubbing, nevertheless told reporters Burkett was “honest and forthright.”

Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff has said that he interviewed Burkett last February and thought Burkett “sounded credible,” but didn’t use the Texan’s story because he couldn’t substantiate it. Good decision. CBS couldn’t prove the authenticity of the documents in its story, and look at the results. Dan Rather has announced his resignation under a cloud and his aggressive news division is tarnished. And the coverage of Memogate effectively killed the story of Bush’s Guard years. Those who kept asking questions found themselves counted among the journalistic fringe.

While 2004 brought many stories of greater public import than how George W. Bush spent the Vietnam War, the year brought few of greater consequence for the media than the coverage of Memogate. When the smoke cleared, mainstream journalism’s authority was weakened. But it didn’t have to be that way.

By Chase Johnson & Andy Zahn
Flat Hat Variety Editor & News Editor

Former Washingtonpost.com blogger Ben Domenech wrote 35 articles for The Flat Hat while he was a student at the College. There are 10 articles that are similar to pieces by other authors, including three new instances discovered by The Flat Hat.

http://flathat.wm.edu/story.php?issue=2006-03-24&type=1&aid=25

Blast from the Past -originally posted 1/10/06

Any talking heads doubting whether "Gekko Jack" and the Hammer are pals should just watch this circle jerk introduction by Abramoff at the 2002,  College Republican Conference.

Jack: Never before  has an individual who has been steadfast to our principles-risen as high as Tom Delay.

Jack: Tom Delay is who all of us want to be when we grow up.

                                                  Video-WMP Video-QT

What principles are those Jack? Using Terri' Schiavo's ravaged body as a political tool, or maybe the Island of Saipan affair that Brian Ross revealed on 20/20? (Al Franken's book has a chapter dedicated to this) Are these the high moral principles that all those impressionable "College Republicans" should aspire towards.
]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/04/abramoff-hearts-delay-redux/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/04/apparently-george-w-bush-has-gotten-us-into-a-mess-and-we-should-have-known/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/04/apparently-george-w-bush-has-gotten-us-into-a-mess-and-we-should-have-known/#comments Tue, 04 Apr 2006 18:10:40 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/04/04/apparently-george-w-bush-has-gotten-us-into-a-mess-and-we-should-have-known/ ]]> Bush's Strong Arm Can Club Allies Too
Lawmakers, Activists Say Tactics for Enforcing Loyalty Are Tough and Sometimes VindictiveBy Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 21, 2003; Page A06

Editor's note: This article was withheld from later editions of yesterday's paper to accommodate coverage of the start of the war in Iraq.

After a Newsweek cover story in 1987 titled "Bush Battles the Wimp Factor," the label stuck to George H.W. Bush for years. Now, his son is creating the opposite perception: the Bully Factor.

As the United States wages war this week following a pair of ultimatums to the United Nations and Iraq, the airwaves and editorial pages of the world have been full of accusations that President Bush and his administration are guilty of coercive and harrying behavior. Even in typically friendly countries, Bush and the United States have been given such labels this week as "arrogant bully" (Britain), "bully boys" (Australia), "big bully" (Russia), "bully Bush" (Kenya), "arrogant" (Turkey) and "capricious" (Canada). Diplomats have accused the administration of "hardball" tactics, "jungle justice" and acting "like thugs."

At home, where support for the war on Iraq is strong and growing, such complaints of strong-arm tactics by the Bush administration nonetheless have a certain resonance — even among Bush supporters. Though the issues are vastly different, Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups report similar pressure on allies at home to conform to Bush's policy wishes.

Although all administrations use political muscle on the opposition, GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics the Bush administration uses on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and vindictive. Just as the administration used unbending tactics before the U.N. Security Council with normally allied countries such as Mexico, Germany and France, the Bush White House has calculated that it can overcome domestic adversaries if it tolerates no dissent from its friends.

In recent weeks, the White House has been pushing GOP governors to oust the leadership of the National Governors Association to make the bipartisan group endorse Bush's views. Interest groups report pressure from the administration — sometimes on groups' donors — to conform to Bush's policy views and even to fire dissenters.

Often, companies and their K Street lobbyists endorse ideas they privately oppose or question, according to several longtime Republican lobbyists. The fear is that Bush will either freeze them out of key meetings or hold a grudge that might deprive them of help in other areas, the lobbyists said. When the Electronic Industries Alliance declined to back Bush's dividend tax cut, the group was frozen out when the White House called its "friends" in the industry to discuss the tax cut, according to White House and business sources.

Under such pressure from the administration, lobbyists and lawmakers who voiced doubts about Bush's economic policies have publicly reversed themselves. "I think I should have kept my mouth shut," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said in one such recantation last month.

The forms of pressure — exclusions from White House guest lists, a loss of access to key Bush aides, calls to dissenters' superiors, veiled threats saying the White House has noted the transgression or even shouted accusations — convey the same message. Grover Norquist, a conservative activist who enforces loyalty for the White House, puts it this way: "If I bitch, guess what? I get coal in my socks."

The technique has served the Bush White House well by maintaining the lockstep support among Republicans needed to pass Bush policies in a closely divided Congress. "It's fascinating the extent to which this administration has been able to hold troops in line for an extended period of time," said Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution.

But on the latest round of tax cuts, there are signs of a backlash against Bush's tough tactics. In Congress, a group of moderate GOP senators and representatives said they would only support a tax cut much smaller than Bush's. And lawmakers suggest that resentment is growing beneath the surface.

More than a dozen members of Congress interviewed for this article said support for Bush's economic plan is weaker than the public might realize because lawmakers don't want to challenge the president publicly. "We don't want to stick it in the president's eye — at the moment," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.). He said as many as 20 House Republicans oppose Bush's tax cuts, and an additional 40 or 50 are uneasy about the details and timing.

The White House says its style is vigorous but not strong-armed. "The president believes strongly in issues and he diligently pursues what he believes in on the basis of policy, and that's why he's won so many votes — because members agree with him," press secretary Ari Fleischer said.

But GOP lawmakers have other reasons for their support. "People have come to realize that it is better to be seen helping the administration than pulling down parts of his plan," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.). Foley knows the consequences. He opposed Bush on a free-trade vote despite intense pressure. So when Bush senior adviser Karl Rove recently encouraged Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel R. Martinez to run for the Senate from Florida — the same seat Foley is seeking — many on Capitol Hill suspected it was Bush's revenge on Foley. Foley, in an interview, said he was worried he might get the "Pawlenty" treatment, a reference to last year's Minnesota Senate race, in which the Bush White House pushed out Tim Pawlenty, the GOP majority leader in the Minnesota House, to clear the way for handpicked candidate Norm Coleman.

Some of the White House's tactics have become lore. After Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) opposed Bush's first tax cut, White House slights and threats to cut his pet programs drove Jeffords from the GOP. Last year, after Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) voiced concern about Bush's immigration policy, Rove told him to never again "darken the door" of the White House.

But the hardball tactics are deeper and more pervasive.

Eager to send a message to the National Governors Association to reflect a GOP majority, the White House for the first time excluded Raymond C. Scheppach, the NGA's executive director, from the governors' annual dinner at the White House last month. Encouraged by the administration and its allies, a few Republican governors — including the president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — threatened to stop dues payments or quit the group. After a bipartisan NGA committee drafted a statement seeking more federal money for the states, the White House let its displeasure be known to the governors, and Republicans arrived at the meeting last month demanding the rejection of the "partisan" statement.

Conservative interest groups get similar pressure. When the free-market Club for Growth sent a public letter to the White House to protest White House intervention in GOP primaries for "liberal-leaning Republicans," the group's president, Stephen Moore, picked up the phone at a friend's one evening to receive a screaming tirade from Rove, who had tracked him down. On another occasion when Moore objected to a Bush policy, Rove called Richard Gilder, the Club for Growth's chairman and a major contributor, to protest.

"I think this monomaniacal call for loyalty is unhealthy," Moore said. "It's dangerous to declare anybody who crosses you an enemy for life. It's shortsighted." Leaders of three other conservative groups report that their objections to Bush policies have been followed by snubs and, in at least one case, phone calls suggesting the replacement of a critical scholar. "They want sycophants rather than allies," said the head of one think tank.

Corporations are coming under increasing pressure not just to back Bush, but to hire his allies to represent them in meetings with Republicans. As part of the "K Street Project," top GOP officials, lawmakers and lobbyists track the political affiliation and contributions of people seeking lobbying jobs.

In a private meeting last week, chief executives from several leading technology firms told Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (Calif.) and other moderate Democrats that they were under heavy pressure to back the Bush tax plan, even though many of them had reservations about it. "There is a perception among some business interests there could be retribution if you don't play ball on almost every issue that comes up," Dooley said.

Staff writer Dan Balz contributed to this report.

If WaPo wants to publicly pay a troll that’s their lookout.

He brags about the hits he gets in the E&P piece.

Let ‘im die alone in a room reeking of cat wee.

[ Reply to This ]
 

New ‘Wash Post’ Blogger: OK, Coretta King Was Not a Communist, My Bad

By E&P Staff

Published: March 23, 2006 5:30 PM ET

NEW YORK For the past two days, as E&P observed yesterday, the world has learned more about Ben Domenech than it, and surely he, thought it ever needed to know, thanks to the detective work of liberal bloggers. The creator of the new, and already controversial, Washington Post conservative blog, Red America, has already been targeted for dismissal by two liberal activist groups, MoveOn.org and Media Matters for America. Conservatives have hailed the Post’s hire.

The End of the Internet?

by JEFF CHESTER

[posted online on February 1, 2006]

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets–corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers–would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us–from content providers to individual users–would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation’s communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet’s future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet’s future. Senior phone executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”

THIMEROSAL

Posted by broadcatching under Uncategorized
No Comments 

Saturday, June 18, 2005 4:47 PM UPDATE—– Jeffrey Schneider, ABC News Vice President for Media Relations called me yesterday, clearly annoyed about the controversy surrounding Thursday’s sudden pulling of Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s story/interview package about Thimerosal slated for Good Morning America, 20/20, and a 3 minute piece on that evening’s World News Tonight. He said the idea that an executive on the “WEST Coast”- his phrase not mine-had the story yanked was ridiculous. He said that he suspected who the source was that gave the kill-story to The Huffington Post and that it was vendetta-driven. He was amused and a bit surprised , he said, that one web posting had created such a commotion. By mid-afternoon, the original story on The Huffington Post had vanished from Google News and replaced with a strong re-affirmation and claim that their source has “first-hand knowledge” of the situation. This was simply a story’s script that the producer took a look at before airing and said ” I want more” Mr. Schneider explained. I was finally able to get ahold of Mr. Kennedy about 20 minutes ago, just as he was getting off a plane, so I will update here when more details become available. Suffice it to say, after what Don Imus went through with the complete SMEARJOB in The Wall Street Journal, after daring to discuss Thimerosal poisoning, I’m starting to get the creeps…. JT

After reading today’s story of 87 bodies found in Iraq, I decided to post the video of John Burns on Real Time.“The question is just the scale of it.” So said  John F. Burns, Bureau Chief of The New York Times on Bill Maher’s live Friday night HBO program.

                                                     Video-WMP  Video-QT

E&P:  “…he now feels that the failure of the American effort in Iraq “now seems likely.” The chances that it will reach “a satisfactory conclusion” appears “improbable.”

 ”Asked if a civil war was developing there, Burns said, “It has been for some time,” adding that it’s just a matter of “scale.” He said the current U.S. leaders there-military and diplomatic-were doing their best but sectarian differences may doom the enterprise…Burns observed that he had been on the ground for 24 hours and, of all the people he had interacted with so far, “no one supports this war.” read on“

Taylor Marsh has more of the transcript

………………………………………………………….GASSED HIS OWN PEOPLE Russ Feingold on The Daily Show

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 

Bush makes false claim about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda

Olbermann: “Who does the President think he’s F’n kidding?”

I know it’s hard to believe Mr. President, but they have these things know that actually record what you say and are able to play back what they record. Even after a long period of time. Keith Olbermann and Countdown supply the evidence.

                                                Video-WMP Video-QT 

Today in his speech in Cleveland:

Bush: “First-just if I might correct a misperception, I don’t think we ever said, at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September 11th and Saddam Hussein.”

In days gone by-SOTU-three years ago:

Bush: “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”

Now-anyone listening and watching his speech back then would make that connection easily enough since al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11-don’t you think? Keith analyzes it very nicely.

Olbermann: “Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in the same sentence separated by seven words. Sept. 11th and Saddam Hussein -two sentences later, separated by six words. In a moment Craig Crawford joins me to discuss the fundamental remaining question. Who does the President think he’s F’n kidding?

This is sure to freak out the wingnuts.

©GASSEDHISOWNPEOPLE

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/washpostblog/2006/01/new_blog_maryla.html

How to become a runner

READ MORE: Exercise, Fitness, How To, Running

Marathoner Brandon Seils puts together a great guide to becoming an avid runner.

I’ve always thought runners the ultimate masochists, because any time I try to get into running I wind up face down on the carpet clutching my legs wondering why anyone would ever subject themselves to that much pain voluntarily. But Brandon says to become a runner, you have to break through a wall:

For most runners, there’s a wall at the three mile mark. This goes for the most beginner runners up to and probably including the long-time marathoners. The first three miles of any run are the most difficult and painful to get through. After this point, however, it’s easy to “just keep going.” Back when I was training for the Boston Marathon, and would go out for 2+ hours on a 20 mile run, the hardest miles were the first three. It’s also these first three miles that make it difficult for running to become habit. You really have to struggle past this, in order to develop a tolerance for the sport.

The health benefits of the sport and tall tales of endorphin-induced “Runner’s High” keep me trying to get past that three mile mark using Coolrunning’s Couch to 5K program. Any new or seasoned runners out there have more advice for newbie runners? Do share.

Learning how to run [Diatribe]

I got myself up to 5 miles not long ago but I started experiencing knee pain so I took some time off. I’m only now starting to pick it up again. very gingerly, with 2-mile runs. So far so good. The Couch to 5-K article was really neat, but by the time I’d found it I was already at 5k, so for me it was more descriptive of what I’d done already than prescriptive of what I should do in the future. I think I’m going to take Brandon’s advice and get an expert shoe fitting.

by Scott D. Feldstein on 03/20/06 11:57 AM

Running’s great but its a much higher-impact sport than, say, swimming or cycling. Because of this, I find the following steps to be of high importance:

A) Invest in an expert shoe fitting (as mentioned) – most runner’s shops will do this for free as they help you pick out your shoe. Don’t go in with a price in mind – go in with getting the right shoe in mind. You may pay $30-40 more than you planned on, but your knees are worth it.

B) Stretch. A lot. I prefer to do a warm-up jog of a few hundred yards, then stop for a full 5 minute stretch. After my full run, I cool down with a slightly longer stretch session. Not only does this help maintain flexibility and prevent injuries, it significantly reduces muscle pain over the next few days.

C) Water. A lot. I can feel a much larger wall at 3-4 miles when I haven’t been hydrating.

D) Technique. Grab a book, join a club, maybe even get lessons. Little tricks can make all the difference in the world. Some of my favorites are breathing out on the left foot-fall, keeping the feet in a straight line, smaller arm-swings to conserve energy, etc…

by allkindsoftime on 03/20/06 12:46 PM

The “Stitch”, or that pain in your side, was the hardest obstacle to overcome. Men’s health says to exhale when your left foot hits the ground. It takes some practice, but helps me a lot.

by Jeff Welch on 03/20/06 01:37 PM

I notice a lot of talk about stretching. Saturday I ran 10 miles in the park with my wife and Sunday I ran my standard 22 mile “at pace” marathon training run (7:10/mile). Total amount of stretching – 0. I am 44 and have been running all my life, but I haven’t stretched since high school cross country. Most of my running partners stopped stretching years ago also. A quick google of stretching and running will show that the community is about evenly split, with some even saying that stretching does more harm then good. I wouldn’t go that far, but for me it is a waste of time, and I would steer clear of people who profess it to be a requirement for everyone.

by MarkMcC on 03/20/06 01:40 PM

Woodward’s Plame-Leak Deep Throat

By JASON LEOPOLD

He is referred to as “official one” and he is the mysterious senior Bush administration official who unmasked the identity of an undercover CIA operative to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003 and conservative columnist Robert Novak a month later.

The identity of this official is shrouded in secrecy. In fact, his name, government status, and the substance of his conversation with Woodward about the undercover officer are under a protective seal in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

But Woodward tape-recorded the interview he had with “official one.” Woodward gave a copy of the tape to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, according to a Feb. 24 federal court hearing, a transcript of which was obtained by this reporter.

Woodward emerged as central figure in the leak of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson in November. For the better part of two years, Woodward had publicly discounted the importance of the Plame Wilson leak and had referred to Fitzgerald as a “junkyard dog” prosecutor in interviews during the course of the investigation. He then revealed in November that he had been told about Plame Wilson’s CIA employment in June 2003–before any other journalist.

Woodward wrote a first-person account in the Washington Post in November about the individual who told him that Plame Wilson worked for the CIA. He identified his source as a “senior administration official.” He also said that the interview with the official who told him about Plame Wilson had been set up simply as “confidential background interviews for my 2004 book ‘Plan of Attack’ about the lead-up to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting for the Washington Post and research for a book on Bush’s second term to be published in 2006.”

White House officials who are sympathetic to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff who is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to a grand jury and FBI investigators about his role in the Plame Wilson leak, say “official one” is former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive NEWS JUNKIE, to be published in April on Process/Feral House books.

Despite his lies and incompetence, Bush remains more popular with elite media than Clinton or any other political leader who sought to save us from the Iraq catastrophe. Why won’t they connect the dots?

Lies About Blowjobs, Bad. Wars? Not So Much.

the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen reported this past Sunday, the pushback against not only reporters, but also federal whistleblowers, has been swift and severe. Eggen’s found “dozens” of employees from the CIA, the NSA and other intelligence agencies who have been interviewed by FBI agents “investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA’s warrantless domestic surveillance program.” What’s more, many employees at the CIA, FBI and the Justice Department “have received letters from Justice prohibiting them from discussing even unclassified issues related to the NSA program.” “Some media watchers, lawyers and editors say that, taken together, the incidents represent perhaps the most extensive and overt campaign against leaks in a generation,” wrote Eggen.

Do Vanity Fair reporters have some kind of truth serum for their interview subjects? It seems as though people are always admitting things like eating disorders or revealing their sources in huge government scandals, and then, suddenly, they never said any of these things.

First it was Lindsay Lohan‘s “I never said I had an eating disorder.” Now we have Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee claiming that “he doesn’t remember” telling the mag that former State Department official Richard L. Armitage is the likely source who named Valerie Plame to Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward.

In an article to be published in the magazine today, Bradlee is quoted as saying: “That Armitage is the likely source is a fair assumption.” Armitage was deputy secretary of state in President Bush’s first term.

This month’s VF “officially” hits newsstands today, and the tell-all issue also features Teri Hatcher‘s confession that she was molested as a child. And a bunch of other stuff that nobody remembers ever saying.

http://www.jossip.com/gossip/vanity-fair/the-case-of-vanity-fairs-mystery-amnesia-20060314.php

:::Magazine: Bradlee Knows Woodward’s Source on Plame Jim VandeHei, Washington Post:::

She referred to hotel-balcony reporters not giving us the good stories in the middle of this war zone where just three days ago, the windows in NBC’s offices were shattered once again. She went there last month for a week or so and reporter Richard Engel has been putting his life on the line the last three years, living with shattered windows and kidnappings of the press and daily IED blasts. Over 50 journalists have been killed in Iraq, Ms. Ingraham.

There’s just Crazy Sectarian bloodshed and mass murders going on and the right-wingers, still to this day, remain dazed by the Kool-aide and she chalks it all up to Bush-hating and liberals actually wanting America to fail over there. That’s all they have left. And none of us forget those of you who were behind this war when there were sane voices warning us of this fate and they were bullied out. We remember and you don’t get to jump ship now with these sorry excuses for your equally lame excuses. O’Reilly had her on that night on his Peabody Award®-winning program, agreed with her, and said he’s really getting peeved about the tone in America. Former Senator Alan Simpson told Larry King that he sure didn’t like the partisanship permeating Washington.

Uh-uh. 

You don’t get to be pissed that we’re mad;

The Republicans created this harsh environment. The so-called weak Democrats can’t even get a hearing room from these hacks and Excuse me, but let’s just cut the old crap about how “both parties are the same” because that’s the kind of mindless drivel that goes right along with “everyone thought Saddam had WMD’s” and ”the democrats can’t seem to do anything” ….and just for good measure:

“There ain’t no diference between Al Gore and George W. Bush”- idiot in America

But that kinda thinking wins out….

and we all lose.

BONUS :::BULL::::  

“Everyone knew she was a C.I.A. agent”

http://mediamatters.org/items/200603220013

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/nbc_today_ingraham_carville_gregory_060320a_320x240.wmv

Bonus footage of J.T. as Senator Deakins

The Long Island Project Teaser Trailer

HEY- OUR TORTURE ISN’T SO BAD!
AFTER ALL- SADDAM WAS WORSE!

O’Reilly and Ingraham Take on NBC and Television Media Bias

Posted by Noel Sheppard on March 22, 2006 – 11:25.

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly had radio host Laura Ingraham on “The O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday evening (hat tip to Expose the Left). Fresh from her battle with NBC’s David Gregory on the “Today Show,” O’Reilly wanted Ingraham’s view (video link to follow) about NBC (from closed captioning):

Bill: Is it your opinion that NBC news spins the war in Iraq negative?

Laura: Well, it’s not between me and NBC, Bill.

Bill: Look, you’re an analyst. You watch these people. Is it your opinion that NBC news spins the war negative?

Laura: I think that the coverage of the war by NBC that I have really focused on, especially since I was in Iraq last month, to me it seems bizarrely focused only on the I.E.D.’s, only on the latest reprisal killings that are taking place. When stories that are so fascinating and interesting and broader and human interest, stuff the “Today” show and NBC likes to do, those stories are out there for anyone to get. I don’t get it.

O’Reilly then made a very bold castigation of NBC:

…………………………………………………………..

 YOU SAID IT….ASS

Stung by Ingraham, NBC Claims its Iraq Coverage . . . Not Negative Enough

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on March 22, 2006 – 07:56.

Stung by allegations levelled by Laura Ingraham yesterday, NBC has admitted that its Iraqi coverage is inaccurate because it’s . . . not negative enough.

Ingraham clearly hit an MSM sore spot with the charges she made during her appearance on yesterday’s Today show, in which she locked horns with David Gregory and James Carville. Read Laura in the Lions Den.

Ingraham accused most American media of covering Iraq from their balconies in the Green Zone, confining their reports largely to IEDs and killings and missing the more positive stories that abound across the country.

On this morning’s Today show, a defensive NBC asked whether it is doing a good job reporting on Iraq, and – surprise! – the Peacock Network assured itself and its viewers that indeed it is. If anything, Today told us, the situation in Iraq is even worse than the MSM portray it. You might say NBC’s position is that its coverage is not negative enough.

……………………………………………………………………….

Olbermann Distorts Bush’s Words, Asks Who Does Bush Think He’s ‘F’-ing Kidding?

Posted by Brad Wilmouth on March 22, 2006 – 02:17.

On his Monday March 20 Countdown show, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann disputed President Bush’s recent contention that he had never claimed “that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein” by citing one awkward quote from the President, which stood in contrast to other public statements that more clearly communicated the point about the 9/11 attacks being a lesson that inspired a confrontation of Iraq, rather than Iraq actually being involved in the attacks. Olbermann rhetorically posed the question: “Who does the President think he’s ‘f’-ing kidding?” On the Tuesday March 21 show, Olbermann added that “any six-year-old would have recognized that his administration had deliberately left exactly that impression.” Guest Craig Crawford labeled Bush’s recent comments as “presidential prevarication” and compared it to Bill Clinton saying, “Depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.” Notably, as recounted by CyberAlert, the Countdown host once before used selectively edited statements by Dick Cheney to make it appear the Vice President had claimed a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, while omitting more of Cheney’s words which clarified his meaning. (Transcripts follow.)

DON’T PULL SOMETHING THERE BUDDY…..SHEESH

I’m Already Exhausted……What a bunch of wankers!

E.Alterman  :::::  http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/

This is too easy.  Did they think that nobody was paying attention?  They’ve lost Bin Laden, screwed up Afghanistan, completely wrecked Iraq, destroyed our fiscal future, left us completely vulnerable on homeland security, ignored the threats to New Orleans, messed up its recovery, thrown science out the window, attacked our civil liberties, undermined freedom of the press, you know the drill.  Why is anyone surprised that they are both incompetent and dishonest when it comes to seeking justice for the terrorist murder of thousands of Americans? 

Carl Cameron Follows Bush’s Instructions On How To Describe Warrantless Domestic Wiretapping

Since January, the White House has tried to re-brand their domestic warrantless wiretapping program as a “terrorist surveillance program.” The goal is to make critics of the program’s legality seem weak on terrorism.

So far, the White House press corps hasn’t bought it. But today, Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron became the first reporter use the term “terrorist surveillance program” during a White House press conference.

From today’s Press Conference:

THE PRESIDENT: Carl.

CAMERON: Thank you, sir. On the subject of the terrorist surveillance program -

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

CAMERON: — not to change the tone from all this emphasis on bipartisanship, but there have been now three sponsors to a measure to censure you for the implementation of that program.

Cameron is not only doing the administration’s bidding – he is not doing his job. The term “terrorist surveillance program” could refer to any number of programs, many of which have been around for decades and are not at all controversial.

The program at issue is different precisely because it is conducted a) without a warrant and b) involves people on U.S. soil. That’s why it’s accurately described as a warrantless domestic wiretapping program.

Filed under: Terrorism, Media

Posted by Payson March 21, 2006 3:50 pm

Permalink | Comment (71)


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/carl-cameron-gave-me-a-marlboro-light-during-the-clinton-impeachment-hearings/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/fuck-you-mr-fukuyama/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/fuck-you-mr-fukuyama/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:54:56 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/fuck-you-mr-fukuyama/ ]]>

FROM THE NEW YORKER: BREAKING AWAY by LOUIS MENAND Francis Fukuyama and the neoconservatives. Issue of 2006-03-27 Posted 2006-03-20

 

On February 10, 2004, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol address at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. The lecture was called “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” It defended the Bush Administration’s policies of unilateralism and preëmption, and proposed that their application be defined by means of a doctrine: “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” Krauthammer said, is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,” and he compared the war that the United States should fight against this entity to the war against Fascist Germany and Japan—a war committed to the eradication of a deadly and evil culture.

Francis Fukuyama was in the audience, and he could not believe the approval with which Krauthammer’s speech was greeted. It seemed to Fukuyama that by the winter of 2004 the policies of unilateralism and preëmption might have been ripe for some reconsideration—they clearly had not performed well in Iraq—but, all around him, people were applauding enthusiastically. Fukuyama had always regarded himself as a neoconservative. He had had close relations with many of the leading figures associated with neoconservatism: Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom, Irving and William Kristol. Now he began to wonder if he still shared the world view of neoconservatives who, like Krauthammer, supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror. The day after the lecture, Fukuyama ran into John O’Sullivan, then the editor of the National Interest (a journal founded by Irving Kristol), and told him that he would be writing a response to Krauthammer. That article ran in the summer, 2004, issue. It was called “The Neoconservative Moment,” and in it Fukuyama announced that neoconservatism had evolved into a set of views that he could no longer support. Krauthammer published a response to Fukuyama’s response (“In Defense of Democratic Realism”) in the fall issue of the National Interest. Last spring, Fukuyama delivered the Castle Lectures, at Yale, in which he responded to Krauthammer’s response to his response to Krauthammer’s speech, and expanded his criticism of the Bush Administration. He proposed a new approach to foreign policy, which he called “realistic Wilsonianism.” Those lectures have been expanded, in turn, and published as “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy” (Yale; $25).

Fukuyama argues that neoconservatism was founded on four principles….

 http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/060327crbo_books
]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/fuck-you-mr-fukuyama/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/what-a-fing-mess/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/what-a-fing-mess/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:40:05 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/what-a-fing-mess/ ]]> • March 20, 2006 | 11:51 AM ET |

I don’t have anything profound to add to the commentary on the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, except that it may be the single most misguided, dishonest and counter-productive expenditure of our nation’s blood and treasure in its history.  And almost all of this was evident from the start to anyone who cared to look.  (The ideological spectrum of Sunday’s Washington Post op-ed page on the topic stretched all the way from Donald Rumsfeld to George F. Will.)  I do think that any political commentator who supported it owes his or her readers an explanation as to why they would expect such judgment to be trusted again in the future.

This is, after all, the purpose of punditry; to help people make sense of the fusillade of news that comes to them, as Walter Lippmann explained, “helter-skelter.”  What’s fascinating is that everyday people seem to have an easier time admitting how foolish they were to trust this dishonest, incompetent, ideologically-obsessed president.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/what-a-fing-mess/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/but-is-al-gore-too-stiff-arghhhh/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/but-is-al-gore-too-stiff-arghhhh/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:33:49 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/but-is-al-gore-too-stiff-arghhhh/ ]]> Draft Gore for president.  

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/but-is-al-gore-too-stiff-arghhhh/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/the-toms-rock-the-straight-dope-on-operation-fubar/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/the-toms-rock-the-straight-dope-on-operation-fubar/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:30:24 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/the-toms-rock-the-straight-dope-on-operation-fubar/ ]]> Brilliant piece:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=70198 

and

Robert Dreyfuss

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/14/deja_vu_all_over_iran.php


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/the-toms-rock-the-straight-dope-on-operation-fubar/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/juan-cole-on-bushs-shit-talk-about-iranian-ieds/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/juan-cole-on-bushs-shit-talk-about-iranian-ieds/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 08:38:36 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/juan-cole-on-bushs-shit-talk-about-iranian-ieds/ ]]> Truthdig.com

“The guerrillas in Iraq are militant Sunnis who hate Shiites, and it is wholly implausible that the Iranian regime would supply bombs to the enemies of its Iraqi allies.”


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/juan-cole-on-bushs-shit-talk-about-iranian-ieds/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/matt-coopers-source-review/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/matt-coopers-source-review/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 08:03:32 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/matt-coopers-source-review/ ]]> Matt Cooper’s Source
What Karl Rove told Time magazine’s reporter.

By Michael Isikoff

Newsweek
July 18 issue – It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. “Subject: Rove/P&C,” (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. “Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation …” Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, “please don’t source this to rove or even WH [White House]” and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.

Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes and e-mails, Cooper agreed to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case. Explaining that he had obtained last-minute “personal consent” from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, refused to identify her source and chose to go to jail instead.

For two years, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating the leak of Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA agent. The leak was first reported by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak apparently made some arrangement with the prosecutor, but Fitzgerald continued to press other reporters for their sources, possibly to show a pattern (to prove intent) or to make a perjury case. (It is illegal to knowingly identify an undercover CIA officer.) Rove’s words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name,” Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Rove did—and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper’s lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify.

The controversy arose when Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying that he had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson said he had found no evidence to support the claim. Wilson’s column was an early attack on the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify going to war in Iraq. The White House wished to discredit Wilson and his attacks. The question for the prosecutor is whether someone in the administration, in an effort to undermine Wilson’s credibility, intentionally revealed the covert identity of his wife.

In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson’s criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time’s editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine’s corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a “big warning” not to “get too far out on Wilson.” Rove told Cooper that Wilson’s trip had not been authorized by “DCIA”—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, “it was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.” Wilson’s wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: “not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger … “

Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame’s name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak’s column appeared; in other words, before Plame’s identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. “Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper,” Luskin told NEWSWEEK.

A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was “absolutely no inconsistency” between Cooper’s e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. “A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame’s identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false,” the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson’s trip to Africa.

Fitzgerald is known as a tenacious, thorough prosecutor. He refused to comment, and it is not clear whether he is pursuing evidence that will result in indictments, or just tying up loose ends in a messy case. But the Cooper e-mail offers one new clue to the mystery of what Fitzgerald is probing—and provides a glimpse of what was unfolding at the highest levels as the administration defended a part of its case for going to war in Iraq.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/matt-coopers-source-review/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople While Cooper got a waiver from Rove, The New York Times's Miller (second from left) went to jail http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/canada-already-hates-usnow-this/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/canada-already-hates-usnow-this/#comments Wed, 22 Mar 2006 07:51:32 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/canada-already-hates-usnow-this/ ]]> The Prince Of Pot

March 5, 2006


---

(CBS) His name is Marc Emery and he is called the “Prince of Pot.” He claims to have sold more marijuana seeds than anyone in the world and, to date, no one has disputed that claim. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the culture is rather permissive concerning marijuana. The Canadian government, for the most part, has left Emery and his business alone.

But to the U.S., he is one of the most wanted men in the drug world. As 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon reports, officials in the U.S. government want him extradited to the United States. They want him in an American prison and they want him badly.

---

Emery believes that marijuana is a wonderful, healing drug and that to criminalize it is just plain silly. To his supporters, he’s a hero, the leader of the marijuana legalization movement. He has even run for mayor of Vancouver, twice.

But to the U.S. government, Marc Emery is a drug kingpin who should be prosecuted in the United States for selling drugs to Americans.

Asked if he has any idea how many of his customers were Americans, Emery says, “Yes, I would think that of the say, 120,000 people I dealt with, I’d say certainly 70,000 would have been Americans.”

That’s why John McKay, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, wants to bring Emery south, across the border.

Why are the Americans going after Emery, who is a Canadian citizen, and not the Canadian government?

“Well, very simply, he’s a drug dealer,” says McKay. “He’s dealing drugs into the United States and violating laws of the United States and we expect to extradite him and try him in the United States.”

“Are there other Canadians who sort of are competitive with him in terms of volume?” Simon asked.

“Today, to our knowledge, Marc Emery is the biggest purveyor of marijuana from Canada into the United States,” McKay replied.

Well, it’s not exactly marijuana. For over a decade, Marc Emery sold marijuana seeds. Technically, that’s illegal in British Columbia, but no one has ever gotten more than a slap on the wrist for doing it.

Emery’s headquarters since 2002, is a store in Vancouver, which also sells marijuana paraphernalia and the magazine Emery publishes, “Cannabis Culture.” Inside the magazine is a mail order seed catalogue, but not for gardeners.

The catalogue, Emery explains, lists 550 different varieties of marijuana seeds.

“For height, you can get a short plant, a tall plant, a purple plant, a red plant, one that goes indoor, outdoor. One that’s good for almost anything that ails you,” he explains. “That I could have sold to you and it would address your medical needs or whatever your needs are in regards to cannabis.”

“Somebody could order any one of these strains and you’d just put it in an envelope?” Simon asked.

“Yes, very simple because you just need a number 10 business size envelope and away it went in the mail for just 85 cents,” Emery replied.

Emery claims to be the first marijuana seed vendor to sell seeds directly over the Internet. His Web site, Marc Emery Direct, sold seeds with names like “Chocolate Chunk” and “The Hog,” which sold at $275 Canadian (ca. $240 U.S.) for just 10 seeds, available to anyone in the world with access to a computer.

Asked how much money he has made in this business over the years, Emery says, “I would say that our sales of seeds over 10 years probably were around $15 million.”

The seeds he sold were used to grow a highly prized type of marijuana called British Columbia bud, or “BC Bud.” Only the bud of the plant is sold for smoking, making it much more potent — and expensive — than it was back in the days when people smoked crushed marijuana leaves and went to Woodstock.

“It is very powerful. It has a reputation — it’s almost been marketed, this, marijuana from British Columbia is great pot,” McKay said.

Asked if there is something special about “BC Bud” or whether it is a marketing ploy, Emery said, “They’ve had a wonderful marketing man in charge of that campaign, yours truly.”

He marketed the grass. He marketed the movement. He used the money he made selling seeds literally as seed money to finance the campaign to legalize marijuana in Canada and the United States.

His goal is to make marijuana a controlled substance like alcohol. Emery only smokes in moderation, he says, but he enjoys blowing it in the face of cops, as a provocation.

One such smoke-blowing incident got him arrested, but in tolerant Canada, he was only held for 24 hours.

He also produces and often stars in an online video show, Pot TV. His strategy, he says, is not to overthrow the government but to overgrow the government, spreading marijuana seeds throughout the world and winning the drug war against the United States.

“The whole idea was that I would help facilitate the growth of so much marijuana that the DEA and all the agencies of the United States would ever be able to destroy it at the rate I would help create it and that, ultimately, I, one man, would neutralize the work of the entire DEA with their multi-billion dollar budget,” Emery said.

While Emery was busy being the self-proclaimed “Johnny Appleseed of Marijuana,” the DEA was busy investigating him.

Last summer, the Canadian police — at the request of the U.S. government — shut down his seed business and arrested Emery, who is now out on bail.

Was he surprised that the DEA spent 18 months and a lot of money to get him charged?

“I’m flattered,” said Emery.

Why spend so much time and money investigating a seed seller? Because under U.S. law, selling seeds is the same as selling marijuana itself. And selling “BC Bud” makes Emery part of a multi-billion dollar business the United States wants to crush.

“We have a huge regional, national and international issue here in the growing of marijuana in lower British Columbia,” McKay said. “That’s a major problem for us. His activities are kind of at the leading edge of that marijuana problem. That’s the thing that really concerns us.”

Asked if the problem is growing, McKay said: “Absolutely. And literally.”

And it’s growing in some of the nicest neighborhoods in Vancouver. So much marijuana is grown inside homes in Vancouver that there’s a special unit in the local police force called “Grow Busters.”

They raid homes — often expensive ones — that have been turned into indoor marijuana farms, called grow-ops. The police estimate there could be as many as 20,000 houses like this in British Columbia.

Each room has plants at different stages of growth. The Grow Busters cut down the plants and put the grow-ops out of business. But they grow back as quickly as they’re shut down and, since Canadian courts have been soft on marijuana offenses, growers rarely get much jail time, making this a high profit, low risk business.

DEA special agent Rodney Benson took 60 Minutes up in a helicopter to see some of the ways “BC Bud” is smuggled into the United States.

Benson pointed out the border, which in this case turned out to be a road. This road divides the two countries, half of it is in Canada, half in the United States.

The border stretches 4,000 miles, often through rural areas that are hard to police. Some drug traffickers just run across the border with hockey bags full of “BC Bud,” others have more sophisticated means.

Marijuana smugglers dug a tunnel that started in a Quonset hut on the Canadian side, went under the road, and ended up in the living room of a house on the other side.

“Their plan was to have that tunnel turn into a gold mine and push in thousands of pounds of marijuana (up) into the country,” Benson explained.

“Well, guess they put a lot of hard work into it,” Simon remarked.

“Yeah, but it didn’t pay off at the end of the day. We were there waiting for them,” Benson replied.

Much of the marijuana crossing the border is smuggled by Asian and motorcycle gangs but the U.S. government says Marc Emery is responsible for more marijuana in the United States than any known gang.

Larry Campbell, a Canadian senator who formerly served on the drug squad of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, is well aware of Marc Emery.

Asked what he thinks of U.S. officials’ stance that Emery is a major drug trafficker, Campbell says laughing, “Well, if he, if they consider that, then they have bigger problems than I can even imagine. There’s simply no way he’s a major anything.”

“What would the public reaction be here if Marc Emery is extradited to the United States?” Simon asked.

“I think there’d be outrage,” Campbell replied.

They might be outraged that the long arm of the U.S. law reached up into Canada to press charges against someone many Canadians consider harmless.

John McKay says he thinks Emery will be extradited.

“Do you realize what a political issue it’s gonna be in Canada?” Simon asked.

“We have full respect for the laws of Canada, for the sovereignty of Canada. We respect their laws and they respect our laws and he’s violated our laws,” said McKay.

Actually, the laws aren’t all that different, it’s the punishment that is. For Emery, it’s the difference between a modest fine or hard time. He awaits his fate in a simple apartment — he’s never lived the lavish life of a drug dealer, since he claims to have given most of his money to the cause.

He doesn’t face any charges in Canada but, if he’s extradited to the United States, he’ll face all the charges in his indictment, which include selling and distributing marijuana.

Is everything in the indictment against him true?

“Everything that I could possibly verify is true,” said Emery. “They have our customers, they have my methods and they have copies of my Web site even in there. And those are all quite correct.”

“He said to us that nothing in the indictment is false. Everything is true. He admits that on camera,” Simon told McKay.

“Right, well we expect to prove that with his help to a jury in the United States. And we expect to send him to prison for it,” McKay replied.

McKay says, if convicted, Emery could face up to life in prison: “He has moved huge amounts of marijuana; the seeds are considered under U.S. law to be the same as marijuana plants and marijuana itself.”

McKay says he doesn’t know how much of a punishment Emery would get if convicted for the same crime in Canada, but acknowledges he’d probably get a lot less.

“Well, no one has ever gone to jail for selling seeds in Canada and only two people in 35 years have even been charged,” said Emery. “The most recent person fined for selling seeds in the year 2000 received a $200 fine.”

While Emery, with the help of his supporters, is fighting his extradition to the United States, he says he’s resigned to the possibility of prison and even sees a potential benefit, if it brings more attention to the legalization struggle.

“I am blessed by what the DEA has done,” Emery said. “I’d rather see marijuana legalized than me being saved from a U.S. jail.”

“Your language is pretty much that of a martyr,” Simon remarked.

“The language I like to use is one of a person, a leader who’s confident and prepared to accept the punishment that noble purpose will bring about,” Emery replied.

But McKay says he’s not interested in Emery’s cause.

“I’m not interested in his political beliefs, so-called political beliefs. What I’m interested in is the fact that he has distributed drugs in the United States, huge quantities of drugs,” he said. “You know he calls himself the ‘Prince of Pot’ but he may become the prince of federal prison.”

The Canadian courts will decide whether or not to hand Marc Emery over to the Americans. They’ve handed over drug dealers before and, with a newly elected conservative government in Canada, Emery fears that’s likely to happen.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/canada-already-hates-usnow-this/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/the-scourge-of-politicians-and-mobsters/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/the-scourge-of-politicians-and-mobsters/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 21:27:00 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/the-scourge-of-politicians-and-mobsters/ ]]> http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1707291,00.html

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/the-scourge-of-politicians-and-mobsters/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/patrick-fitzgerald-is-eliot-ness-with-a-harvard-law-degree/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/patrick-fitzgerald-is-eliot-ness-with-a-harvard-law-degree/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 21:25:28 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/patrick-fitzgerald-is-eliot-ness-with-a-harvard-law-degree/ ]]> Think Again: Mr. Fitzgerald’s Unanswered Questions

by Eric Alterman
November 3, 2005 

According to this week’s Newsweek, the nation enjoyed two historic moments last Friday. The first was special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s press conference outlining his perjury case against “Cheney’s Cheney,” I(rve) Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The second – occurring simultaneously – was that “in the small dining room adjoining the Oval Office, [President Bush] was doing something uncharacteristic: watching live news on TV.” Apparently, the president only watched the first 20 minutes or so of the press conference, but for a guy who famously avoids both print and broadcast news, any small step toward engagement with the “reality-based community” may be a giant step for mankind.

Alas, Fitzgerald’s press conference proved a disappointment to many, in part owing to the attending reporters’ inability to ask him questions he might be likely to answer. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to speculate about where his ongoing investigation might lead, and made clear early on that he wouldn’t discuss certain topics, but numerous reporters appeared more intent on creating sound bites than in garnering whatever information might be available, and instead, inspired repeat after repeat of the special prosecutor’s non-response.

Since Fitzgerald has said he has no intention of issuing a final report about this complicated matter, it remains the responsibility of the reporters themselves to fill in the many holes he left in the story. Americans still need to know just what kind of conspiracy was launched here – not merely to attack the credibility of Joe Wilson and blow the cover off his CIA agent wife, but also to fool the nation into going to war. Here are just a few of them:

Where’s Dick?

As The Washington Post’s Bart Gellman reported in his excellent exegesis of the known story so far, “Libby and Cheney made separate inquiries to the CIA about Wilson’s wife, and each confirmed independently that she worked there. It was Cheney, the indictment states, who supplied Libby the detail ‘that Wilson’s wife worked . . . in the Counterproliferation Division’ – an unambiguous declaration that her position was among the case officers of the operations directorate.” The question we still need to ask is, “Do we know the extent of Cheney’s involvement in his subordinate’s decision to leak classified information and lie about it to a Grand Jury?” We know part of the answer from the indictment itself, and as Josh Marshall pointed out, “Libby had consulted with Cheney about how to handle inquiries from journalists about the vice president’s role in sending Wilson to Africa in early 2002.”

What’s more, on the now-infamous July 12, 2003 Air Force Two flight from Washington to Norfolk, Virginia, according to the indictment, “LIBBY discussed with other officials aboard the plane what LIBBY should say in response to certain pending media inquiries, including questions from Time reporter Matthew Cooper.” Who, exactly, are these “other officials?” Is one of them the vice president? As Gellman wrote in the Post, on that flight “the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson’s credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source.” The question we need to answer is: What else did Cheney “instruct his aide” to do? And are any of these actions indictable? Has Anybody Pled Guilty?

Another thing we still don’t know is if anyone pled guilty in the case. As TNR’s Ryan Lizza reported over the weekend, he asked Fitzgerald’s spokesman Randall Samborn just that question. Samborn partially dodged the question, telling Lizza that there was no “public record” of any pleas. Not satisfied, Lizza put the question to “a white collar criminal defense attorney,” who told him that “Guilty pleas can be taken under seal – and often are – when the person entering the plea is cooperating with the government and they do not want to tip off the other targets or there is a safety concern. Also, plea agreements could have already been reached but not formally entered in court.” Where’s Phase II?

All this was wrought, in the end, by the administration’s use of faulty intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In a bit of crystal ball gazing this past Sunday, Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s failure to issue the “Phase II” section of its report on the administration’s use of that intelligence, calling it a “scandal in its own right.” It is, although it has largely been ignored until Murray Waas reported in The National Journal last week that Cheney and Libby were refusing to hand over to the committee certain documents, which included “the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell’s notorious presentation of W.M.D. ‘evidence’ to the U.N. on the eve of war.” As we know, Harry Reid threw this in the face of the nation on Tuesday, when he invoked Rule 21 and forced Senate Republicans to agree to form a bipartisan committee to find out why we haven’t seen this “Phase II” report.

Where’s Novak?

Enough said.

Will we ever have fully satisfactory answers to questions that initially inspired the Fitzgerald investigation, as well as those it has raised in its wake? Likely not. But if reporters and news organizations decide to invest the time and money in trying to find the answers to these and other key questions, they might at least make a start at making amends to their readers, viewers and listeners for accepting administration claims at face value in the first place, and allowing the nation to be led by lies into war.

Just one request to Bill Keller and the folks at the Times, however: Could you please keep Judy Miller off the story? She’s done her part….

Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of six books, including most recently, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, just published in paperback by Penguin.

 

www.americanprogress.org


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/patrick-fitzgerald-is-eliot-ness-with-a-harvard-law-degree/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/become-a-gmail-master/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/become-a-gmail-master/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 21:13:34 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/become-a-gmail-master/ ]]> Gmail is hands-down the best web-based email service on the ‘net. Conversation threads, search, tagging, and keyboard shortcuts have completely revolutionized the way I look at my inbox. I manage all of my email from my personal Gmail inbox, including the daily flood of Lifehacker messages. At this point, I can’t imagine a program I could use to manage my email any more efficiently.

Despite my undying love for Gmail, there are still a lot of people who aren’t won over by sheer enthusiasm alone, and still others who just aren’t taking full advantage of the features and functions they’ve got at their fingertips in Gmail. Either way, the only thing a Gmail naysayer needs is a better understanding of everything you can do with Gmail.

Today I’ve got a rundown of the methods and add-ons I use to make Gmail more powerful. By the time you’re done with this article you’ll be a bona fide Gmail power user, too.

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/gmail/hack-attack-become-a-gmail-master-161399.php


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/become-a-gmail-master/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/accuracy-in-media-to-russert-withdraw-from-coverage/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/accuracy-in-media-to-russert-withdraw-from-coverage/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 20:55:10 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/accuracy-in-media-to-russert-withdraw-from-coverage/ ]]> WASHINGTON: Citing his role as a likely prosecution witness in a criminal trial involving former vice-presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby, Accuracy in Media said today that Tim Russert of NBC News should voluntarily remove himself from any network coverage of the CIA leak case. “The basic standards of fair and objective journalism require that Russert withdraw from the coverage,” declared AIM editor Cliff Kincaid. “He is a widely respected journalist but he is just too deeply involved in this case to continue to report or comment on it.”
http://www.aim.org/press_release/4130_0_19_0_C/

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/accuracy-in-media-to-russert-withdraw-from-coverage/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/friendster-lost-steam-is-myspace-just-a-fad/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/friendster-lost-steam-is-myspace-just-a-fad/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 20:53:24 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/friendster-lost-steam-is-myspace-just-a-fad/ ]]> http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/friendster-lost-steam-is-myspace-just-a-fad/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/every-one-of-valerie-plames-contacts-has-been-blown/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/every-one-of-valerie-plames-contacts-has-been-blown/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 19:12:05 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/every-one-of-valerie-plames-contacts-has-been-blown/ ]]> It’s super-double-secret information for a reason: Outing covert agents has consequences

Too often lost amid the irrelevant noise about whether Rove said Plame’s name, whether he was trying to warn reporters away from incorrect stories, or how often Valerie Plame went to Langley, is any substantive discussion of the consequences of Plame’s outing. Covert agents, after all, are covert for a reason, and disclosing their identity has real-world implications.

In October 2003, Time magazine reported that Plame was a “CIA spy tracking weapons of mass destruction (WMD).” Former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski told Time, “Her career as an undercover operative is over. … She will no longer be safe traveling overseas.” In other words, the outing cost the CIA an intelligence asset — and may have put Plame’s life at risk.

But that’s not all, as Time explained:

[I]n this case, the officer was one who was working on the most vital security issue of all, the proliferation of WMD. At a time when good intelligence and successful spying has never been more essential to the nation’s defense, the deliberate unmasking of a spy sent shudders through the secret web of spooks worldwide. When a U.S. operative is unmasked, foreign spy agencies go back, retrace his steps, review his contacts and try to figure out how the CIA operated in their country. “Anyone who was seen with her overseas is tainted now,” warns a former officer who knew Plame. “If she went to the grocery store and talked to the grocer, people will say, ‘I wonder if he was working for her?’”

In Plame’s case, the damage may go even deeper. Plame was an NOC, meaning she did her job overseas under nonofficial cover and not out of an embassy or government office. Many in her family did not know she worked for the agency. Such unofficial covers are often with private companies to further disguise an operative’s real work. Plame had worked with Brewster Jennings & Associates, an obscure energy firm that may have been a CIA front company. Deep covers take time, luck and work to develop; the outing of an NOC also blows the cover of the involved business or private entity.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/every-one-of-valerie-plames-contacts-has-been-blown/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/iraq-3-year-report-reason-online/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/iraq-3-year-report-reason-online/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:25:17 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/iraq-3-year-report-reason-online/ ]]> Iraq Progress Report

Advocates for liberty weigh in after three years

A Reason survey

As the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaches, Reason asked a wide range of libertarian, conservative, and freedom-minded journalists and academics to assess the war, the occupation, and how their views have or have not changed.

 

http://www.reason.com/hod/iraqthreeyears.shtml


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/iraq-3-year-report-reason-online/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/eight-lies-about-iraq-from-4-years-ago/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/eight-lies-about-iraq-from-4-years-ago/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:23:00 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/eight-lies-about-iraq-from-4-years-ago/ ]]> http://www.antiwar.com/rep/utley9.html

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/eight-lies-about-iraq-from-4-years-ago/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/libby-lawyers-law-thingy-judy-and-the-times/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/libby-lawyers-law-thingy-judy-and-the-times/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:06:01 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/libby-lawyers-law-thingy-judy-and-the-times/ ]]> Lawyers for Libby Subpoena Reporter and New York Times

By ADAM LIPTAK

Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who faces charges of obstruction of justice, served subpoenas on Tuesday on The New York Times Company and a former reporter for The Times, Judith Miller.

The subpoenas seek documents concerning the disclosure of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson. Mr. Libby has been charged with lying to a grand jury about how he learned about Ms. Wilson’s identity.

Ms. Miller testified before the grand jury last fall, after having served 85 days in jail to protect a confidential source later revealed to be Mr. Libby. She also provided the grand jury with edited notes of her interviews with Mr. Libby. Ms. Miller retired from The Times in November.

The new subpoenas seek her notes and other materials, including any other documents concerning Ms. Wilson prepared by Ms. Miller and Nicholas D. Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times; drafts of a personal account by Ms. Miller published in The Times in October concerning her grand jury testimony; documents concerning her interactions with an editor of The Times; and documents concerning a recent Vanity Fair article on the investigation.

A lawyer for Mr. Libby, William H. Jeffress Jr., would not say whether other reporters and news organizations had been subpoenaed. Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC News have received subpoenas, their representatives said.

A spokeswoman for The Times said its lawyers were reviewing the subpoena served on it. A lawyer for Ms. Miller, Robert S. Bennett, said she would probably fight her subpoena.

“It’s entirely too broad,” Mr. Bennett said. “It’s highly likely we’ll be filing something with the court.”


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/libby-lawyers-law-thingy-judy-and-the-times/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/cia-was-making-specific-efforts-to-conceal-plames-covvert-status/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/cia-was-making-specific-efforts-to-conceal-plames-covvert-status/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:03:01 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/cia-was-making-specific-efforts-to-conceal-plames-covvert-status/ ]]> Newsweek
Feb. 13, 2006 issue – Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done “covert work overseas” on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA “was making specific efforts to conceal” her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge’s opinion. (A CIA spokesman at the time is quoted as saying Plame was “unlikely” to take further trips overseas, though.) Fitzgerald concluded he could not charge Libby for violating a 1982 law banning the outing of a covert CIA agent; apparently he lacked proof Libby was aware of her covert status when he talked about her three times with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald did consider charging Libby with violating the so-called Espionage Act, which prohibits the disclosure of “national defense information,” the papers show; he ended up indicting Libby for lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame.

The new papers show Libby testified he was told about Plame by Cheney “in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion” in mid-June—before he talked about her with Miller and Time magazine’s Matt Cooper. Libby’s trial has been put off until January 2007, keeping Cheney off the witness stand until after the elections. A spokeswoman for Libby’s lawyers declined to comment on Plame’s status.

—Michael Isikoff


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/cia-was-making-specific-efforts-to-conceal-plames-covvert-status/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/arrianna-on-the-vanity-fair-piece-on-judy-miller-the-willfull-misleader/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/arrianna-on-the-vanity-fair-piece-on-judy-miller-the-willfull-misleader/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:44:15 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/arrianna-on-the-vanity-fair-piece-on-judy-miller-the-willfull-misleader/ ]]> There are three fundamental problems with Marie Brenner’s 15-page piece on Plamegate and Judy Miller in the April Vanity Fair (hitting newsstands tomorrow):

1.) It’s laughably biased. Brenner is a close friend of Miller — she co-hosted a dinner for her on July 4th before Miller headed to jail, visited her at the Alexandria Detention Center, partied with her after her release, and is longtime friends with Miller’s husband, who used to be Brenner’s editor.

The article is nothing more than a massive attempt to rehab the disgraced reporter.

But Brenner doesn’t mention that she even knows Miller until 7 pages into the article and doesn’t mention that they are friends until 11 pages in (long after painting a highly favorable picture of Judy as a misunderstood victim/martyr/heroine).

“At times,” writes Brenner of Plamegate, “the complexities of reporters’ commenting on one another’s behavior had the feel of a taffy pull as friends wrote about friends while trying to exhibit detachment.” That surely makes this piece the ultimate taffy pull.

Full disclosure: I have been friends with Brenner for thirty years — I can’t swear that she danced at my wedding, but she definitely attended it — and I respect her loyalty to her friend. But that loyalty should be expressed privately, not by trying to rewrite history in the pages of a national magazine. Also, especially given our friendship, I find it telling that Brenner — even though the Huffington Post‘s coverage of Plamegate is discussed repeatedly in the article — never talked to me for her piece. Instead, the weekend before her deadline, she left me an obligatory voice mail message saying she had some questions for me; I promptly returned her call but never heard back.

This isn’t journalism; it’s a Sag Harbor circle jerk.

2.) It’s shockingly incomplete and incoherent. In order to make her Plamegate narrative fit a predetermined frame of Judy as First Amendment martyr, Brenner has to leap over huge chunks of the story. Because of this, the article is both extremely basic — Plamegate 101, seemingly written for folks who haven’t picked up a newspaper or turned on a computer in the last couple of years — and almost impossible to follow. If Brenner were your sole source of information, you’d have absolutely no idea what really happened with Miller and the Times. There is no mention of the unprecedented Times mea culpa about Miller’s prewar coverage, and next to nothing on the internal struggle at the paper that saw Miller go from Judy of Arc, lauded in 15 Times editorials and compared to Rosa Parks, to a W 43rd Street pariah being publicly slammed by Times editors and columnists and shown the door. We get Floyd Abrams as avuncular Free Speech hero but no explanation of why he was eventually replaced by Bob Bennett as Judy’s lead attorney. Maureen Dowd warrants the most minor of mentions, and, most bizarrely, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. — long Judy’s staunchest supporter — isn’t mentioned at all.

And since Brenner is so intent on casting Judy as a journalistic superhero (even though no one bought her in that role last time around), she needs to put her up against a villain — and casts the dastardly blogosphere in that part. She cluelessly treats bloggers as some kind of monolithic entity, “a vast amoeba,” while totally missing the point of the blogosphere — its relentlessness and its willingness to go where the establishment media won’t.

In Brenner’s telling, “the noisy new democracy of the blogs” — “Chalabi-haters, Rove fanatics, bloviators” — is inaccurate, quick to judge, and unencumbered by conventional journalistic constraints.

Incredibly, Brenner sees no irony in accusing bloggers of being inaccurate and without editorial constraints while defending Miller, whose tragically inaccurate reporting, plastered all over the front page of the “paper of record,” became an indispensable tool used by the White House to sell the Iraq war to the American people.

Leave it to Brenner to totally ignore this giant pink elephant in the middle of the room.

3.) Brenner’s central thesis is wrong. Her overarching premise is that that Judy Miller went to jail for a noble cause — the ability of reporters to protect confidential sources — but the public and the press (led by those nasty bloggers) failed her and now it’s open season on the free press.

“Traditionally,” she writes, “there have been two generally recognized exceptions to journalistic privilege: matters of life and death and imminent actual threat to national security.” But there is a third exception that Brenner conveniently leaves out, an exception spelled out in the ethical guidelines of the New York Times: “We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack.” This was unequivocally the case with Plamegate. And, as the Times‘ ethical guidelines make clear, there is a world of difference between sources using confidentiality to blow the whistle on government or corporate misconduct, and sources using it to promote a war — or to smear a critic of that war.

Even inaccurate, unedited, bloviating bloggers know that.

Brenner’s piece is hyped as “the untold story of Plamegate.” Turns out, there is nothing untold here — but a whole lot that the untold story doesn’t tell.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/arrianna-on-the-vanity-fair-piece-on-judy-miller-the-willfull-misleader/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/pat-tillmans-dad-is-angry/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/pat-tillmans-dad-is-angry/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:35:55 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/pat-tillmans-dad-is-angry/ ]]> Pat Tillman’s Dad: ” What Happened To My Son…It Has Been Lie After Lie After Lie”…

Posted on March 20, 2006 at 8:06 PM. 

Patrick K. Tillman stood outside his law office here, staring intently at a yellow house across the street, just over 70 yards away. That, he recalled, is how far away his eldest son, Pat, who gave up a successful N.F.L. career to become an Army Ranger, was standing from his fellow Rangers when they shot him dead in Afghanistan almost two years ago.

Read the full story »


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/pat-tillmans-dad-is-angry/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/richard-cohen-calls-cia-leak-crappy-little-crime/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/richard-cohen-calls-cia-leak-crappy-little-crime/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:10:02 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/richard-cohen-calls-cia-leak-crappy-little-crime/ ]]> Big-Name Journalists Spar Over Sources at NYC Gathering

By Jennifer Saba
Source: Editor & Publisher

NEW YORK This morning, Court TV gathered a group of columnists, editors, attorneys, and academics to discuss “the rule of the law vs. the rule of journalism” at the popular media haunt Michael’s in mid-town New York. With panelists Norman Pearlstine, Floyd Abrams, Nicholas Lemann, Richard Cohen, Michael Goodwin, Michael Wolff, Paul Holmes, and moderator Catherine Crier, the allotted hour was barely enough time to kick around complicated issues — like the unfolding of the Plame story and other related concerns about confidentially and anonymous sources.

During his opening remarks, Henry Schleiff, chairman and CEO of Court TV, tried to sum up the theme of the breakfast panel as “Sophie’s Choice for the mensa group.”

With that, Court TV’s Crier threw out the first question, seized by the call-’em-as-he-sees-’em Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Michael Wolff.

Crier: “When is a source not a source?”

Wolff: “When the source is a story. That’s a softball question.”

Wolff, whose column in the September issue of Vanity Fair sharply hit the role of journalists in the Plame story, pushed his argument even further this morning over a plate of scrambled eggs and pancakes. He posited that if Time magazine had run the Matt Cooper story — i.e. Rove as the leaker and master puppeteer — a year ago, President Bush may not be in office serving a second term or we may not have had as many deaths in Iraq.

Further, Wolff called this the “biggest story of our age.”

First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, who is representing jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller in the Plame case, dismissed Wolff’s remarks as pure hyperbole. “Reporters should keep their word to their sources,” he said.

Washington Post Op-Ed columnist Richard Cohen seemed to enjoy sparring with Wolff the most: “This is not a major story. It’s a crappy little crime and it may not be a crime at all,” he said. “The issue is this: You gave your word, you stick to it.”


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/richard-cohen-calls-cia-leak-crappy-little-crime/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/aim-urges-nbcs-russert-to-step-aside-from-network-coverage-of-cia-leak-case/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/aim-urges-nbcs-russert-to-step-aside-from-network-coverage-of-cia-leak-case/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:04:36 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/aim-urges-nbcs-russert-to-step-aside-from-network-coverage-of-cia-leak-case/ ]]> http://www.aim.org/press_release/4130_0_19_0_C/

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/aim-urges-nbcs-russert-to-step-aside-from-network-coverage-of-cia-leak-case/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/what-a-bunch-of-fuck-ups-at-the-department-of-justicei-mean-really/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/what-a-bunch-of-fuck-ups-at-the-department-of-justicei-mean-really/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 07:18:05 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/what-a-bunch-of-fuck-ups-at-the-department-of-justicei-mean-really/ ]]> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-botched14mar14,0,2818335.story?coll=la-home-headlines

From the Los Angeles Times

Moussaoui Case Is Latest Misstep in Prosecutions

‘There have been a lot of flubs,’ a law professor says of the U.S. record in terrorism trials.

By David G. Savage and Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writers

March 14, 2006

WASHINGTON — The botched handling of witnesses in the sentencing trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is the latest in a series of missteps and false starts that have beset the Bush administration’s prosecution of terrorism cases.

The government has seen juries reject high-profile terrorism charges, judges throw out convictions because of mistakes by the prosecution and the FBI suffer the embarrassment of wrongly accusing an Oregon lawyer of participating in the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

“There have been a lot of flubs,” said George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg. “I think most observers would say they were underwhelmed by the prosecutions brought so far.”

On several occasions, top administration officials have promised more than they delivered. For example, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced in 2002 that Jose Padilla, a Bronx-born Muslim, had been arrested on suspicion of “exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.”

Padilla was held nearly four years in a military brig without being charged. This year, as his lawyers appealed his case to the Supreme Court, the administration indicted him in Miami on charges of conspiring to aid terrorists abroad. There was no mention of a “dirty bomb.”

In May 2004, the FBI arrested Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer and Muslim convert, saying that his fingerprint was on a bag containing detonators and explosives linked to the Madrid train bombings that had killed 191 people two months before. The former Army officer was held as a material witness even though officials in Spain considered the fingerprint evidence inconclusive.

Mayfield was freed after almost three weeks in custody and received an apology from the FBI, which blamed the misidentification on a substandard digital image from Spanish authorities.

In other instances, prosecutors took cases to court that proved to be weak:

•  A computer science student in Idaho was accused of aiding terrorists when he designed a website that included information on terrorists in Chechnya and Israel. A jury in Boise acquitted Sami Omar Al-Hussayen of the charges in June 2004.

•  A Florida college professor was indicted on charges of supporting terrorists by promoting the cause of Palestinian groups. A jury in Tampa acquitted Sami Al-Arian in December.

•  Two Detroit men arrested a week after the Sept. 11 attacks were believed to be plotting a terrorist incident, in part based on sketches found in their apartment. A judge overturned the convictions of Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi after he learned that the prosecutor’s key witness had admitted lying to the FBI, a fact the prosecutor had kept hidden.

David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has been critical of such prosecutions, blamed pressure from the top. “The government in the war on terrorism has generally swept broadly and put a high premium on convictions at any cost,” he said. “That puts pressures on prosecutors — to overcharge, to coach witnesses, to fail to disclose exculpatory evidence.”

But Andrew McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Virginia, said it was unfair to blame prosecutors for the apparent witness tampering in the Moussaoui case.

“You can’t really lay this at the door of the prosecution,” he said. “This is a lawyer at the TSA [Transportation Security Administration] who screwed up. The rule of witnesses is pretty well known. You would think she would know you are not supposed to discuss the earlier testimony with your witnesses.”

In a recent report on its terrorism prosecutions, the Justice Department called Moussaoui’s decision last year to plead guilty to conspiracy charges one of its leading successes.

But U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema already has questioned whether the French citizen deserves the death penalty; Moussaoui was in jail in Minnesota on a visa violation when hijackers seized four passenger jets and caused almost 3,000 deaths by crashing them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. the Supreme Court has said the death penalty should be reserved for murderers and “major participants” in murder plots. Prosecutors are pushing for the death penalty under the theory that Moussaoui could have prevented the terrorist attacks by telling the FBI about the plot.

Terrorism cases have proved to be especially difficult for prosecutors because investigators need to disrupt plots before they come to fruition. That leaves prosecutors to make a decision on whether to bring a thin case to court. By contrast, in drug cases, police and drug agents can track suspects and arrest them when they take possession of large quantities of narcotics.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, officials feared there were terrorist “sleeper cells” throughout the nation, ready to spring into action. Since then, the determined pursuit of Al Qaeda members and sympathizers has turned up relatively few terrorists.

“The good news may be that there are not as many threatening people out there as we once thought,” law professor Saltzburg said.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/what-a-bunch-of-fuck-ups-at-the-department-of-justicei-mean-really/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/new-york-cee-dee-reviews/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/new-york-cee-dee-reviews/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 07:06:25 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/new-york-cee-dee-reviews/ ]]> AND NOW… NEXT WEEK’S NEW RELEASES!

A DVD: Still riding high from their reunion tour, the Robinson brothers, better known as the BLACK CROWES, are documented on “FREAK N’ ROLL INTO THE FOG,” shot live at the Fillmore in San Francisco from their four night run last August that featured your favorite hits, a treasure trove of covers, and an inspired acoustic set. 19 tracks plus bonus material.

ANOTHER DVD: DAVID BOWIE’s “SERIOUS MOONLIGHT” tour of 1983 finally gets proper DVD treatment in the US. Featuring an inspired set of new and old material as well as the bonus documentary “Ricochet,” which was shot during the Far East portion of the tour.

YET ONE MORE DVD: QUEEN – “THE MAKING OF A NIGHT AT THE OPERA” is just that, an in-depth look into the creation of one of the greatest albums of the ’70s, featuring interviews with Brian May, Roger Taylor, Joe Perry, Ian Hunter, and the always eloquent Nuno Bettencourt.

LUKA BLOOM – “INNOCENCE.” The introspective and super-sensitive Irishman releases his tenth album, hot on the heels of Purim.

ELVIS COSTELLO – “THE JULIET LETTERS” (2 CD EXPANDED REMASTER). 1993′s experiment in chamber-pop, featuring the Brodsky Quartet, was one of those “love it or hate it” records, but even if you didn’t go for the Brodskys’ classically-tinged backings, Costello’s writing and vocals were first-rate as usual. The remaster includes a bonus disc of rare and unreleased material of more of Costello’s forays into classical from throughout the ’90s, as well as some live tracks recorded at Town Hall with the Brodskys, one of which is an incredibly moving version of the standard “They Didn’t Believe Me.” For the record, Sal loves it, and Tony doesn’t dis-love it.

BEN HARPER – “BOTH SIDES OF THE GUN.” Split up over two CDs, which together equal the running time of one CD, Harper ruminates about the long running time of CDs and how they should be shorter. A concept album that really works. For those paying attention, Harper has always been a favorite among surfer dudes and jam band-loving hackysackers, and this record shows both sides of Harper’s gun. One side of his gun is really rockin’, and the other side of his gun is kind of acoustic. Put them together and you get one heck of a gun. Probably the best record he’s made without the Five Blind Boys Of Alabama.

HOWARD KAYLAN (OF THE TURTLES) – “DUST BUNNIES.” We mostly want to know what the following means: “The songs were handpicked by Kaylan from years of seldom-heard B-sides and album cuts recorded by his favorite artists and supplemented by new arrangements of more familiar pieces, and a rock original or two.” HUH?

LOOSE FUR – “BORN AGAIN IN THE U.S.A.” Sophomore release from the Wilco side project. When their first album came out a few years ago in the wake of Wilco albums like “Summerteeth,” it sounded pretty out-there, almost experimental. Now, compared to the last few Wilco albums, this one sounds like a pop album in comparison. Highly recommended, whether or not you’re a Wilco fan.

PRINCE – “3121.” OK, we said all the crap about it last week. Who cares, he’s over, yada yada. Truth is, it’s a pretty good album, and much better than the over-hyped and overrated “Musicology.” It seems as if, for the first time since 1987′s “Sign O’ The Times,” and even 1996′s underrated and underappreciated “Emancipation,” Prince has put together a cohesive collection of songs that actually sounds like one recording session, as opposed to a collection of throwaways from his vaults. Take it from two diehard Prince fans-turned-Prince haters: the first two or three songs that have been heard by the masses (“Black Sweat,” “Te Amo Corazon,” and “Fury”) are three of the weakest songs on the record. Prince is back?

SOUTHERN CULTURE ON THE SKIDS – “DOUBLEWIDE AND LIVE.” Everyone’s favorite chicken eatin’ white trash rockers release their first commercially available live record. If you’ve never been to one of their live shows, this is evidence of what a great time you’ve been missing all these years.

SPARKS – “HELLO YOUNG LOVERS.” The brilliant followup to “Lil Beethoven” gets a US release. Words cannot describe just what the Mael brothers do with instruments and words, but we will provide you with a special link where you can find a film clip of Tony and Sal explaining just what this record sounds like, with the assistance of a spatula and a whole lot of xanthan gum.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/new-york-cee-dee-reviews/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/andrea-marcovicci-rolls/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/andrea-marcovicci-rolls/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:56:04 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/andrea-marcovicci-rolls/ ]]> from Alter-reviews:
I saw Andrea Marcovicci perform a show of Cole Porter love songs at the Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel last week. The woman is a throwback to a better time and place. Marcovicci, has a mature beauty, a fierce intelligence, a hungry mind, and voice that blends in with her carefully chosen material that combines into an iconic cabaret performance. Whitney Balliett, writing over a decade ago, described one of her performances, as follows: 

“[Her] set in the Oak Room generally includes over twenty songs, and lasts an hour and a half. She starts poised on a small platform in the crook of the piano, both hands on a floor microphone in front of her. A measure into her first song, her hands take off. She holds them at her sides, index fingers pointed at the floor, or moves them willow-fashion on either side of her head, or knots them together at one side of her waist. Then she rests her right hand on the piano and, folding her left leg up behind her, grasps the heel of the shoe with her left hand–a “Gee, I’m shy” gesture from a thirties Ginger Rogers movie. All the while, she turns slowly from side to side, giving the impression that she is trying to look into the eyes of each of her listeners. (When she catches you, you suddenly feel like the only person in the room.) Around her seventh or eighth song, she takes the microphone from its stand and sails easily up onto the piano. She crosses her legs, then lets one leg dangle over the edge. Her hands keep dancing. She combs her short brown hair with her fingers and rests her hands, palms down, on the piano, steadying herself in the waves of applause. Somewhere around the thirteenth number, she jumps down on the platform and finishes the set there. She smiles much of the time, but when she does a ballad her eyes go dark and the lines on either side of her mouth tighten and she looks as tragic as Duse.”

I can’t really improve on that. The current show is part of an ongoing project she is undertaking to rescue some of Porter’s lesser known material and present the better known songs in a new context. It is a warm, witty show which she is taking around the country. You can see her at the Oak Room if you have a lot of money or you can buy the cd—which she is pressing minus the artwork until she makes enough money to add that later. Read up on her here.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/andrea-marcovicci-rolls/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/alterman-breaksdown-the-msnbc-heads/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/alterman-breaksdown-the-msnbc-heads/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:52:57 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/alterman-breaksdown-the-msnbc-heads/ ]]> Hey MSNBC-TV guys. You ruined my bagel Monday morning with your full page ad.  I didn’t mind the photos—I don’t love them, but I can live with them,–but why in the world did you guys leave out the captions? Here they are, as public service:
• Norah O’Donnell, alleged moderate, no politics
• Pat Buchanan, nice guy, extremist conservative, proud McCarthyite, possible anti-Semite, Reagan adviser
• Keith Olbermann, no politics
• Chris Matthews, alleged “moderate,” hated Clinton and Gore, loved Bush, but opposed war and worked for Tip O’Neil, extremist Catholic moralist.
• Joe Scarborough, nice guy, extremist conservative, Republican congressman
• Peggy Noonan, extremist conservative, believer in magic dolphins, Bush worshipper, Reagan adviser
• Howard Fineman, alleged moderate but actually voice of (mostly) conservative conventional wisdom, no politics.

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/alterman-breaksdown-the-msnbc-heads/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/72/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/72/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:46:01 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/72/ ]]>

---

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fourwallers20mar20,0,6835689.story?page=1&coll=la-home-headlinesFrom the Los Angeles Times

COLUMN ONE

Playing Out of Pocket

In a Las Vegas practice known as ‘four-walling,’ entertainers pay to perform. It’s worked for George Wallace. Robert Goulet is another story.

By Sam Howe Verhovek
Times Staff Writer

March 20, 2006

LAS VEGAS — To pitch his product, George Wallace has glad-handed every concierge in Las Vegas and talked up hundreds of taxi and limo drivers. He’s gotten up at 4 a.m. to do drive-time radio on the East Coast.

He’s pored over spreadsheets, working to stretch the hundreds of thousands of dollars he spends on billboard, newspaper and radio ads.

Then, shortly after 10 p.m. five nights a week, Wallace steps onto a stage he rents at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino and presents cocktail-sipping audiences with what he’s been selling: the George Wallace show.

Wallace, 53, is a comedian, a friendly bear of a man who once wrote jokes for Redd Foxx. Now he draws laughs with a grumpy shtick of his own, a harangue on subjects ranging from a nephew in baggy pants — “I wanted to kick his tail, but I didn’t know where it was” — to indulgent ministers who preach “six commandments and four do-the-best-you-cans.”

But to perform his comedy, Wallace also has had to become an entrepreneur of sorts. He takes a multimillion-dollar risk by literally paying to play in Las Vegas.

In Vegas parlance, Wallace is a “four-waller,” the term used when an entertainer pays for his or her stage time. It’s an increasingly common arrangement that guarantees the hotel or casino rent and puts much of the marketing and production onus on the performer, unlike the more traditional contract in which the performer receives a set fee.

For the entertainer — often an aging star or perhaps one who never made the showbiz A-list — four-walling is a huge roll of the dice, with odds of success that make the craps tables look inviting.

Performers like Wallace, who is entering his third year at the Flamingo, can make four-walling pay if they sell enough tickets to make their rent and payroll, which for him is no small matter. Wallace oversees a staff of 14, including stagehands, light operators and even the maitre d’ who seats his customers.

While some four-wallers can turn a profit, they can also lose big — running through a bankroll in a hurry. And in the brutal economics of Las Vegas show business, even if they pay the rent, entertainers risk being tossed out if they do not bring in enough people. Casinos not only expect customers to go to the show, but also to arrive early or stay afterward — preferably both — and gamble.

Perhaps the most notable collapse of these self-financed arrangements happened with onetime heartthrob Robert Goulet, the singer and actor, who pulled the plug on his 2001 four-wall deal at the Venetian after just a month, calling it “the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

Expenses for his show, “Robert Goulet: The Man and His Music,” were far outstripping ticket revenue, he said. Among these were the $15,000-a-night cost of the Venetian’s Showroom stage.

“It’s a losing game, and it’s a shame Las Vegas has gone that route,” said Goulet’s wife and manager, Vera Goulet, who added that she still bristles at the experience.

“A man like Robert Goulet shouldn’t have to pay to perform,” she said. “He should be paid to perform.”

Neither party to four-walling particularly likes to advertise the arrangement, and financial details are often kept secret by mutual agreement. Some casinos run as many as four shows a day through a given stage.

And although casino executives say they use pretty much the same yardstick for four-wall deals that they would for traditional contracts — an ability to draw a crowd — four-walling has obvious advantages.

“Absolutely it’s less of a risk overall,” said Ira Sternberg, a vice president for community relations at the Las Vegas Hilton and host of a weekly radio show. Other casino executives describe the arrangement as a “more dependable” or “more straightforward” revenue source.

But the odds are against the performer, said David Saxe, a producer here who is also an adjunct professor in the hotel and casino school at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Saxe estimated that only about 10% of those who four-wall make any money. “It’s a tough town,” added Saxe, who produces “V — the Ultimate Variety Show” at the Aladdin’s Desert Passage.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/72/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/where-are-the-meapons-of-wass-destruction/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/where-are-the-meapons-of-wass-destruction/#comments Tue, 21 Mar 2006 06:35:20 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/where-are-the-meapons-of-wass-destruction/ ]]> What the hell is a “weapons of mass destruction-related program activity?”  And what is its relationship to statements like these:”Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
-Dick Cheney Speech to VFW National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002

“Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.”
-George W. Bush Speech to U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 12, 2002

“We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”
-Ari Fleischer Press Briefing, Jan. 9, 2003

“I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We’re just getting it just now.”
-Colin Powell Remarks to Reporters, May 4, 2003


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/where-are-the-meapons-of-wass-destruction/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/iran-makes-bush-and-staff-seepy-seepy/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/iran-makes-bush-and-staff-seepy-seepy/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 08:43:19 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/iran-makes-bush-and-staff-seepy-seepy/ ]]> From John Amato at  the indispensible Crooks and Liars:

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TDS-Bush-Iran-IED.wmv


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/iran-makes-bush-and-staff-seepy-seepy/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/remember-when-the-post-did-that-story-on-missile-defense/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/remember-when-the-post-did-that-story-on-missile-defense/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 08:37:30 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/remember-when-the-post-did-that-story-on-missile-defense/ ]]> FROM ALTERCATION: 

HO HUM, More dishonesty, more wasted money, more scandals buried deep inside the Washington Post and largely uncovered elsewhere.  This one, you guessed it: “Missile Defense Testing May Be Inadequate.”  Hey Mr. Headline Writer, that is one hell of a “may” you got there.  Anyway, I miss the days when this was one of our most significant problems.  Speaking of the Post, Michael Getler thinks there’s “lots of smoke and probably a fire” in its pro-war, pro-Bush biases

.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/remember-when-the-post-did-that-story-on-missile-defense/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople cohen_lebowski.jpg http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/66/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/66/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:35:01 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/66/ ]]>

If Bush ruled the world

William Pfaff

MONDAY, MARCH 20, 2006

PARIS Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration’s new National Security Strategy statement, issued on Thursday. Its overall incoherence, its clichés and stereotyped phraseology give the impression that Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and his fellow authors assembled it from the boilerplate of bureaucratic discourse with contempt for the Congress to whom it is primarily addressed.

It reveals the administration’s foreign policy as a lumpy stew of discredited neoconservative ideas with some neo- Kissingerian geopolitics now mixed in.

The statement’s only visible purpose is to address a further threat to Iran, as its predecessor, in 2002, threatened Iraq. The only actual “strategy” that can be deduced from it is that the Bush administration wishes to rule the world. The document is nonsensical in content, insulting to other nations and unachievable in declared intention.

If people read it to find a statement of American foreign policy’s objective, they will learn that the United States has “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Good luck.

The document’s foreign readers will have two reactions. The first will be that it can’t be serious. The second will be that it has to be taken seriously since these people have spent three ruinous years in a futile effort to control Iraq; they must be assumed capable of doing the same thing again to Iran.

An annual national security statement was demanded by Congress in 1986 legislation. The present document is the first since 2003, when an American policy of military pre-emption was proclaimed – subsequently implemented in Iraq. This document reiterates the pre-emption policy, warning that “we are in the early years of a long struggle” like the Cold War.

One asks if its authors foresee a 50- year struggle against Iran? Or with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Iraqi desert and Osama bin Laden in his cave in Waziristan? Or against febrile and fanaticized young Muslim men in European ghettos, already repudiated by the immigrant populations from which they come? Surely the great American nation will have better things to do during the next 50 years.

While Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s former deputy, was preparing the strategy statement (or signing off on it), Rice was in Indonesia to “expand a strategic partnership” with Jakarta, a visit described by officials accompanying her as a signal of American “interest in building up [Indonesia] as a major commercial and military power … to help counter the growing influence of China.”

A few days earlier, Rice and President George W. Bush were in India on the same mission, making a “historic” gesture that conferred on India a nuclear partnership with America and authorized it to keep its nuclear weapons. This was also as meant to check China.

Speaking to the International Institute for Strategic Studies just three years ago, Rice condemned “balance of power” politics as outmoded and dangerous. She said: “We tried this before; it led to the Great War.”

In a few weeks, President Hu Jintao of China will be at the White House for a long-delayed meeting. Possibly he in turn will be offered a strategic partnership, provided that Beijing obeys the new U.S. National Security Strategy, which tells China to “give up old ways of thinking and acting … and [make] the right strategic choices for its people.” Until China takes this advice, the strategy statement menacingly adds, the United States will “hedge against other possibilities.”

The president and the secretary of state have been trying to manipulate the Asian power balance against China. At home, Stephen Hadley and colleagues have told us that the effort in Iraq has been worth it because now “tyrants know that they pursue weapons of mass destruction at their own peril.” (One has also learned that those who pursue nonexistent weapons of mass destruction also do so at their peril.)

In addition, we are told that the United States today “may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran,” and that it reserves the right to take “anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.” Whose attack? Iran’s? Under what conceivable circumstances would Iran attack the United States, even if it possessed nuclear weapons?

Finally there is North Korea, which the national strategy document seems to assume already has nuclear weapons. Pyongyang is simply enjoined to “afford freedom to its people,” and the North Koreans are warned that the United States will protect itself “against adverse effects of their bad conduct.” The Iranian government in Tehran will surely note that pre-emption is not mentioned in connection with North Korea.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/66/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople International Herald Tribune http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/kate-obeirne-says-its-too-cold-for-global-warming-daily-howler-redux/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/kate-obeirne-says-its-too-cold-for-global-warming-daily-howler-redux/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:31:32 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/kate-obeirne-says-its-too-cold-for-global-warming-daily-howler-redux/ ]]> BURN, BABY, BEIRNE: If it’s cold in New York, is global warming all wet? In fact, many readers wrote to remind us that warming theory predicts increased extreme weather of all varieties. Almost no pundit is really prepared to discuss the science of climate change. But even our current slackers and harlequins know that a few days of snow in New York can’t cool off the fever about warming. But clowning clowns of the pseudo-con press united when Gore gave his speech about warming (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/16/04). It was cold outside, so Gore had been burned. Indeed, to Kate O’Beirne of the Capital Gang, Gore’s speech was the “outrage of the week:” MARK SHIELDS (1/17/04): Kate O’Beirne. O’BEIRNE: With the exquisite judgment we have come to expect from Al Gore, this week he appeared in New York to blast President Bush for his inattention to the pressing issue of global warming. Gore’s attempt to turn up the heat on Bush was on the coldest day in New York in memory: Minus 1 degree. Solid scientific evidence and a unanimous Senate that rejected the Kyoto Treaty are against Gore on this phony issue. So too is Mother Nature. Poor lefty Al Gore. It’s cold way out there. There’s little chance that Kate has a clue about the science of climate change. But she eagerly joined in the clowning clownistry which seemed to be the real ’rage last week.

]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/kate-obeirne-says-its-too-cold-for-global-warming-daily-howler-redux/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/classic-eric-alterman-diss-of-sullivan/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/classic-eric-alterman-diss-of-sullivan/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:30:22 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/classic-eric-alterman-diss-of-sullivan/ ]]> Speaking of which, I admit it, I am not a good person.  I am genuinely enjoying the fact that our own Little Roy Cohn, not altogether unlike Emma Bovary, is finally, painfully waking up to the fact that the political figure to which he has betrothed himself so profoundly and abjectly during the past three years has been using him for kicks, mocking his assignations while professing his true allegiance to those who would stigmatize gays as less than human and even rewrite the U.S. Constitution to prevent their becoming—Andy’s own words—“free at last.” 

The ironies are too thick and laden with multiple metaphor to unpack here.  (I wonder how many slaves fell—politically speaking—for Jefferson Davis…)  And I haven’t even mentioned the drunken-sailor spending spree that used to define exactly what a conservative isn’t—at least in the days before Karl Rove ran the country.  My heart almost goes out to the guy.  Being the world’s most famous gaycatholictoryMcCarthyiteGAPmodel ain’t as easy as it used to be.


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/classic-eric-alterman-diss-of-sullivan/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/weapons-of-mass-destructionno-really/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/weapons-of-mass-destructionno-really/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:22:15 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/weapons-of-mass-destructionno-really/ ]]> What the hell is a “weapons of mass destruction-related program activity?”  And what is its relationship to statements like these:”Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
-Dick Cheney Speech to VFW National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002

“Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.”
-George W. Bush Speech to U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 12, 2002

“We know for a fact that there are weapons there.”
-Ari Fleischer Press Briefing, Jan. 9, 2003

“I’m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We’re just getting it just now.”
-Colin Powell Remarks to Reporters, May 4, 2003


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/weapons-of-mass-destructionno-really/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/ja-rule-plays-bat-mitzvahs/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/ja-rule-plays-bat-mitzvahs/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:17:58 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20// ]]> By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: November 20, 2005

JA RULE stopped by a party at Shaquille O’Neal’s mansion in Miami Beach the Friday night before last as a favor to the host, who asked him to grab a microphone and rock the house to surprise his guests. He obliged, he told friends, but for only two numbers. Ja Rule, the platinum-selling rapper accustomed to Madison Square Garden, could not afford to strain his vocal cords. He had an important gig the next night. He was playing a Miami steakhouse. The occasion was a bat mitzvah.

 

NYTIMES

http://tinyurl.com/rgxa3


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/ja-rule-plays-bat-mitzvahs/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/men-who-served-vs-chickenhawks-for-the-war/ http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/men-who-served-vs-chickenhawks-for-the-war/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:14:53 +0000 gassedhisownpeople https://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/men-who-served-vs-chickenhawks-for-the-war/ ]]> I know many of you have seen this list countless times, and for that I offer my apologies; however, the hypocrites on the far right never fail to bristle with a mixture or embarrassment, anger, and self-righteous indigantion whenever I post it. I hope you’ll indulge me once again.
I hope you’ll please remember the following names:



 Democrats

* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan.
 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.

* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor,
 Vietnam.

* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.

* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze
 Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.

* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze
 Star, Korea.

* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star &
 Bronze Star, Vietnam.

* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.

* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve,
 1968-74.

* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army
 Reserve 1979-91.

* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star
 and seven campaign ribbons.

* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam,
 DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier’s Medal.

* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple
 Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.

 * Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne,
 Purple Heart.

* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in
 Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.

* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.

* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57

* Chuck Robb: Vietnam

* Howell Heflin: Silver Star

* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.

* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments.
 Entered draft but received #311.

* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy. Graduate of Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD.

 * Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953

* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal
 with 18 Clusters.

* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII.




Republicans

* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.

* Tom Delay: did not serve.

* Roy Blunt: did not serve.

* Bill Frist: did not serve.

* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.

* Rick Santorum: did not serve.

* Trent Lott: did not serve.

* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the
 last by marriage.

* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to
 teach business.

* Jeb Bush: did not serve.

* Karl Rove: did not serve.

* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. “Bad knee.” The man
 who attacked Cleland’s patriotism.

* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.

* Vin Weber: did not serve.

* Richard Perle: did not serve.

* Douglas Feith: did not serve.

* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.

* Richard Shelby: did not serve.

* Jon Kyl: did not serve.

* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.

* Christopher Cox: did not serve.

* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.

* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight
 instructor.

* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year
Air National Guard tour of duty; got assigned to Alabama so he could
campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.

* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a
non-combat role making movies.

* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting
was over in Korea.

* Phil Gramm: did not serve.

* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of
Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.

* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.

* John M. McHugh: did not serve.

* JC Watts: did not serve.

* Jack Kemp: did not serve. “Knee problem,” although
continued in NFL for 8 years.

* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National
Guard.

* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.

* George Pataki: did not serve.

* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.

* John Engler: did not serve.

* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army
base.

Pundits & Preachers
* Sean Hannity: did not serve.

* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a
’pilonidal cyst.’)

* Bill O’Reilly: did not serve.

* Michael Savage: did not serve.

* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.

* Paul Gigot: did not serve.

* Bill Bennett: did not serve.

* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.

* John Wayne: did not serve.

* Bill Kristol: did not serve.

* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.

* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.

* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.

* Ralph Reed: did not serve.

* Michael Medved: did not serve.

* Charlie Daniels: did not serve.

* Ted Nugent: did not serve. (He only shoots at
things that don’t shoot back.)



By: SergeantD on November 13, 2005 at 06:18pm


]]> http://gassedhisownpeople.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/men-who-served-vs-chickenhawks-for-the-war/feed/ 0 gassedhisownpeople