Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
I am uncertain, in fact highly doubtful, about all the following links. Nonetheless they provoke further questions that I can't answer right now. And there is some cool bank fraud conspiracy stuff in there. First, a couple DailyKos diary entries:
Daily Kos :: Manipulating the media -- an experiment in cajoling CNN to cover the voting challenge stories more closely by signing up for CNN email alerts. Seems like a wack idea. Ignoring Voter Suppression is Betraying Black Voters.
At least CNN is printing something. CNN.com - Suit seeks new look at rejected Ohio ballots - Nov 26, 2004
I am not sure what the deal is with this guy. Ohio hearings show massive GOP vote manipulation, but where the hell are the Democrats & John Kerry? - Harvey Wasserman
A strange tale from OnlineJournal.com. It reads a little bit too much like the "classic spy caper" inspired by Iran-Contra, complete with offshore bank accounts and the Department of Homeland Security in the mix. Basically this asserts that a bunch of technicians went in and added electronic votes in Ohio under the guise of federal agents.
I have pondered the possibility that the Department of Homeland Security might have some inbuilt tendency to defend the Bush government by prolonging its political existence, much as the CIA is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy accountable to no one. This is really just a fart of a conspiracy theory... nonetheless now the internet has a story where DHS and FBI perpetuate the Bush administration. A fine tale...
I will add that I have my doubts about what the hell OnlineJournal.com is. For example take this cheesy piece about fascism in America.
"More on the [alleged] buying of electoral fraud by the Bush campaign":
November 26, 2004—Additional information on the buying of vote riggers with Saudi and former Enron funds has been obtained. The epicenter for the vote rigging operation is Dallas, Texas, and the operation may involve retired FBI agents who used a well-established "good ole boy" network to arrange for access to polling precincts by electronic voting machine technicians who took advantage of various November 2 security "lockdowns" to illegally alter the tabulation of votes in favor of Bush. Some of the retired agents may have used courtesy credentials issued upon retirement to fool unsuspecting polling place workers.
The cost of the operation was estimated at $29 million with the money sent via a circuitous network of offshore trust companies and shell activities. This reporter has obtained a copy of a bank check for $29,600,000 that was allegedly sent to cover the cost of the Texas-based vote rigging operation. The check is dated October 22, 2004, and was made payable to "Five Star Investment Ltd.," a trust said to have long connections to Saudi-funded operations in Texas and around the world. The payer is identified as "Equity Financial Trust," a Houston-based "brass plate" and post office box entity tied to offshore Cook Islands "folding tent" accounts used to hide away profits amassed by the former Enron as well as Saudi financiers.
On October 6, 2004, some two weeks before Equity Financial Trust transferred the money to Five Star Investment Ltd., the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions for Canada listed Equity Financial Trust, along with Bankers Financial and Security Trust, Falcon Financial and Trust, and Unity Virtual Trust Group as "unauthorized financial institutions." In fact, the check for $29.6 million, which is marked "Not to exceed fifty million dollars," is drawn on the Laurentian Bank of Canada's Toronto branch. Its serial number is 317675450 3 and the bank number is 23-97/1020. The bank instrument is issued by Integrated Payment Systems, Inc. of Englewood, Colorado, and Bank One, NA, Denver, Colorado.
It is noteworthy that a number of companies operated by past Bush campaign contributor Pierre Falcone, under criminal investigation in France for weapons smuggling in Angola, are called "Falcon." Several non-governmental organizations, including Global Witness, have tied Falcone to questionable Halliburton activities when Vice President Dick Cheney headed the firm. Some of the vote riggers who were guaranteed a minimum payment for their services have started talking about the operation because they did not receive the money they were promised.
The same reporter previously published "Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election." Again, take it with that grain of salt, but there's nothing like a fun banking conspiracy!
November 25, 2004—According to informed sources in Washington and Houston, the Bush campaign spent some $29 million to pay polling place operatives around the country to rig the election for Bush. The operatives were posing as Homeland Security and FBI agents but were actually technicians familiar with Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Triad, Unilect, and Danaher Controls voting machines. These technicians reportedly hacked the systems to skew the results in favor of Bush.Well then, if they say so! :-P
The leak about the money and the rigged election apparently came from technicians who were promised to be paid a certain amount for their work but the Bush campaign interlocutors reneged and some of the technicians are revealing the nature of the vote rigging program.
There have been media reports from around the country concerning the locking down of precincts while votes were being tallied. In one unprecedented action in Warren County, Ohio, election officials locked down the facility where votes were being counted. The officials said this was in response to a Level 10 high-threat terrorist warning being issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI for Warren County. George Bush won 72 percent of the vote in Warren County, much larger than his percentage of victory statewide.
The money to rig the election in favor of Bush reportedly came from an entity called Five Star Trust, largely based in Houston but a worldwide entity that is directly tied to the Saudi Royal Family. Five Star Trust was termed "a well-protected vehicle" that has been used to support both Bush and Osama bin Laden in the US and around the world.
Other money used to fund the election rigging was from siphoned Enron money stored away in accounts in the Cook Islands, which was once the base of one of the more questionable and Saudi-linked BCCI subsidiaries. Cook Islands banks also handled some of the weapons smuggling financing of the Iran-Contra scandal. A former Justice Department attorney who helped prosecute the BCCI case said the use of the Cook Islands by the Bush reelection team indicates they wanted the bank arrangements to be a "quick folding tent" operation that would cease to exist when the election was over. He said the Cook Islands was notorious for not requiring any documentation for such operations.
[....]
The sale of nuclear material to Iraq was funded through Saudi operations in Houston, including those associated with George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, James R. Bath, and Saudis Abdullah Taha Baksh, and Kamal Adham, as well as Lebanese businessman Ghaith Pharaon (who was also involved in the collapse of Miami's CenTrust S&L, a bank that had ties to Jeb Bush). This gang, along with Salem Bin Laden, the older brother of Osama, funneled over $1 million into failed Bush ventures, including Arbusto, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy. Some of the Saudi money also financed Enron Oil and Gas Resources (later EOG Resources) in the Belspec Fusselman Field in Midland, Texas, a deal in which George W. Bush had a financial stake. In fact, Saudi planes in the 1980s landed in Houston with mountains of cash used to buy nuclear material for Saddam to possibly use against the Iranians. The money was laundered through Houston's Main Bank, a bank close to the Bush family. Skyway Aircraft of Houston, owned by Bath, was invested in by Abu Dhabi's ruler (the main owner of BCCI) and whose parent company in the Cayman Islands was used by Ollie North to collect foreign money for his Iran-contra enterprise.
Sorry to disappoint but I can't really post anything today, except maybe late at night. The radio station is closed down for the weekend, so I don't have a show this evening. That's really a good thing because I don't have the time right now.
Today I am working on a paper about pipelines and pipeline politics. As an experiment I put together a few Wiki pages about pipelines. I have no idea if you might find these interesting, but energy politics is a real big deal so it might be worth lookin at. There is some interesting stuff about the Caspian Sea, an article by Seymour Hersh about Mobil oil doing shady things in Kazakhstan, etc. I should say that this paper is a lit review about the subject, so I'm not vouching for the accuracy of any of these materials. They are intended to provide different perspectives etc.
Also I have some stuff about pipeline plots in Afghanistan and the new deals between those old bugbears Iran and China. And The Balkans.
I am sorry I haven't updated the 'Tracking election irregularities' HongWiki page lately... It's on the list!
Here is some more stuff from Dan Schwartz about the new Defense Science Board report which basically assaults what the Pentagon and White House are trying to claim about the "War on terror" etc, plus the Ukraine story and how Wal-Mart alienates the labor of Chinese people... Mr. Schwartz:
First, an unexpected bit of good sense from the Pentagon: the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel within the military, issued a report admonishing the US government for a failure to communicate effectively with the Muslim world AND warning that even if we communicate our policies and intentions clearly, there is no P.R. remedy for bad policies. (it hasn't been released to the public, so all I know is what the NYT has reported)
"In stark contrast to the cold war, the United States today is not seeking to contain a threatening state empire, but rather seeking to convert a broad movement within Islamic civilization to accept the value structure of Western Modernity - an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a 'War on Terrorism,' " the report states. "Today we reflexively compare Muslim 'masses' to those oppressed under Soviet rule," the report adds. "This is a strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies - except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends."
I would add, obviously, that those yearning to be free of such tyrannies are unlikely to wish our assistance in casting of their yokes; as the report notes, we often support the dictators. "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies," adding that "when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy."
Further, "The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of 'dissemination of information' or even one of crafting and delivering the 'right' message. Rather it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none - the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam."
I'm incredulous that a government agency of any striping, let alone the DOD, would say things like this. Questioning American altruism? Denying American credibility on the world stage? Betraying the rhetoric of the War on Terror? Ladies and gentlemen, this is HERESY. let's see if anything comes of it...
"The United States is deeply disturbed by extensive and credible indications of fraud committed in the ... presidential election. We strongly support efforts to review the conduct of the election and urge ... authorities not to certify results until investigations of organized fraud are resolved. We call on the Government ... to respect the will of the ... people, and we urge all ... to resolve the situation through peaceful means. The Government bears a special responsibility not to use or incite violence, and to allow free media to report accurately on the situation without intimidation or coercion. The United States stands with the ... people in this difficult time."
So goes the White House press release concerning the recent US elections. Just kidding. Everything was FINE here, but the Ukraine, it would seem, just doesn't meet international standards for electoral legitimacy, so we'll probably need a recount or maybe even a new election. The press has been all over this one; I've seen more coverage, closer to the front page, from more sources in the last 3 days alone than there has been in the 22 since our own election.
Here's a nice roundup of some Ukraine coverage via Metafilter.
Speaking of double standards, Wal-Mart has conceded to allow store associates in its Chinese retail locations to form unions. The company has fought tooth and nail over the years to prevent such perversity among its employees here in the states, but I guess even unionized Chinese workers won't ask much in the way of decent pay or dignified working conditions. The All China Federation of Trade Unions is relatively weak—not much more than an extension of the national party bureaucracy—so hey! if that's the price we pay for expanding to this enormous new market, so be it.
Happy Turkey Day!
I just got a few things from Dan Schwartz that I deemed interesting for a Turkey Day Spy Spectacular. Ok, not that spectacular. More of a Tryptophan National Security Adventure. First, it now seems that the Bush administration did in fact have forewarning of the coup attempt against Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in April 2002. This means that they lied about it coming out of the blue. Also, as most people don't know, the Bush administration was among very few governments to recognize the coup leaders as legitimate, until they were trapped in the Miraflores palace and deposed by Chavez's people a couple days later.
This made the Bush administration embarrassingly appear to support military coups, and it discredited them in Latin & South America. I'm sorry, Rummy and Cheney, it's not the Gerald Ford days anymore, and South American leaders you don't like can't just be hacked down. Newsday reports that a FOIA request got the info out of the CIA:
The U.S. government knew of an imminent plot to oust Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, in the weeks prior to a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary a week after the putsch.
Yet the United States, which depends on Venezuela for nearly one-sixth of its oil, never warned the Chávez government, Venezuelan officials said.
The Bush administration has denied it was involved in the coup or knew one was being planned. At a White House briefing on April 17, 2002, just days after the 47-hour coup, a senior administration official who did not want to be named said, "The United States did not know that there was going to be an attempt of this kind to overthrow - or to get Chávez out of power."
Yet based on the newly released CIA briefs, an analyst said yesterday that did not appear to be the case.
"This is substantive evidence that the CIA knew in advance about the coup, and it is clear that this intelligence was distributed to dozens of members of the Bush administration, giving them knowledge of coup plotting," said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington.
However, Kornbluh said that while the documents show U.S. officials knew a coup was coming, perhaps implying tacit approval, they do not constitute proof the United States was involved in ousting Chávez, Venezuela's elected leader. That is partly because the briefs are from the intelligence side of the CIA, not the operational side.
[....]
Chávez was traveling in Spain yesterday and could not be reached for comment, although his information minister, Andres Izarra, said through a representative that his government had not yet taken a position on the documents. Tarek William Saab, a state governor and member of the president's inner circle, said the documents showed "that the United States was implicated in this coup and did nothing to stop it."
The Bush administration and Chávez, a fiery former paratrooper, have clashed repeatedly, with Chávez accusing the United States of backing the coup against him and U.S. officials denouncing his leadership as authoritarian. The United States was one of the few nations to embrace the coup initially, though it later reversed its position.
The documents were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by Eva Golinger, a Long Island attorney and pro-Chávez activist who also is investigating U.S. funding of groups opposed to the Venezuelan leader. Golinger said she was outraged by the documents. "If they knew that a democratic government was going to be overthrown, why wouldn't they send signals to it or at least explain what was going to happen?"
The documents - called Senior Executive Security Briefs - are one level below the highest-level Presidential Daily Briefs and are circulated among about 200 top-level U.S. officials, Kornbluh said.
Chávez was arrested and overthrown on April 12, 2002, after military dissidents blamed him for violence at an opposition protest march that left 19 people dead and 300 wounded. He was returned to power two days later.
All the CIA documents were heavily censored before being released. One, dated April 6, 2002, states that "dissident military factions, including some disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers, are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month."
[....]
Julia Sweig, deputy director of Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in Washington, said: "The fact that we didn't call Chávez and say, 'This is brewing,' reflects the incredible antipathy toward Chávez at that time" on the part of the Bush administration.
I am hungover. Dan knows why.
Anywhoodalolly, I have a sweet little nugget of goodness for you Pongsketeers (and no, it's not THAT, you perverts), I found a site called TheyRule, where you can track down the links between executives, major corporations, political entities and EVIL... well, not evil, but the Brookings Institution, so close to evil. Also, there is a raging debate on the site regarding the relative autonomy of Apple Computer board members. Workers of world, unite! But don't get too excited, because you can't win any way you cut it.
We've all heard the story of the innocent Iraqi civilian shot at point-blank range by a U.S. Marine by now. An army of apologists have crawled out of the woodwork to support him, citing everything from battle fatigue to booby-trapped bodies as important mitigating factors in his actions. Some have even come out against the reporter who took the pictures, and the issue seems to have become quite blurry, devoid as it is of factual underpinnings besides a series of four photos. Unfortunately for hill-billy marine boy, NBC photog-man Kevin Sites has his own blog, and in it he gives a pretty staggering account of that day and the actions of the member of the Devil Dogs who callously a shot a previously-wounded Iraqi:
"Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.
Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.
"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.
I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.
But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.
For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here."
I digress. Read the account.
Blue Lemur carries a story from the University of California Berkeley, where researchers have found that Bush was likely awarded an extra 130,000 to 260,000 votes via the electronic voting systems there, including an impressive 72,000 in Broward County alone.
The survey, which is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of Florida’s 2004 election results to date, found that compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show gains for Bush between 2000 and 2004.
Unlike other analyses, this survey accounted for and ruled out other demographic factors which have clouded the results of other studies, such as the “dixiecrat” phenomenon, where Democratic counties have supported Republican nominees in the past.
“For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida,” Professor Hout remarked in a statement to RAW STORY . “We’re calling on voting officials in Florida to take action.”
Among the factors weighted in the study were the Hispanic/Latino population, median income, change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004 and support for Senator Bob Dole in the 1996 election.
The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predicted a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush’s support in Broward County, yet machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes – a net gain of 81,000.
President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 – a difference of 19,300 votes.
“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” Hout added. “The study shows that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.
The odds of this occurring by chance?
“Less than once in a thousand,” he said.
In the reported results, Bush led Senator John Kerry in Florida by 377,216 votes.
Stunning reports of illegally installed software from April of 2004 add to already-horrific mess!Then there is the weird story of Jeff Fisher, a Democratic candidate who claims straight up vote fraud. BradBlog followed up on this guy, who seems like he might be crazy. Thom Hartmann, who wrote a piece that raised Fisher's credibility perhaps more than he deserved, has sort of retracted what he wrote earlier. There is a lot of other interesting info in this one... A couple older pieces claiming voter suppression from Bob Fitrakis, "None dare call it voter suppression and fraud" and "And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins."
Still waiting for the "Liberal" Media to Show Up!
A series of investigative stories (here, here, and here) by WISHTV.com in Indianapolis from April of this year, have just come to my attention (sent by several different readers).
They concern yet more troubling reports about the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) company, who's software and tabulating machines, along with Diebold's, are responsible for tabulating about 80% of the votes in America. Both companies were founded by the same man, who just happens, along with the rest of their Boards of Directors to be big donor/supporters of the Republican Party.
The series of reports from WISHTV earlier this year tell of ES&S employees surreptitiously installing illegal, uncertified software, into the voting and tabulating machines in Marion County, Indiana. They then ordered their regional ES&S project manager to lie about it to county officials. She refused. As had her husband in a previous ES&S incident, where he was also a project manager, in a different Indiana county. He was fired for his refusal.
In one of the reports, the Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler is quoted as saying that ES&S "has willfully and purposely deceived me and the Marion County election board...[W]ith complete disregard for business ethics and with intent to deceive, [ES&S] deliberately worked to keep their actions from the Marion County election board and its employees."
The county's election board vice chair added, "Throughout the process, there have been missteps and outright fabrications and mistruths given to us by the vendor implementing the election process."
The assiduous BRAD BLOG readers will note that ES&S has popped up time and time again in so many of these stories of "irregularities" related to electronic voting and tabulating machines. Amongst the many troubling incidents so far reported here:
- ES&S Employee found on Auglaize County, OH Computer! Just weeks before election! County had 4th highest Bush vote percentage in the state!
- 10,000 Extra Votes Added in Nebraska County! Another ES&S computer "failure".
- 50,000 Votes LOST in LaPorte County, IN County! Yet another ES&S computer "failure". This one in a heavily Democratic county.
Additionally, DailyKos reported ... on yet another Indiana county where the U.S. Congressional results are now in doubt and a recount may be coming shortly due to revelations from nearby Franklin County where a recount was already held after it was discovered that the optical-scan tabulating machine was counting straight Democratic ticket votes as Libertarian votes!
I'm not sure if I can round this up into a coherent point. It looks like the Bush administration is determined to wipe out those sections of the intelligence services that tried to discredit the lies necessary to trick the American people into the march on Iraq.
Now, there will come more incompetent political appointees like Porter Goss, partisan Republican hitmen determined to crush all opposition–not just political opposition, but all 'reality-based' opposition as well. That is, bureaucrats inside the State Department and CIA who thought that "A) this WMD evidence isn't good; B) We should have written a post-invasion plan; C) Ahmed Chalabi is a dangerous liar who can't be trusted to run Iraq," are now going to get thrashed right out of the bureaucracy.
It's a shame, and it upsets me... not least because these are the people who actually have the operational knowledge to protect us from terrorist attacks. Not that the targets of the Stalinist Election Purge are "good liberals" or "progressives." I don't think most of them are; in fact they are as likely as anyone to be adherents to the old 'Washington Consensus' neo-liberal school. Unfortunately, these guys have been the best institutional brake we've had against the imperial schemes of neoconservatives. I hope as many of them as possible survive inside the CIA, and I hope that the ones who get slashed out of the program actually manage to get their story out to the public. Michael Scheuer, you're not the only articulate one...
Some stuff about the CIA purging: Justin Raimondo says it's one hell of a victory for the neo-cons. Here's a nifty source: schema-root has lots more news about neoconservatives, updated constantly.
On a somewhat related note, Dr. Rashid Khalidi has an excellent piece in In These Times about the history of Fallujah, "Fallujah 101: A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying." Thanks for the historical context we never get!
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi Arabia in the late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi ideas—those of a man named Muhammad Ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab—took root in this city more than 200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where what we would call fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been well implanted for 10 generations. This town also is the place where in the spring of 1920 ... the British discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer who had quelled unrest in the corners of their empire, Lt. Col. Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of Iraq. Leachman was killed in an altercation with a local leader named Shaykh Dhari. His death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives of 10,000 Iraqis and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To restore Iraq to their control, the British used massive air power, bombing indiscriminately. That city is now called Fallujah.
Shaykh Dhari’s grandson, today a prominent Iraqi cleric, helped to broker the end of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah in April of this year. Fallujah thus embodies the interrelated tribal, religious and national aspects of Iraq’s history.
The Bush administration is not creating the world anew in the Middle East. It is waging a war in a place where history really matters.
[....]
The United States is perceived as stepping into the boots of Western colonial occupiers, still bitterly remembered from Morocco to Iran. The Bush administration marched into Iraq proclaiming the very best of intentions while stubbornly refusing to understand that in the eyes of most Iraqis and most others in the Middle East it is actions, not proclaimed intentions, that count. It does not matter what you say you are doing in Fallujah, where U.S. troops just launched an attack after weeks of bombing. What matters is what you are doing in Fallujah—and what people see that you are doing.
[....]
Most Middle East experts in the United States, both inside and outside the government, have drawn on their knowledge of the cultures, languages, history, politics of the Middle East—and on their experience—to conclude that most Bush administration Middle East policies, whether in Iraq or Palestine, are harmful to the interests of the United States and the peoples of this region. A few of these experts have had the temerity to say so, to the outrage of the Bush administration and its supporters, who are committed to what I would call a fact-free, faith-based approach to Middle East policymaking.
...and it is precisely those annoying voices that shall be purged, purged from the leaner meaner Bush2 government. A little more about Fallujah: a writer on the Egyptian periodical Al Ahram says Fallujah is "a crucible of discontent" that heightens friction between Sunnis and Shiites. The shocking video of the Marine blasting the wounded insurgent dominated the Arab media, surprise surprise. Pressure grows to delay voting, even though they've set the deadline for the end of January. Mosul has apparently spun out of control, as the Sunnis are essentially rebelling against the Kurds, with the U.S. supporting the Kurds. There are rumors of Kurds ethnically cleansing the area of Sunnis, something I find quite believable these days.
From a more unorthodox source, the World Socialist Web Site: Behind State Department, CIA shake-up: Bush-Cheney regime prepares a second term of all-out militarism. Yes, this comes from "The Socialists" rambling about "American imperialism," but look, even the Reds can refer to Knight Ridder news service as a source!
Throughout the first four years of the Bush administration, Powell and the State Department have been viewed with suspicion or outright hostility by right-wing neo-conservative elements entrenched in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office. Neither Powell nor his chief deputy, Richard Armitage, opposed the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they were regarded as too closely aligned to the traditional foreign policy methods of American imperialism favored by career State Department and CIA officials, based on utilizing alliance structures like NATO and international institutions like the UN.
[....]
The purge of top officials in the CIA is an even more glaring case of suppressing any potential source of internal criticism or restraint on Bush administration foreign policy. On November 12, deputy CIA director John McLaughlin resigned, to be followed three days later by the deputy director for operations, Stephen Kappes, and his top deputy, Michael Slusick. This brings to nine the number of top-ranking CIA officials to depart since former director George Tenet was replaced by Porter Goss, a Republican congressman and head of the House Intelligence Committee. Only two of Tenet’s top aides still remain.
[....]
Sections of the CIA officialdom were effectively aligned with the Democratic campaign, providing a series of leaks to the press demonstrating that the White House had lied about prewar planning for postwar Iraq and debunking various Bush lies about the “war on terror.” The agency even authorized one top CIA official, Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden unit, to publish a book—under the pseudonym “anonymous”—denouncing the White House for failing to take the threat of bin Laden seriously before the 9/11 attacks. Scheuer also quit the agency, on November 11.
Goss has brought with him into the CIA four top aides from the House Intelligence Committee, all far-right Republican Party activists determined to remove any political opponents from the agency’s leadership.
The right-wing press, spearheaded by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, has demanded such a purge of both the CIA and the State Department. At the time the pre-election leaks, the Journal published an editorial denouncing the CIA for “declaring war” on the Bush White House. The newspaper greeted Powell’s resignation with an editorial demanding that Bush stamp out similar opposition in the diplomatic corps.
In both the State Department and the CIA, it should go without saying, the opposition to Bush is within the framework of the defense of imperialist interests. Both agencies are staffed by battle-hardened defenders of American imperialism who have participated in countless crimes against working people on every continent. Their opposition to Bush arises largely from the debacle produced in Iraq by a policy that deliberately ignored the complex politics of the country and the Middle East as a whole, in favor of a crude doctrine that the United States could have its way by force alone.
The result of the bureaucratic infighting is that the Bush White House is moving to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, riding roughshod over the established institutions of American imperialism. As the Knight-Ridder news service observed: "by agreeing to Powell’s departure and approving an apparent purge by new CIA chief Porter Goss, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney appear to be eliminating the few independent centers of power in the US national security apparatus and cementing the system under their personal control."
More about Powell: a UPI analysis sums it up pretty well:
For as it turned out, Powell's moderate, cautious internationalist approach to U.S. foreign policy, impeccably in line as it was with the broad policy strategies of Republican Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush would have fitted well with Clinton's own approach and preferences. But it proved totally out of touch with the Republican president he actually served.
At first, it did not seem to be that way. In the first eight months of the first Bush administration Powell, as had been widely expected, fought many bruising policy battles with the confident and energetic neo-conservatives who had Vice President Dick Cheney's ear and that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But he won a few battles too.
In those days, Powell appeared to be Bush's "go to" guy. It was he the president turned to in order to defuse tensions with China after a U.S. EP-3 electronic surveillance aircraft made a forced landing on Hainan Island after colliding with a Chinese fighter buzzing it in international air space. And in early September 2001, he appeared to have won a major policy victory by convincing the president to approve a major U.S. diplomatic initiative to establish a fully independent Palestinian state.
[....]
As Bob Woodward wrote in "Bush at War", the secretary of state often did not even meet face to face with the president he served for weeks at a time. In a Washington where personal access to the Chief Executive is the gold standard of clout and influence that probably hurt his standing more than anything.
Powell's writ did not even run within key areas of his own State Department. Under Secretary of State John Bolton, now widely tipped to be the next deputy secretary of state repeatedly made end-runs around him especially on Middle East policy issues with the aid of his neo-con allies in the Pentagon.
But Powell would not resign and the president would not fire him. He was determined to complete a full term of office as the first black secretary of state in U.S. history. And he was convinced his moderating presence was still essential at the top table to try and keep things on an even keel.
So what is going into the neo-con agenda in the second term? Veteran snooper Jim Lobe at Asia Times Online writes about leading neo-con Frank Gaffney's newest plans as laid out in a National Review article (via interesting site 'The Experiment'). Gaffney is one of the more batshit, institutional neo-cons who's always rambling about "Islamofascists" and World War IV. He didn't let us down this time.
The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of "appropriate strategies" for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and "the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America", also calls for "regime change" in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising from the (then) anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel giving up "defensible boundaries".
[....]
Yet its importance as a roadmap of where neo-conservatives - who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon - want US policy to go was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who he said "helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term".
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified - and controversial - neo-conservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby; his top Middle East advisers, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons-proliferation specialist Robert Joseph; and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National Security Council.
Also on the roster are: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide William Luti, in the Pentagon; Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton; and for global issues, Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq war, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign-service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
[.....]
As Perle's longtime protege and associate, Gaffney sits at the center of a network of interlocking think-tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists such as Cheney and Rumsfeld and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of US foreign policy since September 11.
Included among CSP's board of advisers over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Joseph, former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former navy under secretary John Lehman and former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey.
Woolsey also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neo-con-led lobby group that argues Washington is now engaged in "World War IV" against "Islamo-fascism".
Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which - along with wealthy individuals sympathetic to Israel's governing Likud Party, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing bodies, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations - finance CSP's work.
Gaffney, a ubiquitous "talking head" on TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, sits on the boards of CPD's parent organizations, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism. He was a charter associate, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century, another prominent neo-conservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the "war on terrorism" just nine days after the September 11 attacks.
[.....]
"The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the right to life were central to his vision of US war aims and foreign policy," according to Gaffney. "Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to the ultimate moral value - freedom - as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly [sic] anathema."
To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney, beginning with the "reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq"; followed by "regime change - one way or another - in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'axis of evil' states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions".
Third, the administration must provide "the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing protection of our homeland, including deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore".
Fifth, Washington must keep "faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and ... for our shared 'moral values') especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries".
Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them "so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution - as well as other international institutions and mechanisms - to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington".
Finally, writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt "appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America", which he does not identify.
DemocraticUnderground.com: After a day of furious auditing Bev, Andy and Kathleen of Black Box Voting have found discrepant results in Volusia county. At this time we have had an attorny LOCK DOWN all poll tapes, memory cartridges and the GEMS central tabulator. The discrepant results were concentrated in mainly minority areas. We are currently going through trash obtained early this morning by Bev and Kathleen Wynne via a FOIA request. At one point they were threatened with arrest but avoided it narrowly (Bev will do a full report later). Black Box Voting will be issuing a press release later today. This is it folks...the first crack in Florida.And they even got VoterGate.tv to record the confrontation. Check out VoterGate's 30 minute pre-election video about Black Box Voting and their fight for the integrity of voting systems. Also you'll see a Diebold PR flack squirming when questioned about their CEO's notorious boast that "We'll deliver Ohio's electoral votes." They even go dumpster diving at Diebold and find a memo where some county refuses to pay for electronic machines that won't upload votes correctly. The crew that made this video is following Bev Harris around Florida now and finding trouble with county election officials all over the place.Andy
More about Bev Harris' & co. sudden discoveries in Volusia County below.
Recounts are getting underway all over the place now, but here's a few stories that should inspire confidence in all believers in Democracy.
We have the final 4 PM exit polls from Nov. 2 now, and they show distinct 'red shifts' in many places. That is, the exit polls showed Kerry quite a few points higher all over the place. North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida all had major shifts. Via DailyKos diary.
Indiana Democrats are demanding a recount in their 9th district. Via DailyKos, a report from Roll Call:
The Indiana Democratic Party on Friday requested a recount of votes cast in the 9th district, where Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.) was narrowly defeated by Republican Mike Sodrel on Nov. 2.The recount request was made after an election-equipment malfunction was discovered in Franklin County, which is not in the 9th district.
On Nov. 3, Hill conceded defeat to Sodrel, a trucking company owner, and the most recent vote tally available from the Indiana secretary of state's office showed Hill trailing by 1,485 votes. As of midday Friday, Sodrel had 142,257 votes to Hill's 140,772.
An emergency meeting of the state's recount commission was held Friday afternoon and the machines, ballots and all other material relating to the election were ordered impounded. The commission will meet again on Tuesday to decide the next course of action and to hear cross petitions from Republicans.
"They want to hear from the other side as well," Kate Shepherd, a spokeswoman for the Indiana secretary of state's office, said Friday.
Last week, Rock Island, Ill.-based election equipment vendor Fidlar Election Co. acknowledged that some of its vote-scanning machines counted straight Democratic ticket votes as Libertarian votes.
There is some really weird stuff happening in Florida. First the smaller story:
The unmarked brown box sat unnoticed in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections office until Monday, two weeks after the election, when an employee cleaning a desk stumbled upon it (via DKos).And what was the margin of victory in 2000??!!?!?! Also this story quite accurately makes the point that these voting discrepancies affect other races, not just the presidential. So this one was probably just a little bureaucratic incompetence rather than malicious intent.Inside were 268 uncounted absentee ballots.
[.....]
Five days ago, Clark sent the state the county's final results for the Nov. 2 election. But her office had failed to perform a standard check to ensure that all ballots had been accounted for.Clark assumed her staff had performed the check, but they had not.
Now she will ask the state for permission to change Pinellas' official results. The canvassing board will count the missing ballots Thursday.
Although it is numerically possible, officials say the missing ballots probably won't change any results. Only a few races were decided by less than 268 votes - including the presidential contest.
George W. Bush won the presidential race in Pinellas by just 226 votes. While Bush's margin in Pinellas could change, his statewide victory won't.
A city commission seat in South Pasadena and a referendum in Indian Rocks Beach were also decided by fewer than 268 votes.
"If you found a couple hundred thousand votes in Ohio, that might be exciting," said Paul Bedinghaus, chairman of the Pinellas Republican Party. "I expect that human error will continue to occur as long as human beings are involved."
This is the third time since Clark became election supervisor in 2000 that her office has had problems handling ballots.
In the presidential race in 2000, the office neglected to count 1,400 ballots - and counted more than 900 ballots twice. In 2001, her office misplaced six absentee ballots in a Tarpon Springs city election.
There's a sweet writeup, "HackTheVote FAQ" by Republican 'white hat' hacker (i.e. 'legit' tech security professional) Chuck Herrin, who was sickened by all the flaws in Diebold's systems, and he describes why one might go about hacking the central tabulator systems. This guy's motives are a perfect example of why I think following this story is important, not because I think that "Kerry Really Won" but because it shows that all sorts of people care deeply about the integrity of our system, and the flaws profoundly disturb them:
I feel that it is unlikely that these individual touch screen machines would be targeted. At greater risk than the individual touch screens are the Central Voting Tabulation computers, which compile the results from many other systems, such as touch screens and optically scanned cards. From a hacker’s standpoint, there are a couple of reasons why these central computers are better targets:a. It is extremely labor intensive to compromise a large number of systems, and the chance of failure or being detected increases every time an attack is attempted. Also, the controversy surrounding the touch screen terminals ensures that their results will be closely watched, and this theory has been born out in recent days.
b. If one were to compromise the individual terminals, they would only be able to influence a few hundred to maybe a couple of thousand votes. These factors create a very poor risk/reward ratio, which is a key factor in determining which systems it makes sense to attack.
c. On the other hand, the Central Vote Tabulation systems are a very inviting target – by simply compromising one Windows desktop, you could potentially influence tens or hundreds of thousands of votes, with only one attack to execute and only one attack to erase your tracks after. This makes for an extremely attractive target, particularly when one realizes that by compromising these machines you can affect the votes that people cast not only by the new touch screen systems, but also voters using traditional methods, such as optical scanning systems since the tallies from all of these systems are brought together for Centralized Tabulation. This further helps an attacker stay under the radar and avoid detection, since scrutiny will not be as focused on the older systems, even though the vote data is still very much at risk since it is all brought together at a few critical points. This also has been born out by early investigations, where the touch screen results seem to be fairly in line with expectations, while some very strange results are being reported in precincts still using some of the older methods.
But from Volusia County, Florida, Bev Harris and the ragtag band of misfits known as Black Box Voting and affiliated voter-activists have zeroed in on suspicious county behavior. After hitting Florida counties with FOIA (Freedom of Information Act requests) they found that Volusia County wouldn't give them xeroxed copies of the poll tapes for one precinct in particular, a heavily black precinct that recorded far more votes for Bush than the party registry would predict.
In other words, the vote could have been manipulated here, and Black Box Voting is putting together a concrete investigation to lock down all suspicious county computers and voting machines. Bev Harris is a grandmother on a mission to protect voting integrity and shine light on irregularities. If only we had thousands of people like her...
Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the door.Talk about your classic shady Florida government officials... GO BEV GO.... down to the wire!There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.
So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete" came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.
A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.
Black Box Voting collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it, for the public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."
Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and everyone stood around discussing the merits of the "black bag" public records request.
The police finally let Harris and Wynne go, about the time the Votergate.tv film crew arrived, and everyone trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened.
Black Box Voting began to compare the special printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.
Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or the ones with signatures, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?
Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia employee boxed up some items from an office containing Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took them to the back of the building and disappeared.
Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.
So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given, unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.
So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.
This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there had said that bag was destined for the shredder.
By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.
Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.
From the "Somewhere Between Bad P.R. and War Crimes" department I bring you the following image off Yahoo! News:
A series of television pool images shot by NBC shows a U.S. Marine shooting dead a wounded and unarmed Iraqi in a Falluja mosque November 13, 2004. U.S. Marines rallied round the Marine now under investigation for killing the Iraqi during the offensive in Falluja, saying he was probably under combat stress in unpredictable, hair-trigger circumstances.Via DailyKos.
This is a repost from BlackOutBlog, but as nobody reads BlackOutBlog, I'm posting it on Hongpong.
On to my thoughts:
Safire: He's leaving, and I am despondent over it. Safire is a gargantuan asshole, with a Mailer-like obsession, if not a Carlyle-like obsession, with the halls of power. His life has been lived with an ear undelicately to the ground, pumping biased sources for information often false. However, his commentary is excellent. There is no denying this guy is one smart mofo, and I will miss him.
Compounding my despondency is the now-obvious placement of David Brooks, who has been placed in the role of sucessor to token conservative on the NYT staff. Brooks is colorless, odorless, tasteless and uninsightful, choosing to review Tom Wolfe's (another non-dumb ragin asshole) new book the other day rather than do his job. He belittles those book critics who line up to trash his latest book every time, and lauds Wolfe's "moral intent" while dismissing his underdevloped characters.
To you, David, I say this: shut the fuck up. You aren't a critic, and your love of Wolfe has to do with some notion of him as a pitchman for your own retrograde notion of morality. First off, I don't think Wolfe is pushing any value system upon his readers. I would suspect, though I don't know, that Wolfe would agree with Oscar Wilde's prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray when he says:
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."
It's not as simple as that, however?there are beautifully-written books with no content or vision published every year. However, a writer and an artist are two different things, and morality has a complicated relationship with the artist and an untroubled relationship to the writer. Brooks would be a writer in this construction, lacking the chops for artistry:
"The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved."
In fact, Wilde would posit that Brooks is not even a legitimate critic:
"The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things."
Brooks is not translating, he is drawing conclusions on something for which conclusions can not be drawn, only interpretations forwarded. For him to discursively rant, stapling his ideology upon a great man of letters, demonstrates what a pea-brained little sycophant he is, a little nitpicking turd without the breadth of vision of Friedman (who I nonetheless dislike), the humanity of Kristof or Krugman (though Krugman can be a sanctimonious whinger at times) or the wit of Dowd (my hero). While the alternatives are no great shakes, either?we could have seen some George F. Will-esque replacement?I really think the world's most august daily could do a little better than Brooks.
Back to Safire; the man used "Weltanschauung" in his column today. These days, we are running out of competent writers in the newspaper industry. There is no craftsmanship, just a dry retelling of facts or a spoken word-like delivery of opinions. Safire is a godsend here?he, like Dowd, can write?they have lively writing voices, their prose represents a sub-character of themselves, not merely their world view as they would present it on a pundit's show. Dowd is a wry and raunchy cocktail-circuit party girl grown up, Safire is a deeply skeptical observer, peering through the fog of cigarette smoke and the haze of scotch towards the raw and unedited truths of the game as played in Washington.
Both voices are certainly self-caricatures; Safire is an accomplished historian of the English language, with other interests and an awareness of his crotchety bias. Dowd is simply too old and too smart to think her barbs even scratch her targets. They still do it, though, bring a literary twist into their writing, and I willmiss Safire's counterpoint. In retrospect, they should have been scheduled to write on the same day, it would have allowed for more competitiveness. By the way, Weltanschauung means "world view" in German.
As for world views and the relative lack thereof of certain individuals in government, Condi Rice was named Secretary of State by Piehole yesterday, meaning a continuation of her shameless sycophancy and her utter distaste for world politics. A former Kremlinologist, Rice is still bent by the "Us vs. Them" mentality that was the hallmark of the Manichaean ideological divide of 1946-1991.
Dan adds: Oh and she ducked questions under oath and stonewalled the 9/11 Commission.
Safire had argued that Powell would stay on a few months to see if Arafat's death could help clear the peace process, but it looks as if he wanted out and wanted out NOW. Obviously, peace is on the backburner now, and it's up with war:
Be afraid of the war mammie, be very afraid.
We all know about John Ashcroft's musical talents, as "Let the Eagle Soar" perched at the top of the Billboard charts for months on end last year (lyrics)... but wait, there's more!
That's right, now you too can experience Missouri state auditor John Ashcroft and his arm candy Bacon singin about God and stuff. Via the site whitehouse.org you can download recordings and they're damn funny. Check out this candid in-studio album art:
Also Nick posted a rather shocking picture of Big Vice Man. I think it may have been faked in PhotoShop, but maybe not.
Thanks to Big Poppa Peter Gartrell for the Ashcroft recording link... I know Pete's way into this folk stuff.
Well, first off, a little in memoriam:
RIP Russell Jones a/k/a "Ol' Dirty Bastard a/k/a "Osiris" a/k/a "Big Baby Jesus a/k/a Dirt McGirt. As you may have heard, the dirty passed away this weekend, dropping dead in a recording studio at the age of 35. While his death was obviously due to a breathtaking history of drug consumption, it is sad nonetheless. No one captured the kind of brainless senseless FEEL for Hip-Hop tha tall rappers need in order to bring something that isn't cliche and effete into their rapping style. ODB had the kind of unglued loopy energy that all great rappers (do you hear me Slug?) possess in some quantity, be it the irreverant wordplay of Jay-Z, the ludicrous political screeds of Nas or the sheer, well, ODB-like loopiness of early Eminem. Legend has it that Russell once ran out of a recording studio to help a 4 year old girl pinned under a car. May this good deed and others never witnessed weigh heavily enough against the much-publicized bad that Russell committed in his lifetime to ensure him a place on the 'good' list.
Another RIP follows: Ted Rall and Gary "Doonesbury" Trudeau have been removed from the Washington Post's stable of editorial cartoonists. Perhaps in the wake of another Bush win the lefties are being culled from major media outlets in an effort to "centralize" themselves politically and not jeopardize their access to those in power or alienate themselves and lose ad revenue. This would seem more true for Rall than Trudeau—I assume Doonesbury was dropped because it is probably expensive to carry and anyone can look at it free on the internet or in their local paper. Rall may very well have gotten the axe over his caricature of the Bush administration. I would argue that it is hardly even a caricature, but there you have it. RIP freedom of speech, inch by agonizing inch. We here at Hongpong use the Internet, as we are taking back what is rightfully ours. I hope you all do the same.
Next: This will not be a link-laden entry, with source material not included, or perhaps not even existing. I would link this next article, however, but it isn't available online anymore. Reading the New Yorker this morning on the bus, I ran into an article that explains an economic theory that I find both fascinating and staggeringly obvious, the kind of intellectual posit that is difficult to properly phrase but so obvious that it hardly needs explanation, the kind of bread-and-butter duh that keeps half of the faculty of American universities in the money.
The theory of the principal-agent problem is simple: in an era of increasing specificity in expertise, large corporations, government agencies and any institution of significant size undoubtly employs "agents," experts in a field, to negotiate for and advise on matters relating to institutional business. Insurance brokers, defense corporation lobbyists, and even buyers for department stores would all be considered agents. The problem, as outlined by economists, is that these agents oftentimes have a vested interest in the outcome the dessemination of their expertise has on the bottom line of their company, their future job prospects or their immediate financial gain.
For example, a real-estate agent looks for a quick turnaround on a home owned by a client, but will wait and get the highest possible price by using all the tools at his/her disposal to sell their own home. Likewise, a stock analyst for a major financial house like Bear Stearns or the like may give a more favorable analysis of a certain corporation's stock on the basis of that corporation's relationship to his house, as evidenced with Enron and their high ratings in major financial houses that had significant investments in the company.
This notion is an important even politically; military officials may be bullish on particular weapons systems because of hopes of employment in the manufacturing corporation upon retirement or because of its political expediency (i.e. Dick Cheney's reference to specific weapons systems that John Kerry voted against as being "instrumental in winning the Cold War") and their corresponding pull with politicians on The Hill.
Conflicts of interests are complicated, but when a middle man is involved, it could be for the very simple reason that the directness of said conflict is diffused when it is complicated. The loser, almost everytime, is the consumer, as the costs are almost always born by those consuming the product or being affected by the policy in question. I am filing this one under Military-Industrial Complex, but it really applied to any business.
All for now, stay cool.
UPDATE: Continuing on the matter of disappearing voices, William Safire will be stepping down as an opinion columnist at the NYTimes in January. I love Safire—not because I agree with him, but because I think he's a smart motherfucker. He will be missed. Perhaps the Times knew about this ahead of time, though, well ahead of time. It would seem Brooks is the replacement conservative voice. A poor replacement, says I, and a little douchebag, says Leroy. At least it's not Novak, I guess, or Will. I never really considerd Safire a true conservative, more of a Likud Libertarian. Ah well, he's preparing to write his memoirs, I would imagine. I'll buy it.
I sent an email (and posted) a while ago about a supposed 93,000 votes in Ohio materializing from somewhere, but the morning after I sent the email the story was debunked. It seems that some Ohio county put the wrong number of total voters on their website, which a little bit of the corporate news (and some bloggers) picked up on.
Meanwhile, despite the media impressions that everything went real smoothly, there are still many unresolved stories, and rather shocking stories of voting machines counting backwards (in Florida, of course) and another story about a county in Ohio that suddenly locked down its ballot counting facilities, barring the media and official ballot observers, citing 'homeland security' concerns.
There are a lot of concerns about the integrity of our electoral system out there. This is not the same thing as saying that "Bush didn't win." Rather, many people are concerned that the system at all levels--and races all over the country, including ballot initiatives--may not be 100% accurate. This is really a huge story that has to be dissected, not just out of suspicion of fraud, but simply to understand if the present system even works right or not.
I have put together a web page that has a lot of these election stories. The page also has links to websites like BlackBoxVoting.org, an organization that is conducting Freedom of Information Act requests all over the country to find out exactly what happened on Nov. 2. Some of the websites have political agendas, yet all should provide information that people need to see about our system.
The page is located at http://wiki.hongpong.com/index.php/Tracking_election_irregularities
The page can be edited by the public so if any of you find stories about voting irregularities, weird stuff or investigations of fraud, you could easily add a link onto the page. To explain this a little better, I have added a type of technology called a 'wiki' to my website that allows people to collaborate and interlink easily written webpages. That may not make a lot of sense but go check it out.
If you want to leave any comments about the page or what's on it, go to this link and click the '+' button to type something in.
http://wiki.hongpong.com/index.php/Talk:Tracking_election_irregularities
Thanks for checkin this out and please let me know what you think!
More news from the ongoing Israeli-American hegemon project. According to this rightwing news story, it sounds like Israel gave the U.S. some of their trusty Evil Israeli Bulldozers to git those Ayrabs... To restate the major problem with this type of thing, the U.S. military is so disadvantaged in the situation that we are dependent on the Israelis to provide operationally useful tactics (and bulldozers).
Unfortunately, traveling down this dark road will make us rise to ever worse methods of torture and suppression, while merging our perceived national identity with Israel's. The Israelis will happily provide the means (and the personnel?) as long as it takes. Operationally useful tactics probably can't rescue us from strategic disaster, and when the Arab TV networks get a good look at these bulldozers, it will make our strategic position that much worse.
I should add that I don't know much about WorldTribune.com so this article could be nonsense, but there is nothing in it too surprising. WorldTribune looks like a right-wing rag, as they have a link to the Drudge Report at the very top.
Is it really true that we have run out of armor plates so badly that we are buying the damn things from the Israelis? How much are we paying their military-industrial complex, then?
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
BAGHDAD – The U.S. military has employed Israeli urban warfare tactics during the current invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.
U.S. officials acknowledged that hundreds of officers have trained in Israel over the last two years in urban warfare and counter-insurgency. In September, scores of U.S. officers trained at the Adam urban warfare school northeast of Tel Aviv, a facility that contains a mock Arab village.
The U.S. officers trained in Israel relayed their expertise to the U.S. Army's Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, La. Over the last two years, the army center has increased the number of mock Arab villages from four to 18 and employed Arab speakers for urban warfare exercises.
A key Israeli lesson adopted by the U.S. military was the need to maintain surprise during an infantry advance in an Arab urban environment.
Officials said the Army and Marine Corps have employed tactics developed during the Israeli military invasion of West Bank cities in 2002.
They said the Israeli methods helped save soldiers and accelerate the advance through Fallujah.
"We have learned a lot regarding urban warfare tactics in the Middle East from our allies," an official said. "Yes, this includes Israel."
In the Fallujah operation, U.S. troops broke through walls of Iraqi homes to avoid exposure in the city's narrow alleys, believed to have been mined by insurgents.
Another Israeli lesson was the use of air platforms to target enemy combatants during street battles. In Fallujah, the United States has employed AC-130 gunships to target insurgents in downtown Fallujah. In the Gaza Strip, Israel has used the Apache AH-64A attack helicopter to strike insurgents and their vehicles.
On Wednesday, the U.S. military said it has captured 70 percent of Fallujah and killed about 80 insurgents. The military, reporting light casualties, said most of the fighting was taking place in the center of the city.
"The enemy is fighting hard but not to the death," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the multinational ground force commander in Iraq, said in a Pentagon videoconference broadcast from Iraq. "There is not a sense that he is staying in particular places. He is continuing to fall back or he dies in those positions. I think we're looking at several more days of tough urban fighting."
Another Israeli tactic developed by the U.S. military in Fallujah was the use of a multi-pronged advance on insurgency strongholds in an urban area. Officials said the technique was employed in the Israeli ground offensive on the northern West Bank city of Nablus in April 2002. The U.S. force has also employed armored D-9 bulldozers to clear roads. Israel has provided the United States with 14 armored D-9 bulldozers for the war in Iraq.
Officials said Israel has also provided armor for Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, many of which have been deployed in Fallujah. They said Rafael, Israel Armament Development Authority has sold the reactive armor plates to the U.S. Army.
In Fallujah, the U.S. military also employed an Israeli method of clearing mines. The method called for a tank to fire a barrel of more than a ton of explosives and attached to a 200-meter cord.
The barrel explodes and sets off mines planted in either a field or street.
I will not get into the election irregularities stuff I've found lately at the moment, but I will quote a form email that Dan Schned sent me:
Dear friend,I wrote the following in the petition comment box:Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?
If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and to help prevent this from happening again.
Members of Congress are demanding an investigation to answer this question. Join me in supporting their call, at:
http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/
Thanks.
As a young person who understands the principles of information technology, I am terrified that the legitimacy of our democracy rests on the 'black boxes' of memory cards in electronic voting machines. I know perfectly well (and I suspect the Republicans know, too) that anomalies in how these machines operate cannot scientifically be detected from the outside. Hence, the election becomes a matter of unobserved, unverifiable phenomena, encouraging electoral fabrication similar to so many Iraqi defectors providing fake intelligence to Congress about weapons of mass destruction. Every year, my generation trusts less and less what the adult world tries to pass off as legitimate systems of government. Our patience for these farcical claims of veracity wears thin.
Assam state in India has about 5000 elephants running around, causing havoc and consuming alcohol, reported a story on The Agonist today. The elephants have killed at least 22 people in the state this year. This maybe related to the fact that 100,000 acres in the state were cleared by humans since 1996.
(Indo-Asian News Service) Ranchi, Oct 5 : Don't store liquor. Don't go out into the forests drunk. Don't worship elephants. And move only in groups at night.These are among a list of do's and don'ts brought out by the forest department of Jharkhand in a bid to check the growing cases of man-elephant conflict that have resulted in the deaths of over 300 villagers here in the last four years.
Huge posters carrying these do's and don'ts have been put up in areas where elephants often stray and damage crops and property and sometimes even kill people.
The villagers have been advised not to store 'mahua' (a substance from which local brew is prepared) in their homes.
Elephants can smell 'mahua' from a distance of three to five kilometres. Intoxicated by it, elephants often attack villages and houses and trample anyone coming in their way.
Villagers have also been asked not to move out of their homes in an inebriated condition. "Sometimes a person who is drunk mistakes an elephant for a hillock and tries to climb it. This irritates the beast who in turn attacks the person, resulting in his death," said a forest department official.
Worshipping of elephants, an animal considered by many as a divine incarnation, has also been put on the don'ts list.
"Every elephant is not trained to accept the worship and when they feel threatened they attack human beings," said another forest official.
The villagers have been asked not to venture into the forest after sunset to collect firewood. In case it became necessary to step into jungle at night, the posters advise the villagers to move in groups and carry with them torches, drums and other tools to drive away elephants in case they are confronted by elephant herds.
Holy War: Evangelical Marines Prepare to Battle Barbarians:
With US forces massing outside Fallujah, 35 marines swayed to Christian rock music and asked Jesus Christ to protect them in what could be the biggest battle since American troops invaded Iraq last year.
Men with buzzcuts and clad in their camouflage waved their hands in the air, M-16 assault rifles beside them, and chanted heavy metal-flavoured lyrics in praise of Christ late on Friday in a yellow-brick chapel.
[....]
"You are the sovereign. You're name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb," a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes, reflecting on what lay ahead for them.
Between the service's electric guitar religious tunes, marines stepped up on the chapel's small stage and recited a verse of scripture, meant to fortify them for war.
One spoke of their Old Testament hero, a shepherd who would become Israel's king, battling the Philistines 3,000 years ago.
"Thus David prevailed over the Philistines," the marine said, reading from scripture, and the marines shouted back "Hoorah, King David," using their signature grunt of approval.
The marines drew parallels from the verse with their present situation, where they perceive themselves as warriors fighting barbaric men opposed to all that is good in the world.
"Victory belongs to the Lord," another young marine read.
Their chaplain, named Horne, told the worshippers they were stationed outside Fallujah to bring the Iraqis "freedom from oppression, rape, torture and murder ... We ask you God to bless us in that effort."
"American Marines attack Fallujah" via ScotlandToday:
Colonel Gary Brandl of the United States Marine Corps commented:
"The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him."
The Americans needed to free up hundreds of troops for this operation and the Black Watch was moved from the relatively benign Basra area to allow that to happen.
On Thursday, three soldiers died in only their second day in the area - Sergeant Stuart Gray and Privates Paul Lowe and Scott McArdle, all of whom were from Fife.
There's an interesting documentary that I found out about called "THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR" by Adam Curtis, originally aired in late October on BBC2. You could have gotten part 1 via BitTorrent, but it seems to be gone now.
This guy made a transcript of the whole thing (Part 1 [A B], part 2 [A B] part 3 [A B]) It starts with the adventures of one Sayyed Qutb in Colorado, 1949. The writings of this guy have been highly influential in forming Sunni fundamentalist ideas. Then it flips straight over to Leo Strauss. Regardless of how you think these guys fit into the scheme, they are definitely part of the intellectual backdrop of both sides of the 'War o' Terror.'
I have two main threads to post here from the documentary. One theme is the origins of modern Islamist ideology. The other is how the neoconservatives filtered into power and manipulated how the U.S. perceived the threat from the Soviet Union. Both of these are quite important, yes?
Voiceover: This was Truman’s America, and many Americans today regard it as a golden age of their civilization. But for [Sayyid] Qutb, he saw a sinister side in this. All around him was crassness, corruption, vulgarity—talk centered on movie stars and automobile prices. He was also very concerned that the inhabitants of Greeley [Colorado] spent a lot of time in lawn care. Pruning their hedges, cutting their lawns. This, for Qutb, was indicative of the selfish and materialistic aspect of American life. Americans lived these isolated lives surrounded by their lawns. They lusted after material goods. And this, says Qutb quite succinctly, is the taste of America.
VO: What Qutb believed he was seeing was a hidden and dangerous reality underneath the surface of ordinary American life. One summer night, he went to a dance at a local church hall. He later wrote that what he saw that night crystallized his vision.
CALVERT: He talks about how the pastor played on the gramophone one of the big-band hits of the day, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He dimmed the lights so as to create a dreamy, romantic effect. And then, Qutb says that “chests met chests, arms circled waists, and the hall was full of lust and love.”
VO: To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent picture of youthful happiness. But Qutb saw something else: the dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls. They believed that they were free. But in reality, they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires. American society was not going forwards; it was taking people backwards. They were becoming isolated beings, driven by primitive animal forces. Such creatures, Qutb believed, could corrode the very bonds that held society together. And he became determined that night to prevent this culture of selfish individualism taking over his own country.
[ TITLE: CHICAGO ]
VO: But Qutb was not alone. At the same time, in Chicago, there was another man who shared the same fears about the destructive force of individualism in America. He was an obscure political philosopher at the University of Chicago. But his ideas would also have far-reaching consequences, because they would become the shaping force behind the neoconservative movement, which now dominates the American administration. He was called Leo Strauss. Strauss is a mysterious figure. He refused to be filmed or interviewed. He devoted his time to creating a loyal band of students. And what he taught them was that the prosperous liberal society they were living in contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Professor HARVEY MANSFIELD, Straussian Philosopher, Harvard University: He didn’t give interviews, or write political essays, or appear on the radio—there wasn’t TV yet—or things like that. But he did want to get a school of students to see what he had seen: that Western liberalism led to nihilism, and had undergone a development at the end of which it could no longer define itself or defend itself. A development which took everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings, and made us into dwarf animals. Made us into herd animals—sick little dwarves, satisfied with a dangerous life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.
VO: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny to battle the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program: Gunsmoke.
The episode quickly goes into Qutb's philosophy of jahiliyya (roughly "the pervasively corrupting influence of the West that has poisoned our people and must be destroyed") and how that led to Ayman Zawahiri starting Islamic Jihad.
The documentary also talks about how the neoconservative clique wormed its way into Washington with Cheney and Rumsfeld in 1975-76. Then Paul Wolfowitz started the 'Team B' plan to demonize the Soviet Union and exaggerate the threat it represents. Then the Committee on the Present Danger was created to propagate their bollox findings. A fascinating tale of cold war hawk propaganda.
Suddenly I realize why they titled this "The Power of Nightmares"... But wait, Michael Ledeen makes an appearance!
VO: To persuade the President [Reagan that the Soviets were a global threat], the neoconservatives set out to prove that the Soviet threat was far greater than anyone, even Team B, had previously shown. They would demonstrate that the majority of terrorism and revolutionary movements around the world were actually part of a secret network, coordinated by Moscow, to take over the world. The main proponent of this theory was a leading neoconservative who was the special adviser to the Secretary of State. His name was Michael Ledeen, and he had been influenced by a best-selling book called The Terror Network. It alleged that terrorism was not the fragmented phenomenon that it appeared to be. In reality, all terrorist groups, from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, and the Provisional IRA, all of them were a part of a coordinated strategy of terror run by the Soviet Union. But the CIA completely disagreed. They said this was just another neoconservative fantasy.
MICHAEL LEDEEN , Special Adviser to the US Secretary of State 1981-1982: The CIA denied it. They tried to convince people that we were really crazy. I mean, they never believed that the Soviet Union was a driving force in the international terror network. They always wanted to believe that terrorist organizations were just what they said they were: local groups trying to avenge terrible evils done to them, or trying to rectify terrible social conditions, and things like that. And the CIA really did buy into the rhetoric. I don’t know what their motive was. I mean, I don’t know what people’s motives are, hardly ever. And I don’t much worry about motives.
VO: But the neoconservatives had a powerful ally. He was William Casey, and he was the new head of the CIA. Casey was sympathetic to the neoconservative view. And when he read the Terror Network book, he was convinced. He called a meeting of the CIA’s Soviet analysts at their headquarters, and told them to produce a report for the President that proved this hidden network existed. But the analysts told him that this would be impossible, because much of the information in the book came from black propaganda the CIA themselves had invented to smear the Soviet Union. They knew that the terror network didn’t exist, because they themselves had made it up.
MELVIN GOODMAN , Head of Soviet Affairs CIA, 1976-87: And when we looked through the book, we found very clear episodes where CIA black propaganda—clandestine information that was designed under a covert action plan to be planted in European newspapers—were picked up and put in this book. A lot of it was made up. It was made up out of whole cloth.
So in other words, neoconservatives used the CIA's black propaganda against the policymaking process of the American people. That's clever! Ledeen again, and he really sounds like he did when he came to Macalester:
VO: [Reagan's 1983 order authorizing covert action against leftists globally was a] triumph for the neoconservatives. America was now setting out to do battle against the forces of evil in the world. But what had started out as the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had said was necessary for the American people increasingly came to be seen as the truth by the neoconservatives. They began to believe their own fiction. They had become what they called “democratic revolutionaries,” who were going to use force to change the world.
LEDEEN : We were aiming for an expansion of the zone of freedom in the world. And in part that had to do with fighting Communism, and in part that had to do with fighting other kinds of tyrannies. But that’s what we were about, and that’s what we’re still about.
INTERVIEWER (off-camera): When you say you were democratic revolutionaries, what do you mean?
LEDEEN : It meant that we wanted to support the people who wanted to carry out revolutions against tyrannical régimes in the name of democracy, in order to install a democratic system.
INTERVIEWER : As simple as that.
LEDEEN : Yeah. It’s not nuclear physics, you know. I mean, freedom is a fairly simple thing to get.
In a nutshell, then, we have gone from the faked threat from the Soviet Union to a situation where our armed forces claim to be fighting the face of Satan in Fallujah.
Ah, the sweet, sweet power of fake moral frameworks. I hope this illustrates a little of how they lied to us before, and how they found the political power of racist dehumanization...
"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."
--Thomas Jefferson. I found this quote on a picture on SorryEverybody.com, a site (nick linked to below) featuring apologies from ordinary folks to the rest of the world about the election.
Mysterious stuff from San Andreas... I mean Los Angeles. Apparently some tanks showed up at an anti-war protest. We were sent an opinion piece with a link to some video of the tank hosted on LA IndyMedia, but it doesn't work. However, LA Indymedia still has something of the story, which is where I ripped off this strange picture from.
[UPDATE Nov. 12] The vehicles are marine Armored Personal Carriers (APCs), not tanks. I thought the barrel of the turret looked a little small. The video of what happened is now available.
Not sure what to think of this. The LA site has stuff rambling about the Posse Comitatus Act, as if that will protect us from the threat of domestic militarization. This policy paper about domestic militarization from the libertarian Cato Institute looks like it opposes such nastiness.
Well, sweet children of the corn, guess who's bizack? Started with a FaceMob, time to get that pape, dawg.
Mordred's back, that's who, and he's got some shameless plugs to slip into the uber-serious train of thought that is Hongpong.
First, BlackOutBlog is back in full force- there will be daily posting on this site from here on out, so head on over for some mind-expanding goodness.
Second: 6-8 p.m. Sunday on 91.7 FM WMCN, DanF and I have a radio show entitled "Michael Powell, Make Me a Sandwich" that anyone with access to a radio should be listening to, because it kicks MONKEY ASS.
Third, tell Dan to redesign BlackOutBlog with spiffy graphics like his site- why do the good guys always get the big SHAFTerussky right up the pooper? Answer me that, huh?
While we're on the topic of Shafterusskies, check out this site here, an open apology to the rest of the world, who got shafted along with us. Also, see who got the shaft in a game of Congressional Am I Hot Or Not?
Just trying to lighten up the mood here at HongPong. Not that I think this Ohio story isn't intriguing, but we all know nothing will come of it. Let's face it, the Supreme Court would decide this one again if they had to.
OK, little ones, I must go fly with the unicorns now, a toute a l'heure.
I'm about to get teased, I sense, by one of my afternoon poli. sci. professors for an email I sent out after posting the stuff below last night. Turns out that Olbermann retracted the 93,000 vote claim this morning, much to my chagrin. I got an email from Peter Gartrell suggesting that I not wrap the whole damn campus up in my conspiracy theories. Well, i never said that I was certain of the story, just that its appearance in a corporate news source proved it was more likely to have something behind it.
However, there are plenty of other stories out there that need to be examined, including the Black Box Voting issue, the optical scanner discrepancies in Florida and such things as the Ohio machine that added 4,000 votes for Bush—nearly a twentieth of his victory margin, from just one machine. That one was corrected, but how many of things happened in an unobservable fashion?
I'm feeling a little bit dumb that I jumped the gun on this one, and normally I don't do such things, but for some reason I felt that when the corporate guys broke the story, it became far more worthwhile to email people about. Email your brickbats to Microsoft. (what is a brickbat besides a tired journalist expression for pissed off people anyway?)
I have to jet to lunch in a sec, but here are a few stories to look at about it.
Florida discrepancies from county to county.
"Election 2004: worse than 2000?"
"Presidental votes miscast on e-voting machines across the country"
"Going down the stolen election road?" by David Corn of The Nation.
"The Scourge of PESTS," more fluffy but it talks about people denied the right to vote and missing absentee ballots in Ohio.
Eriposte has some stuff about exit poll irregularities and other stuff.
This is really weird. One of the more marginal yet oddly spunky anchors on cable TV, the former sportscaster Keith Olbermann, has suddenly decided to take his show, Countdown, straight into the land of tinfoil hats (welcome, sir!) and is now trying to blow the stories of voting irregularities wide open. Fascinating stuff. I am posting a bit about this voting fraud story (described as 'naked promotional announcement') I got this off a DailyKos diary which has links to some of the MSNBC videos.
There is some serious shit in here, about security lockdowns in Ohio and the apparent discrepancies between optical scanners and electronic machines in Florida. Yeee-haw!!!
This was originally published on MSNBC's website. The nut of the issue: we now have evidence that shows most of the gap in Ohio's election results can be filled with phantom voters (evangelicals or ghosts in the diebold machines, take your pick).
At least, that's what a corporate news desk is now saying. WHAT the HELL? I will not still not assign credulity to the idea that the election WAS stolen. However, now things are, shall we say, amped.
I needed to pull out this quote. I can't believe it myself. And Homeland Security is involved?
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.
I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.
Sorry, here is the full thing:
SECAUCUS -- A quick and haplessly generic answer now to the 6,000 emails and the hundreds of phone calls.
Firstly, thank you.
Secondly, we will indeed be resuming our coverage of the voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida -- and elsewhere -- on this evening's edition of Countdown {8:00 p.m. ET}. The two scheduled guests are Jonathan Turley, an excellent professor of law at George Washington University, and MSNBC analyst and Congressional Quarterly senior columnist Craig Crawford.
For Jonathan, the questions are obvious: the process and implications of voting reviews, especially after a candidate has conceded, even after a President has been re-elected. For Craig, the questions are equally obvious: did John Kerry's concession indeed neuter mainstream media attention to the questions about voting and especially electronic voting, and what is the political state of play on the investigations and the protests.
Phase Two, in which Doris gets her oats...
Keep them coming. Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
* November 9, 2004 | 12:55 a.m. ET
Electronic voting angst (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK -- Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written "I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2... My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time."
I didn't get the memo.
We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Monday's Countdown. There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who had personally encountered the `lockdown' during the vote count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who've written the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we should gently call the Electronic Voting Angst. Conyers insisted he wasn't trying to re-cast the election, but seemed mystified that in the 21st Century we could have advanced to a technological state in which voting-- fine, flawed, or felonious-- should leave no paper trail.
But the show should not have been confused with Edward R. Murrow flattening Joe McCarthy. I mean that both in terms of editorial content and controversy. I swear, and I have never been known to cover-up for any management anywhere, that I got nothing but support from MSNBC both for the Web-work and the television time. We were asked if perhaps we shouldn't begin the program with the Fallujah offensive and do the voting story later, but nobody flinched when we argued that the Countdown format pretty much allows us to start wherever we please.
It may be different elsewhere, but there was no struggle to get this story on the air, and evidently I should be washing the feet of my bosses this morning in thanks. Because your reaction was a little different than mine. By actual rough count, between the 8 p.m. ET start of the program and 10:30 p.m. ET last night, we received 1,570 e-mails (none of them duplicates or forms, as near as I can tell). 1,508 were positive, 62 negative.
Well the volume is startling to begin with. I know some of the overtly liberal sites encouraged readers to write, but that's still a hunk of mail, and a decisive margin (hell, 150 to 62 is considered a decisive margin). Writing this, I know I'm inviting negative comment, but so be it. I read a large number of the missives, skimmed all others, appreciate all-- and all since-- deeply.
Even the negative ones, because in between the repeated "you lost" nonsense and one baffling reference to my toupee (seriously, if I wore a rug, wouldn't I get one that was all the same color?), there was a solid point raised about some of the incongruous voting noted on the website of Florida's Secretary of State.
There, 52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County-- Bristol, Florida and environs-- where it's 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the other 24.
Those protesting e-mailers pointed out that four of the five counties we mentioned also went for Bush in 2000, and were in Florida's panhandle or near the Georgia border. Many of them have long "Dixiecrat" histories and the swing to Bush, while remarkably large, isn't of itself suggestive of voting fraud.
That the other 24 counties were scattered across the state, and that they had nothing in common except the optical scanning method, I didn't mention. My bad. I used the most eye-popping numbers, and should have used a better regional mix instead.
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.
I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.
Vote early! Vote often!
And in the continuing saga of the secret vote count in Warren County, Ohio (outside Cincinnati), no protestor offered an explanation or even a reference, excepting one sympathetic writer who noted that there was a "beautiful Mosque" in or near Warren County, and that a warning from Homeland Security might have been predicated on that fact.
To her credit, Pat South, President of the Warren County Commissioners who chose to keep the media from watching the actual vote count, was willing to come on the program-- but only by phone. Instead, we asked her to compose a statement about the bizarre events at her County Administration building a week ago, which I can quote at greater length here than I did on the air.
"About three weeks prior to elections," Ms. South stated, "our emergency services department had been receiving quite a few pieces of correspondence from the office of Homeland Security on the upcoming elections. These memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County and they included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day security.
"In a face to face meeting between the FBI and our director of Emergency Services, we were informed that on a scale from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8 to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular, was rated at 10 (with 10 being the highest risk). Pursuant to the Ohio revised code, we followed the law to the letter that basically says that no one is allowed within a hundred feet of a polling place except for voters and that after the polls close the only people allowed in the board of elections area where votes are being counted are the board of election members, judges, clerks, poll challengers, police, and that no one other than those people can be there while tabulation is taking place."
Ms. South said she admitted the media to the building's lobby, and that they were provided with updates on the ballot-counting every half hour. Of course, the ballot-counting was being conducted on the third floor, and the idea that it would have probably looked better if Warren had done what Ohio's other 87 counties did-- at least let reporters look through windows as the tabulations proceeded-- apparently didn't occur to anybody.
Back to those emails, especially the 1,508 positive ones. Apart from the supportive words (my favorites: "Although I did not vote for Kerry, as a former government teacher, I am encouraged by your `covering' the voting issue which is the basis of our government. Thank you."), the main topics were questions about why ours was apparently the first television or mainstream print coverage of any of the issues in Florida or Ohio. I have a couple of theories.
Firstly, John Kerry conceded. As I pointed out here Sunday, no candidate's statement is legally binding-- what matters is the state election commissions' reports, and the Electoral College vote next month. But in terms of reportorial momentum, the concession took the wind out of a lot of journalists' aggressiveness towards the entire issue. Many were prepared for Election Night premature jocularity, and a post-vote stampede to the courts-- especially after John Edwards' late night proclamation from Boston. When Kerry brought that to a halt, a lot of the media saw something of which they had not dared dream: a long weekend off.
Don't discount this. This has been our longest presidential campaign ever, to say nothing of the one in which the truth was most artfully hidden or manufactured. To consider this mess over was enough to get 54 percent of the respondents to an Associated Press poll released yesterday to say that the "conclusiveness" of last week's vote had given them renewed confidence in our electoral system (of course, 39 percent said it had given them less confidence). Up for the battle for truth or not, a lot of fulltime political reporters were ready for a rest. Not me-- I get to do "Oddball" and "Newsmakers" every night and they always serve to refresh my spirit, and my conviction that man is the silliest of the creator's creations.
There's a third element to the reluctance to address all this, I think. It comes from the mainstream's love-hate relationship with this very thing you're reading now: The Blog. This medium is so new that print, radio, and television don't know what to do with it, especially given that a system of internet checks and balances has yet to develop. A good reporter may encounter a tip, or two, or five, in a day's time. He has to check them all out before publishing or reporting.
What happens when you get 1,000 tips, all at once?
I'm sounding like an apologist for the silence of television and I don't mean to. Just remember that when radio news arose in the '30s, the response of newspapers and the wire services was to boycott it, then try to limit it to specific hours. There's a measure of competitiveness, a measure of confusion, and the undeniable fact that in searching for clear, non-partisan truth in this most partisan of times, the I'm-Surprised-This-Name-Never-Caught-On "Information Super Highway" becomes a road with direction signs listing 1,000 destinations each.
Having said all that-- for crying out loud, all the data we used tonight on Countdown was on official government websites in Cleveland and Florida. We confirmed all of it-- moved it right out of the Reynolds Wrap Hat zone in about ten minutes.
Which offers one way bloggers can help guide the mainstream at times like this: source your stuff like crazy, and the stuffier the source the better.
Enough from the soapbox. We have heard the message on the Voting Angst and will continue to cover it with all prudent speed.
Thanks for your support.
Keep them coming... Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
I am down in The Mac Weekly office right now and I probably ought to start laying out the Opinion section now (including Jack Phinney's hilarious letter), but I thought that it would be a good idea to quickly post something about the changes on the site since last week and a whole new project that's now up and running.
This weekend I installed a powerful software package called MediaWiki on my server, which offers me the ability to stash an infinite amount of information on interlinkable dynamic web pages until the DogCows come home.
The new project is called the HongWiki, and for now it is a totally public system. That is, you don't even need to have a login on the server to make a page, add text or upload images. If this gets abused, the public access will have to be closed off, but hopefully that won't happen for a while.
Also, I have found that HongPong.com has achieved the top spot in some interesting Google searches, bringing this site to a (small) commanding height in the emerging global information economy. If you run a search for "Democratic Spectacle in Des Moines" or "west bank settler Douglas Feith," you will find HongPong.com as the top result. "West Bank Douglas Feith" puts my site as the fifth result.
It is not really a surprise that the 'Democratic Spectacle' search would come to this site, since that was the headline of a story I wrote when checking out the Democratic caucus process in Iowa a year ago. It is really just a funny search string.
But how did I get highly linked with Israeli settlers and our fanatical and dangerously incompetent defense undersecretary for policy? It just goes to show that not enough people, even out in this 'blogosphere' (I hate using that word) give a damn about the connection between messianic-eschatological political movements and the Pentagon.
So then, if I argue that there is an Israeli-American hegemon effect in politics, does this mean that since I dominate a search string that directly refers to this hegemon, now I'm a part of it? (talk about your foucaultian networks of power)
(By the way, what the hell is the DogCow Wiki?)
What does this election prove? What does it suggest we are destined for? What does it signify about the people of this nation?
I don't think the answers are positive ones. I have some lingering questions about the legitimacy of this one, although we are meant to believe that the results were clear and obvious. Yet I must ask, is it possible that they could have made 11,000 votes for Kerry in New Mexico disappear? A hundred thousand in Ohio?
Adding to the uncertainty, journalist Greg Palast, whose book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy summed up all the electoral fraud in Florida last time, now hypothesizes that Kerry actually won, if the exit polls are to be believed:
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here .] Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
[.....]
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.
The Impact Of Challenges
First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.
In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
[.....]
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.
I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
This rests rather heavily on the idea that the exit polls will be accurate within just a few points. However, it would help explain why the chattering heads on Fox News couldn't stop their disdain for exit polls. Exit polls are in fact the only real way we have to detect electoral fraud, and I'm alarmed at the idea that they would no longer be used. We find widespread discrepancies between the exit polls and election results in Ohio and Florida, and this ought to be explained, yet probably won't be.
Dan Schwartz wrote the following email that rounds up the various rumors and incongruities.
The Democrats have already conceded the presidential election, magnanimously declaring that victory is impossible and that we should therefore spare the nation the excruciating pain of a full vote count. The major media agrees. Pre-election voter disenfranchisement, though widely reported and thoroughly documented (see http://vote2004.eriposte.com/ for this), has completely dropped out of the spotlight; the possibility of an imperfect election seems to be headed the same way.
There is a growing pile of evidence, though, that clearly points to the possibility of outright fraud on election day. The AP and AFP (Agence France-Presse) are both carrying stories now that detail instances where 'software glitches' resulted in Bush winning more votes in a county than are possible- more than the total number of registered voters. These stories come from Ohio and Florida, obviously the 2 most crucial and contentious states in the entire election.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/05/politics1149EST0515.DTL
http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local
This graph shows wild discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote tallies, suggesting the possibility of fraud. The servile mass media relies on these same polls to make their coverage bearable on election night, so you'd better believe they work hard to make sure they're reliable.
Check it out: http://img103.exs.cx/img103/4526/exit_poll.gif
Other counties have made projections based on voter registrations, then found that the election result was massively different. Take Baker County, FL as an example:
Registered Voters
REP: 24.3% DEM: 69.3%
Actual Votes
REP: 7,738 DEM: 2,180
Change from Expected Results REP: 220.4% DEM: -68.4%
(data from http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00000893.htm)
Here's a story from Warren County, Ohio: "Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns."
The Miami Herald has reported an instance where officials in Broward County were forced to change a previously announced result on a gambling referendum after discovering a 'computer glitch' that caused the vote tabulation system to begin counting BACKWARDS after hitting a ceiling (chosen by the software programmer) of 32,000 votes. the machine did this for every vote it counted for every race. officials there have apparantly known about the 'bug' for 2 years now but never had it fixed. "Florida's election chief, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, downplayed the significance of a miscount she blamed on 'inadvertent human error' in the Broward elections office. Hood stressed that double-checking procedures had caught what she described as an isolated error. Hood maintained that the incident shows the system worked. 'It's not a problem. . . . They made the correction.'"
Even if you don't think this is conclusive proof of fraud, it is certainly enough to justify demanding a recount. Remember, Kerry's concession is not legally binding in any way. It was a political decision, taken to save face and preserve everyone's perceptions that the system is not corrupt. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CALL YOUR CONGRESSPEOPLE, CALL EVERYONE YOU KNOW, AND FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU HAVE EVER MET.
dan [Schwartz]
So then, do I conclude that the Republicans stole their second presidential election in four years? That's a tall order to fill, and I don't really believe it that much. However, I will say that our election system does not work perfectly, and provides plenty of opportunities for electoral fraud all around.
I even talked with someone (though I forget who, Your Honor) who planned to vote in both a swing state and Minnesota. I also heard about some foreigner getting into the polls here. This stuff happens, and we cannot ignore that. The question is whether the people on top are gaming the system as much as the random folks I've run across.
Campaign 2004 might be over, thank God, but it was not clean nor honest.
Hey folks, it's been an interesting week, hasn't it?
I am having my usual radio show at 6 PM tonight on 91.7 WMCN. DJ IDon'tEvenGoHere and DJ BFG look somewhere to the west with the right kind of eyes, where it reached the high water mark and rolled back...
Election day is tomorrow. (Ok, it's actually today and I changed the time of the post a couple hours back for dramatic effect. Yay.)
On what will hopefully be the last day of this strange government’s political domination of our country, I thought that I should share something about the last four years. Where to begin… where to begin…
I wonder how much of this time has been wasted and whether the energy we spent in resisting served no purpose.
Then I think back to the times that we came together to declare with one voice that the war was wrong, the policies were wrong and the leaders were mad. Even in those dark hours, those symbolic gestures in the street assured me that there was some kind of link between people that even Bush couldn’t crush.
All the way back to the fall of high school’s senior year (2001), on that distant planet we once lived on, I felt that the good times couldn’t last. I thought the economy was cruising on a bubble. I thought that things would make less sense before they made more.
That bizarre election four years minus one day ago launched the country into the sea of uncertainty. Little did we know that the political strategy of this president was to burn away the basis of facts themselves, and substitute spin for reality.
After looking at Macalester College in the Clinton days, I found coming here in the calm, almost flippant season before 9/11. Somewhere I still have that summer’s Time magazine all about shark attacks.
We had ten glorious, blazing days at Macalester, partying on Turck Three, Turck Two, up and down Doty and Dupre. The social universe had no barriers. It was just as well that I didn’t yet have the computer my parents had ordered for school.
One Tuesday morning, I hadn’t yet done my work for Griffin’s film analysis class that afternoon. My crappy old clock radio clicked on, disjointed ramblings about some crash on MPR. Hit the snooze button. The second time I listened for a while, buildings on fire. Went to the bathroom and a floormate told me something crazy was going on.
We went into my room and fiddled around with Adam’s shitty old TV. Then the fuzzy image came up: the towers burning in a haze of static. Campus ground to a halt, everyone stopped to watch, agape.
In the days that followed, I looked again and again at the American flag outside the chapel. Anything was possible now. In a way that was a sort of freedom, the idea that from such a chasm something better might be fashioned. But I also feared that they would take this disaster and run away with it.
At least we would have the chance to start afresh in college, at least this epoch would let us cleanly break from the old days.
Unexpectedly, something weird happened to our class, and I think our class alone. The famed Macalester bubble hardened into a Macalester shell through the rest of that semester. We reoriented towards our friends and our studies. Generally, we rarely got far off campus. I think that somewhere among those crucial weeks, when the country wept and the flags flew out of stores, we missed some indoctrination session that everyone else got. We didn’t get saturated by the media—we barely saw cable. We were not formed into believers.
I still remember someone telling me that they could hardly believe that these flags were all over the place. It felt alien—more American than America.
Then came those slogans. “United We Stand” was the best because it was consonant with “United States.” Later the war brought “Support Our Troops.” One night in Mickey’s Diner with some of my Indian friends, I realized that among this group, the slogans became meaningless. If you were among foreigners, the ‘We’ and ‘Our’ become false, and suddenly you escaped from the mental box.
What, then, to say about the war? What to say about where God has gotten placed these last few years? There’s really nowhere to begin but with my persistent atheist beliefs. For me, the most threatening, doom-laden quality of this government has been the way its supporters have attached an eschatological, apocalyptic meaning to September 11. They believe (or purport to believe) that September 11 was not a ‘mundane’ event. Instead, the disaster is elevated to a spiritual or eschatological plane, as it becomes an element of God’s plan for the world. The crashes are not just plane crashes, they are a projection of supernaturally pure moral evil into reality, and a revelatory moment for the believers.
Such heretical thinking has a great political advantage. Over fall break, I saw a few minutes of a Congressional campaign debate from gerrymandered Texas that when the Republican related the dangerous idea. He said that God had allowed this disaster to happen, but God’s grace was revealed in the American reaction to it. The disaster opened a path of redemption, and Bush, as God’s agent, had moved down this path. The War on Terror became spiritually licensed.
No, I say to these people, No a million times. God was not involved. God does not exist, and everyone who says that there was Grace in what followed is fabricating a ghastly deity of convenient vengeance. The Republicans have exploited this unholy narrative and its profoundly evil nature should alarm any student of politics or history. Aggressive nationalists have run this kind of line throughout human civilization, because people fear the uncertainty of not placing faith in the story.
A professor of journalism, David Domke, visited my rhetoric of campaigns and elections class this fall to talk about Bush’s religiously colored language, as part of a tour for his fascinating new book, “God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the “War on Terror” and the Echoing Press.”
He describes how the Bush administration fabricated the “good vs. evil” and “security vs. peril” binaries, and applied them to make it seem as if Bush was carrying out God’s will.
Cynical atheistic political theorists like Leo Strauss have said that a political leadership’s appeal to God serves the purpose of lending cohesion to the society, and claiming to speak on behalf of the Invisible One effectively silences the doubters. Some leaders, like Bush, claim to act as prophetic agents or portals of insight into God. These are the dangerous ones; once followers buy into this, there is no stopping them.
Over the course of this government, I’ll say that the most profoundly frightening and disturbing moment of the whole adventure came during my attendance at a rally supporting the war in its first days, on March 22, 2003, where I took pictures.
There, our governor, Tim Pawlenty, uttered something I knew to be racist and totally false. I heard the grief of 9/11 cynically redirected to support the war, an abuse of power that literally made me shake. Pawlenty was speaking on the steps of the state Capitol building. He said that we were going to strike back at those who struck us on 9/11. I instantly knew this to be a lie, a horrible lie. The crowd cheered, and I shuddered.
Early in 2002, I started looking around at the points of conflict between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Without too much trouble, I found the Intifada. Here was a concrete case of Muslims getting crushed by outsiders with military aid from the United States. If we were to patch this War on Terror up, it would have to involve peace in the West Bank and Gaza. There was no other way.
My lifelong fascination with maps took a turn for the surreal when I first looked at the complex diagrams of settlements and Israeli roads on the West Bank. What the hell was this program? Why are these things expanding? Did someone say that God authorized this? Was there some kind of moral fiction being generated to sustain the process? And what does democracy become in a country that generates racially exclusive colonial suburbs?
In the fall of my sophomore year, October 2002, two men from this place came to Macalester. (I wrote an editorial about it a couple weeks before they came) I co-wrote the news story about their visit here, but of course someone failed to put that issue of the Weekly (Vol. 5, Issue 4) online.
I talked briefly with Ami Ayalon, Sari Nusseibeh and George Mitchell. Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s FBI-like security forces, the Shin Bet, and Nusseibeh, the then-president of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University, came to the U.S. to talk about their sensible peace plan, which entailed removing virtually all the settlements, sharing Jerusalem and bringing the Palestinian refugees into the territories, not Israel. They hoped to promote the plan by getting ordinary folks on both sides to sign their statement.
For me, this encounter forever destroyed the idea that to be ‘pro-Israel’ or ‘a friend of Israel’ means supporting the self-destructive policies of the Likud. Ami Ayalon is as much of a hard-nosed Israeli security expert as you will ever find. He could have probably killed me with his ballpoint pen in a dozen different ways. Yet this tough man was acutely afraid of the settlers and the threat they posed to Israel’s stability. His years at the Shin Bet actually were among the safest and most hopeful that the people of that poor, beleaguered country ever had. It was Ayalon’s Shin Bet that cooperated with the Oslo Accord’s new Palestinian security services to prevent the Islamic fundamentalists from bombing and shooting Israelis. There were virtually no suicide bombings under Ayalon’s watch, because he determined how to coordinate Israel with willing Palestinian security forces. I learned it could be done again, because it had been done before. If only the constant process of the settlers’ territorial aggression—which increased dramatically during Ayalon’s tenure—had been checked, things might not have spun out of control.
At this same time, we began to hear rhetoric of plans to invade Iraq. I dismissed these rumors for a while, believing that the U.S. would have to intervene with Israel before breaking out into Iraq. I saw a couple patterns emerge as the deed went down. The first was the source of stories about weapons of mass destruction and lurid tales of terror training within Iraq. These stories tended to depend on the statements of defectors, who in fact turned out to be liars pimped out by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. It was difficult, if not impossible, to hear of the really threatening yarns from more objective sources.
The other key pattern was a sense that the government itself was divided about the war, because, as we found out later, there was a dramatic factional battle, roughly between the neoconservatives in Cheney’s office and the top of the Pentagon, versus the State Department, CIA, and some of the uniformed military staff.
Reading one of my weirder “news” sources, I found references to a 1996 policy document called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” This doc, widely available on the Internet, prompted me to rethink what exactly these neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith were gunning for. I have rambled extensively about the significance of the Clean Break, and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my days. Near the beginning of the war in Iraq, I posted my analysis of it on Everything2.com. As the war started during spring break, I remember reading one of the key passages to my family:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
So before I get into the wretched nature of the war, I should explain a politically hazardous, yet profoundly important idea about our present situation. At this moment, we are deeply wrapped within something I call the ‘Israeli-American Hegemony,’ (a.k.a. ‘the Republican-Likud merger’) a crucial, misunderstood component of the ‘War on Terror’ campaign. In some ways this hegemony is a continuation of the old ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ we’ve heard so much about, but it is in fact a new, evolving political form that both the Bush and Sharon administrations have done their utmost to market to their countries.
This hegemony signifies that the national identities of Israel and the United States should merge together, on the basis of perceived political, moral, military and religious congruities between the countries. There is a specific moral calculus fabricated into the hegemony: namely, that Israel and the United States exist on a moral plane apart from the rest of the world, and their decisions are effectively guided by God’s higher moral purpose.
The Clean Break document states that Israel needs to match America’s language. In an institutional fashion, this is what hegemony and integration really means: the Pentagon starts to think and function like the IDF and the American messianic Christians move closer to the messianic Jewish groups in the West Bank.
The Clean Break document said that
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values…
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.
To synchronize the language between our governments is precisely the objective.
Yet the success of this hegemon is based on insane, shaky foundations. For one thing, it defies a fundamental premise of international politics: different states have different interests. I’m sorry, but I do not have the same policy interests as a handful of messianic settlers on a West Bank hilltop, and my government should reflect that. The whole enterprise of the Israeli occupation itself is horrible: only our own Christian fundamentalists who see the construction of settlements as a means to fulfill the return of Jesus and bring about the apocalypse favor this undertaking.
This hegemony idea also is rather racist: it suggests that the Israelis themselves are incapable of charting their own destiny. Instead, they are expected to play out the end-of-the-world script that Christian fundamentalists believe they ought to play.
I’ve found that this hegemon has been quite easy to spot lately. We can pick apart political discourse just from the last few weeks of the campaign. We saw it when Sharon and Bush agreed that “Israeli population centers” in the West Bank could be annexed, as if Bush could somehow speak on behalf of the Palestinians.
Thomas Friedman says that Iraqis refer to American troops as “Jews,” while Arab TV networks show split-screens of Israeli aggression in the territories and American lunacy in Iraq. This, Friedman says, is harmful because it merges these identities into a larger complex, but not because it’s an objective fact of the current situation. As he says, now it is hard to know where American policy ends and Sharon’s begins.
Osama Bin Laden’s latest video references the crimes he claims were committed by this same ‘alliance,’ a charge probably not literally true (I doubt he cared that much in 1982) but with much more resonance after the U.S. has tried to kill vast numbers of Iraqis over this year.
I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers.
But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that.
And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.
In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Right-wing Israeli hawks crow about how the U.S. is finally absorbing the lesson it learned in Lebanon from the Marine barracks bombing. Our future wars, they say, will more resemble Israel’s campaigns in the West Bank and Lebanon. Hence, we need the Israeli operational methods to succeed (ignoring the fact that the Israeli ventures have been bloody, pointless failures). Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:
…there is no doubt that the American military's view of Israel's strategic posture today bears little resemblance to its perception of Israel's strategic posture 21 years ago. Particularly since September 11, and as the situation in Iraq continues to evolve and mutate, the US military has increasingly come to see Israel's war fighting experience both against the Palestinians and in Lebanon from 1982-2000 as a composite of how America's wars will look in the future. Everything from Israel's need to have armed guards at the entrances to shopping malls and cafes to our tactics for land-air-sea combat operations and intelligence-gathering techniques informs the US military as its commanders prepare for battles of the present and the future.
Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations' enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as "subject matter experts" is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe.
Hawks also constantly assert that Hezbollah is an enemy of the United States, and its television station, Al Manar, even more so.
I argued in a paper this spring that as the U.S. military depends more and more on private corporations for doctrine, training and logistics, privatized military firms are an ideal transmission belt to strengthen this hegemon, as ‘Israeli security experts’ come in to provide the goods on how to manage these Arabs. In the other direction, the U.S. provides military hardware like Apache helicopters to Israel. If you think that national identity has nothing to do with helicopters, tell me if the images of Apaches blazing missiles that the Arabs constantly see .
Consider that al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia killed an American working on Apache helicopters there. Al-Qaeda is zeroed in on attacking highly visible elements of the hegemon like the Apache.
Perhaps, too, the same informational tools that the Israelis use to target individual ‘terrorists’ are being implemented throughout the U.S. military. In particular, CACI International has been lauded by Israel as providing informational tools to fight the war on terror, and CACI interrogators in Iraq construct matrices that tell the military which Iraqis to go after. What if these very tools are part of the political problem that has obliterated all goodwill between the U.S. and the Iraqis? What if the tools have gotten out of control, instructing the military to lock up the wrong Iraqis in places like Abu Ghraib indefinitely? For that matter, what about the rumors of Israeli interrogators within Abu Ghraib?
Seymour Hersh has reported that one book in particular, “The Arab Mind,” has been instrumental in shaping how the neocons developed their strategies in Iraq. “The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour'. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - 'one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation'."
Now, Iraq. More than a thousand U.S. soldiers dead, many thousands more wounded and crippled. The war has reached out and killed folks in harmless backwater places like Ellsworth, Wisconsin. And now we hear estimates that one hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed by the war and civil disorder.
There has always been something strange and unreal about the invasion and the way our occupation policies have been carried out. There’s been a certain feel or metaphor to their approach that I would describe as the ‘Babylon complex.’
The Babylon complex was a result of the asphyxiated, closed decisionmaking process in the Pentagon, combined with the foolish, racist assumptions of horrible people like Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The image of a Free Iraq that they painted in our heads was one of great power, good for us and a friend of Israel. The operation would finance itself through Iraq’s vast oil revenues, an globally unmatched mountain of wealth under the sand.
The vision of this wealth overwhelmed the planners of the war, really. They bet everything on subduing the Iraqis and implementing their economic-political shock therapy plan. The Bush administration believed that any serious acknowledgement of their horrible planning would harm their political leverage in the U.S., so they did not fire the incompetent people in the belief that somehow Good Faith could carry them through the situation.
The continuity of the operation trumped its stability. Providing the spin or appearance of stability precluded actually working for stability. As the great CPA spokesman Dan Senor (who entered Washington as an aide for the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC) put it when talking about the al-Qaqaa munitions disaster:
(Image composited from the 'Metropolis')
How suitable, then, that in the very site of historical Babylon itself was the stage for this flight of fancy. It reminds me of the 1925 Fritz Lang classic, “Metropolis,” and the story of Babel contained therein.
Maria: Today I will tell you the story of the Tower of Babel.
Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies—
and on it we will inscribe: ‘Great is the world and its Creator. And great is Man.’
Those who had conceived the idea of this tower could not build it themselves, so they hired thousands of others to build it for them.
But these toilers knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned the tower.
While those who had conceived the tower did not concern themselves with the workers who built it.
The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many.
[Title:] BABEL
[A crowd rushes the tower, and destroys it.]
Between the brain that plans and the hands that build, there must be a mediator.
It is the heart that must bring about an understanding between them.
Worker: But where is our mediator, Maria?
Maria: Be patient, he will surely come.
Worker: We will wait, but not for long.
So now the hands are fighting the planners, surprise surprise. They are only fighting for the greatest material prize of world history, and they’re just settling in to fight to the death.
The spooky feeling stepped up when I heard that the U.S. military was finding mountains of arms all over the country, but lacked the manpower to capture and secure them. All these arms—of all the things you need to capture and secure in an occupied country, for the sake of ordinary folks and your own soldiers, you have to secure the arms. And they didn’t. Al Qaqaa is only the latest example.
The disastrous planning has quickly undermined our moral stature in Iraq, as small tactical victories are actually strategic failures. We play word games about terrorism then airstrike the hell out of Sunni city after Sunni city. As the conservative William Lind put it:
The point here is not merely that in using terrorism ourselves, we are doing something bad. The point is that, by using the word "terrorism" as a synonym for anything our enemies do, while defining anything we do as legitimate acts of war, we undermine ourselves at the moral level — which, again, is the decisive level in Fourth Generation war.
The incredibly astute Professor Juan Cole described how the Bush administration operates by representing, rather than reflecting reality.
The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it turns out that Kerry was right, but Bush was being dishonest in postponing the further request until after the election. Another example of how the Bush administration is government by "representation" in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term rather than in the civics sense. Foucault said that people have a tendency to represent reality, and then to refer to the representation rather than to the reality. (This is also the way stereotypes and bigotry work.) So Bush represented the Iraq war as a $120 billion effort, and actually corrected Kerry with reference to this representation. But the representation was a falsehood, hidden by a clever fiscal delaying tactic. So Kerry is made to seem imprecise or as exaggerating, when in fact he was referring to the reality. Bush made representation trump reality.
Edward Said in his Orientalism shows the ways in which Western travelers and writers have often invented a representation of the Middle East that then gets substituted for Middle Eastern realities so powerfully that the realities can no longer even be seen by Westerners. Said cites travel accounts by eyewitnesses who report falsehoods that had already entered the literature. So these travelers let the representations over-rule what their own eyes saw.
Ok, Dan, you think, that’s great but can you prove it? Can you prove anything? And when does this ridiculously long post end?
I’ll be done soon. It’s been four horrible years, for God’s sake! Fortunately, I have collected some useful evidence. Dr. Rashid Khalidi visited Macalester in the fall of 2003, and I managed to snag him for an interview for the Mac Weekly. This interview, for me, answered many of the key questions. Did Iraq have to go so wrong? Did the neocons fabricate intelligence data to justify the war? Is there a connection between Douglas Feith and the settlers? It’s all there…
DF: You said in your talk regarding Iraq that “there are much worse days to come.” What leads you to this?
RK: Several things. The first is that the Administration purposely had too few soldiers for the post-war, leading directly to a chaotic situation which resulted in the destruction of the organs of state. The occupation thereafter took a number of decisions which alienated the entirety of the armed forces, and the Baathist technocrats, without whom it would be almost impossible to run a modern state in Iraq….
DF: What do you believe are the central principles of neo-conservativism? Do you believe it carries an outer moral ideology for mass consumption, and an elite truth for the few?
RK: Yeah, Seymour Hersh in his articles in the New Yorker about these people has argued that these are people who studied under Leo Strauss or under disciples of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, people like Wolfowitz himself, [Pentagon policymaker] Abram Shulsky and others, and that they came away with a sort of neo-Platonic view of a higher truth which they themselves had access, as distinguished from whatever it is you tell the masses to get them to go along.
There is a certain element of contempt in their attitude towards people, in the way in which they shamelessly manipulated falsehoods about Iraq, through Chalabi….
DF: A Frontline interview with Richard Perle was published with the documentary “Truth, War and Consequences.” He talked about the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which reviewed intelligence on Iraq prior to the war. Perle said the office was staffed by David Wurmser, another author of the Clean Break document. Perle says that the office “began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.” Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?
RK: I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found.
It was not just the Office of Special Plans, or whatever. There are a lot of institutions in Washington that were devoted to putting this view forward. Among them, other parts of the bureaucracy, and the vice president’s national security staff….
We now know this stuff, with a few exceptions, to be completely and utterly false, just manufactured disinformation designed to direct the United States in a certain direction. Whether the neo-cons knew this or not is another question, but I believe Chalabi’s people knew it. I would be surprised if some of them didn’t know it.
And now, the presidential campaign. Early on, I was all over the place, distrustful of the candidates. I felt that the ‘Washington candidates’ like Kerry were compromised by the war. I wanted someone to wake this slumbering country, and somehow Howard Dean succeeded brilliantly in getting attention and articulating opposition to the war. I went to Iowa to check out the process there. I wrote a story about going to the unofficial kickoff of the Iowa caucus race, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. Outside the hall, Howard Dean shook my hand, but didn’t look me in the eye. Most of the candidates spoke there, and I found Dean’s readiness to holler “You have the power,” amping up his huge section of the crowd, to be somewhat distasteful if not outright demagoguery.
In Iowa, all the candidates met a friendly audience, because they all spoke to the better side of America, and they each went for one of Bush’s exposed quarters. Such a spectacle as this veered into heights of drama so that for those moments, these folks under hardship and war could let each other know they still had friends in Washington, and they were part of a project bigger than themselves.
My admiration for the Dean campaign became a confidence in a stable new coalition, but Dean’s theatrics fit poorly at key moments. My perceptions of Edwards and Kerry as trustworthy and experienced leaders was boosted by Peter’s and Andrew’s thoughtful support. The basic trust of our southern neighbors gave me hope in these bleak days that America isn’t totally in disarray. Their support of each other led me to believe that the majority of the country—which never voted for Bush, or anyone—might still be reached in the wilderness.
I shied away from thinking about the Democratic race after that, but of course the process heated up and Dean faded after the summer. John Kerry, the frontrunner, found himself hamstrung by his Iraq position, so how could he find a way out of the bind and discredit the Bush administration?
Finally, when Kerry came to Macalester and I helped cover it for the Weekly, I had the opportunity to ask him a question as he was shaking hands on the way out. I asked, “Senator Kerry, do you believe that the intelligence distortions on Iraq should be treated as a criminal matter akin to the Iran-Contra affair? Do you believe that the investigation should be a criminal matter?”
Kerry said to me, “I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done.”
A classically hedged answer from Kerry, which wasn’t a surprise. However, I would say it was the wrong answer. His campaign could have challenged the “flip-flopper on the war” idea by telling the American people how the administration fabricated the WMD and terror intelligence on Iraq, and tricked well-meaning legislators like Edwards and himself into supporting the war with it. But Kerry’s people never concretely made it a part of the campaign, although late in the game Kerry finally said that Bush had “played games with intelligence.” People love a spy thriller: Kerry should have laid out how Chalabi and the gang faked it. Bush and the whole administration would have been better discredited. A real pity, a pity. But you can’t say I didn’t try.
Ok, well this has become more a ramble on the usual political topics than a digestion of what the subjective experience of living under this government has been like. Looking back on it, I have some regrets. I have a serious problem with trusting people and even being willing to spend time with them. Most days it was just chickenshit reluctance, but sometimes my political obsessions and paranoia got the better of me, even before I found out that all these military and government guys were looking at my website.
With regards to running this website, it has been an interesting experience. It has brought the CIA and Department of Homeland Security straight into my bedroom, but its also showed me how profoundly interconnected the Internet makes us. How else, besides lunch at Macalester, can you run into so many random people from so many different countries?
I can’t say that every decision I’ve made has been worth it. I know I didn’t do the most I could to challenge the war; I spent a lot of time in a muted, black and fearful moods. Not like the soft weight of clinical depression, this was a kind of burning flame I could see when I closed my eyes. I knew that the bastards were smashing the heritage of all human civilization when they invaded Iraq without protecting our first Artifacts.
As someone who refuses to believe in God, I have only the continuous stream of history to supply a foundation of meaning in our lives. That’s why I’ve found it so difficult to come to terms with the idea that these guys just didn’t give a damn. I am still terrified of the political forces they’ve unleashed.
One last thing that I haven't yet written about online: what it meant for me to visit the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. I will say that it simply makes it easier to think about once the icons become fixed in your concrete reality, instead of the fluid, alternately fixated and amnesiac media sea that we float in. Once the place is tied down in your own experience, it is much easier to understand. Power became easier to understand from we saw later: a young guy reading the Bill of Rights in a park got arrested right in front of us.
(This is the third-to-last picture I took in New York, during the protests outside Bush's speech. Click for larger version)
I remember standing on the stoop outside Wallace a few days before spring break in 2003. They had just clipped the fences between Kuwait and Iraq. This was a time of sociological anomie, I said to Alison and Dan Schned. There are no social norms here. In a way, it was a kind of freedom, and we treated it as such. We are still stuck in that anomie, even when Kerry wins tomorrow, as I’ve guaranteed myself he will.
Fortunately, I still have some glimmering bits of optimism left. When the sun rises on November Third, it will be a whole new world. I feel that I’ve gotten through the worst times now, and maybe, just maybe, the four-year malaise will finally be crushed by the evidence that my people have not yet abandoned hope.
