Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
HuffyPost:
US AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ PREDICTS US WILL GO INTO SYRIA…
Worth the huge type:
Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, made the off the record prediction that the US will go into Syria to combat insurgents that have been using the country as a staging ground for terrorist activity in Iraq.
Ambassador Khalilzad’s comments were made at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend.
In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.
Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest.
Arch-conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen has a really entertaining one up at his website: "The Demise of Global Communications Security: The Neo-Cons' Unfettered Access to America's Secrets." There is some interesting stuff about the National Security Agency, backdoors in Swiss Crypto AG machines, Jonathan Pollard, billionaire fugitive Marc Rich and his lawyer Scooter Libby, Canadian peacekeepers in the Golan Heights, Larry Franklin, Martin Indyk, John Bolton, the suspicious Israeli moving company (Urban Moving Systems) that some have alleged was linked to 9/11, and late FBI agent John O'Neill. And also the True reason Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan.
Not that I believe such a story. However, I would love to write a movie script that sounded like this. And I did agree with the statement at the end: "U.S. intelligence sources report that the one Israeli who is considered an extreme threat to U.S. national security is former Prime Minister and current Prime Minister hopeful Binyamin Netanyahu." A fine work, Madsen, can we get you into screenwriting?
Raimondo kicks around a little with the old Anthrax Attacks of 2001. They sure were helpful in driving the country into a frenzy of fear... A frame up? etc etc... WaPo says little progress in FBI work.
Reuters: "Psychopaths could be best financial traders." Who makes the most cash? Sure they're all sane.
Apparently White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card may end up secretary of the Treasury. Weird. As Kevin Drum says:
Has it really gotten to the point where it's impossible for Bush to find solid, conservative appointees for these positions who have actual experience in the relevant fields? Aren't there any left who are still willing to work for him? Or does he feel so besieged by life that he literally feels he can't trust anyone with a big job unless they've spent a couple of years working within a few feet of him?
Check out the AliveInTruth New Orleans oral history project. Best blog title I've heard lately: "Clusterfuck Nation" by Jim Kunstler. There's trouble a brewing... and he thinks life is on the edge in this Long Emergency of ours:
The new assumption will be that when shit happens you are on your own. In this remarkable three weeks since New Orleans was shredded, no Democrat has stepped into the vacuum of leadership, either, with a different vision of what we might do now, and who we might become. This is the kind of medium that political maniacs spawn in. Something is out there right now, feeding on the astonishment and grievance of a whipsawed middle class, and it will have a lot more nourishment in the months ahead.
As always, bagNewsNotes is excellent.
BAD TIMES: They are charging for me to read my Krugman and Dowd. No good. So we will have to turn to places like this for Krugman. Dammit!!
Polls Baby: Bush's speech didn't do anything good for his poll numbers. Speaking of poll numbers, Hot Damn, the Democrats are polling really damn well these days! w0000!!! Independents favor Donkeys right now 55 to 27!!! MyDD also says that "the progressive blogosphere is a larger source of news for younger Americans than all of the cable news networks combined". So Good news. Peter Daou reflects on "limits of blog power" in Salon. He was basically the Kerry Campaign-blog connection, which must have been dicey. Interesting. Much wisdom, but this nails it:
"Rightwing bloggers will do everything in their power to prevent another Katrina triangle, where the confluence of blogs, media, and Democratic leadership exposes the real Bush and shatters the conventional wisdom about his ability to lead. .... For the progressive netroots, the past half-decade has been a Sisyphean loop of scandal after scandal melting away as the media and party establishment remain disengaged."
There's some kind of video blog interview thing going on at something called EvolveTV. Apparently Kos will interview Juan Cole. Sounds good to me. (more on it)
How are Talking Points drilled into the heads of the pundits?
When John G. Roberts is approved as chief justice of the United States, as expected, he can thank President Bush 's "Friends & Allies" program, which went to work on him immediately after he was nominated. The project, started by the Republican National Committee in the 2004 re-election campaign, is simple and effective: Give opinion makers, media friends, and even cocktail party hosts insider info on the topic of the day. How? Through E-mailed talking points, called D.C. Talkers, and conference calls. For Roberts, it worked this way: A daily conference call to about 80 pundits, GOP-leaning radio and TV hosts, and newsmakers was made around 9 a.m. On the other end were the main Roberts gunslingers like Steve Schmidt at the White House and Ken Mehlman and Brian Jones at the RNC. D.C. Talkers would then be distributed to an even larger list filled with positive info about Roberts and lines of attack on his critics. "The idea," said one of those involved, "is to feed them information and have them invested in us." It has even created addicts, he added. "Now they come to us before going on TV."
Not really that clever. But interesting.
IRAQification: The Score. What happened to that $1 billion? Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad is on it. The part about 28-year old Soviet helicopters and phony Egyptian-made MP5 knockoffs is kind of funny. TIME has "The Secret History of How the US Misjudged the Enemy in Iraq (condensed)." (also this full article) And the WMD hunt fucked up early efforts that might have reduced the strength of the insurgency. The article indicates that once Tommy Franks moved his HQ to Florida from Qatar, the force in Iraq was basically run by colonels, with less than 30 intelligence officers left in Iraq. Amazing. And then they dissolved the Iraqi army and civil service. A great moment. Needs to be read. It ends:
"We have never taken this operation seriously enough," says a retired senior military official with experience in Iraq. "We have never provided enough troops. We have never provided enough equipment, or the right kind of equipment. We have never worked the intelligence part of the war in a serious, sustained fashion. We have failed the Iraqi people, and we have failed our troops."
On the other hand, Condi says it's about coffee. So what would an actual Civil War look like? Meanwhile in Central Asia, the Great Game Reloaded.
Juan Cole had a fine look at the Egyptian elections: "A people who figured out how to get rid of Napoleon Bonaparte within a year is hardly flummoxed by a mere Texas poseur." "Church of England offers to meet Muslim leaders to apologize for Iraq war." I was talking earlier about the Zarqawi-Goldstein symbolic connection. Well also, someone named Ritt Goldstein had a good story about anomalies in the Berg video last year from Asia Times Online.
Right Wing Echo Chamber invents missiles: Apparently for some reason the right wing blogosphere is inventing stories about missiles getting shot at a flight last Thursday. I have no special insight here, except that it shows a fertile fantasy life... Speaking of fantasies, Pandagon mocks PowerLine's PowerLies. But the more I think about people like that, the less free time I have. A funny interview about Creationism and Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, the Faith of Our Times. Haven't you heard that the leftists are trying to destroy America? That's new!
Someone is still keeping score on the Valerie Plame affair. Hopefully that will come roaring back again. Arianna had a bit on it.
As DeLay's Woes Mount, so Does Money: (NYT)
A legal defense fund established by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has dramatically expanded its fund-raising effort in recent months, taking in more than $250,000 since the indictment last fall of two his closest political operatives in Texas, according to Mr. DeLay's latest financial disclosure statements.
The list of recent donors includes dozens of Mr. DeLay's House Republican colleagues, including two lawmakers who were placed on the House ethics committee this year, and several of the nation's largest corporations and their executives.
Among the corporate donors to the defense fund is Bacardi U.S.A., the Florida-based rum maker, which has also been indicted in the Texas investigation, and Reliant Energy, another major contributor to a Texas political action committee formed by Mr. DeLay that is the focus of the criminal inquiry. Groups seeking an overhaul of Congressional ethics rules have long complained that companies might seek the favor of powerful lawmakers by contributing to their legal defense funds.
While the disclosure forms show that the defense fund has raised nearly $1 million since its establishment in 2000 and that Mr. DeLay is continuing to pick up generous donations from House Republicans and corporate executives, the documents also suggest that the majority leader's fund-raising efforts could soon be outpaced by ballooning legal bills.
The disclosure statements show that Mr. DeLay, whose title as majority leader makes him the second most powerful Republican in the House and whose fund-raising tactics led the House ethics committee to admonish him last year, paid $370,000 in legal fees last year - $260,000 of it in the final three months of the year.
The fees were divided among lawyers in Washington and Mr. DeLay's home state of Texas, where he is facing scrutiny by a grand jury in Austin over his role in the creation and management of Texans for a Republican Majority, the political action committee that he helped establish in 2001. The committee has been accused of funneling illegal corporate donations to state Republican candidates in the 2002 elections.
That is the best thing about their gerrymandering scheme in Texas: a tasty idea that took down the leader by his own hubris. Another example of successful long term thinking, like so many others we see and hear about.
Well, the time is upon us to certify last November's election, and there are some hopeful rumors that up to three senators were favorable to objecting to the certification of Ohio's electors. Possibly the certification of other states might be challenged, as well.
I will be back at the Dungeon of the Palace of DeWitt Wallace (ie the library computer lab) on Thursday so I will try to post some more stuff up as things in Washington unfold. Yes, the site has not been getting fresh content like we had going before finals. I would simply say that:
A) I have needed some time off of writing to read more–and actually read pleasant things, not the usual endless stream of insanity
B) the server had outdated versions of important software and it keeps forgetting what time it is. No, it is not 1904. So I've spent a while patching things up, strengthening the operation. This is especially important because
C) when looking through the hongpong.com server logs late last night, I discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency came back, (after their first openly identified visit—the real covert dudes would obviously use computers that didn't have IP numbers tied to CIA.gov) but this time, they downloaded a large section of things. I will say more about this later. Centcom.mil, the Joint Forces Command, and the usual jokers on Air Force and Army bases looking (via Google) for the violent military helicopter kill video keep coming back.
As you might imagine, the CIA has given me one of those weird post-paranoia feelings. I am not wildly alarmed, but it's motivated me to spend a while increasing the security of things, reflecting on what other script kiddies and spammers are trying to do all the time. I don't think the CIA has it 'in for me,' but it motivates me to keep a reasonably close eye on what is going on.
All this stuff has taken my attention away from looking at the election stuff and posting about it. But anyway here goes...
Your reading assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to look at the report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee called "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio." [Full PDF] I will post the whole executive summary below this stuff because it is important.
So bradblog.com is offering some hopeful rumors and tidbits. The great Clint Curtis will probably get some attention as well, as he was making the rounds through Capitol offices. Three senators, says Brad:
We have heard that there was a hard coalition of three Senators in support of challenging the Electors, while a larger number had hoped to simply publish a letter calling for Election Reform instead of taking the more impressive stand as recommended by the Constitution. There is a reason why in a body of hundreds, only two are required to immediately halt all proceedings in order to debate and investigate any Electoral chicanery.Well, that makes me feel a little more optimistic that the whole issue of vote integrity will get propelled into the news cycle for a while, but these days I just don't think it will stick. If it weren't for the tsunami disaster, there would have been a lot more oxygen in the media spin chamber for elevating this fight.
While Election Reform is clearly necessary, that can be done next week, or next month. Tomorrow is the moment for Senators to stand up with the 24 House of Representative members to challenge Electors for being illegally seated.
We're happy to report we've heard that the three Senators in favor of challenge held strong, at least for the day, and did not fold in favor of the "Letter" option.
Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Executive summary
Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Democratic staff to conduct an investigation into irregularities reported in the Ohio presidential election and to prepare a Status Report concerning the same prior to the Joint Meeting of Congress scheduled for January 6, 2005, to receive and consider the votes of the electoral college for president. The following Report includes a brief chronology of the events; summarizes the relevant background law; provides detailed findings (including factual findings and legal analysis); and describes various recommendations for acting on this Report going forward.
We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.
This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people’s trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.
With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.
First, in the run up to election day, the following actions by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens, predominantly minority and Democratic voters:
• The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. This was illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post reported that in Franklin County, “27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.” Among other things, the conscious failure to provide sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which requires the Boards of Elections to “provide adequate facilities at each polling place for conducting the election.”
• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters. Mr. Blackwell’s decision departed from past Ohio law on provisional ballots, and there is no evidence that a broader construction would have led to any significant disruption at the polling places, and did not do so in other states.
• Mr. Blackwell’s widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election.
• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to engage in preelection “caging” tactics, selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter turnout. The Third Circuit found these activities to be illegal and in direct violation of consent decrees barring the Republican Party from targeting minority voters for poll challenges.
• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges “can’t help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration.”
• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell’s order to be illegal and in violation of HAVA.
Second, on election day, there were numerous unexplained anomalies and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for:
• There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote. Mr. Blackwell’s apparent failure to institute a single investigation into these many serious allegations represents a violation of his statutory duty under Ohio law to investigate election irregularities.
• We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors.
• There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected. The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had an undervote rate of over 25% each – accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president.
• There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; (ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; (iii) the voting records of Perry county show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot; (iv) in Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history; (v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known third-party candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas; (vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush.
Third, in the post-election period we learned of numerous irregularities in tallying provisional ballots and conducting and completing the recount that disenfanchised thousands of voters and call the entire recount procedure into question (as of this date the recount is still not complete) :
• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots resulted in the loss of thousands of predominantly minority votes. In Cuyahoga County alone, the lack of guidance and the ultimate narrow and arbitrary review standards significantly contributed to the fact that 8,099 out of 24,472 provisional ballots were ruled invalid, the highest proportion in the state.
• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to issue specific standards for the recount contributed to a lack of uniformity in violation of both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses. We found innumerable irregularities in the recount in violation of Ohio law, including (i) counties which did not randomly select the precinct samples; (ii) counties which did not conduct a full hand court after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; (iii) counties which allowed for irregular marking of ballots and failed to secure and store ballots and machinery; and (iv) counties which prevented witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount.
• The voting computer company Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.
Gooo Conyers, he's the man!
It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.
It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.
So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.
So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.
This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.
January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.
My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.
But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.
Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...
Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).
The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.
After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....
So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.
After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.
I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.
School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.
I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.
And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.
I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?
To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.
The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...
So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
Arafat's sudden illness has prompted a flurry of activity all over. The Israeli military is of course concerned about what might happen after he dies, to the extent that rioting Palestinians might overrun settlements and military positions in the territories, or that Jordan, pressed between the West Bank and Iraq, could get violent.
Within the West Bank, occupation policy is tense (via Haaretz):
IDF commanders were instructed, should such a situation arise, to do everything in their power to prevent a flare-up and reduce friction between troops and Palestinian demonstrators in West Bank and Gaza towns. Even so, commanders were also told to make every effort to prevent demonstrations from overrunning IDF roadblocks and settlements in the territories.
In the Ramallah area, IDF troops were put on a raised level of alert, fearing that the gravity of Arafat's condition would spark a wave of Palestinian demonstrations.
Military sources believe that the causes of Arafat's deterioration would have a direct effect on the extent to which Israel is held responsible for his death, even though the IDF is not particularly active in Ramallah recently nor has it strictly maintained the siege on his headquarters.
Still, IDF sources say that should Arafat die, soldiers will be told to respect Palestinian mourning rituals, thereby avoiding a situation in which expressions of joy of Israeli soldiers cause emotions to ignite.
Early IDF discussions on the matter included the question of where Arafat would be buried. The PA chairman had in the past stated that he wished to be buried on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, although it is unlikely that Israel would ever agree to this.
"Divvying Up Arafat's Powers." At least the Palestinians are already planning a round of elections in a couple months.
Inside Israel, we now see the emergence of a messianic, pro-settler faction within Likud led by Benjamin Netanyahu. We need to fear this man:
Netanyahu revolted against Sharon on live television. For three years he has been repeating to his people that he would not depose the prime minister because he is not willing to sit on a chair that is bleeding. This week he did, although in an embarrassing way, but there is no need to worry. He will recover. The person who managed to recover after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and go on to win the elections will ultimately succeed in defeating the elderly leader who is now clinging to the tattered remnants of his party.
Henceforth it will be like in the period prior to the 1996 elections. Netanyahu is now conducting a campaign for the leadership of the Likud party and in order to do this he is turning to his home camp, the Yesha (settlers' acronym for the territories: Judea, Samaria and Gaza - which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) Council, the courts of the National Religious Party rabbis and Shas leader Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. When the moment rolls around he will run a national campaign - he once again will go back to being "moderate" and speak to Shinui voters.
The dumb Shas party is against withdrawal, says the settler news.
"Dismantling Jewish communities in Gush Katif and northern Samaria would endanger Israel," Shas party spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said Saturday night. "Next, they will chase Jews out of Ashkelon, [West Bank city Hebron] Hevron and Be'er Sheva; there will be no end!"
Speaking in his weekly Saturday night sermon, which drew much more press coverage than usual given its political content and ramifications, Rabbi Yosef ruled that the 11 Shas MKs - and others - must vote against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. The Rabbi's decision stonewalled Sharon’s attempt to win an impressive majority in the Knesset when the disengagement bill comes to a first reading on Tuesday.
The rightwing WorldNetDaily reported it believed that the ailing Mr. Arafat prefers that Kerry wins. This item via the settler news service Arutz Sheva. It's a one-time opportunity for progress, eh? What kinds of shakeups for the Middle East?
A writeup on CounterPunch critical of Thomas Friedman's sudden turn against the Bush Administration because it regards the Israeli-American hegemon issue as something transmitted via TV.
In some random domestic headlines,
Is Bush's website blocking international visitors?
Tom DeLay's corruption may bite him on the ass in the election, before he goes down for certain indictment. Wouldn't that be sweet if Texas voters knocked him out first?
Ralph Nader has a letter from a Minnesota highway. Fuck him and the tarmac he rides on.
A Perfect Circle is popular music around here. Something appealing about being more ethereal than Tool, but just as despairing. Personally, my favorite songs are from a live concert last Halloween in San Antonio that someone taped and put on the Internet. The excellent recording shows how skillfully the group uses reverberations to build a sonic masterpiece.
With that in mind, the band has released a couple music videos to the Internet, highly critical of Bush etc. One, a deceptively simple looking cartoon-style "Counting Bodies like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums" (RealMedia & Quicktime available) features a hypnotizing Bush channeled through tons of television screens. Beautiful imagery.
A more disturbing video, "Imagine" covers the John Lennon classic (RealMedia only, sorry) in the most scathing way possible, subverting the happy happy joy joy stuff with unfiltered images of the horror of war.
On Election Day, A Perfect Circle is releasing their next album, eMOTIVe, about "WAR, PEACE LOVE AND GREED," according to their website, which has all kinds of goodies, including more tracks from the album, for free. The album art for this one looks excellent: a battered concrete peace sign in the foreground, torched city in the back. What more do you want?
Crucial:
With your halo slippin' down,
I'm more than just a little bit curious
How you plan to go about making your amends
To the dead
-- A Perfect Circle, The Noose
Eminem's new video, and not the funny one, has been getting a lot of attention lately. All about the election, war and everything.
It's called Mosh and you can see it online.
HURRAY fall break... time to freak out!!! WHOOO
UPDATE Oct. 30: A review of the Eminem video via The Nation.
Well, everyone has heard by now about Jon Stewart's exciting trip onto CNN Crossfire a couple weeks ago. You can download it via this BitTorrent link. I've had this link a while but been too lazy to put it up.
I ♥ Huckabee's opens tonight at the Grandview. Nice. My Michael Ledeen story will be in The Mac Weekly today... "Lunch Beyond Good And Evil." Coming soon.
Some random tidbits for Friday morning:
Hans Blix on the preposterous games that Bush played with the inspections. Not as funny as Blix's role in TEAM AMERICA, which I saw last Saturday and really liked.
What is going on regarding Major Assaults Planned Right After the Elections? More of the democracy-terror nexus whipping about and killing innocent people.
Get your Armies of Compassion domain names. They're going quick. In the time I was watching this, someone bought armiesofcompassion.net. WhoooO!
As everyone knows by now, Ron Suskind's article in the NY Times Sunday magazine was staggering. I left one quote as my AIM away message for awhile:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
All sorts of faulty technology messed up the war for troops, besides the catastrophic planning.
"Post-war planning non-existent" by those stalwart Knight Ridder guys.
War on Terror spreads terror, says Rami G. Khouri in "Filling the Swamp."
"Allawi Presses Effort to Bring Back Baathists." Yes, that's Moral Clarity! Green Zone sabotage. Actually this proves that the "Green Zone" no longer exists, if it ever did.
On a lighter note, how about that Apple stock?
"Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"
Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man (Highway 61 Revisited)
Small, somewhat terrifying factoid: a poll in Israel last week revealed that about 36% of Israelis fear their country is "close" to a civil war. On the other hand, the poll also showed that strong majorities, even of Likud voters, favored withdrawing from Gaza, and most of them also favored holding national referendums to decide the matter, and others. All in all, very very interesting. But also scary.
Are you for or against carrying out a national referendum on the plan to
disengage from the Katif Bloc and Gaza Strip?
Total: For 57% Against 32% Other 11%
Likud voters: For 71% Labor voters: For 54%
And if a referendum takes place on the matter of disengagement from the
Katif Bloc and Gaza Strip how would you vote?
Total: For 62% Against 26% Other 12%
Likud voters: For 54% Against 36%
Labor voters: For 73% Against 19%
[.....]
Do you think that the Israeli public is close or far from civil war?
Total: Close 36% Far 52% Other 12%
Likud voters: Close 43% Far 50%
Labor Voters: Close 42% Far 54%
Danny Rubenstein in Haaretz says that the Israeli setters, who have already conquered the West Bank, are actually turning their sights around and trying to rule Israel. An interesting argument!
From the Palestinians' perspective, and apparently not only theirs, the real battle has recently moved entirely onto the Israeli side of the court. There, one of the sides in Israel is well-defined. These are the Jewish settlers in the territories and their allies, who are doing with the territories what they think is good for Israel - that is, doing whatever they please. They grab land and properties, for the most part in accordance with plans that are defined in advance and with government budgets. They set up settlements and outposts, mark what they think should be Israel's border, and shape the way the Arabs who live there are controlled.
The other side - the Israeli government and its mechanisms - is harder to define because at least in the West Bank, the government of Israel does not exist. If it does, it appears in the form of Jewish settlers. On the weekend, for example, Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim declared that the Israel Defense Forces will not be able at this time to demand that Jewish settlers who have illegally seized shops owned by Arabs in Hebron's wholesale market, clear out.
The IDF will also not be able to protect Arab olive-harvesters who are attacked by Jewish settlers, and the evacuation of the outposts has already become a joke. Palestinian spokesmen cite many examples of how the settlers and the Israeli government in the territories are one and the same. A significant proportion of the people in Israel's administration and security forces in the West Bank are inhabitants of the Jewish settlements there, and many of them see the rulings by the rabbis of Yesha (the settlers' acronym for Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) and the decisions of the Yesha Council as authoritative and legitimate.
In this context it can be said that the political battle that has moved onto the Israeli side of the field is abandoning the territories of the West Bank and is moving inside Israel proper. The state of the Jewish settlers, which has won in Yesha, is now trying to rule all of Israel.
Hard to know how to respond to that one. At least we know that the second Bush administration will continue its pattern of excellent decisionmaking.
I will have to merge my Campaign 2004 and Israel-Palestine topics: for a rather graphic example of the Republican-Likud merger, check out Republicans Abroad-Israel. Norm Coleman is smiling there, sharing a sign saying "Minnesotans in Israel for Bush."
I had a piece in the Mac Weekly on Friday about the technological gap at school and getting some new stuff going on the Internet. People seem to like the idea. I'll post the link when the story becomes available.
The town hall debate went real well for Kerry, and I think he's building a good foundation here. This weekend Alison and I volunteered for Paul Gardner, who's running against Phil Krinkie in the north suburbs. I think it's going really well up there. We put out flyers across Lino Lakes today. The weather was really excellent.
There is a lot of hectic news about the need-blind admissions, and it's all gotten intense on campus. I don't want to even talk about it, save to say that this issue of the Weekly also spells out some of the stuff that has been going on. William Sentell '02, one of the alumni speaking out on the policy conflict, has a site needblind.com, also at http://ilovemacalester.blogs.com/.
Right now I don't want to take a swing at this. I hope you all understand. Trying to enjoy the weekend. Too much work on Sunday!
I am hoping Cheney just flips out and dives, goes sliding across the little table, grabbing for Edward's throat. I think we will get some true nasty grimaces from him. I'll probably watch it on C-SPAN so I can see the splitscreen. Last time, Bush's facial expressions in reaction to Bush were priceless. Cheney's body language has only gotten more severe over the course of this Administration, and he could seem like a cartoon by the end of this one.
They're both such cutouts, its hard to know which way this debate will unfold. People always say Edwards looks like a little boy. So Make Cheney appear as the evil headmaster rapping shiny schoolboy on the knuckles for his irrepressible good spirit.
It's the first and last time someone will get to challenge the Great Tilted Head before the election. On CNN now, they are talking about Halliburton, mercilessly chasing Cheney on all the shady things he's done.
This debate will be about about confidence and credibility. Cheney will tease the trial lawyer thing, and then Edwards might say, "Yeah, I'd like to ask you some questions," and proceed to launch into a full out attack on how they provided fake intelligence through a ring of shady people in the Pentagon, people that have botched the whole thing, basically incompetent people.
I mean, for the purposes of the election, right now, those neo-cons and other spooky Defense people, those who fabricated the intelligence for the war, and laid down the policies that led to Abu Ghraib, I consider that their motives are horribly evil, as far and deep as anyone's could ever be. But this is very difficult to prove to people.
It's my view that you can convince ANYONE that they are incompetent.
So Edwards should put on a big pouty face and talk about fake intelligence that tricked all the well-meaning senators and congressmen. Edwards can cut to the heart of it by talking about all the shadiness around the Vice President's office, the Scooter Libby investigation, the corrupt deals all around. And how sad it makes him....
But who knows if Edwards will zap him like that. He should really keep in mind that there are more than a hundred million people in this country furious about George W Bush, all of whom would have a few well-chosen words for the most machiavellian character since Nixon to stalk the White House.
This debate will change Cheney's whole image, one way or another. And for that, we will cheer.
Well well. Newsweek reported yesterday that Bush's commanding lead in their national poll, around 11 points, has completely evaporated, and now Kerry enjoys about a 2 or 3 point lead. I had a feeling going into the debate that it would shift ten points, one way or the other. Fortunately, Kerry had some damn wits about him! Talking about the now-famous Bush scowl complex. The Dems made a video of it!
Take the Armageddon Books poll immediately: Armageddon Books Prophecy Poll:
Will the Illuminati be the force that brings about Antichrist's one-world government and religion?
I've got a ton of homework and a radio show in two hours so I've got to lay this out quickly.
Keep reading Josh Marshall and the TPM. Lots of interesting stuff coming thru there. Can you believe that we've only fully trained about 8,000 Iraqi police?! Juan Cole always crucial.
The officials in Washington -- CIA, State, Defense -- have rapidly worsening opinions about the situation. Interesting information from a Wall Street Journal reporter, Farnaz Fassihi, who wrote a really hellish email of life in Iraq (also posted here):
It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
Have to love a good military-industrial conspiracy! "Ex-Pentagon official gets 9 months for conspiring to favor Boeing" in an arms deal. Haha talk about the tip of the iceberg!
"International Observers predict trouble in US vote." ...Alarm bells....
Pentagon Paperer Daniel Ellsberg says "Where are the leakers of the Iraq war?" As in, why aren't more horrible facts coming forward right now?
WaPo says that the government is starting a PR campaign to paper over the hellish disintegration of Iraq.
Interesting issue: Google News frequently gives these links to hard rightwing sites when it seems that more balanced news sources should appear instead. Why is this happening?
Humor: Bush and the yawning boy via Wonkette. Bush vs Jesus political advertising via Atrios. Thanks to Alison on the link.
Random right wing opinion: classic anti-Islamic fear mongering from Daniel Pipes: "The Islamic States of America?" Of course they're trying to Subvert our Way of Life, those Damn Commies IslamoFascists!!!
So these are just a few of the random things I've got for you today... Gotta go!
Howard Fineman's article on battleground states spent a while discussing Hudson this week.
It turns out that television alone can't reach some voters, at least to the extent that Bush and Kerry need to reach them. At best the tube can be an annoyance, at worst it can feed a sense of distance and suspicion, especially in a swing state inundated by ads. "People here don't pay much attention to what they see on television," said Bob Feickert, a Democratic organizer in Hudson, Wis., a fast-growing Minneapolis exurb. "They want to hear somebody from around here say, 'I support my candidate, and this is why'." Lori Bernard, a Republican counterpart, agreed. "Someone sitting next to you in church, someone you go hunting with, that's who you know best," she said. "That's who you trust."
[...]
Demography is destiny. In Wisconsin, Republicans are scoping out the gun-loving members of Turkeys Unlimited—not to mention Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever.
First: we are an exurb? And of Minneapolis?! To hell with you, Mr Fineman. You and all the other Kool Kids who lied about the basis for the war and continuously frame the issues in a misleading fashion. (Can you tell I don't like him?)
The second page of the article has a photograph of the Hudson Democratic office downtown.
So yes, Hudson is one of those hinge places... So goes Hudson, so goes the nation? Can I believe that? Anyhow, it is pretty cool that we are in there.
Ok, I'm about to crash now, but I just had to post something about how delightfully the debate went tonight for Kerry.
I could not believe how far Bush was off his game. Kerry was collected, interesting, cool and persuasive. Admittedly, I watched it in an auditorium of boistrous liberals at Macalester in the Campus Center, so maybe we were extra cynical. But we had the C-SPAN split screen, so we were treated to all the nasty scowling faces Bush made, quite frequently, after Kerry attacked him. It provoked a lot of laughing. Actually, Bush provoked a lot of laughing many times.
Kudos to Mr Kerry. He could have had a little more sauce on it tonight, sometimes was repetitive, but the tone was basically what the situation called for, and he totally knocked Bush off-message.
I couldn't believe it when Bush completely bobbled his introduction. I mean, how hard is it to remember an opening spiel?
I think we definitely saw Kerry get repositioned as a strong and logical guy here. For that, I think we can all sleep quite a bit more soundly.
And get ready for Cheney-Edwards on Tuesday!!!!
As long as we are on a religious bender all the sudden, why not throw in this map of Florida, superimposing the path of the recent hurricanes with the county-by-county totals.
You get a clear message from God that Bush voters in Florida suck, and in fact should be punished for having contributed to the disaster of the Bush administration. Sweet. But I am still an atheist. And I have not confirmed the veracity of this map with anyone.
Thanks to Kat for this one.
UPDATE: Apparently the map is inaccurate. I am glad that I warned y'all about not knowing the veracity of it.
What can I say? It has been busy as hell lately. I have been shoehorning Spanish workbook pages and Polanyi's 'The Great Transformation' into my morning shifts at the computer lab in the library. Then there is all the Mac Weekly stuff, and those people would flay me alive to tick away on this site on Tues. or Weds. when there's so many glitches to be fixed in the paper. Even though I did last week.
I will move right along to the big event on campus. Ralph Nader came last Thursday, and gave a press conference in the Campus Center. Peter Gartrell asked him some questions, actually, although I'm not sure what Nader said. Shouldn't Peter get a recording device?? So anyhow, Nader then spoke at the Chapel for an admission of $5 for students, $10 for the general public. A bunch of Mac students protested outside and carried Kerry signs. My moral fiber felt weak after giving that man money.
Nader admitted during the talk that he had Republican lawyers, but kept harping on the Dems, demanding they step aside and let him slither onto state ballots.
So a couple hours later I had to meet my dad to get this textbook which had been left back in Wisconsin. We met at the Artist's Quarter in downtown St. Paul, where my dad's friend from the olden days, Lucia Newell, was singing jazz with her group. They have just released a CD and it's a damn fine one.
So there was another old friend of my dad's there, a cynical, middle-aged Republican, whom I told about seeing Nader. Nader's a great human being, he intoned. "He's appealing to your noblest instincts, Daniel," he said. And then came the kicker.
He told me he'd given Nader's campaign a good deal of money.
That, essentially, tells you everything you need to know about the Nader situation.
Ok, ok, ok, I have to post some things around the ideological spectrum. Starting around the right-wing anti-war libertarian pole, Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo had three interesting pieces, but as always I take him with a grain of salt. First, the Democrats may have flipped around, and become the more militarily interventionist party. Is this too hard to believe?
[Chalmers] Johnson cuts right to the essential issue, which is not just the plethora of bases, but certain recently-established military installations:The idea of permanent military bases in Iraq is simply ghastly, as most Americans can intuit by this point. Every permanent base there, established and maintained in such a bloody fashion, would irresistably attract every militant in the middle east."At the same time, they don't say anything about 14 permanent bases being built in Iraq. Four are already built: Tallil Air Base, Baghdad, the one in the north near Mosul and the one over on the border with Syria. They don't say anything about the bases in Jabuti, in the Saharan Desert, in Mali and places like that."
Neither Kerry nor Bush wants to talk about those particular bases, or what they imply. Whatever their disagreements over particular nuances, both "major" party candidates support the concept of a semi-permanent American military presence in Iraq.
Beyond that, this mutual nonaggression pact underscores the role of the two parties as twin pillars of a foreign policy based on hubris, and rooted in the grating, militant self-righteousness of our ruling elites that has – rightly – made us the objects of worldwide opprobrium.
"Good!" they say. "Bring the Terrorists out to fight!!! Bring em on, hash it out over there, stay on offense!"
Yeah. That's working out smoothly. Such a strategy is BASED on abusing and disrespecting the occupied nation, because then the goal is to turn into a bloody wasteland, you cannot but reach disaster.
Next story: the improbable tale of Israeli counterterror expert and sexual harrassment victim Golan Cipel. Now, some might say that it's a little odd to have an Israeli citizen acting as the main counter-terror czar in a crucial place like New Jersey. But wait, there's more! Evidently Cipel—or someone else named Golan Cipel—worked at the Israeli Consulate General in New York City, handling the public relations side of government activities. Raimondo's column has all sorts of interesting links to Internet search archives, such as the Google USENET archives that include a ton of the "Israel Line" government press releases that Cipel helped write. And, according to Raimondo, he's made a few interesting statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here and there.
Also, Raimondo cites one hell of an odd posting from the right-wing FreeRepublic.com news site from November 2002 that says:
Perfect accuracy nearly two years ago, filched away on this madcap right-wing site. I find that rather stunning... In any case, Cipel sounds like he was fairly close to the Israeli intelligence services. Oh well.... besides this the neo-cons are lining up to sneak into the opposition. Check the door for sweaty, militant old bureaucrats, please. In a column about the late libertarian Mike Mayakis he referred to an old piece about how Superman was anti-war...and Captain America saw Nixon hang himself? Meanwhile this cheesy piece asserts that comics suddenly got political out of nowhere. Right.
NJ has within its borders a scandal which makes the Clinton/Lewinsky matter a walk in the park. The press has danced around the real issue. It will be revealed that what has occured in the Garden State is a scandal of the greatest importance. It will lead to the resignation of its current Governor James McGreevey due to his abuse of office and the NJ tax payers to prop up Golan Cipel. The nature of their real relationship is on the verge of breaking into the spotlight. This will be earth shattering.To: deepthroatnnj
I know what it is. That Isreali friend of McGreevy's who was on the payroll is really his gay lover.
2 posted on 11/03/2002 2:26:41 PM PST by Rodney King
There are some sweet political ads that Errol Morris is making for MoveOn.org. Seemingly modeled on the Apple Switch ads, that Morris also made, these are pretty sweet, and remind me of Fog of War because of the "Interrotron," a teleprompter-based interview device that Morris put together to really extract a directness from people. See the ads on this delightful PAC donation page.
Christopher Hitchens is such an idiot, I can't believe he got suckered into defending Ahmed Chalabi. What the hell?
I will summarize a few nice bits from Billmon, who has gone fishin' for a while. On the Valerie Plame/Get Scooter front, the prosecution zeroes in, but will Libby defend himself by claiming that other reporters already knew Plame was an agent? An older story asks if it will end at the Supreme Court.
To flip to the right, we have some columns from SoldiersForTheTruth.com, a really interesting source for perspectives on the strange mush of tortured politics of today's U.S. military. John Lehman from the 9/11 Commission says, damn right we are after the Islamic fundamentalists, so where's the leadership? The editor of DefenseWatch, Ed Offley, says we need to get more alert about Muslim soldiers as "the enemy within" acting for Al-Qaeda. I liked the bit by the site's main editor, David Hackworth, about a nation, divided again:
...Kerry’s campaign push on how he Ramboed his way through the war – for four months – rubs a lot of vets the wrong way. And it does take its toll on those of us who prefer our heroes to be modest, unassuming types like Alvin York – who stayed the course until it was “Over, over there.”But politics and style aside, Kerry did serve with distinction in Vietnam when he easily could have avoided that killing field. His service to his country shouldn’t be diminished by the same despicable, politically motivated tactics visited upon Sens. John McCain in South Carolina and Max Cleland in Georgia, also Viet vets. This kind of gutter-bashing doesn’t belong in American politics, and vets shouldn’t allow themselves to be used as ammo for cheap shots at one of their own.
The stalwart Brown Water Navy warriors who fought at Kerry’s side say he was A-OK, which is good enough for me. The muckrakers such as John O’Neill and his Swiftboat snipers – who didn’t sail on his boat but served anywhere from 100 meters to 300 miles away – are now coming off like eyewitnesses when in fact not one of their testimonies would hold up in a court of law. A judge would call these men liars and disallow their biased statements.
I’ve been in a fair number of battles in my lifetime, first fighting for my country in several hot wars, then covering a dozen conflicts as a correspondent. And I’ve learned that if you can’t see the fight right up close, smell it, hear it and touch it, you can’t possibly bear witness.
[......]
[John] O’Neill and his chorus of haters are still in their get-Kerry mode. I suspect the decades-long fury is still fueled by Kerry’s high-profile anti-war stance when he returned home. That was a position that was taken by hundreds of thousands of other Viet vets, including myself in 1971 – which, according to Joe Califono's recent book, Inside: A Public Life, almost cost me my life.
Not just Ted Kennedy, but hundreds of people are being screwed by airline watch lists. Ught.
Ok, this is the last round of stories to throw up before I clean up the computer for some hard-core graphics stuff, so....
Chalmers Johnson, the author of Sorrows of Empire and an all-around interesting analyst, says that the troop realignment is a weird gesture, but then again, nothing that the Bush Administration does makes any sense.
In Iraq, Sadr wants to talk. Or not. He is so damn twitchy, it's ridiculous. The 8-day battle grinds to a stalemate. So is Sadr actually a unifying factor? This Pepe Escobar piece says it is... Pepe is one of those anti-Bush folks who always has something interesting going on, but I'm not sure if I find it as credible, as, say, Robert Fisk or Jim Lobe, two other journalists in funky territory.
Meanwhile arms inspector David Kay faults the pre-war intelligence.
Some atoms flew in formation. Wow. I don't get the science involved, but hey, why not?
Two things: firstly, Porter Goss is part and parcel one of Dick Cheney's evil congressional badger brigades, as a Congresscritter acting to cover up investigations into the intelligence distortions that unfolded into the invasion of Iraq. Like Cheney's little finger, said Billmon:
Goss - last seen in Farenheit 9/11 giving out the number to an entirely ficticious civil liberties complaint hotline - is a former CIA operative turned Florida hack congressman who has made himself useful to the administration in ways both large and small, not least by savaging the reputation of the agency he once worked for and now hopes to lead.Billmon referred to an excellent piece in CounterPunch by Ray McGovern, retired CIA dude and a representative of the "sane" intelligence analysts around Washington, ripping Goss apart as a horrible Republican piece of garbage:In other words, picking Porter Goss to be CIA director is roughly the same as nominating Dick Cheney's little finger...
...There are plenty of Mexicans dying for the War on Terror... David Ignatius says that the GWOT (military acronym for take over the world global war on terror) shouldn't get politicized, but of course it already has, shamelessly:
That possibility conjures up a painful flashback for those of us who served as CIA analysts when Richard Nixon was president. Chalk it up to our naivete, but we were taken aback when swashbuckling James Schlesinger, who followed Richard Helms as CIA director, announced on arrival, "I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon!" To underscore his point, Schlesinger told us he would be reporting directly to White House political adviser Bob Haldeman (Nixon's Karl Rove) and not to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.No doubt Goss would be more discreet in showing his hand, but his appointment as director would be the ultimate in politicization. He has long shown himself to be under the spell of Vice President Dick Cheney, and would likely report primarily to him and to White House political adviser Karl Rove rather than to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Goss would almost certainly follow lame-duck director George Tenet's practice of reading to the president in the morning and become an integral part of the "White House team." The team-membership phenomenon is particularly disquieting.
If the failure-prone experience of the past few years has told us anything, it is that being a "team member" in good standing is the kiss of death for the CIA director's primary role of "telling it like it is" to the president and his senior advisers. It was a painful moment of truth when former Speaker Newt Gingrich--like Cheney, a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters--told the press that Tenet was "so grateful to the president that he would do anything for him."
But now to delightful Pakistan, where nothing makes sense. This Salon piece, "Subcontracting the hunt for Bin Laden," by a former bigshot of the deposed civilian government was quite unnerving:
A government has no asset more precious than public trust. That's especially true for a nation threatened by a terrorist adversary, where good intelligence and reliable warnings can save lives. By linking its reelection campaign so closely to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration has eroded its credibility -- to the point that some members of the public are beginning to wonder whether terrorism warnings are all just politics. The administration risks compounding that climate of politicization by nominating a sitting Republican member of Congress, Porter Goss, to be the next CIA director.
The relative transparency of the U.S. political system should make it difficult for U.S. officials to be blatant about linking political agendas to a national security issue such as the war against terrorism. In an article titled "July Surprise?" in the New Republic, published several weeks before the Democratic Convention, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman and Massoud Ansari wrote of pressure on Pakistan by the Bush administration to produce a "high-value target" around the time of the convention to steal Kerry's thunder. The suggestion was rejected by some as a conspiracy theory at the time, but when Pakistan announced the arrest of Ghailani, a Tanzanian, in Gujarat, Pakistan, hours before Kerry's acceptance speech, eyebrows were raised even among those Americans who normally dismiss such conspiracy theories.Meanwhile the Paki government is now going to go after the grandaddy of all Islamic fundamentalist organizations, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the results won't be predictable:For the Bush administration to have risked playing politics with the timing of arrest of terror suspects is a disturbing enough possibility. More disturbing is the prospect that the initiative to gain political advantage from these arrests came not from the Bush administration but from the Musharraf regime. By subcontracting the hunt for bin Laden to an authoritarian ally who has a special interest in the flow of economic and military benefits resulting from this contract, the administration may be giving that ally a powerful say in America's political agenda whose effect is to undermine the war against al-Qaida.
Musharraf's enlistment in the war on terrorism is an extension of Pakistan's long-established willingness to be useful to the United States for the "right price." Pakistan's first military ruler, Gen. (later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan (who ruled from 1958 to 1969), told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade as early as 1953, "Our army can be your army if you want us." Ever since, Pakistan's military leadership has seen its alliance with America as its meal ticket.
[.....]
As long as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship remains a single-issue alliance based on the quid pro quo of changes in Pakistani policy for U.S. money, the regime in Islamabad will continue to be tempted to take its time in finding all the terrorists at large in Pakistan. After all, most subcontractors who are paid by the hour take longer to get the job done. And while this may seem like a risky scheme for Musharraf, it conforms to the past pattern of Pakistani military regimes collecting rent from the United States for providing strategic services.
Under immense pressure from the United States, a slow and gradual operation has begun in Pakistan against the strongest political voice of Islamists and the real mother of international Islamic movements, of which Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front is the spoiled child.From that new blog of Steve Clemons, "Who are the real neo-cons?" looking at a new book, "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order" by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. Sounds excellent, but how much have I heard before? Old David Broder says that Bush has Two Albatrosses: going into the war, and not paying for it.In a surprise move this week, Pakistan's federal minister of the interior, Faisal Saleh Hayat, listed a number of incidences in which members of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), the premier fundamentalist party in the country, had been tied to al-Qaeda, and called on it to "explain these links".
"It is a matter of concern that Jamaat-e-Islami, which is a main faction of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal [MMA], has neither dissociated itself from its activists having links with the al-Qaeda network nor condemned their activities," Faisal said, adding that "one could derive a meaning out of its silence".
The MMA is an alliance of six religious parties that gained unprecedented electoral victories in national elections in 2002. One of its members is the leader of the opposition in the Lower House, while the MMA controls the provincial government in North West Frontier Province. It also forms part of a coalition government in Balochistan province. The MMA has 67 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly, with just under a third of them held by the JI.
[.....]
Intelligence insiders tell Asia Times Online that initial operations are not targeted against the main JI structure, but at lower-rank workers suspected of involvement in underground militant activities. At the same time, once this operation starts, it will be inevitable that it extends to the highest level. Further, every JI leader is involved with senior army officers, both serving and retired, and they will not be spared in the process.The JI is not only the largest, most organized and most resourceful organization in the country, it has deeper roots in the establishment than any other outfit. Tackling it will surely open a Pandora's box, and at the same time create a vicious backlash.
In the tit for tat realm of punditry, I say that this actually defines Kerry's position on the war, and Cheney accuses himself of sensitivity in the war on terror. Then the Daily Howler says: Cheney, thou have flipped and flopped!
It's fitting that finally, at this late date, I saw this President we've heard so much about. The War on Terror came to Hudson, Wisconsin, and I posted up at Second and Locust, just outside the security perimeter. At least there weren't any of those 'free speech zones' today. Rather, Bush and Kerry partisans circulated freely. I was more agitated than usual because this was an infringement on my home turf.
The roads were blocked off by city dump trucks to block car bombs. Did that mean they weren't just dump trucks, but Dump Trucks in the War on Terror?
Three large Bush-Cheney buses came up from Exit 1 and I basically grimaced there. In 10 minutes they had gone up another block and turned down towards the river. Peering from my spot on Second Street down to the "HUDSON, WIS." archway at the end of the dike where they built the stage, the buses pulled up in tandem and for a blazing moment George W. Bush, in a blue shirt, worked the crowd lined up on the other side.
A whole crush of people were all around us, standing on railings around a pit reaching the basement windows of this corner building. I turned because Jon Lyons couldn't see a damn thing, so I crouched down and made a bridge with my hands, and Jon saw Bush ascend onto the stage and out of sight behind the buses. That was the end of our contact with the Officeholder.
In an interesting side story, my sister and some friends apparently sneaked most of the way through the security zone, in a sense proving that the war on terror is smaller than Lakefront Park. I will have to follow up on this exciting story.
Ok then kids, my dad will be here in like 20 minutes. I have all these browser windows to clean out before I go to Utah, so this will be a little funky. But interesting stuff.
josh Marshall points out a new washington blog. this guy wrote a sweet article about think tanks.
low numbers for bush. checkpoints.
Robert Fisk says Iraq imploding. Durrr.
mccain and the swift boat veterans thing.
israel says to hell with road map, more suburbs in west bank!! interesting letters.
Alan Keyes is the Quintessential American
The internal press squabbles about WMD lameness
particles information holes etc.
After the convention, Democrats are reclaiming the center says Dionne. Right wing son of a bitch liked Obama. Explosions of applause etc. krugman on the Script. go to hell Brooks.
So then are the Dems shifting to the right on foreign policy?!
Dissection of Iraq lies from before. So then why did they go to the desert? the uprising is a test!
American prisons are horrible too.
i saw this sweet video called Spin that was made from unedited network TV satellite transitions, and people come across as racist or just batshit crazy, in Larry King's case. About Spin [1 2 3 4 5 6]
I liked Manchurian Candidate. Read Ebert's review of the classic original and the new one.
Keep reading TPM. Duhhh.
Iraq reconstruction funding has spawned 27 criminal inquiries. what the hell?!
Most important: does M. Night Shammaaaala (no time to type) suck as director?
OK I am the hell out of here!!!! Peace to y'all!!!!! Be back Sunday!
Mordred has posted something about Donald Trump this morning so I suggest ya check it. Again I'll note that he's going to have a top link on the side here, but I haven't had the time to change my templates yet, and I guess I won't until I get back.
The wild documentary "Outfoxed" that even Kerry is mentioning finally arrived at my house yesterday and I haven't had time to watch it yet. It sounds awesome though.
Well well, it took one hell of a long time, but my summer video project is finally finished. I decided to call it 'Between the Lines' because that's where I'm always looking, true?
In the University lab right now, I am burning a total of four DVD copies. Turns out the first two that I made last night have a couple glitches in the menus that i didn't catch. I would also like to note that Apple's DVD Studio Pro, while a fairly powerful and intuitive program, is really annoying because it seems to always want to render (in this case called 'compiling' menus and 'muxing' tracks) every time I want to burn a copy. In other words, it is rendering out the whole thing, and then throwing it away every time. What the hell? It wastes like 20 minutes a disc.
On the other hand I may have been using the wrong command, 'Build' instead of 'Build/Format.' Right now it's doing the latter, so my hopes are higher.
So I am getting picked up at 3:30 today to fly out to Utah for my cousins' wedding. As I wait for the discs to burn, let me share some quick headlines that have been sitting around. I have a stack of about 30 links to post up. In the meantime here's a smaller collection of older tidbits:
Times feature on a woman who educates naive county officials on the madness of electronic ballot systems. What can I say? These things scare the hell out of me and I try not to think about it. Some terrorist plotting to disrupt the election? Who cares, we've got electronic machines that can eat votes by what, the millions?
In Iraq
The Times has switched its little "Iraq news theme" motif to "THE REACH OF WAR: THREATS AND RESPONSES" with scary looking narrow type. Hey, they gotta be selling papers....
This cemetary fighting in Najaf is some seriously creepy stuff. Can you imagine the chills on their spines as the Marines go into this ancient collection of Shi'ite graves? This type of situation is so incredibly combustible I don't even know what to say. And Robert Fisk (or was it Juan Cole?) said that the governor of the province is some unemployed old Iraqi they dragged out of Michigan. However, I think that the anger Iraqis feel about violating the sanctity of the cemetary is perhaps directed as much to Muqtada al -Sadr's guys that hunkered down there. I mean, it's not exactly a standard insurrection tactic. Then again, if you were a fanatical pre-millennialist you might want to bring about a more mythic Mahdi Army by fighting among the dead spirits. Or something like that. Like I said, chills on the neck.
A National Guardsman was ordered to look the other way at torturous conditions in an Iraqi detention center. Down the slippery slope...
Newsweek on Fallujah: "We Pray the Insurgents Will Achieve Victory."
Al Jazeera shut down in Iraq againógrouchy ministers. So is Jazeera just a Jihadi PR device? (I don't buy that; Control Room really put the idea away)
Elsewhere
Alternet on the vast right-wing Scaife conspiracy and more specifically his grudge against Teresa Heinz-Kerry.
"Afghanistan's Transition: Decentralization or Civil War?" on EurasiaNet. Indeed.
BAGnewsNotes has the best regular collection of parody images. Laughs every day.
Kerry has an interview in the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes, and it's really a pretty gutsy one. Nice work on both sides. But does this stuff, particularly about the global military base arrangement, mean Kerry is just going to play the military-industrial game yet again? (in fairness, Kerry is not a huge military pork enthusiast) He knows the jargon pretty well.
I found this random weird online science fiction story via a BlogAd. Just for something different.
Andy just sent me this link to White House West, a fakr White House ad starring Will Ferrell stumbling around down at the ranch.
Can you believe that Bush is going on another huge vacation? WTF... do they think that a more relaxed, wood-chopping oriented president is expressing an image of leadership?
The project is coming along nicely, over these horribly long days in the lab all week. And I've gotten a parking ticket... back to it now...
Last night I burned a draft version of the DVD, and I found that many of the transitions I'd put in were no good. I remember that the same thing happened on a project before.
The problem with making videos on the computer is that the screen makes all these visual distortions in how it represents motion. It makes transitions and wipes look fuzzier than they actually are, and the video color balance is a lot darker.
When we did the "American Women in World War II" video, we had a digital video camera hooked right up to the computer all the time, and the camera passed its signal out to the television, so you could see the way it bulges outwards and cuts off the sides of the picture, and how weird some things look that you can't see at all from the computer.
The problem is that this University lab has little TVs, but they can't represent what people are doing on the computers. So it took until tonight to see a bunch of glitches...
It sounds like Allawi knows how to cap some insurgent ass, for better or worse. They say he shot six captured rebels, but that's the way it goes these days...
Spencer Ackerman's blog Iraq'd is back up and he has no idea if the man is a "cold-blooded murderer." eh....
Good piece from Hoaglund on the 'perception gap' on Iraq, pointing out that Allawi has a tendency to make pronouncements aimed at the beltway, and that whole attitude could cause even more divergent pointless thinking about Iraq:
There is some new stuff in the Valerie Plame case. So Wilson didn't actually debunk the Iran-Niger story? And wives pull all the strings, rendering a man worthless, or so they say in the WaPo.
Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq's insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.
The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency's exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington's version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.
Josh Marshall is hacking through the details as usual but I found the following via Raimondo:
Washington journalist Laura Rozen is exploring the echo theory on intel distortions, that is, the same spoofers spoofed many different agencies, creating the appearance of truth such as WMDs all over the place.
Fafnir is a broken-hearted Fafnir. For I was deceived. Deceived by the story of Joe Wilson who as it turns out lied about absolutely everything he said to anyone ever because there in the Washington Post last Saturday exists definitive proof that somebody somewhere has said that his wife, exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame, got him his job checking out if Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger.Poor foolish Fafnir! I had thought somehow this was all about how exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent is a federal crime but apparently it is really about how her husband is a big fat jerk who got a job by ridin his wife's coattails. I don't quite understand what that has to do with a criminal investigation but hipublican intellectual Jonah Goldberg does so that's OK.*
Found a nifty Mesopotamian blog Iraq the Model, that I don't think I'd seen before.
Older news that polygraph tests have been done in the Chalabi-Iran leak investigation.
Look out, the NAACP says that Bush treats black people like prostitutes. What more can I say? A man with 8% of the black vote can't be wrong, can he?
In front of the theater on Friday there was a guy with a table set up handing out flyers and talking to people. He turned out to be one Thomas Harens, new pre-candidate for President here in Minnesota. He's started the Christian Freedom Party, a group opposed to the Christian right that would supposedly strip votes from Bush's right in Minnesota, perhaps a reverse Ralph Nader. Gotta love the beret on his campaign site.
There's something uniquely American about such a scene, that our system permits a guy from St. Paul to form a party, collect some signatures and get on the ballot. In Minnesota, the threshold is only 2,000 signatures, lower than most. Along with Alex Legge, we signed his petition to the Secretary of State. It's quite improbable to find a third-party presidential candidate getting started virtually on my doorstep. I talked with the guy, and I hope to get some interesting news out of this one...
There have been a lot of strange reports from the wasteland of mirrors lately. Some of these are in registration-required type websites like the LA Times. Therefore as a handy tool for everyone I suggest BugMeNot.com, a repository of logins for news sites that should let everyone duck the hassle of giving those shady corps our email addresses. I have not looked at my server traffic logs in a while, but I suspect things have slacked off during this low-volume time of mine, and that's fine with me. I have been trying to get some exercise, get a life, get outside while the weather's good, and take two classes and work. So sue me.
I've got a lot of stuff referring to the CIA's Anonymous man. He's one solid character. Angry, yes, but clear enough to understand what a crazy detour Iraq was...
On a random note, keep reading Prof. Juan Cole every day.
The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs [high-value targets] by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."The point here, assuming this is even close to true, is that the Bush administration--shockingly--views the war on terror as an ATM machine, where they can buy votes by withdrawing from the Pakistan account. The country is teetering on some sort of tribal war, but the administration's persistent evasion of really dealing honestly with the problems in that country has been put off for so long that when they try to symbolically whack the hornet's nest again because of domestic politics, what kinds of things might fly out?A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
[........]
But there is a reason many Pakistanis and some American officials had previously been reluctant to carry the war on terrorism into the tribal areas. A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually capturing any of the HVTs. Military action in the tribal areas "has a domestic fallout, both religious and ethnic," Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri complained to the Los Angeles Times last year.Some American intelligence officials agree. "Pakistan just can't risk a civil war in that area of their country. They can't afford a western border that is unstable," says a senior intelligence official, who anonymously authored the recent Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and who says he has not heard that the current pressures on Pakistan are geared to the election. "We may be at the point where [Musharraf] has done almost as much as he can."
In any case this one will come to a head in a few weeks. More on how Iraq situation puts a "squeeze" on Musharraf. And Iraq is "A failure without borders" according to William Lind, who if I recall is a deserter of the neocon movement. This article describes the key idea of dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, or the abode of Islam and the abode of war as elements in Islamic 'fundamentalist' thinking, although Lind relishes his own rhetoric a little too much:
It is all one war, one battlefield. State boundaries mean nothing. Of course, it is not going very well on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But in this war, events in those places are in effect merely tactical. The strategic centers of gravity are in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. Al-Qaeda, I think, understands this. Washington does not. That fact alone suggests we have only seen the opening moves in what promises to be a very long war.
The latest from Dr. Khalidi: in an excellent piece condensed from his remarks at the UCLA International Institute, Rashid Khalidi describes something I've personally heard before from other experts, that the Bushies told all the real regional experts to go straight to hell:
Everything taking place in U.S. policy in the Middle East since 9/11 is not grounded in real knowledge about the Middle East. Without a knowledge of resistance to Western control over two centuries, America cannot know how our policy is viewed in the region. We are seeing the dismissal of real history in favor of crude stereotypes.And of course if you haven't read it, check out my exclusive Mac Weekly interview with Dr. Khalidi from last fall. Talk about prescient warnings...Those who attacked the United States are very smart people who have played on real grievances in a very expert way. The Bush administration has not used the informational resources at its disposal to respond appropriately. The U.S. attack on Iraq was accompanied by an insidious attack on domestic Middle East experts. Experts can be wrong, but the dedicated professionals have often been prescient in their warnings.
Fareed Zakaria talks some sense, simply saying "Reach Out to the insurgents;" in other words the end of the CPA has opened an opportunity to define a new relationship with the opposition groups. I always firmly believe that we can't just classify such characters as "the terrorists" and leave the situation at that, for then you get nowhere. Instead, engagement... dialectic... other hopeless hopes.
The Iraqi Baathists in exile are considering forming an Iraqi government-in-exile to offer the Iraqi people. Or it could be a framework to propel a civil war. We would just need names for the sides. A basic argument from Charley Reese on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and in particular mentioning where the U.S. recently sided with a military government against some elected Islamists in Algeria, sparking a civil war.
Once again I will cite this very fascinating up-to-the-minute perspective on the insurgents, and how well armed they are. Seems the daring journalist went out and actually talked with them for three hours. It's quite dramatic, including a rendezvous at Hotel Babel, swarming with foreign mercenaries. Take what they say with a grain of salt, but its surprisingly plain in a way:
"The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war. And the transfer of power on June 30 will not change anything regarding our objectives. This new provisional government appointed by the Americans has no legitimacy in our eyes. They are nothing but puppets." Why have these former officers waited so long to come out of their closets? "Because today we are sure we're going to win."
[......]
We knew that if the United States decided to attack Iraq, we would have no chance faced with their technological and military power. The war was lost in advance, so we prepared the post-war. In other words: the resistance. Contrary to what has been largely said, we did not desert after American troops entered the center of Baghdad on April 5, 2003. We fought a few days for the honor of Iraq - not Saddam Hussein - then we received orders to disperse." Baghdad fell on April 9: Saddam and his army where nowhere to be seen."As we have foreseen, strategic zones fell quickly under control of the Americans and their allies. For our part, it was time to execute our plan. Opposition movements to the occupation were already organized. Our strategy was not improvised after the regime fell." This plan B, which seems to have totally eluded the Americans, was carefully organized, according to these officers, for months if not years before March 20, 2003, the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The objective was "to liberate Iraq and expel the coalition. To recover our sovereignty and install a secular democracy, but not the one imposed by the Americans. Iraq has always been a progressive country, we don't want to go back to the past, we want to move forward. We have very competent people," say the three tacticians. There will be of course no names as well as no precise numbers concerning the clandestine network. "We have sufficient numbers, one thing we don't lack is volunteers."
[......]
Essentially composed by Ba'athists (Sunni and Shi'ite), the resistance currently regroups "all movements of national struggle against the occupation, without confessional, ethnic or political distinction. Contrary to what you imagine in the West, there is no fratricide war in Iraq. We have a united front against the enemy. From Fallujah to Ramadi, and including Najaf, Karbala and the Shi'ite suburbs of Baghdad, combatants speak with a single voice. As to the young Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, he is, like ourselves, in favor of the unity of the Iraqi people, multiconfessional and Arab. We support him from a tactical and logistical perspective."
[....]
"The attacks are meticulously prepared. They must not last longer than 20 minutes and we operate preferably at night or very early in the morning to limit the risks of hitting Iraqi civilians." They anticipate our next question: "No, we don't have weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, we have more than 50 million conventional weapons." By the initiative of Saddam, a real arsenal was concealed all over Iraq way before the beginning of the war. No heavy artillery, no tanks, no helicopters, but Katyushas, mortars (which the Iraqis call haoun), anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other Russian-made rocket launchers, missiles, AK 47s and substantial reserves of all sorts of ammunition. And the list is far from being extensive.But the most efficient weapon remains the Kamikazes. A special unit, composed of 90% Iraqis and 10% foreign fighters, with more than 5,000 solidly-trained men and women, they need no more than a verbal order to drive a vehicle loaded with explosives
A little from Asia Times Online via their mideast page: More on the five key actors: Israel, the U.S., Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi insurgents. What will sovereignty mean to each? A moment for the great Mr. Negroponte and his Battalion 316 death squad. A fairly even look at the moral shell games being played with Saddam's trial. A book review of "Exiting Iraq: Why the US Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against al-Qaeda," written by Chris Preble.
Highly worth reading is a very lengthy piece on Al Qaeda by Craig Hulet looks at the CIA agent 'Anonymous' on why Al Qaeda would benefit from Bush's reelection:
The most profound assertion the author made (Anonymous), who published an analysis of al-Qaeda last year called "Through Our Enemies' Eyes", thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. Bush is good for the Islamists the world over who want to make war on America and the West. Anonymous again:I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now. One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president. In every age ... the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power: "their idea about what is of most fundamental importance and may therefore ultimately be worth a war." - Evan Luard, International War
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One must question not only what the administration is doing presently but what it will do should it return to office after the November elections; upcoming wars against other nation-states (which clearly have been targeted) are on the Pentagon's desk. Further evidence that the latter is officially on the agenda is below: This was dated Monday, February 17, 2003:US Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards. Bolton, who is under secretary for arms control and international security, is in Israel for meetings about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In a meeting with Bolton on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Israel is concerned about the security threat posed by Iran. It's important to deal with Iran even while American attention is turned toward Iraq, Sharon said.
[.....]
Paul R Pillar, whose book Terrorism and US Foreign Policy was a staple for reading in counterterror circles and private security specialists like myself, pre-September 11. He notes this regarding the afore mentioned arguments:More than anything else, it is the United States' predominant place atop the world order (with everything that implies militarily, economically, and culturally) and the perceived US opposition to change in any part of that order that underlie terrorists' resentment of the United States and their intent to attack it.
[....]
The Defense Science Board's 1997 Summer Study Task Force on "Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats" notes a relationship between an activist American foreign policy and terrorism against the United States:As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America's position in the world invites attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.
Apparently more Democrats are being hired as lobbyists. Should I be happy?
To hell with global Social Democracy, they say....
Ick, a National Review hack defending the torture scandal. Just here for color. Yes in fact, Cheney is a 'mixed blessing' at best. Ha.
A hearty congratulations to Mr. Edwards for landing the job he's been gunning for all along... he's a natural choice for a folksy veepster and clearly has a great deal of support across the country, while perhaps more importantly, he looks just fantastic next to Cheney. I took this photograph, tilted like crazy, when he came to town before the caucuses. There's a whole Edwards photo gallery on the site, check it out.
Ok, ok, some substantial post is actually going to get on this site Wednesday. I have been off to evaluate where I stand in the world, what I ought to believe in (less than ever) and take these summer classes. I have a midterm exam on Thursday, AUUGH!!!! Yet I will deal with it. Much to note, but unpredictability increases as the situation complexifies.
On the Fourth, I peeked into the movie theater next door and took the following glorious pic. The theater was mostly full:
This weekend I decided to see if Fahrenheit 9/11 is downloadable from the Internet. I got it off BitTorrent in about 36 hours, and I did indeed leave my connection open for a while to 'give back' the file seed to the swarm. This essentially proves the film is available to anyone in the world with a sufficient Internet pipe, in Baghdad or otherwise....
Upon downloading (try this link via Suprnova.org if you want it) I found that there are three video files. On a Mac these all play very nicely using the great video program VLC. The main video file is suitable for burning onto a VCD that can play in most modern DVD players, using something like Roxio Toast.
The first video is a statement from Moore at a press conference describing his position on sharing the movie. He said that he was all right with it as long as no one was making profit off his labor. The second video is a short sample showing the recording's quality, a standard feature of these pirated Internet movies. There was also a text file with all the usual movie piracy ring jibba jabba ("POT" is their handle), and of course the film itself, at about 650 MB.
It was somewhat different than the theatrical release, but at least 90% of the final images are intact. (Maybe a little less: the film's edges are rather cropped but the top subtitles are generally visible, and during the wrenching scene with the bereaved Iraqi mother calling God's wrath down on the houses of America, the camera tilts down for the captions)
The section about Ashcroft and the Patriot Act, including his reading of it from the ice cream truck, was gone. The controversially 'slanted' montage of Iraqi children flying kites and other happy stuff isn't there. Instead it cuts roughly from the mechanic dude who says that ya can't trust your friends, right to the exploding government buildings in Baghdad. I was most disappointed that much of the excellent music was gone ("Roof on Fire"), or at a very low level ("Shiny Happy People"). Sadly it's missing such bits as the tense post-airport shutdown music and, in particular, the haunting back-and-forth piano line in the Florida classroom. Instead the sound levels of those clips are higher, which makes some of the Iraq scenes even more jarring. The film's credits are entirely missing after the dedication screen.
If you want the proper, immersive cinematic experience, frequent a real theater like my neighbor the St. Paul Grandview. If you resent giving Mr Moore money, have no theater within 40 miles, want to back up claims for or against the movie, or are planning to write the next great grad student paper on it, live under some repressive or un-Hollywoodified regime overseas, you should probably download this to check out what's going on. You basically have Moore's explicit permission. However, it is not authoritative and not nearly as funny without much of its music.
I will throw out this blob of links before getting later to more prosaic things later Fri. And lots more light rail stuff.
Rumsfeld reminded his folks coercing Arabs to stand in the hot Cuban sun, he can do it for eight hours, so why can't they do four? This man is next for the Nobel prize and its no wonder the chicks still dig him. Look at all these hot interrogation docs they put out but Billmon adds that they are from far too early, before the torture scandals in question.
Resistance grows to the 'imported government' that the IGC foisted on everyone. "Pressure at Iraqi prison detailed" in USA Today:
The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense "pressure" from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.In the area of treacherous Washington lobbyists, it seems that little pseudo-Dem fattycats have been giving away strategy to the Republicans so that they can calibrate how hard to squeeze their own party. Yes.Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to "pull the intelligence out" of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib.
[......]
Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, described "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to get information from detainees, including a visit to the prison last fall by an aide to Rice that was "purely on detainee operations and reporting." And he said he was reminded of the need to improve the intelligence output of the prison "many, many, many times."
[....]
Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that he recalled imploring, " 'Help, intelligence community and CIA. Give us more information.' Certainly that's a fairly typical thing in a conflict." He said he could not recall "any specific conversations" about improving intelligence results at Abu Ghraib.The Defense secretary also acknowledged that, at CIA Director George Tenet's request, he ordered an Iraqi terror suspect held for seven months without registering him on prison rolls or notifying the Red Cross, as is customary. The move delayed access by Red Cross inspectors to the detainee, a suspected member of the terror group Ansar al-Islam. But Rumsfeld said "there is no question at all" that the suspect was treated humanely. The terror suspect was never held at Abu Ghraib, but the incident illustrates the involvement by high-level administration officials in prisoner handling.
The twerps at New Republic wade into self-pity for supporting the war (David Corn says YOU SUCKAZ):
Finally the fate of Iraq is in the hands of Iraqis. If Iraq becomes a theocracy, or succumbs to a strongman, or collapses as a state, all this, too, will be the work of a free Iraq. For this reason, it is important to remember also that democratization is essentially a policy of destabilization. It demands the overthrow of one political culture so that another political culture may take its place. (That is why the outrages at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere are not only repugnant but also disastrous: "Hearts and minds" are precisely the field upon which democratizers make their stand. In this regard, nothing could be more damaging to the future of Iraq than Iraqi anti-Americanism.) It is absolutely astonishing that the planners of this war expected only happiness in its wake. Their postwar planning seems to have consisted in a kind of reverse Augustinianism: goodness is the absence of evil, Saddam is evil, Saddam's absence is good. They failed to intuit all the other evils that would emerge in the absence of this evil. They did not recognize the multiplicity of Iraq's demons; which is to say, they did not recognize Iraq.It's upside down as hell, the Iraq = 9/11 spinstorm. They claim that believing in Mohammed Atta in Prague is actually a major matter of faithful credence, a matter of your political compass rather than factual veracity. What tasty quotes from the Bush administration:
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It is no wonder that this administration has presided over a new flourishing of anti-Americanism. It accepts anti-Americanism as a compliment. It holds that all anti-Americanism is like all other anti-Americanism, and is in no way to be imputed to American behavior. In this way, the Bush administration has transformed anti-Americanism into one of the most urgent, and least addressed, problems facing American foreign policy. In a time when the safety of the United States depends more and more upon the cooperation of other states and other societies--the struggle against terrorism is a struggle against stateless villains organized in far-flung networks--the foreign policy of the United States surrendered to Gary Cooperism. Our leaders are all such legends in their own eyes. But after Will Kane shot Frank Miller dead, you will recall, he left town. The unilateralist became an isolationalist. The transition was easy. He would rely forevermore upon his sanctimony and his hauteur.
MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?I would point out the growing evidence of ethnic cleansing of Arabs in northern Iraq. This is to a great extent the backlash from the cleansing that Saddam carried out. I also find it disturbing that the former Kurd-Arab barrier is called the Green Line... what does this sound like? In fact, refugee camps of Arabs are forming, a perfectly logical outcome of stumbling into an ethnically troubled county without a plan or enough troops to maintain political order. What on earth will happen next?? Where will the newly sovereign refugees go?VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think it's not surprising that people make that connection.
MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don't know. You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn't have any evidence of that. Subsequent to that, we've learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organization.
[.....]
We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn't mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That's a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the '90s. That was clearly official policy.
Q: Mr. President, do you believe that Saddam Hussein is a bigger threat to the United States than al Qaeda?PRESIDENT BUSH: That's a--that is an interesting question. I'm trying to think of something humorous to say. (Laughter.) But I can't when I think about al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They're both risks, they're both dangerous. The difference, of course, is that al Qaeda likes to hijack governments. Saddam Hussein is a dictator of a government. Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world.
Both of them need to be dealt with. The war on terror, you can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. And so it's a comparison that is--I can't make because I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive.
Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.Some more of that stuff from the chatty anonymous CIA agent (via Washington Monthly). This dude was on CNN Wednesday, and his voice wasn't disguised. As most have noted, he had a strange combination of honest sentiment towards our evolving catastrophe in the so-called GWOT, but Anonymous suggested we might just have to go with the high body count.....some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, who has advised the Kurdish leadership, said he recommended a claim system for Kurds and Arabs to Pentagon officials in late 2002. Nothing was put in place on the ground until last month, he said, long after the Kurds began to move south of the Green Line.
"The C.P.A. adopted a sensible idea, but it required rapid implementation," Mr. Galbraith said. "They dropped the ball, and facts were created on the ground. Of course people are going to start moving. If the political parties are encouraging this, that, too, is understandable." [?!?!? -Dan]
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But in the villages and camps where the Kurds have returned, Kurdish leaders are more boastful. They say they pushed the Arab settlers out as part of a plan to expand Kurdish control over the territory.
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Before the war began in 2003, Arab settlers worked the fields in the areas surrounding Makhmur. Most of the settlers were brought north by successive waves of Mr. Hussein's campaign to populate the north with Arabs, killing or expelling tens of thousands of Kurds.Exactly what happened when Mr. Hussein's army collapsed is disputed. Kurdish officials say the Arab settlers fled with the army. No expulsions were necessary, they said.
Meanwhile in the Holy Land, you got Hebron headaches.
Hurray for Krauthammer and his West Bank wall:
The more Shaul sifts through his memories, the plainer it seems that there was no particular single moment in which his view of the world changed. A year and two months of serving in Hebron, first as a soldier and then as a commander, became a nightmarish collage of sights, sounds and feelings, which gradually led him to conclude that "It's a situation that screws up everyone. Everyone goes through the same process there of the erosion of red lines and a sinking into numbness. People start out at different points and end up at different points, but everyone goes through this process. No one returns from the territories without it leaving a deep imprint, messing up his head."
[.....]
Shaul could not bear the moral erosion he noticed in himself and his comrades: "It starts with little things. At first, you only blindfold real suspects, and in the end you have some teenager who left his house during the curfew sitting next to you blindfolded for 10 hours, and it seems normal to you. A lot of things are done just to demonstrate a presence, to show that the IDF is everywhere at all times. On each patrol, they enter a few houses, put the women and children in one room and the men in another, check documents, turn the house upside down and then leave. There are no terrorists there, no special alerts. It's just done. And then there's the shooting, of course. Hours upon hours of shooting from a heavy machine gun or a grenade launcher, on a residential neighborhood, like Abu Sneina. Do you know what it means to fire grenades into a crowded neighborhood where people live? And for four hours in a row? It's a situation that brings out the insanity in people."At a fairly early stage of his army service, he considered refusing orders, and for a time, he asked his displeased commanders to assign him guard duty only within the base. After a little while, he decided that he had to change things from the inside and started a course to become a squad commander. "It was a disheartening experience. The kind of people I encountered there made me realize that there was no chance of influencing this system from the inside."
How so?
"There were a lot of people there, the next generation of IDF commanders, who weren't open at all to questions of ethics. For them, the slogan `In war as in war' was a satisfying answer to everything."
[....]
Since the outbreak of the intifada, the public has heard many reports about exchanges of gunfire between Palestinians in the Abu Sneina neighborhood and the IDF posts in the area of the Jewish neighborhood. Shaul explains that in most cases, the soldiers have no idea where the shooting is coming from, and so they developed the concept of iturim - picking out certain buildings that for one reason or another came to be marked as preferred targets for shooting. For example - abandoned buildings, buildings under construction, or buildings that just stuck out, "that we shoot at when they shoot at us."They shot at you from the buildings?
"From the neighborhood. Most of the time, there's no connection to the buildings. You don't know where they're shooting at you from, but the idea is that there shouldn't be an event without a response, so you respond with a big spray of gunfire. Sometimes they shoot something like four bullets and the IDF, in response, goes at it for four hours."
Always in response to Palestinian gunfire?
"A lot of times, we told ourselves, they'll surely start shooting when it gets dark, at six, so why shouldn't we start shooting at 5:30, to deter them? Or they go up with the armored personnel carriers into Abu Sneina and start to spray the iturim, the selected buildings, from close up. To make a show of presence."
Oddly enough Israel is still sinking under the same demographic problems it had before: you can't overlay a minority of Jews over a space that holds more Arabs; that is, with the settlements Israel is still entering a minority situation that defies stable democracy, and hence, Hebron.
Even more important, [Palestinians] have lost their place at the table. Israel is now defining a new equilibrium that will reign for years to come -- the separation fence is unilaterally drawing the line that separates Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians were offered the chance to negotiate that frontier at Camp David and chose war instead. Now they are paying the price.It stands to reason. It is the height of absurdity to launch a terrorist war against Israel, then demand the right to determine the nature and route of the barrier built to prevent that very terrorism.
These new strategic realities are not just creating a new equilibrium, they are creating the first hope for peace since Arafat officially tore up the Oslo accords four years ago. Once Israel has withdrawn from Gaza and has completed the fence, terrorism as a strategic option will be effectively dead. The only way for the Palestinians to achieve statehood and dignity, and to determine the contours of their own state, will be to negotiate a final peace based on genuine coexistence with a Jewish state.
A couple tidbits about the rearranging of U.S. military forces: it really says something when we are actually pulling people from South Korea to stuff into the war effort. Altogether there are a lot of changes planned in the global military system (make what you will of that Orwellian statement). Base-wise, things are moving around now.
Draft rumors flyin: anything to it? All I know is that we have the notice filling up the draft board with "Oh shit!" written on it in the living room.
The mad Reverend Moon got some attention from the mainstream media for his bizarre peace crowning ceremony where he declared himself the Messiah. I swear, if someone manages to immanetize the eschaton, Moonies will be involved.
PR flacks of the former Clark-Gore schools prepare to defend Mr Moore. (more about flackery) At least Kerry is polling well in the independents.
Why I loathe David Brooks: he is an irritating "scruffy little mascot" of the neo-cons, but I forget who said that.
So let these be the links to chew on. I have more things to figure out Friday. Can't wait for the movie.
A lot of people talking about the rhetoric of fascism along with crazy symbols of power. I can't say I'm a fan of that kind of crazy talk, but also as an atheist I am hearing an increasing amount of crazy talk that threatens to overrun my value system. Some are freaked out. Yes, many are. I'm not going to get into talking much about the unfortunate kidnapped defense contractor in Saudi Arabia... it is worth considering that Apaches do not have a great public reputation in the Arab world, as their networks are far less reluctant to show the Israeli ones in action. The documentary Control Room that I mentioned earlier is playing at either Lagoon or Uptown, I need to go see it.
We can't quite measure terrorism accurately. It's on the decline! Brilliant.
Measuring the self-appointed cultural warriors, look at the evil rhetoric of ol'David Horowitz from back in 2000.
Nasty bit mocking the NY Times for torching their credibility on Chalabi. Tragically, due to my unemployed status, I suspended the Times delivery this weekend. It was a nice dead pulp sort of read... This blog, page A01, monitors the Times all the time. (mahablog and the left coaster ain't bad either)
An excellent bit on Juan Cole's site about what a bad idea it was to ditch early elections in Iraq, and the shadowy motives involved. Al-sadr increases in popularity, the bloody way.
A lot of retired officials, some of them key Republican appointees of yore, have released a statement saying Bush must leave office because of all the alliances he's shattered.
Look, 2004 political campaigns are advertising on blogs and making some money. Yay for that... is it effective???? It's gotta be, in some situations.
Last bits of Reagan anti-nostalgia: "Schisms from administration lingered for years," to put it mildly. Yes, it was not all rosy tinted scenarios and photo ops. The end of the cold war: we needed Gorbachev to do it, bottom line.
A humorous bit about Iran-Contra: what if it was really quite a skim-off-the-top kind of bribery scheme?
Middle east chunking up, getting ominous etc.: "Worst is yet to come as US pays the price of failure" but sadly, "a tough time for neo-cons," widely discredited, they say.
Speaking of photo ops, Josh Marshall asks:
In fact, the prison abuse and torture story itself has become a perfect example of how two separate media storylines — ones that clearly contradict each other — can coexist and yet seemingly never cross paths.i'm going to throw in a handful of final, old, links here, which spelled out rather neatly two flip sides of the situation: the neo-con fanatic wing [one two three] and the fundamentalist Christian fanatic wing [one two three].
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In this case, the partisan divide is conventional and predictable. Administration advocates argue that abuse was isolated — just a few malefactors who got out of control — while critics claim that it was systemic, stemming from policy choices made at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House.Yet, while this debate is being carried on, we’ve also had a steady stream of evidence (not pictures, but reports, testimony, and other documentary evidence) that makes it fairly clear that the first debate really isn’t a debate at all, or rather, that it’s an open-and-shut case.
[....]
Let’s start by discussing what’s in the pictures: limited violence against detainees, the use of nudity and sexual humiliation as a means of “softening up” detainees, psychological “torture” like the threat of death (such as the case of the picture of the man standing, arms outstretched, who was told he’d be electrocuted if he fell), and the use of attack dogs to frighten if not necessarily attack prisoners.Those are the acts contained in those lurid photos. But even from the internal reports and official statements coming from the Pentagon and other branches of the administration, it’s clear that each of these methods was approved and authorized as a way of preparing detainees for interrogations.
First, there was approval for using an enumerated list of interrogation techniques for al Qaeda terrorists housed at Guantanamo and other U.S. facilities. Eventually those techniques — honed in Afghanistan and Guantanamo — were OK’d for use against detainees in Iraq. We even know that the importation of those methods into Iraq probably happened in the late summer and early fall of last year. Most of the techniques mentioned above are specifically mentioned in the list of authorized methods issued by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in Iraq. The rest are detailed in other memos and reports made public over the last month and would certainly be covered by the new “torture memo” out this week.
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Yet the debate over who is responsible for what we see in those pictures continues, even when we have plenty of evidence that the tactics they were using were either specifically authorized by policymakers at the Pentagon or widespread at U.S.-detention facilities commanded by the same folks now prosecuting those reservists in the photos.Isn’t it about time that we just come clean with ourselves and admit that those half-dozen reservists really probably were just following orders?
Well there you have it, a few of the fine trends making up this turning point month.
Right now, Fox News is advertising:
I am not going to make any Iran-Contra jokes this evening, except one.
"If you helped Reagan sell missiles to the Ayatollah so that coke mobsters in Latin America would get more weapons, what does that make you?"
"A trusted member of Fox News... if you ran the show, you get a show!!"
Only funny because it's true. Not because it's funny. Ollie also wrote a couple books such as The Jericho Sanction, with such chapter titles as Legacy of Death, The Letter, Intrigue, Traitors & Hostages, Blown Cover, The Wolf, Making Plans While Marking Time, and other highly original contributions. Then there is "Mission Compromised," something Ollie Poo would Never Do!
Reagan and God, from the link above:
But it was in his lifelong battle against communism – first in Hollywood, then on the political stage – that Reagan's Christian beliefs had their most profound effect. Appalled by the religious repression and state-mandated atheism of Bolshevik Marxism, Reagan felt called by a sense of personal mission to confront the USSR. Inspired by influences as diverse as C.S. Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he waged an openly spiritual campaign against communism, insisting that religious freedom was the bedrock of personal liberty. "The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual," he said in his Evil Empire address. "And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man."Well, you have to admit it's better than "Bring Em On!" Billmon memorializes the great actor who filled up a suit 40% more effectively than W.
In some ways, Reagan's biggest triumph was the creation an atmosphere of existential crisis, in he could play the stereotypical role of the man on a white horse. He had a brilliant script, written by a new type of PR consultant (Michael Deaver generally gets the top credit) ready to exploit the synergies of the merger between politics and show business. And, like all great myths, it had enough correspondance with the reality of the times to be believable.Billmon follows again with a look at the Legacy:But there was always a kind of stage set quality to it - the sense that if you looked behind the facade all you'd find would be plywood and paper mache.
The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for - in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new "strategic relationship" with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and (perhaps most ironic, given Reagan's tough guy image) the weakeness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beruit - all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.There's a whole slate of good films coming out. Check out "The Hunting of the President," telling the story of Clinton's sleazy tormenters. My favorite part of the trailer might be where one journalist says "We were following these stories simply because Scaife was paying us to do it," presumably referring to the evil Republican billionaire industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife indeed dropped a fat $2,400,000 on the American Spectator magazine to go after Clinton, along with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation... on and on and on... more about the foundations.But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America....
The second movie is of course Fahrenheit 9/11 (Quicktime trailer). I am not a uniform supporter of Michael Moore, particularly with glaring inaccuracies that pop up all over some of his stuff. Regardless, the man is a pressure release valve on the hypocrisy and contradictions in what they're trying to sell us. He is shrill and unpleasant a great amount of the time, but that's tempered by a real quest to bring us something significant, at odds with the mainstream narrative.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.In other news, a splendid review of media bias by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.
The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
...
....saying that while terrorists must be confronted, the bigger problem is the extremist Islamic ideology that produces them.''What you have is a civil war in that religion where a small minority are trying to hijack it,'' he said.
This is just so damn goofy: an RNC promotional website for Hispanics that offers them four job choices: war veterans, teachers, senior citizens, or farmers and ranchers. Yes, that is where they fit in. (via WaPo)
Religious crusaders attacking the separation of church and state, while bringing political campaign pressure straight into churches. Safety for atheists not assured.
I saw Eyedea & Abilities with Dan Schned and Jitla last night. That was an excellent show, and it let out just as the T-Wolves beat the Lakers. We went storming around the packed downtown bars, and it was really one hell of a time.
Today, inside during this endless rain, I am bringing together the elements of the new server "tarfin", poking around, adding mod_perl to Apache2 (a slightly tricky proposition) and helping move some furniture around for people, and cleaning the room a little bit.
Oddly enough in the last 3 days two people have each given me CRT monitors—three, if you include the one that Eric let me use with the Compaq—and now I am in a world of Cathode Ray riches.
Then again, we should take a reality check here and look at a recent piece in the Times:
Studies show that gregarious, well-connected people actually lost friends, and experienced symptoms of loneliness and depression, after joining discussion groups and other activities. People who communicated with disembodied strangers online found the experience empty and emotionally frustrating but were nonetheless seduced by the novelty of the new medium. As Prof. Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon researcher, told me recently, such people allowed low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world.Wisconsin's senator Russ Feingold has put together an advertising campaign on the blogs. My dad recently sent me a Feingold 2004 bumper sticker, which has a certain geographic symmetry across the car bumper from my Wellstone! sticker.
........
Marcus is a child of the Net, where everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.But teenagers who spend much of their lives hunched over computer screens miss the socializing, the real-world experience that would allow them to leave adolescence behind and grow into adulthood. These vital experiences, like much else, are simply not available in a virtual form.
For those of you deeply saddened by the lack of news tidbits, well, I have been keeping looser tabs on the news than usual, but I have been saving a lot of news bookmarks, and you can expect that things will be parsed again more closely this coming week.
Emmerich's disaster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' has opened today at the Grandview next door. There are people, I think from MoveOn.org, hanging around talking with people.
Sometimes I ask people coming out of the movies what they think. And sometimes as we chillin on the front porch we overhear their opinions anyway. This one may be interesting.
In news of the server, Jess gave me some old floppy disks and I am making the boot disk necessary right now. The Linux box may be ready to roll tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have to erase the whole HD in order to get the stupid Compaq diagnostic partition on there. Ugh. Stay tuned on that.
I was thinking about going to a camp near International Falls today, but I said I wouldn't if the weather looked terrible. Well, it does. There are tornadoes and crazy warnings all south of us, while the atmosphere has less energy and more slow moisture here.
These summer storms come zooming over us, and their power comes from the intensity of the summer heat--and how it picks up moisture. It's quite fitting that there's a movie about global warming and climate shifts, as the west dries up and the sun makes storms and tornadoes.
What is a pressure point of this global warming? Where are its effects felt the most heavily? Places in the desert that lack air conditioning. So global warming impacts Bush's policy in Iraq too.
Alison gets a lot of flack from people for the gas prices at SA. She is the last domino in a global chain of violence, market anxiety and schemery that stretches all the way to the top of the White House. Energy waves come right to the corner.
Bush is talking again tonight. Will he declare anything about Chalabi? Will he say anything about oil? Or is it just another one of those pop out of the shell for a moment, vanish, kind of things. There was a report in the NY Times today about how furious congressional Republicans are that they can't get the man's attention. If that's how their people in Congress are treated, who the hell is running this operation?
Yeah, it's the failure of a presidency before our very eyes, the rolling energy of all the horrible things he's done—all the failures to handle reality—jeopardizes the whole world. Yet that administration has christened itself. Literally, they map the situation onto theocratic ideas. Rick Perlstein reveals that they are synchronized with apocalyptic Christians in their mideast policy, in a sense. In the Village Voice:
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and Solomon's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace."
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
......(snip).....
When Pastor Upton was asked to explain why the group's website describes the Apostolic Congress as "the Christian Voice in the nation's capital," instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation's capital, he responded, "There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn't speak for the right, someone who doesn't speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective."When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a "theocratical" perspective, not a "theological" perspective, he said, "Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue."
I don't know if the real world is reaching these people, or what. I don't know if they even perceive those who are dying, on all sides. What's the purpose?
Maybe Bush will announce the resignations of Douglas Feith and Rummy!!! I think he'll have to lay someone out tonight. These guys have stacked up their self-important authority so high, any fired political appointees would bring about the collapse of their whole legitimacy.
Yet they are whole, and their legitimacy has already collapsed rapidly. Where are the cracks going to come out? And what gets poured into all the policy? Religious fanaticism? Talk of "the enemy" and "terrorist clerics"? When does it end?
They've all got guns, Mr Secretary. Thanks for giving Chalabi and Iranian intelligence all of Saddam's secret files. Nice move in the war on Evil.
Its a horrible place to be for those young soldiers, and its going to get hot as the burned oil has become carbon dioxide trapping more thermal energy, where it joins the hot dust and burned substances, all heating the place, with no plan...
The former commanding general of Centcom, Mr Zinni, called it Niagara Falls. The energy waves rise and fall, dollars, gallons, bombs...
What do you do now? What can you do? Tell us, oh great secreted President, shaky and irritable.
There's been a lot of things on the news today. Why did the CPA suddenly choose to shut down Sadr's newspaper? Perhaps it had something to do with this AP report that Sadr was declaring allegiance with Hamas and Hezbollah last Friday. Did this provide an opportunity for the Middle Eastern altruists in the Pentagon to, say, merge the threats between Israel and the U.S.? That's wild speculation!! Can't be true!
Prof. Juan Cole continues to describe things with the most clarity. He actually sounds almost as paranoid as I do sometimes:
The civilians in the Department of Defense only know how to blow things up. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith staffed the CPA with Neoconservatives, most of whom had no administrative experience, no Arabic, and no respect for Muslim culture (or knowledge about it). They actively excluded State Department Iraq hands like Tom Warrick. (Only recently have a few experienced State Department Arabists been allowed in to try to begin mopping up the mess.) The Neocons in the CPA have all sorts of ulterior motives and social experiments they want to impose on the Iraqi people, including Polish-style economic shock therapy, some sort of sweetheart deal for Israel, and maybe even breaking the country up into three parts.He informed me of people called "Palestinian-Salvadorans," quite a shock. Polls:
An opinion poll taken in late February showed that 10 % of Iraq's Shiites say attacks on US troops are "acceptable." But 30% of Sunni Arabs say such attacks are acceptable, and fully 70% of Anbar province approves of attacking Americans. (Anbar is where Ramadi, Fallujah, Hadithah and Habbaniyah are, with a population of 1.25 million or 5% of Iraq--those who approve of attacks are 875,000).But simple statistics don't tell the story. If there are 25 million Iraqis and Shiites comprise 65%, that is about 16 million persons. Ten percent of them is 1.6 million, which is a lot of people who hate Americans enough to approve of attacks on them. If Sunni Arabs comprise about 16% of the population, there are 4 million of them. If 30% approve of attacks, that is 1.2 million. That is, the poll actually shows that in absolute numbers, there are more Shiites who approve of attacks on Americans than there are Sunni Arabs. The numbers bring into question the official line that there are no problems in the South, only in the Sunni Arab heartland.
Sadr's volatile movement has seized control of the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shiism's holiest sites. (All we need now is a(nother) Temple Mount incident)
Will the US attack the Kurds? What? This latent Kurdish nationalism seems to be emerging. It is, as they say, troublesome.
As well as an interesting report about crime and disorder thriving in Baghdad, Al Jazeera has some late breaking news, in their own unique style, from Falluja. (this city has somewhere called the "Golan District?!" Hell) Also there is a lack of food.
"We also visited the Golan district where clashes took place earlier today between fighters from Falluja and US forces," Ali said. "We saw signs of fierce confrontation. US forces have bombed the district. We saw several destroyed houses."Golan inhabitants say US forces used cluster bombs and missiles against them," he said. "Citizens of the city are completely enraged - but not afraid - waiting for the coming events," the correspondent said.
.....
The leaflets outlaw demonstrations and the possession of firearms and impose a 7pm to 6am daily curfew. Residents are advised that in the event of a raid by US forces, all family members should gather in a single room in the house. "This indicates that door-to-door operations will be launched by US forces," the correspondent said.Aljazeera has also received a statement issued by a group in al-Anbar province calling itself the Jihad Brigades, urging followers of the Shia leader al-Sadr to continue resisting.
"Even Falluja's main hospital is inaccessible because it is located out of the city across the Euphrates river, and the bridge is closed. Today I saw an ambulance driver negotiating with US soldiers to let him cross the bridge. They let him through after a long and tiresome argument.""Shops are closed and life in the town is paralysed. I am standing among dozens of angry Falluja people. They say they are not afraid of the US forces, they are ready to fight. The crowd was chanting 'There is no God but Allah'."
THE PREZ: No, the intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same. I believe we can transfer authority by June 30th. We're working toward that day. We're, obviously, constantly in touch with Jerry Bremer on the transfer of sovereignty. The United Nations is over there now. The United Nations representative is there now to work on the -- on a -- on to whom we transfer sovereignty. I mean, in other words, it's one thing to decide to transfer. We're now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty. But, no, the date remains firm.
Gloom...has been building over Iraq. Increasingly, the Wise Heads are forecasting disaster. Wise Heads say they see no realistic plan, hear no serious concept to get ahead of the situation. Money, training, jobs...all lagging, all reinforce downward spiral highlighted by sickening violence. There seems to be no real "if", just when, and how badly it will hurt U.S. interests. Define "disaster"? Consensus prediction: if Bush insists on June 30/July 1 turnover, a rapid descent into civil war. May happen anyway, if the young al-Sadr faction really breaks off from its parents. CSIS Anthony Cordesman's latest blast at Administration ineptitude says in public what Senior Observers say in private...the situation may still be salvaged, but then you have to factor in Sharon's increasing desperation, and the regional impact.
WaPo says it "Marks a New Front in War." Also "Spread of Bin Laden Ideology Cited." Al Qaeda == "The Base," don't we get it yet?
I liked the NY Times story about the life of the mercenary. Google News searches for mercenaries are fruitful right now.
Here's a fun article about how religious people are turning away from the Enlightenment from the Secular Humanists.
Guardian writer grumbles about America's emerging cultural war. Is it really that polarized? I don't know if I buy it.
More paranoid things about the energy markets. I'm certainly not buying all of this one.
A few bits about Israel: Increasing anti-Semitism really concerns me, as it will likely cause the social fabric in a lot of already marginal places to fray, as well as scare the hell out of many people. Haaretz investigates something well worth reflecting on. Sharon says his hands are clean of bribes, yet no matter how much he washes, the spots, damn spots, won't come out, he says. " Less than a man of his word, Sharon's Passover Legends." Not surprisingly the Palestinian peace movement is having trouble getting traction right now. Why aren't settlers protesting more?
Christian Science Monitor says that Iraqis and Palestinians see their sufferings as a form of globalization (via Prof. Cole):
The focus on Jews and Israel reflects a wider belief among Arab Iraqis, Sunni and Shiite alike, that the US and Israeli occupations are twin Golems of a globalization that they can not resist or control, one that is causing the disintegration of the very fabric of their cultures and economies even as it offers prosperity and freedom to a fortunate few.It may be hard for Americans to understand the occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend. Here, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity - oil. And corporations allied with the occupying power literally scrounge the country for profits, privatizing everything from health care to prisons, while Iraqi engineers, contractors, doctors, and educators are shunted aside.
Like economic globalization in so many other countries of the developing world, this model in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. My visits to hospitals, schools, think tanks, political party headquarters, art galleries, and refugee camps reveal conditions clearly as bad, and often worse, than on the eve of the US invasion.
....
Iraq is sliding toward chaos; a state that many Iraqis increasingly believe is exactly where the US wants them to be. A prominent Iraqi psychiatrist who has worked with the CPA and the US military explained to me that "there is no way the United States can be this incompetent. The chaos here has to be at least partly deliberate." The main question on most people's minds is not if his assertion is true, but why?For example, many here see last week's carnage of Americans in Fallujah as suspicious. To send foreign contractors into Fallujah in late-model SUVs with armed escorts - down a traffic-clogged street on which they'd be literal sitting ducks - can be interpreted as a deliberate US instigation of violence to be used as a pretext for "punishment" by the US military.
I like last December's special Washington Monthly report on the glorious synchronicity between powerful Republican families in the U.S. and those who are somehow plucked to serve in Iraq.
When the history of the occupation of Iraq is written, there will be many factors to point to when explaining the post-conquest descent into chaos and disorder, from the melting away of Saddam's army to the Pentagon's failure to make adequate plans for the occupation. But historians will also consider the lack of experience and abundant political connections of the hundreds of American bureaucrats sent to Baghdad to run Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Wandering around I found a piece by Manuel Valenzuela on a rather far-left site, featuring things by the "Worker's World" and others... (they are reprinting the as-yet-unconfirmed Zelikow-Israel thing, again via Cole) More than a little bloated with cliches but interesting nonetheless: "The War of Error:"
It is in the MIC’s interest to prolong this most ambiguous and marketable war for as long as possible. When the citizenry has been successfully turned to submissive sheep, ignorant as to its role as a massive pawn, primordial emotions dictating logic and common sense, the MIC is assured of ever-increasing power, control and wealth. From cradle to the grave, we are but slaves to the military-industrial complex, nothing more than puppets whose strings are attached to the massive claws of the omnipotent masters tearing us to shreds as they amuse themselves with the games of disquieting existence and rapacious divisiveness they thrust upon our oblivious selves.Greed-mongers, fear-mongers, warmongers and profiteers, the Bush administration, the Corporate Leviathan and the MIC together are annihilating our future. When greed intermingles with the almighty dollar, profit is placed above people, we become statistics in cost-benefit analysis, we are shamelessly exploited and we all become open wounds waiting to become collateral damage.
I am supposed to write a proposal for my final paper in International Security class tonight. But given what's been happening the last few weeks, what can I address that isn't tearing apart like wet toilet paper? Where can I stand when the sands are shifting so? Is it possible to research and write on security in this snake pit? I'm hoping you guys might have suggestions!
This deserves to go first: a report from Haaretz that America plans to make 'implied' recognition of the illegal Israeli settlements. Holy land, gotta gotta get it!
U.S. assures Israel no retreat to 1967 lineBelow is my round-up on the Iraq and the Fallujah-mercenary issue, Pakistan, military-industrial corruption, the Uzbekistan aftermath, Clarkestorm 2004 and further Israel-Palestine tidbits. (crossposted on DKOS diary)
The U.S. will assure Israel that it will not have to withdraw to the Green Line in a future permanent settlement with the Palestinians.The promise appears in a letter of guarantees drafted by the American administration in exchange for Sharon's disengagement plan.
The U.S. rejected Israel's request to recognize the future annexation of the large settlement blocs in Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel and Etzion. Instead of referring explicitly to the settlements, the Americans propose a vaguely worded letter, which Israel would be able to present as implied recognition of the settlement blocs.
My special thanks go to those following the best of mainstream and alternative media every day at WarInContext. The Agonist is a news blitz all day long--they are making a full-time go at it. New frontiers of journalism or just obsessed people?
That's Robert Fisk reporting "Things are getting much worse in Iraq" today, a brutally honest British reporter who has given a totally different slant to the war, but then again he said it would be a quagmire from the very beginning. Juan Cole is an expert who just plain gets it:
Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did General Kimmitt take us through the little uptick [in violence].
A marine vehicle blown off the road near Fallujah, a marine killed, a second attack with small-arms fire on the same troops, an attack on an Iraqi paramilitary recruiting station on the 14th July Road, a soldier killed near Ramadi, two Britons hurt in Basra violence, a suicide bombing against the home of the Hillah police chief, an Iraqi shot at a checkpoint, US soldiers wounded in Mosul ... All this was just 17 hours before Fallujah civilians dragged the cremated remains of a Westerner through the streets of their city.
.....
But there was an interesting twist - horribly ironic in the face of yesterday's butchery - in General Kimmitt's narrative. Why, I asked him, did he refer sometimes to "terrorists" and at other times to "insurgents"? Surely if you could leap from being a terrorist to being an insurgent, then with the next little hop, skip and jump, you become a "freedom-fighter". Mr Senor gave the general one of his fearful looks. He needn't have bothered. General Kimmitt is a much smoother operator than his civilian counterpart. There were, the general explained, the Fallujah version who were insurgents, and then the al-Qa'ida version who attack mosques, hotels, religious festivals and who were terrorists.
So, it seems, there are now in Iraq good terrorists and bad terrorists, there are common-or-garden insurgents and supremely awful terrorists, the kind against which President George Bush took us to war in Iraq when there weren't any terrorists actually here, though there are now. And therein lies the problem. From inside the Green Zone on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything. How far can the occupying powers take war-spin before the world stops believing anything they say?
What would drive the crowd to this barbaric behavior? It is not that they are pro-Saddam any more, or that they hate "freedom." They are using a theater of the macabre to protest their occupation and humiliation by foreign armies. They were engaging in a role reversal, with the American cadavers in the position of the "helpless" and the "humiliated," and with themselves playing the role of the powerful monster that inscribes its will on these bodies.I was disturbed by the 'frenzy of violence' in Iraq, as the Star Tribune headline put it, although perhaps I see the frenzy occurring over a longer timeframe. The images they printed had a distinct Mogadishu overtone, it's hard to deny.This degree of hatred for the new order among ordinary people is very bad news. It helps explain why so few of the Sunni Arab guerrillas have been caught, since the locals hide and help them. It also seems a little unlikely that further US military action can do anything practical to put down this insurgency; most actions it could take would simply inflame the public against them all the more.
As recounted by Clarke in his book, and confirmed by documents provided to NEWSWEEK, Emerson and his former associate Rita Katz regularly provided the White House with a stream of information about possible Al Qaeda activity inside the United States that appears to have been largely unknown to the FBI prior to the September 11 terror attacks.In confidential memos and briefings that were sometimes conducted on a near weekly basis, Emerson and Katz furnished Clarke and his staff with the names of Islamic radical Web sites, the identities of possible terrorist front groups and the phone numbers and addresses of possible terror suspects—data they were unable to get from elsewhere in the government.
Experts say the bloodshed could signal the resurgence of the regional Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which has revitalized itself in the lawless Pakistan-Afghan border area, under the leadership of Tohir Yuldashev. Or it could point to a violent offshoot of the local, moderate Hizb-ut-Tahrir, fed up with years of brutal crackdowns by Uzbek President Islam Karimov on Islamic believers of all types.This Yuldashev character is being called the new "Al Qaeda leader" of the moment. Is he really internationally evil??
Well, that's about the most comprehensive war mosaic I can put together today.
So what the hell do I do about my final paper?
I have been very busy this week working on a group paper for International Security class responding to Richard Perle and David Frum's horrible book, "An End to Evil." The whole thing filled me with dread. I never want to look at it again.
Having said that, it has been most entertaining to watch CNN these days, as Dick Clarke brings down the Bush Administration's American Grandstanding about their competence in confronting terror. By his account, the Administration's first months were like a special cubicle hell, an inert bureaucracy staffed by cold war geriatrics "encased in amber" who invented task forces that never met and demoted Clarke, the nation's supposed counterterror guru, who tried to put the government on high alert, but found the shell of evildoers around the president almost inpenetrable. Happily, Bush's poll numbers seem to be taking a hit.
I don't quite grasp why the conservatives issue catcalls and deny credibility because Clarke has written a book about it. This is the information age. How is the public supposed to become informed, if not by the printed word?
In any case I wanted to post a link to this amazing story about the graffiti found all over the walls of Baghdad, meticulously collected and translated by an old Iraqi. It's riotously funny. Here are a some that the old man captured:
SADDAM WILL RETURN!
And written underneath:
THROUGH MY ASS!ANARCHY IS GOVERNING THROUGH A PARLIAMENT AND AN EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY
SADDAM SWALLOWED ALL THE PRICKS OF THE WORLD, AND HE STILL SAID HE WAS VICTORIOUS
SADDAM IS A WORD THAT MEANS A DISEASE THAT HITS DONKEYS
EVERYONE, SADDAM CRAPPED IN HIS TROUSERS
EVERYONE, SADDAM PIMPED HIS WIFE SAJIDAH
DEAR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SADDAM ATE FROM THE KAADAH! [a child's potty]
DOWN WITH AHMAD CHALABI, MAN OF CATS!
CHALABI IS THE ENGINEER OF DEMOCRACY
And underneath is written:
ZIONISTS SAID THAT!OUR WEALTH IS OUR OWN, OUR OIL WILL ENRICH US IF WE CAN GET IT BACK INTO OUR HANDS
THE GOVERNING COUNCIL IS A COUNCIL OF AGENTS, TRAITORS, SPIES, AND MERCENARIES
DONKEYS PISS HERE!
And underneath is written:
AND PIMPS AND BAATHISTSACHIEVEMENTS OF THE POST-LIBERATION IRAQ:
105 NEWSPAPERS (ALL LIES)
110 FAILED PARTIES
300 THIEVES' ORGANIZATIONS
500 UNIONS WITH NO WORK
600 HEADQUARTERS FOR PLUNDERING AND STEALING
700 MOVEMENTS WITH NO BLESSING OR GOOD
25,000 SPIES FOR THE AMERICANS
4,000 EMPLOYEES IN OFFICIAL OFFICES, ALL THIEVES
5,000 DOUBLE AGENTS FOR THE AMERICANS AND FOR SADDAM AT THE SAME TIME
2 MILLION HOMELESS FAMILIES WITH NO DIGNITY
25 MILLION IRAQIS THAT WANT TO LEAVE IRAQ
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical CitySADDAM ATE BEANS AND EMITTED STINKY AIR
LONG LIVE SADDAM, IN SPITE OF HIS FOOL CRAZIES!
And underneath is written:
SADDAM IS A PIMP; ASK YOUR SISTER!PATIENCE, BAGHDAD, PATIENCE, SADDAM IS COMING BACK SOON
And underneath is written:
TO FINISH OFF WHAT REMAINS OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR TO FUCK YOUR MOTHER?LET YOUR HEADS APPEAR, YOU BAATHISTS. WHERE ARE YOU HIDING? IN THE SEWAGE PIPES?
IRAQ IS THE MUSTACHE OF EVERY HONORABLE MAN--The Army of Mohammed
WE SWEAR WE WILL MAKE MASS GRAVES FROM IRAQ'S LAND FOR ALL THE TRAITORS AND ALL THE AGENTS OF THE AMERICANS AND THE ZIONISTS--Army of Mohammed
And underneath is written:
WE ALREADY KNOW MASS GRAVES ARE YOUR SPECIALTY; GOD IS OUR WITNESS ON THATINCREASE IN RATION SHARES:
100 KG. SADNESS, PAIN, AND MELANCHOLY FOR EACH CITIZEN
50 KG. WORRY, GRIEF, AND SORROW FOR EACH HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD
10 PROBLEMS PER FAMILY
4 VOLTS ELECTRICITY PER HOUSE
1 MASS CEMETERY PER CITY DISTRICT
5 RANDOMLY SHOT BULLETS PER STREET, INCREASED TO 50 BULLETS ON THURSDAYS
1 GAS CANISTER PER FAMILY PER MONTH
2 KEROSENE BOTTLES PER FAMILY PER MONTH
10 CANS OF FOOD PER FAMILY PER MONTH: VARIOUS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN AND FULL OF DIFFERENT POISONS
NB: TRANSPORTATION COSTS ARE BORNE BY MR. BREMER
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical CityEVERYONE WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT OF IRAQ, EVEN THE PORTERS AT THE SHARJAH BAZAAR
BE FRIGHTENED OF GOD, PROSTITUTE OF JORDAN! AND YOU THE TURBANED MEN OF IRAN, AND YOU GRANDSONS OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS
WE WILL RETURN SOON!--The Baath Party
And underneath is written:
AND WE WILL WAIT FOR YOU WITH SLIPPERS, YOU DREGS!--The Al Daawa Islamic PartyKIRKUK IS FOR THE KURDS
This has been crossed out and written instead:
KIRKUK FOR THE TURKMEN
And this has been crossed out and written instead:
KIRKUK IS FOR THE IRAQIS, YOU TRAITORS!BREMER! IF YOU DON'T KNOW, IT'S A DISASTER, AND IF YOU KNOW, THE DISASTER IS GREATER
IF SADDAM SPENT THE OIL REVENUES ON THE WELFARE OF HIS PEOPLE IRAQ WOULD BE:
THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
EVERY IRAQI WOULD HAVE TWO HOUSES: ONE FOR WINTER, ONE FOR SUMMER
EVERY IRAQI WOULD HAVE THREE CARS: ONE FOR WORK, ONE FOR HIS FAMILY, AND ONE FOR PICNICS AND TRAVELING
EVERY IRAQI WOULD TRAVEL THROUGHOUT THE WORLD ANNUALLY
EVERY IRAQI WOULD BE EDUCATED TO THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING, AND EDUCATION
IRAQ'S POPULATION WOULD BE 50 MILLION
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical City
I am eagerly looking forward to spring break this year. For the first time, I'll fly over the big pond to Europe and hang out with Nick Petersen in London for a week. That's this Friday.
During that time I'll leave the site turned on, and I'll probably find some time to post back to here, but it can't be frequent.
This week, I have several mid-term exams and a giant group paper to contend with, so I can't spend a great deal of time writing here.
On the plus side, I realized that the Apache server which comes with OS X has a built-in Perl module (mod_perl), but deactivated. The Perl module runs the site's Perl code much more quickly than a server without the module. To turn it on I just had to enable it in the configuration files and restart the server. *Bingo*, just like that my site's dynamic stuff runs about 3x-4x faster. It was really necessary, and I only put it off because I was too busy and I thought I would have to go through the mess of recompiling Apache. So far I am using Apple's default Apache server with no problems.
This week I am experimenting with a slick program called ecto which allows me to write entries without using a web browser.
As far as the news is concerned, those new Bush ads are just so marvellous I don't really need to add anything. But imagine if Lincoln or FDR had tried to exploit similar images. This site is run by a legal professor with a spectacular sense of humor. (via the DKos)
The NY Times is running a huge Kerry op-ed blitz today. Maureen Dowd is clearly sugar-coating a nice image of a candidate with rich interests. A DLC totem suggests that "reform" should be Kerry's word of the campaign. A Clinton-Gore poll guru says that Kerry can take Bush on all kinds of issues.
For now, however, only 40 percent of voters think the country is headed in the right direction. According to nearly all public polls, Mr. Kerry is the preferred choice for president, and that prospect may well keep Mr. Kerry from focusing on the larger choice before America. That would be a shame, because voters would respond to such a challenge.The choice is between an America inspired by John F. Kennedy and one shaped by Ronald Reagan. When the alternatives are framed this way, Americans choose the Kennedy vision by a striking 53 percent to 41 percent. It brings increased support for Democrats among voters from across the political spectrum — in small towns and rural areas, in older blue-collar communities, among low-wage and unmarried women as well as young voters and women with a college degree.
Rather than simply criticizing specific policies of the Bush administration, Mr. Kerry should emphasize the worldview it represents. Mr. Bush favors tax cuts for business and the wealthy as the best way to bring about prosperity. He heralds individualism as the key to a healthy community. In his tenure America has retreated at home before our shared problems, but advanced alone abroad. If Mr. Kerry challenges this worldview, Mr. Bush will be forced to defend it.
For more election news, Electablog is pretty darn good.
There is some weird stuff going on in Afghanistan, as the long-awaited Spring Offensive between the allies and the Taliboid forces (al-Qaeda types, probably ISI people, who knows?) springs into action. Bin Laden may have narrowly avoided a Pakistani raid. US snipers killed a bunch of "suspected Taliban."
I never thought the Republicans were 31337 hax0rs, but apparently they can steal filez and r00t a judicial computer system better than anyone thought. Their head judicial aide apparently helped steal around 4,670 secret Democratic documents. As the trolls on Fox News have been commanded to point out, many memos indicated the D's were working with outside groups to keep conservatives off judicial panels for specific cases, a hoorrrible, oh so hoorrible, infringement of judicial power. Or something like that.
I don't quite understand what D's were legitimately doing, except considering impact the judges will have on cases!!! Bad Democrats! Thinking about the effect of judges!! Bad!
Kerry beats Bush by a few points, 49-43, in Florida!!! Time to purge the voter rolls again!
Many Palestinians killed, including 4 children, in massive Gaza raids supposedly designed to draw militants out. What the hell is the point? Apparently Sharon's credibility with the abused Israeli public is at a new low, so this, like many Sharon initiatives, probably has a wag-the-dog logic to it. There is also word that the Israelis may have been asked by the Bush administration to avoid withdrawing from Gaza before the elections because of the potential instability. Uhm, Israeli occupation ==Bush political power? What? This is worth following.
Finally, at long, long last, the pervasive sense of the everlasting nightmare has softened. Yet now we have VP speculations. Bill Richardson or John Edwards seem good right now. Alison caught the McLaughlin Group this morning and McLaughlin predicted that the search for VP would go for ethnic, not regional, balance. We could do worse than Richardson, a popular southwestern Hispanic governor with tons of executive and international experience. Or on SNL, the skilled Darrell Hammond as Clinton put forth his own VP candidacy. He asked how awesome it would be to have him around again with even less responsibility. He said could put the Vice back in Vice President, although Cheney's done pretty well by that measure.
Ok, so now I will say it. My optimism about the outcome of the election and the future of the country has finally shot above 50%.
The glass is indeed half full.
The word is that Richard Perle got tossed on his butt from the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, supposedly for calling for the firing of the Pentagon's in-house spy agency's chief. The agency, the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency, is somewhat more towards the "rational" side of intelligence gathering. That is, they were not the ones principally responsible for silly WMD intelligence. Yet Perle blames them for messing it up.
Too much for Rummy, finally at long last.
Pat Buchanan predicted on the McLaughlin group on Sunday morning that he would not be the last kicked out before the election. Ahh Pat.
Aside from that I should explain why I often miss posting Wednesdays on the site. The problem is that I have creative writing from 7 to 10, and of course last week I had to cover the Kerry rally and write the story, which took hours.
Midterms are right in my face here. It's going to be a hella lot of work. I covered the caucus story this week. it was altogether messy but interesting, as Kucinich overwhelmingly won our precinct, and we found out Edwards was dropping out while filling out ballots.
I am going to visit NickP in London in a week!! This is so damn cool, I've never been across the big ocean. Really. (Cheng has just gone the other way to Tokyo. He may make contact one of these days)
Thats about all I have the energy left about right now. Night.
We are about to take off for Empirical Research Methods class this morning. Later today we are going to take entrance polls at the Minnesota Democratic caucuses in St. Paul. Should be good.
There have been a lot of stories flying today about the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Seymour Hersh released a major article stating that the U.S. is going into the remote Hindu Kush areas with possibly thousands of troops to seek out Bin Laden. This article is worth reading in its entirety.
Hindu Kush means "Hindu Killer," and as Hersh pointed out today, Alexander the Great lost a division up here to the harsh conditions. These are highly tribal areas, and most people are well-armed.
The problem is that for a lot of the hard-core Islamists in the Pakistani security services--mainly the ISI--the entry of US troops into Pakistan is the real red line, the breaking point. Musharraf has already narrowly avoided death several times.
Should it be a red line for us? As Andy put it, this is massive intervention into a nuclear power we are talking about. Does this kind of thing have to be voted on somewhere? What can this lead to? (What might the North Koreans do?)
Stop.
Ok, alternatively, none of this madness is going on. It's all fiction and spy yarns. Sometimes I worry I am over-reacting, but then I think about how scary nuclear weapons seemed to me back in the day. Back then, we had huge states looking out for their crown jewels, but now its more of an virtual Persian bazaar of clandestine WMD trafficking and shady deals.
Besides that, Reuters reports NATO is planning to sweep through Afghanistan, taking security control of continuous areas in a grand sweep. Yet the Taliban has control of Zabul province now, according to one Pakistani article. The NGOs have been brutally driven off in these parts and the central government, corrupt in many places, is out of reach.
The Pakistani military killed some people a little ways inside Pakistan, in an area they are searching through.
There is an interesting story in the WaPo that the Palestinian Authority might crumble, too.
Something less terrifying about other fuzzy borders in Central Asia. Seems Uzbekistan, kind of a troll state, has been laying landmines well beyond its boundaries. Meanwhile Tajiks have been wandering into Kyrgyzstan and taking resources. It's a very nomadic place, which is part of the reason the land mines are such a problem.
Interesting campaign blog with the Columbia School of Journalism.
I TOLD you that Ahmed Chalabi was dirty dirty stuff, selling bad intel via the neo-cons. The investigations are piling up. Hurrah!
Andy sent me an instant message at about 12:45 this morning saying that I appeared on the policy wonk's lifepartner C-SPAN during the Vote 2004 segment on Kerry's visit to Macalester.
Fortunately C-SPAN has put up a RealPlayer video stream of Kerry's event. It is quite blurry at 128K, but the sound is much more clear than I got with my voice recorder. Kerry and I can be heard really well, actually. I appear at about 1 hour 8 minutes into the clip.
While reporting for the Mac Weekly, I located myself in the audience near the "stage entrance" of the campaign rally. Senator Kerry moved down the line, shaking hands and signing things. With a huge crush of people and cameras all around, I asked Kerry if the investigation into intelligence distortions on Iraq should be a criminal matter. We reported his answer in the Mac Weekly story. (not yet online).
Kerry responded: "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."
The campaign story was a very tough one for us to write, and the session well into the early morning left me tired for days afterward. It is damn hard to write the Weekly and look sane the next day, as the editors know all too well.
The newspaper is in sweet sweet color on the cover. I'm really happy I snagged a candidate's quote, but I wish that more of what other people said at the rally could have been put in. Unfortunately, the paper a huge crush for space this week.
I have thrown together an ugly iPhoto web gallery of my pictures from when John Edwards came to St. Paul on Saturday. Here is a choice image of Alison giving a w00p w00p sort of expression while Mr. Edwards makes another gesture.
Enjoy the photos. I am really trying to get a pretty photo layout setup like other sites have, but with all the goings on it has been very difficult to get it together.
Kerry is coming to the Macalester campus today! I am going off to report on the event soon, and will be quite busy capturing the story with Mike Barnes tonight. We may have gained some special insider access so I'm hoping for the all-important campaign scoop.
I am now covering the Kerry event on Macalester's campus Wednesday, which, alongside the Edwards rally on Sunday has surprisingly thrown me right into the middle of the national campaign for the first time since my November pilgrimage to Iowa (though the stories of Kellen, Andy and Adam at the Iowa Caucus made it far more colorful--and insightful).
With Dean's sudden deflation, my wandering political spirit stumbled onward yet again. I'm genuinely happy that the Democrats haven't torn themselves to pieces, and evidently Edwards doesn't plan to attack Kerry, or so he told us on Saturday. That in itself is a big step for the Dems.
The gang around here is flocking to Edwards, but I've hemmed and hawed about where I stand altogether. I think his image works great, I think he's making an impressive run that a lot of people said would never even get this far. That's a lot to his credit. There were plenty of Dean backers sporting their colors at the rally, so naturally, I am supposed to gravitiate there. But is Edwards' glossy inexperience ultimately a liability? (Additionally there's an incestuous sort of lawyer love going around among this crew, whether or not they admit it :-)
In the end Kerry seems to be steamrolling all the way down, and what's coming Wednesday will reflect that. Yet the Iowa and Wisconsin campaigns revealed Edwards poll spikes at the very end. Would Minnesota finally be the site where Edwards beats the man on top?
In sum, I am still ambivalent, and heck, since we are conducting entrance polls to the caucuses for Empirical Research Methods, I probably wouldn't even have time to caucus even if I wanted to. At this point, I may be more interested in watching the pretty pieces assemble into one glorious mural than really come down on it either way.
It's a five-w00p event as John Kerry crashes Macalester College this coming Wednesday (Feb 25) at 4:15. He will be at the Field House. For more information email the Macalester Democrats. hurrrah!!!
I have to find some birthday presents for the Chunkies this afternoon, and I'm still struggling to get HongPong.com's photo album software I want. The Edwards slideshow is coming along nicely so far, though. Hopefully later today, and I'll send out some notifications to all who might be interested...
One of the big questions around the war is whether or not the "terror states" of Iran and Syria might be impelled to help Iraqis strike US forces, thusly proving QED for the neo-cons that they are all EvilDoers Waiting to Strike Against Us. TIME reports that it's really a locally-based thing, not foreigners pulling strings. But now comes a Guardian report that Syria and Iran have been helping some groups. (WiC again)
Senior Iraqi intelligence officers believe an Islamic militant group which has claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings in Irbil and a spate of deadly attacks in Baghdad, Falluja and Mosul is receiving significant help from Syria and Iran.The officers, who have been tracking the activities of domestic and foreign jihadists in northern Iraq, claim that members of Jaish Ansar al-Sunna (the army of the supporters of the sayings of the prophet) have been "given shelter by Syrian and Iranian security agencies and have been able to enter Iraq with ease".
The group is suspected of training suicide bombers and deploying them against US forces in Iraq and Iraqis considered to be collaborating with the US-led authorities.
For Iraqis already in, or thinking about joining, one of the Iraqi security forces -- such as the Iraqi Civil Defence Corp (ICDC), the border guards or the police -- the dangers were made all too clear last week. Instead of being viewed by insurgents as people protecting their country, or simply needing a job, Iraqi police or corps members are simply labelled "collaborators", aiding and abetting the US occupation. Over 100 people were killed in Iskanderiya and Baghdad in two car bombings over two days, both targeting Iraqis signing up to join security forces.
.....
Standard operating procedures for troops stationed in Iraq have changed in such a way as to avoid lethal engagements. US soldiers in Iraq have told Al-Ahram Weekly that, for example, if a patrol comes under fire, the usual response is to leave the area rather than counterattack, unless absolutely necessary. As the US makes plans to pull troops out of cities to bases on the edges of urban centres, Iraqi security forces are being trained and deployed at a break-neck pace, often without proper vehicles or communications and security equipment. The goal is to hand over all security positions to the Iraqis, and damn the consequences.Existing resistance activities, like the prison raid in Fallujah, could be an example of the chaos that may erupt this summer. Take the already volatile tensions between the Sunni, Shi'ites and Kurds, and the fact that some of these groups have their own militias -- like the Kurdish peshmergas or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's Badr Brigade and Muqtada Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army -- then add some foreign fighters intent on inflaming those tensions and an elections showdown sure to make either Shi'ites or Sunnis very upset: we have the perfect ingredients for a civil war. If that happens, the US seems to be the only force in the country with the capability to keep the peace, but ironically they have not accomplished that even without widespread sectarian violence.
Confronting problems on critical fronts, the CIA recently removed its top officer in Baghdad because of questions about his ability to lead the massive station there, and has closed a number of satellite bases in Afghanistan amid concerns about that country's deteriorating security situation, according to U.S. intelligence sources.The previously undisclosed moves underscore the problems affecting the agency's clandestine service at a time when it is confronting insurgencies and the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, current and former CIA officers say. They said a series of stumbles and operational constraints have hampered the agency's ability to penetrate the insurgency in Iraq, find Osama bin Laden and gain traction against terrorism in the Middle East.
One former officer who maintains close ties to the agency said it was stretched to the limit. "With Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, with Iraq, I think they're just sucking wind," he said.
But the officers also said the latest problems point to a deeper problem with the CIA leadership and culture. Some lamented that an agency once vaunted for its daring and reach now finds itself overstretched and hunkered down in secure zones.
....
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the agency has brought back hundreds of retirees, dubbed "green-badgers" for the color of the identification cards issued to those who return to the fold under contract. The agency has also turned to young officers without any overseas experience.New agency recruits with military backgrounds are being sent to Iraq as soon as they emerge from the CIA training academy in Virginia, said one former agency official. "They don't speak the language, don't know how to recruit," the official said. "It's on-the-job training."
...
The problems [with turnover] also extend to Afghanistan, sources said. One CIA veteran said he recently spoke with an officer who had served as a base chief in Kandahar for 60 days, an unusually brief tenure for such an important assignment.The base in Kandahar is one of five or six the CIA established in Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded the country in 2001, all reporting to the agency's primary station in Kabul, the capital. But a number of those remote bases have been closed in recent months, according to current and former CIA officials.
...
The CIA has struggled to fill high-ranking posts in other countries, sources said. Four former CIA officers with close ties to headquarters said in separate interviews that the agency struggled to fill its top post in Pakistan last year, that at least five candidates turned down the job of station chief in Islamabad before the agency found an officer willing to take it.
It was Mary Vargas, a 44-year-old engineer in Renton, Wash., who carried U.S. therapy culture to its new zenith. Explaining why the war in Iraq was no longer her top election issue, she told the Internet magazine Salon that, "when they didn't find the weapons of mass destruction, I felt I could also focus on other things. I got validated."Yes, that's right: war opposition as self-help. The end goal is not to seek justice for the victims, or punishment for the aggressors, but rather "validation" for the war's critics. Once validated, it is of course time to reach for the talisman of self-help: "closure." In this mindscape, Howard Dean's wild scream was not so much a gaffe as the second of the five stages of grieving: anger. The scream was a moment of uncontrolled release, a catharsis, allowing U.S. liberals to externalize their rage and then move on, transferring their affections to more appropriate candidates.
"Whaaaaatup??"
More of my pictures coming soon. There's some damn good ones!!
It's the big campaign swing through town as John Edwards visits Carpenter Union Hall, at 700 Olive Street. it's down by the Capitol building, but east of 35-E. Dennis Kucinich will also be in town and down by the U. Is this all we're going to get, as they go after delegates in richer Super Tuesday pastures?
(MAP to the event)
There was an amusing exchange on Hardball yesterday which revealed Pat Buchanan's tendencies as an Edwards fan, with regards to the whole jobs and trade issue. I was talking about this last night. Is Buchanan closer to Edwards than Bush?!?! (I found this via fellow panelist Katrina vanden Heuvel's blog)
MATTHEWS:Ý What does Edwards have to campaign for that Kerry doesnët already buy?ÝBUCHANAN:Ý I think what Edwards is doingóone thing he is doing, he is making himself a positive, great national figure and force in the Democratic Party every week he campaigns.Ý His media coverage is almost uniformly positive.Ý
He has plugged into the No. 1 economic issue in this campaign.Ý That is jobs and the betrayal of the American worker, white collar with outsourcing, blue collar with these deals with China and NAFTA.Ý He has got that issue.Ý I think he only helps himself.Ý The only way he can hurt himself if he gets brutal on Kerry and hurts himself with the party or he runs so long that he starts to look ridiculous.Ý
MATTHEWS:Ý Let me ask the Reverend Jesse Jackson.Ý You were in
(CROSSTALK)
JACKSON:Ý Let me say this.Ý
MATTHEWS:Ý Go ahead.Ý Go ahead.
(CROSSTALK)
JACKSON:Ý ... student activists and Pat Buchanan all support Edwards.Ý
That itself is a broadening of the base.Ý
MATTHEWS:Ý Do you support Edwards?Ý
BUCHANAN:Ý I support Edwardsë campaign, yes.Ý I would like to see him do well.Ý I would like to see him go forward with this issue.Ý I would like to see him make it at the convention, because itës important for the country.Ý
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS:Ý Reverend Jackson
(CROSSTALK)
JACKSON:Ý And Pat Buchanan is closer ideologically to John Edwards than he is to George Bush.Ý And that itself again is expanding the base.
MATTHEWS:Ý Is that the case?Ý
BUCHANAN:Ý Well, if you get allóon the jobs issue, yes.Ý
MATTHEWS:Ý How about on Iraq?Ý
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS:Ý Actually, Edwards is with him on Iraq.
BUCHANAN:Ý I think what Jerry Brownówhat Jerry Brown said isóand theyëre not tapping into it, but Jerry Brown is exactly right.Ý The overextension of the American empire all over the world, this idea of permanent war for permanent peace is a tremendous issue which the Democrats could also tap into.Ý
MATTHEWS:Ý Are they ready to?Ý
BUCHANAN:Ý No.
(SNIP)
JACKSON:Ý Well, I would be very impressed with a Kerryówith a Kerry-Edwards ticket.ÝMATTHEWS:Ý Well, thatës a brief statement.Ý That was a Mike Mansfield answer.Ý I donët knowóI donët know how to respond.Ý Reverend Jackson says it would be a good ticket.Ý
Pat Buchanan, you got your heartóyou didóletës say one last word here for Howard Dean.Ý I loved his goodbye today.Ý
BUCHANAN:Ý I thought he was excellent.Ý Frankly, I think he won a gallant, good, courageous campaign.Ý He stood for his beliefs and his principles.Ý He made some mistakes and some blunders.Ý But I was sad to see him not getóreally get the chance he should have gotten because of that crazy concession speech.
MATTHEWS:Ý Do all mavericks get beaten?
JACKSON:Ý Ifóif Democrats win, over that inauguration will be the halo of Howard Dean.Ý
MATTHEWS:Ý How so?Ý
JACKSON:Ý Because he set the pace.Ý He stood up to Bush when other Democrats were ducking, dodging, trying to be politically correct.Ý He stood up on the issue of the war, tax policy, trade policy.Ý Howard Dean set the raceóset the pace for this race.Ý
MATTHEWS:Ý OK.Ý Thank you.Ý
BROWN:Ý A maverick is without honor in his own party.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS:Ý OK, thank you, Reverend.Ý Adlai Stevenson once said that.ÝAnyway, thank you.Ý No, Gene McCarthy said it about Adlai Stevenson.ÝHe also said itës easier to run for president than to stop.Ý
We've been watching the Wisconsin coverage rolling on into the wee hours. Edwards spiked here. CNN said that most voters who decided late went for Edwards, and the newspaper endorsements played a key role, as they did for Edwards in Iowa. Kerry is steaming on with little standing in his way, and the friendly southern gentleman on his left is digging in on horrible trade policy.
Dean is getting a pretty rough time of it as the mainstream media sees him off. Wisconsin got roughly the same results as Iowa, for much the same reasons. Jobs. The black hole budget. Crunched people. And the tidy warfronts.
Edwards turned upwards in the last days of the race yet again, which inclines me to believe that he'll keep attracting independents--which flooded the polls yesterday for him.
In Wisconsin we have the open primary, which attracts Republicans and independents in scads. Are they voting against the D's in general--just toying with it, taking time on these FRIGID days--or has the rather rapid decline mobilized all those random segments of Wisconsin: Families who have seen industrial plants close, the swift collapse of school funding, and horrible rural health care.
Wisconsin has all kinds of odd roots--the socialist movements and Fightin Bob LaFolette. So it's not going to be the tedious flat political competition. There is no monolith of NASCAR dads floating around. It is people considering their interests. These primaries and caucuses work to call attention to the interests and bombard the Bush administration from all directions.
On the other hand i feel somewhat negligent because I didn't go home to visit how it was unfolding.
Edwards is coming to the Twin Cities on Saturday, they say. But where? Unknown!
Some scattered thoughts to expand on tomorrow: Yes, the New Hampshire primary is finished and John Kerry continues to rock the voters. Howard Dean finished in a fairly strong second, which he needed to keep from evaporating. But the magic's off for Dean. I feel that he messed up a lot of things by labeling the DLC as Republicans, for example. I don't like them, but its still wasn't fit for him to say. The Iowa Perfect Storm led to the Iowa Perfect Roaring Screech which tsunamied all over the damn place. Iowans aren't the only ones who appreciate tact from those taking third.
Both Dean and Kerry look so tired, worn, nearly ill on television. Dean caught a little break tonight, as did Wesley Clark. Clark's win at the tiny midnight towns was a clue: independent conservative voters think he's all right, because that's who his image has been crafted for. I don't think his job is to win the nomination, but to become burnished and popular brass for Defense Secretary or VP. (let's not underestimate the Vice President's office these days: Cheney has his own National Security Council. Clark could have one too?)
Alison is satisfied with Dean because he captured an all right second place. She's still on the wagon. I have not been impressed with anything Dean has done all over January. He just got way too negative against Gep the Torpedo--and suddenly the magic was gone.
Kerry is the most likely to succeed against Bush, according to a majority of New Hampshire voters. That's not so bad, if the ticket can be rounded out with something southerners find compelling. Edwards might be the smash hit in South Carolina, and Clark has everything to lose there.
Yet Sharpton, Clark and Edwards all must fear the Steamroller of Joe-mentum sweeping through the country this very night.
Here's one interesting thing. Cheney's polled unfavorability ratings have stayed about the same for quite a while. But his favorability has plunged as he's seen as Halliburton's inside man, just to begin with. Cheney may yet be a liability, especially since he led the way claiming the vanished illegal weapons--even inspector David Kay now admits they never were.
The Daily Show was excellent tonight as Jon Stewart deployed the fabulous clip today of Bush stumbling over the talk of "Gathering Threats." The Daily Show is making golden material these days. And then a creepy interview with Richard Perle?! Very A-list, all the way.
More later...
(Fri. Dec. 12)
In the last week, right in the middle of finals, I submitted an opinion about the Middle East (Who? Me?!) to this year's final Mac Weekly.
The United States finds itself at an ultimate nadir. We occupy hundreds of thousands of square miles of central Asiaís most historically fractious territory. The nearly-forgotten Taliban has sprung back from Pakistani strongholds, and Saddam is finally free to join the audiotape-jihadist club.Mesopotamia, the valley where the party started, is a smoldering, fourth-world ruin, flooded with a mixture of suspicious military-industrial corporations and mujahideen. The armyís mass arrests, its deployment of armor in urban areas, the razing of homes, and encircling towns with razor wire echo the terrible confrontation around Jerusalem that Bush has defiantly refused to confront. America grows inured to the daily violence and tragedies facing both Iraqis and American troops as young as first-years.
Nothing can shake this eerie sense that it is not just that Bush has failed us; rather, it is the whole underpinning of civilization itself, past and present, which has been shaken from its foundations.
It is not merely the museums of early history plundered, but the sites of our very genesis that lie destroyed. In those looted ruins, what was once knowable about our original nature has been smashed into darkness. We can never recover this loss.
The anarchy that transpired was not just an obscenity to todayís Iraqis; it was an attack on every ancient people there, and all their descendants. It destroyed our link with history, a knife in our collective soul more damaging than any crime humanity has yet witnessed. America still struggles to control a land it barely understands.
A stunning report by Seymour Hersh in this weekís New Yorker spells out the path America now seeks. The Pentagon will escalate their operations against Iraqi militants, using Special Forces hit squads to assassinate those whom our new reconstituted Baathist security forces point fingers at, Vietnamís Phoenix Program for the 21st century.
Who better to train U.S. troops than their Israeli counterparts? Happy to build their occupation assassins into our expanding War on Terror, Israeli ìconsultantsî have already visited Baghdad. But which American general is putting the project together? None other than William Boykin, who publicly equates the Muslim world with the devil. According to reports, speaking before fundamentalist church audiences that ìSatan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.î
Bush, insensitive to Boykinís hate, is a special kind of leader. He is afraid of newspapers. He told Fox a little while ago, ìI glance at the headlines. I rarely read the stories. I understand that a lot of times thereís opinions mixed in with news. And I appreciate peopleís opinions, but Iím more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me whatís happening in the world.î
Yet his objective sources keep ducking the important questions. They didnít send enough troops to Iraq. Why? Why was there no peacekeeping plan for the Iraqi cities? Why didnít the Pentagon plan to defend the Iraqi government ministries? Why do they forbid Iraqis from unionizing? Why canít they control the enormous caches of captured arms around the country?
Is their goal chaos in the name of order? Pain and death in the service of defending our freedoms? Democracy, or Michael Ledeenís ìcreative destruction?î
Their special plans have unfolded. Now the abyss between America and the Arabs has busted wide open. It is well past time to get rid of Rumsfeld and the incompetents who have botched the occupation. We must go hat in hand to the UN and ask the world to repair the political catastrophe weíve sown at its root. If we quietly accept this path, we will never know peace again.
[link]
I went to a huge Democratic event in Iowa and witnessed the Democratic race up close, and the Dean phenomenon from the inside. There's a lot more I could add about this experience, but it was amazing. This was a contributed feature for the Mac Weekly.
Last weekend, Iowa Democrats hosted the kickoff of their 2004 presidential campaign, the Jefferson Jackson Dinner at Vets’ Auditorium in Des Moines. Six candidates, a collection of Iowa pols and Hillary Clinton took the stage at an event which raised money for the Iowa party while energizing Democrats to unseat George Bush and fight for Congress.
I attended this event as a wavering Dean supporter. Here, a few shades from Minnesota, I wanted to explore how Iowa Dems felt about the candidates and whether or not the other candidates were, as Kerry claimed he was, the “Real Deal.” Was Dean “unelectable?” Was his campaign composed of “West Wing” liberals and ignorant Internet kids? Or was it a collection of typical liberal causes uniting around someone more forthright than the Washington “centrists?” Did anyone’s partisan enthusiasm translate to support of the whole party?
What I found in Iowa supported few caricatures. Instead, I discovered that Dean is hardly the messianic anger case seen on CNN, and at least here his supporters don’t come from insulated, surreal clusters like the Nader or Perot people, nor the city liberals held in such low regard these days.
He’s attracted throngs of fiercely committed people, but their values weren’t exclusive to him. Out here, groups of people are always looking for someone who seems likely to give them a seat at the table and won’t play games. That sentiment has always existed in this continental nation of 260 million individuals, most of whom choose not to vote and support no party. Dean’s support reflects this, but hardly swallows it up. Democrats participate in Iowa’s process not with zealous faith in an individual, but after pondering things in the dark winter, always keeping in mind the ultimate goal: ousting Bush.
There are about 60 days left until the Iowa caucus. Iowa supposedly measures the 94 percent white “nice folks” vote and the farm vote via the community caucus process in January 19. Dean, ostensibly the front-runner, has seized political attention, unpredictably blurting awkward statements and entrancing a weird array of groups. Dick Gephardt polls a point ahead of Dean here. His steadfast support for labor and farms from Missouri makes him a friendly, trusted leader. Kerry’s support, including that of many many Mac Dems, is well-earned from years of excellent legislation and shining light on Iran-Contra. Edwards—always the mill worker’s son—honestly represents the liberal south. His strong support here surprised me. Even the maligned “bottom-feeders” provide an enlivening texture to the field. The wildly idealistic, butterfly-like speeches from the small, kinetic man, Dennis Kucinich, gesticulating and asking us to believe in the creation of a Department of Peace, reminded Dems of our own best people. For that fleeting moment, two percent support didn’t matter because he sincerely believed in bringing us something about our dreams. Carol Moseley Braun breaks barriers and it’s clear that she won’t stop when the campaign ends.
At Vets’ Auditorium, the ground throbbed with thousands of Democrats, chanting and waving signs, as entrepreneurs hawked pins and bumper stickers. Dean, pol in action, came through a column of supporters. I leaned over and he grabbed my hand. Mobs of partisans hollered in the lobby. Gep’s people collided with Dean’s at the door. Steelworkers for Gephardt and Cyclones for Dean screamed “Go Dick go! We want Dean! Gep! Dean! Win! Win!” The raucous, inscrutable essence of democracy could almost be glimpsed in this maelstrom. Moseley Braun walked by.
The dark auditorium covered with posters filled in with supporters, bringing signs, shirts, chants and noisemakers. For 40 minutes, spotlights punched through the darkness, prompting the crowd to make a ruckus. The lights switched between groups, prompting each one to outdo the other. “Real Deal” Kerry’s and Dean’s people each made an impressive, well-organized showing, as did the smaller Gep and Edwards contingents.
The evening’s speakers, including Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and Senator Harkin, were well-received, but the audience electrified when Hillary Clinton started running the show. After addressing the situation of America’s soldiers, she passionately called out for unity among Democrats. The candidates mainly delivered from their stump speeches, while adding concerns relevant to Iowans. Gephardt suggested an international minimum wage and Edwards talked of getting rid of mass feedlots. Kerry along with his people, said everyone knew Bush was giving us a “RAW DEAL!” The candidates avoided negativity and alienated few. For his passionate and idealistic speech, Kucinich received a standing ovation.
Peter Gartrell ’05 and Andrew Riely ’05 volunteered to usher on the floor, and they enjoyed the up-close experience. Riely said that he “dated Dean and married Kerry,” while Peter likes his home senator, Edwards, with whom he got to talk for a minute on an escalator.
Before the big event, our small group of Dean supporters arrived at a downtown high school, whose gymnasium was filled with 2,000 Dean boosters waving signs and sporting pins. The crowd was older than I expected: many seniors, gays and lesbians with rainbow pins, burly union dudes, red-shirted Grinnell students, middle-aged moms and the young Alex Doonesbury segment. Dean’s state campaign coordinators proclaimed they’d never seen anything like “the organization and commitment to a movement growing across this state and the country.” They reiterated one of Dean’s key talking points, that this was “making history,” a truism attractive to any political group.
Dean’s campaign plays off sentiments that exist as so many loose ends out here: taking care of the elderly, Wellstone-Harkin style grassroots support, unions scared as hell of Bush, family farmers. I found Democratic veterans outraged with Bush’s vet policies, gays and lesbians who point to serious progress, law enforcement types waiting for a Democrat who wasn’t ensconced with anti-gun organizations and those excited by online meet-ups. Among this whole set might be those who believe the DLC-type groups have gone too far right, but they still fervently love Bill and Hillary. Dean’s wallet issue, health care, attracts medical professionals and seniors alike.
Recently, Dean has received endorsements from key unions, though Gephardt draws much on labor as well. The Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) all endorsed Dean, and other unions will be influenced by this. SEIU, mostly made of healthcare workers, is The United States’ fastest-growing union and one of the most democratically run. The grassroots structure of these unions might threaten Washington-dominated organizations which make up the AFL-CIO.
Was Dean a demagogue, as my conservative friends complain, when he opened his speech talking about his own Internet fundraising and closed by pointing at the crowd and shouting over and over, “You have the power”? Yes, and it seemed arrogant to lord fundraising over the others when so much more important issues needed to be addressed. Yet we live in this time of unparalleled theatrics, aircraft carriers and awes and shocks. It always was part circus.
The dinner brought a sense that there might be differences, but Dems don’t give a damn, because at this point the prize—the White House and Congress—have to be roundly sought like no time in the party’s history. Iowans are too nice to support an “angry Dean” and too smart to give up on the Democrats, no matter who gets the nomination.
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've been quite busy this week, and if you're like me then now, finally, it might be safe for us to breathe again. Through all those Clinton years we were treated to one smear incident after another, Travelgate, Watergate, Monicagate... all these inconsequential scandals with one special prosecutor after another.
And now this Administration, with its 'crown jewels' of 'credibility and integrity' or whatever they call it, now finally has that unmistakeable tarnish of a real political disease upon it. The schism between the government agencies (the CIA never really bought this bullshit all along) has exploded all over the cable news, months after it should have...
Actually that's one interesting aspect. Novak wrote his column back in mid-July, and Bush only publically said anything about this national security crisis a few days ago. One guy points out that's 75 days of sitting on his ass. True.
What to make of this? What damage? Who's spinning?
FOX News has been hilarious the last few days. First, they didn't want to talk about it. They avoided noting the Justice investigation for quite a while. Brit Hume disparaged the whole thing, anchors noted that 'nothing ever comes of these things, why bother?' Silliest of all, one rightie after another has said Wilson was some partisan peacenik yahoo, who existed to hassle the Bush administration. This doesn't quite fit with Wilson's work around the first Gulf war, where he was the US unofficial ambassador to Iraq, and the last American to meet with him prior to the war. He received much praise from Poppa Bush for his work. He also has given money to Republican candidates recently. No one's partisan, really.
I also like the line of reasoning which claims that because 'all he did was sip tea' in Niger rather than, I don't know, break into offices and kidnap officials, he could never have done a thorough job investigating the uranium story. (this is what Brit Hume and resident AEI Neo-con bitch Reuel Marc Gerecht talked about, because they didn't want to talk about the leak itself) But these fools don't know how the uranium business works. The mine is run by a large European conglomerate licensed under the IAEA. It's on the level. Really.
Novak himself is putting out all kinds of nonsense, but it's like he's compelled to share national security secrets with the public. for one thing, he said that she was known as an agent to insiders and "well known" in Washington, so it's not a big deal that he ran her name. What the hell is he talking about? So just now he decided to tell the name of her CIA front company. Good, that will help destroy their cover overseas. On CNN he said:
"Joe Wilson, the -- everybody knows he has given campaign contributions in 2000 to both Ford -- I mean to both Gore and to Bush. He gave twice as much to Gore, $2,000, $1,000 over the limit. The government -- the campaign had to give him back $1,000. That very day, according to his records, his wife, the CIA employee gave $1,000 to Gore, and she listed herself as an employee of Bruster, Jennings and Associates (ph).The Washington Post now reportsThere is there no such firm, I'm convinced. CIA people are not supposed to list themselves with fictitious firms if they're a deep cover. They're supposed to be real firms, or so I'm told. So it adds to the little mystery."
After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front... The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame's identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.Thanks, Novak! You're a great journalist! These clips come via DailyKos.
There is one piece of fallout from the crime we can't deny: whoever was ever associated with agent Plame overseas is in danger. What remains in question is what, exactly, Plame did. Calpundit piles up the public facts so far. It seems to be emerging that Plame ran networks of foreign informers who passed on information about biological, chemical, and nuclear material. Let me say that again: Plame's job was to collect intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, to monitor and prevent them from being used against the United States. Now anyone who can be tied to her can be compromised.
That's something that is really a disaster for everyone. That's the central point. Politics don't enter into calculating this.
Yet it is political. The leaker went after Wilson to intimidate anyone else who might attack the Bush folks falsification of war intelligence.
Let me offer a prediction about who was probably behind the leak: the Vice President's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby. There have been insiders saying that the bad guy works in the Executive Office Building, where Cheney's people are. If I'm right about this, I definitely win a cookie.
On a related topic, you need to see this report which says that FOX News watchers were the most likely to believe in misinformation about the war, namely that WMD have already been found, and Saddam was acively engaged with Al-Qaeda. Fair and Balanced!
In following these developments, naturally the Internet is the best source. Lately my reliable wisdom has come from the Daily Kos, Eschaton and The Agonist. If you keep an eye on these then you'll probably catch most of what's going on. Also much respect is due to Washington reporter Josh Marshall, who writes the Talking Points Memo, and kept the story alive since July. Marshall also has recently interviewed Wilson and Wesley Clark.
Actually, Clark told Marshall something important about neoconservatives:
TPM: I noticed that Doug Feith, who's obviously the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had a statement a while back saying that the connection between terrorist organizations and state sponsors was, I think he said, the principal strategic thought behind the administration's policy.This whole statement that the neo-cons actually used the PNAC to undercut the administration's options is a kind of inverted view of issue advocacy (and it's fun to tie them to Carter). Marshall strongly agrees with the idea, and it got a bunch of nasty feedback from neocons. Very interesting. I am happy Clark is on the right page with neo-con deviousness, because that would be so fun to see him go off about in the democratic debates.CLARK: It's the principal strategic mistake behind the administration's policy. If you look at all the states that were named as the principal adversaries, they're on the periphery of international terrorism today. Syria -- OK, supporting Hezbollah and Hamas -- yeah, they're terrorist organizations. They're focused on Israel. They're getting support from Iran. It's wrong. Shouldn't be there. But they're there. What about Saudi Arabia? There's a source of the funding, the source of the ideology, the source of the recruits. What about Pakistan? With thousands of madrassas churning out ideologically-driven foot soldiers for the war on terror. Neither of those are at the front of the military operations. ...
The ability to conduct foreign policy draws not only on the president himself but on the leadership of the administration. If you were to start here and work backwards, you'd say this administration was doctrinaire. You'd say that it didn't have a real vision in foreign policy. It was reactive. Hobbled by its right-wing constituency from using the full tools that are available -- the full kit-bag of tools that's available to help Americans be in there and protect their interests in the world.
Clinton administration: broad minded, visionary, lots of engagement. Did a lot of work. Had difficulty with two houses in congress that [it] didn't control. And in an odd replay of the Carter administration, found itself chained to the Iraqi policy -- promoted by the Project for a New American Century -- much the same way that in the Carter administration some of the same people formed the Committee on the Present Danger which cut out from the Carter administration the ability to move forward on SALT II.
TPM: This being the same neo-conservatives that people hear about in the press today?
CLARK: Right, some of the same people. And then, you know, if you go back to the Bush administration, they were there when the Berlin Wall fell.
I suggest everyone sit back and watch the fireworks. This mess has just begun to unfold.
There has been plenty of bad news for the Bush administration in this most difficult of August vacations. First of all, a new poll has shown that a majority of Americans would prefer 'someone else' to Bush. Now, polls can fluctuate in a range and all that (it's just a touch over 50%) but still, it shows a very large bloc of people aren't happy with things.
To put this in some perspective, you should check out the site Professor Pollkatz, which has a few interesting graphs and charts. In particular check out this graph, which shows an unquestionable slope downwards. Bush's approval ratings look like a sawtooth: his ratings jump up astronomically when the country has shifted into immediate war/reaction mode (spikes at 9/11 and this March), but as things settle the air comes out like a leaky balloon. Granted, the percentages are falling off extremely high numbers that no one expected to last. I just think its interesting that the polls pull down with such little variance. Also compare his approval rating with other recent wartime presidents, and you can see they have a rolling, up and down kind of pattern. Will this pattern bend around at a safe 55%? Why the hell would it?
And the economy. Let's have just a bit from the Scripps Howard News service:
Labor Day 2003 finds unemployment hovering near a nine-year high and people thankful to have work nevertheless feeling anxious because of the jobless recovery. Some 9.1 million Americans are officially unemployed, even though joblessness ticked down 0.2 percentage points from June's 6.4 percent high because 470,000 people quit looking for work last month. Meantime, 74.5 million adults are outside the labor force, 4 million more than when the nine-month recession started in March 2001.Happy day! The federal deficit wanders into new and exciting territory as it will reach around, oh, $480 billion or so. That's $480,000,000,000. I like it when they can just write their contributors dividend tax 'rebates' to get tossed in that phat $200 million election coffer. That's what I call prosperity."For too many working families, the current recovery is indistinguishable from the recession," said economist Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank.
High-paying manufacturing jobs have plunged by more than 2.7 million since August 2000, and the National Association of Manufacturers forecasts that U.S. factories will add back just 200,000 to 250,000 of those jobs even if the economy grows at 4 percent or better through 2004. Association president Jerry Jasinowski blames a "toxic brew" of fair and unfair foreign competition and high health care, litigation and energy costs at home for "the slowest manufacturing recovery on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking industrial production back in 1919."
On the elder Bush's watch, it took 15 months for job growth to resume, but today job growth hasn't jump-started 22 months into recovery - the worst job-creation record since the Labor Department started tracking such statistics in 1939.
The federal deficit will hit a record $480 billion next year, more than twice the level forecast just five months ago, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.Then on the foreign policy front, the spread of freedom and the spirit of liberation are strong in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has liberated itself from the label of 'destroyed' and gone wreaking havoc in the provinces, which are controlled by an anarchic system of U.S.-backed warlords, in what resembles a combination of Reagan's Honduras, Khengis Khan and Lebanon. What is the secret of the Taliban's guerrilla persistence, when all had dismissed them? Human Resources! Basically they set up a bunch of religious schools in remote areas around Pakistan and Afghanistan, (with Saudi money) and these schools teach a rather remote and extreme version of Islam, generating a number of militantly motivated young kids who go off and cause trouble. There's quite a lot of trouble to get into with right now, as Israel and the United States occupy every other Muslim territory from Jerusalem to Pakistan.Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said in a statement that "this unprecedented binge-borrowing imposes a heavy burden on Americans by increasing the cost of borrowing for businesses, home buyers and students."
If the tax cuts are extended, the CBO said, deficits would grow by an additional $1.6 trillion over the next decade, by an additional $400 billion if a drug benefit is enacted, and by another $400 billion if Congress takes steps to keep the alternative minimum income tax -- a baseline amount of tax that must be paid, even if the filer's tax calculated under standard rules falls below that level -- from affecting more middle-class families.
The nonpartisan agency said the annual budget shortfalls will total nearly $1.4 trillion over the next decade, compared with a $5.6 trillion surplus the CBO forecast in 2001. Bush didn't address the deficit directly. But in St. Paul, Minn., where he raised $1.2 million for his re-election campaign, Bush spotlighted his tax cuts, the centerpiece of his economic policy.
"Here's what I believe and here's what I know: that when Americans have more take-home pay to spend, to save or invest, the whole economy grows, and people are more likely to find a job," Bush said.
Then of course there's the Palestinian cease-fire that collapsed when Israel, in its wisdom, decided to kill the guy in Hamas that Mr. Abbas talks with, dealing a handy blow to his efforts.
Then there's the UN bombing, which has wigged out all the NGO's trying to clean up in Iraq. The Red Cross is reducing its operations, which is very depressing for Iraqis, because the Red Cross is the group which acts as a go-between with Iraqi POWs, detainees, their families, and the Americans.
So the Neo-con scheme is working out pretty smoothly, as prescribed. And we're Taking the Fight to Them! Oh yeah!
This is a bit of older news, but I still think it's worth looking at. 2001 Nobel Prize winner, econ professor George Akerlof, has become somewhat politicized by the outrages he sees in the Bush administration. He spoke out against Bush's terribly constructed tax cuts and the general depravity of the president's policies:
The government is not really telling the truth to the American people. Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have on the average run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting...Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly...
I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extraordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign and economic but also in social and environmental policy. This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for people to engage in civil disobedience.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Of what kind?
Akerlof: I don't know yet. But I think it's time to protest - as much as possible.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You've mentioned the term civil disobedience a minute ago. That term was made popular by the author Henry D. Thoreau, who actually advised people not to pay taxes as a means of resistance. You wouldn't call for that, would you?
Akerlof: No. I think the one thing we should do is pay our taxes. Otherwise, it'll only make matters worse.
One nice thing going on today is the profusion of internet weblogs in places like Baghdad and Tehran. During the war Salam Pax got to be pretty well-known as 'the Baghdad Blogger.' I'd suggest looking at his look at the return of the Hashemite prince or the story of depressing Baghdad madness:
Actually we have been having pretty bad days. If you would have talked to me a week ago and I would have told you that I am very optimistic; maybe not optimistic but at least had hope. Now I can only think of two things. One of them was something my mother said while watching the news. She was watching something about the latest attacks on the "coalition forces" and their retaliation. She said that she has always wondered how people in Beirut and Jerusalem could have led any sort of lives, when their cities were practically military zones, she said she now knows how it feels to live in a city were the sight of a tank and military checkpoints asking you to get out your car and look thru your bag becomes "normal". When you turn on the TV and just hope that you donít see more pictures of people shooting at each other.Salam has started a photo-log too. Other Iraqi bloggers include 'G in Baghdad,' who describes an encounter with a captured Syrian teenager in an American-run hospital, or the dual reality of the Iraqi mind:The other thing was something a foreign acquaintance has said after spending some time in the city on a really hot day. He went in threw his hat on the floor and said loudly: "I want to inform my Iraqi friends that their country is doomed". I have no idea what that was about but the sentence just stuck to my mind.
Here in Iraq every citizen was provided -since the early days of the regime- with a whole set of lies that gradually became the foundation on which you would build your perceptions of the world outside. Consequently you end up with two channels, a "channel reality" that is off the air most of the times and "channel rhetoric" a mixture of self-denial, conspiracy theory [apologia] and propaganda.G also has a photolog going now. There's an Iraqi female blogger named Zainab writing now too.Of course we shouldnít blame Saddam and his lies based tyrannical regime only, this phenomenon has its roots deep in our cultural/religious history. Nowadays the main question every Iraqi is trying to answer, since the removal of our beloved leader is: (how should I feel towards the Americans?) and (is the American "liberation / occupation" a good or bad thing?). Donít expect an answer from me here, until we have our first Gallup poll in Iraq all what you will get is mere speculations-observations gibberish...
I think one of the main issues we have to face, is how to stop using the rhetoric channel, how could we stop this cog mire of stupid conspiracy theories going on and on and on how to liberate our selves from the secret police mechanisms nesting in our brains, this liberation will not be achieved by American tanks, nor by a self-denial flagellation process.
Iran has experienced an upsurge in blogging as well, as View from Iran and Blue Bird Escape look at Iran from inside. Persian Blogger Chronicles is grad student Alireza Doostar's attempt to chart this new form of information as it emerges from Iran.
While on the topic of blogs, notorious uber-blonde right-winger Ann Coulter supposedly has a weblog now, but it hasn't really started. She must be building up steam and bleaching those locks...
There are a whole lot of other blogs out there to check out. Here's a few:
Today's Star Tribune features a story on the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Paul Wellstone. Most likely it was a random accident, but as Ted Rall said, we can't ignore the remote possibility of a harsh government killing its most powerful liberal opponent. Was Wellstone worth assassinating? I think so. i think my favorite theory is the electromagnetic pulse assassination:
Discounting weather, pilot error or mechanical problems in Wellstone's flight, Fetzer's articles have seized on the possibility of sabotage brought on by a futuristic electromagnetic pulse weapon that he said could have disabled the plane's computerized components. Evidence for this, he said in an interview, was the absence of any distress call from the pilots and the odd cell-phone experience reported by St. Louis County lobbyist John Ongaro.Ongaro, who was near the airport when Wellstone's plane went down, has dismissed the significance of his experience, in which he said his cell phone made "strange" sounds and then disconnected. "It's not unusual for cell phones to cut out, especially in northern Minnesota," he said.
The Democrats are conflicted, believe it or not. Kerry and Dean are dickering with each other, as Dean has been the most outspoken, grassroots oriented Democrat to run. Is there a conflict between the D grassroots, (Wellstone's bread and butter), versus the Democratic national leadership? (link Nick)
The contest for the 2004 Democratic nomination cannot be understood apart from two factors. One is the intense opposition to Bush at the Democratic grass roots. The other is the widely held sense that the party's older strategies and internal arguments are inadequate to its current problems. Candidates can't win if they address only one of these concerns. But addressing both at the same time will require a political magic that Democrats haven't seen yet.
Private schools in Minnesota are undergoing a growth spurt, according to an article in today's Strib. Would Mounds Park do something similar? Well, you gotta keep up with Blake and Minnehaha, dontcha?
Nick was happy with Thomas Friedman in the times yesterday, talking a big game about the whole theory of everything and generally disreputing the usual targets. Friedman is funny, I like to think of him as this guy from St. Louis Park, travelling about on an exciting personal journey to illuminate the whole everything (particularly the Middle East) for confused American liberals. Yet he seems to sugarcoat the corruption inherent in the way America has managed so much. Does he pull it off?
Why didn't nations organize militarily against the U.S.? Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World," answers: "One prominent international relations school ó the realists ó argues that when a hegemonic power, such as America, emerges in the global system other countries will naturally gang up against it. But because the world basically understands that America is a benign hegemon, the ganging up does not take the shape of warfare. Instead, it is an effort to Gulliverize America, an attempt to tie it down, using the rules of the World Trade Organization or U.N. ó and in so doing demanding a vote on how American power is used."Oh dear, the lack of weapons of mass destruction is blowing a mess all over the place. Paul Krugman is pounding away as usual today on the Bush crew and their addiction to 'spin.'
There is another reason for this nonmilitary response. America's emergence as the hyperpower is happening in the age of globalization, when economies have become so intertwined that China, Russia, France or any other rivals cannot hit the U.S. without wrecking their own economies.
The only people who use violence are rogues or nonstate actors with no stakes in the system, such as Osama bin Laden. Basically, he is in a civil war with the Saudi ruling family. But, he says to himself, "The Saudi rulers are insignificant. To destroy them you have to hit the hegemonic power that props them up ó America."
Hence, 9/11. This is where the story really gets interesting. Because suddenly, Puff the Magic Dragon ó a benign U.S. hegemon touching everyone economically and culturally ó turns into Godzilla, a wounded, angry, raging beast touching people militarily. Now, people become really frightened of us, a mood reinforced by the Bush team's unilateralism. With one swipe of our paw we smash the Taliban. Then we turn to Iraq. Then the rest of the world says, "Holy cow! Now we really want a vote over how your power is used." That is what the whole Iraq debate was about. People understood Iraq was a war of choice that would affect them, so they wanted to be part of the choosing. We said, sorry, you don't pay, you don't play.
It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters ó a group that includes a large segment of the news media ó obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.Sounds like nothing but liberal excuses to me. Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken got in a huge argument over liberal media bias on CSPAN. However what was shown on TV was edited to provide its own perspective. (The fair and balanced Fox News story) I can't seem to find a transcript of the argument around, but here is a story about the whole book fair they were at, which seems to have been overtly political this year. (AP)If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent ó who supported Britain's participation in the war ó writes that "the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks."
