WP
The question came politely, almost sweetly. Toward the end of the White House daily briefing yesterday, USA Radio Network's Connie Lawn asked press secretary Scott McClellan if he had considered resigning.
After three weeks of telling the world that Harriet Miers was the best possible Supreme Court nominee because she is a woman who was not an Eastern Ivy Leaguer serving on the appellate bench, McClellan made the case yesterday that the second-best possible Supreme Court nominee is Samuel Alito -- an Ivy League-educated man from New Jersey who has been on the appellate bench for 15 years.
Worse, McClellan personally vouched for White House officials Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, saying that they had nothing to do with the leak of a CIA agent's identity and that anybody who did would be fired. Libby was indicted in the case on Friday, Rove has been identified as a leaker but remains on the job -- and McClellan says that, on advice of counsel, he can't say a peep about the whole thing.
McClellan doesn't seem to be having any better luck getting the White House press corps to trust him. ABC News's Terry Moran informed McClellan that "we can't vouch for you" and said he couldn't "carry your water for you." Moran added: "There's been a wound to your credibility here. A falsehood, wittingly or unwittingly, was told from this podium."
Monday, October 31, 2005
Report: Bush fundraisers got $1.2 billion in public funds
10/30/2005, 2:28 p.m. ET
The Associated Press
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Thirty Ohioans who raised a combined $4.1 million for President Bush's re-election campaign have received more than $1.2 billion in public funds for their companies and clients, a newspaper reported.
Since Bush took office in 2001, the federal government has given those companies more than $447 million in subsidies, contracts and other payments, according to records analyzed by The Blade. Ohio has awarded them about $800 million in the last six years, the paper reported Sunday.
Business leaders and lobbyists who raised money for Bush were called "Pioneers" if they raised at least $100,000 and "Rangers" if they raised $200,000; some also were given political appointments.
One of the fundraisers, coin dealer Tom Noe, was charged Thursday with illegally funneling $45,400 in contributions to Bush's re-election bid. Noe has denied wrongdoing in his fundraising and in his handling of a state investment fund, which prompted an investigation that led to Gov. Bob Taft's conviction on ethics charges
The Associated Press
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Thirty Ohioans who raised a combined $4.1 million for President Bush's re-election campaign have received more than $1.2 billion in public funds for their companies and clients, a newspaper reported.
Since Bush took office in 2001, the federal government has given those companies more than $447 million in subsidies, contracts and other payments, according to records analyzed by The Blade. Ohio has awarded them about $800 million in the last six years, the paper reported Sunday.
Business leaders and lobbyists who raised money for Bush were called "Pioneers" if they raised at least $100,000 and "Rangers" if they raised $200,000; some also were given political appointments.
One of the fundraisers, coin dealer Tom Noe, was charged Thursday with illegally funneling $45,400 in contributions to Bush's re-election bid. Noe has denied wrongdoing in his fundraising and in his handling of a state investment fund, which prompted an investigation that led to Gov. Bob Taft's conviction on ethics charges
The Top 10 Conservative Idiots (No. 220)
October 31, 2005 · Indict, Sweet Prince Edition
Last week the rest of the country finally learned what we've all known for years: The country is being run by criminals. Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby, who just happens to be the Chief of Staff to the most powerful Vice President in the history of the United States.
Doubts Cast on Vietnam Incident, but Secret Study Stays Classified
WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian's work say.
The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.
Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.
-------MORE--------
The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.
The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.
Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.
-------MORE--------
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Harness Racing Results for 10-30-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (241)
Place (71)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Colonial Downs
Race # 6
Horse: ANTHONY'S BLISS (Place)
Post Position: # 4
Win (241)
Place (71)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Colonial Downs
Race # 6
Horse: ANTHONY'S BLISS (Place)
Post Position: # 4
Frank Rich:One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada
The New York Times
Sunday 30 October 2005
To believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took "responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."
In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of the story. That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.
After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective the administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two separate official investigations into the failure of prewar intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong. But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate lingo, "the big enchilada."
The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a "sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.
The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the release of its initial findings in July 2004, the committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn't, and no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with "crucial documents," including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to the U.N. on the eve of war.
Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has prompted the revelation of much of what these previous investigations left out. But even so, the trigger for the Wilson affair - the administration's fierce effort to protect its hype of Saddam's uranium - is only one piece of the larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White House subterfuge. We're a long way from putting together the full history of a self-described "war presidency" that bungled the war in Iraq and, in doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic terrorism as well.
There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?
These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and outright lies.
Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts. Long before he played semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial matters of national security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his new assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide review of U.S. "consequence management" in the event of a terrorist attack. As we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.
That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's unreliable pronouncements about the war, from his early prediction that American troops would be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq to this summer's declaration that the insurgency was in its "last throes." Even before he began inflating Saddam's nuclear capabilities, he went on "Meet the Press" in December 2001 to peddle the notion that "it's been pretty well confirmed" that there was a direct pre-9/11 link between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link was disproved later, Gloria Borger, interviewing the vice president on CNBC, confronted him about his earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three times that he had never said it had been "pretty well confirmed." When a man thinks he can get away with denying his own words even though there are millions of witnesses and a video record, he clearly believes he can get away with murder.
Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His own false claims about Iraq's W.M.D.'s ("We found the weapons of mass destruction," he said in May 2003) are, if anything, exceeded by his repeated boasts of capturing various bin Laden and Zarqawi deputies and beating back Al Qaeda. His speech this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots is typical; as USA Today reported last week, at least 6 of the 10 on the president's list "involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out." In June, Mr. Bush stood beside his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, and similarly claimed that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half" of those had been convicted. A Washington Post investigation found that only 39 of those convictions had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed to, say, immigration violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by the combined number of convictions in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.
The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as the hyping of Saddam's uranium: in both cases, national security scares are trumpeted to advance the White House's political goals. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a political downturn for the administration," from revelations of ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings to fresh news of detainee abuses, is "followed by a 'terror event' - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." To switch the national subject from the fallout of the televised testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley in 2002, John Ashcroft went so far as to broadcast a frantic announcement, via satellite from Russia, that the government had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the arrest of a single suspect, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan - an arrest that had taken place a month earlier.
For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White House's infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning. But Watergate's dirty tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to crush the political competition at any cost. That's a powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this administration has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6, 2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr. Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" were "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people." That's what Nixon administration defenders first said about the "third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.
Sunday 30 October 2005
To believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took "responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."
In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of the story. That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.
After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective the administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two separate official investigations into the failure of prewar intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong. But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate lingo, "the big enchilada."
The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a "sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.
The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the release of its initial findings in July 2004, the committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn't, and no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with "crucial documents," including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to the U.N. on the eve of war.
Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has prompted the revelation of much of what these previous investigations left out. But even so, the trigger for the Wilson affair - the administration's fierce effort to protect its hype of Saddam's uranium - is only one piece of the larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White House subterfuge. We're a long way from putting together the full history of a self-described "war presidency" that bungled the war in Iraq and, in doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic terrorism as well.
There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?
These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and outright lies.
Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts. Long before he played semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial matters of national security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his new assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide review of U.S. "consequence management" in the event of a terrorist attack. As we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.
That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's unreliable pronouncements about the war, from his early prediction that American troops would be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq to this summer's declaration that the insurgency was in its "last throes." Even before he began inflating Saddam's nuclear capabilities, he went on "Meet the Press" in December 2001 to peddle the notion that "it's been pretty well confirmed" that there was a direct pre-9/11 link between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link was disproved later, Gloria Borger, interviewing the vice president on CNBC, confronted him about his earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three times that he had never said it had been "pretty well confirmed." When a man thinks he can get away with denying his own words even though there are millions of witnesses and a video record, he clearly believes he can get away with murder.
Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His own false claims about Iraq's W.M.D.'s ("We found the weapons of mass destruction," he said in May 2003) are, if anything, exceeded by his repeated boasts of capturing various bin Laden and Zarqawi deputies and beating back Al Qaeda. His speech this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots is typical; as USA Today reported last week, at least 6 of the 10 on the president's list "involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out." In June, Mr. Bush stood beside his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, and similarly claimed that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half" of those had been convicted. A Washington Post investigation found that only 39 of those convictions had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed to, say, immigration violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by the combined number of convictions in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.
The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as the hyping of Saddam's uranium: in both cases, national security scares are trumpeted to advance the White House's political goals. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a political downturn for the administration," from revelations of ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings to fresh news of detainee abuses, is "followed by a 'terror event' - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." To switch the national subject from the fallout of the televised testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley in 2002, John Ashcroft went so far as to broadcast a frantic announcement, via satellite from Russia, that the government had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the arrest of a single suspect, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan - an arrest that had taken place a month earlier.
For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White House's infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning. But Watergate's dirty tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to crush the political competition at any cost. That's a powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this administration has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6, 2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr. Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" were "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people." That's what Nixon administration defenders first said about the "third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.
Trick-Or-Treaters To Be Subject To Random Bag Searches
WASHINGTON, DC—Responding to "a possible threat of terror and fright," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Monday that trick-or-treaters will be subject to random bag searches this Halloween season.
"Individuals concealing their identities through clever disguise, and under cover of night, may attempt to use the unspecified threat of 'tricks' to extort 'treats' from unsuspecting victims," Chertoff said. "Such scare tactics may have been tolerated in the past, but they will not be allowed to continue this Halloween."
While he would not elaborate on the specific threat, Chertoff said his office had "heard a couple spooky tales," and indicated that there was good reason to believe that Americans face "a very ghoulish scenario" this October.
"We have done and will continue to do everything we can to protect citizens from those who would play on our fears," a haunted Chertoff said. "Nevertheless, Americans are advised to be in a state of readiness."
National Guard troops and local police are being stationed at checkpoints in residential neighborhoods to seize the contents of any paper bags, pillowcases, plastic pumpkins, or other receptacles. Additionally, candy-sniffing dogs will be posted at regular intervals to locate and devour suspicious items.
Local, county, and state officials have been placed on orange alert, with strict orders to confiscate and investigate bags containing Bit-O-Honey, Snickers, Baby Ruth, Twix, Butterfingers, Mr. Goodbar, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, gum, and any and all forms of taffy.
Chertoff asked Washington citizens for their assistance, and he outlined steps that the average citizen should take to aid in the war on fright. The DHS guidelines encourage parents to report any suspicious neighbors who create potentially spooky yard displays, especially those that include candle-illuminated pumpkin faces, skeletons in windows or doorways, or repeating tape loops of werewolf howling.
Chertoff recommended that law-enforcement authorities be granted sweeping new powers to ensure security, including mandatory street-corner identity checks for suspects wearing clothing designed to conceal facial features or otherwise obscure ready personal identification. Additionally, local police have been ordered to detain any individuals appearing to be ghosts, goblins, witches, or other characters designed to evoke fear.
Critics of the warning say that the DHS is merely sowing seeds of unease for political reasons, pointing out that the organization has yet to present any real evidence of the threat.
"This is yet another misguided and unfair example of profiling by our nation's law enforcement," said ACLU spokesperson Marilee McInnis. "It's doubtful that many G.I. Joes will be searched, but Aladdins, genies, and belly dancers should expect a huge crimp in their Halloween fun."
"Individuals concealing their identities through clever disguise, and under cover of night, may attempt to use the unspecified threat of 'tricks' to extort 'treats' from unsuspecting victims," Chertoff said. "Such scare tactics may have been tolerated in the past, but they will not be allowed to continue this Halloween."
While he would not elaborate on the specific threat, Chertoff said his office had "heard a couple spooky tales," and indicated that there was good reason to believe that Americans face "a very ghoulish scenario" this October.
"We have done and will continue to do everything we can to protect citizens from those who would play on our fears," a haunted Chertoff said. "Nevertheless, Americans are advised to be in a state of readiness."
National Guard troops and local police are being stationed at checkpoints in residential neighborhoods to seize the contents of any paper bags, pillowcases, plastic pumpkins, or other receptacles. Additionally, candy-sniffing dogs will be posted at regular intervals to locate and devour suspicious items.
Local, county, and state officials have been placed on orange alert, with strict orders to confiscate and investigate bags containing Bit-O-Honey, Snickers, Baby Ruth, Twix, Butterfingers, Mr. Goodbar, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, gum, and any and all forms of taffy.
Chertoff asked Washington citizens for their assistance, and he outlined steps that the average citizen should take to aid in the war on fright. The DHS guidelines encourage parents to report any suspicious neighbors who create potentially spooky yard displays, especially those that include candle-illuminated pumpkin faces, skeletons in windows or doorways, or repeating tape loops of werewolf howling.
Chertoff recommended that law-enforcement authorities be granted sweeping new powers to ensure security, including mandatory street-corner identity checks for suspects wearing clothing designed to conceal facial features or otherwise obscure ready personal identification. Additionally, local police have been ordered to detain any individuals appearing to be ghosts, goblins, witches, or other characters designed to evoke fear.
Critics of the warning say that the DHS is merely sowing seeds of unease for political reasons, pointing out that the organization has yet to present any real evidence of the threat.
"This is yet another misguided and unfair example of profiling by our nation's law enforcement," said ACLU spokesperson Marilee McInnis. "It's doubtful that many G.I. Joes will be searched, but Aladdins, genies, and belly dancers should expect a huge crimp in their Halloween fun."
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."
Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."
Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
Cia Leak: Not above the law
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
There is a cancer on the presidency, and it cannot be exorcised by the resignation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Libby, assistant to the president and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted on five federal counts, including obstruction of justice, making false statement and perjury. The charges stem from the investigation into a leak disclosing that Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a covert CIA operative.
Based on the allegations special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald laid out in the indictments Friday, it's increasingly evident that officials within the Bush administration disclosed Plame's identity as part of an effort to discredit Wilson's criticism of one of the pretexts for war against Iraq.
Fitzgerald said that the investigation remained open, and the indictments make intriguing reference to the conversation another senior White House official, identified only as "Official A," had with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson's wife was "discussed as a CIA employee."
No matter where the investigation goes from here, the question is why President Bush didn't fire Libby long ago if his role in outing Plame was as clear as the indictments indicate. It raises the uncomfortable and inevitable question: What did the president know and when did he know it?
The larger, more important context goes beyond palace intrigue: the lengths to which the Bush administration was willing to go to protect its trumped-up justifications for an unjustifiable war.
There is a cancer on the presidency, and it cannot be exorcised by the resignation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Libby, assistant to the president and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted on five federal counts, including obstruction of justice, making false statement and perjury. The charges stem from the investigation into a leak disclosing that Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a covert CIA operative.
Based on the allegations special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald laid out in the indictments Friday, it's increasingly evident that officials within the Bush administration disclosed Plame's identity as part of an effort to discredit Wilson's criticism of one of the pretexts for war against Iraq.
Fitzgerald said that the investigation remained open, and the indictments make intriguing reference to the conversation another senior White House official, identified only as "Official A," had with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson's wife was "discussed as a CIA employee."
No matter where the investigation goes from here, the question is why President Bush didn't fire Libby long ago if his role in outing Plame was as clear as the indictments indicate. It raises the uncomfortable and inevitable question: What did the president know and when did he know it?
The larger, more important context goes beyond palace intrigue: the lengths to which the Bush administration was willing to go to protect its trumped-up justifications for an unjustifiable war.
Newsweek: The Price of Loyalty
By Jonathan Alter
The conventional Washington explanation is that this is just old-fashioned politics. As long as you don't lie to a grand jury, there's nothing illegal here. But the consequences of a bias for loyalty over debate—even internal debate—have been devastating. The same president who seeks democracy, transparency and dissent in Iraq is irritated by it at home. O'Neill tells his story in a book by Ron Suskind called "The Price of Loyalty," and that title is the missing link in explaining the failure of the Bush presidency. The price of loyalty is incompetence. Issues don't get aired; downside risks remain unassessed.
The conventional Washington explanation is that this is just old-fashioned politics. As long as you don't lie to a grand jury, there's nothing illegal here. But the consequences of a bias for loyalty over debate—even internal debate—have been devastating. The same president who seeks democracy, transparency and dissent in Iraq is irritated by it at home. O'Neill tells his story in a book by Ron Suskind called "The Price of Loyalty," and that title is the missing link in explaining the failure of the Bush presidency. The price of loyalty is incompetence. Issues don't get aired; downside risks remain unassessed.
What Liberal Media? Andria Mitchell, Russert, and Pete Williams are all GE Republicans.
Pete Williams must have felt a little disoriented Friday:
At one point, Mr. Cheney's onetime press secretary, Pete Williams of NBC News, asked Mr. Fitzgerald how the prosecutor could take the word of "three reporters" (including his current bureau chief and boss, Tim Russert) "versus the vice president's chief of staff," with whom Mr. Williams served in the Pentagon when Mr. Cheney was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration.
At one point, Mr. Cheney's onetime press secretary, Pete Williams of NBC News, asked Mr. Fitzgerald how the prosecutor could take the word of "three reporters" (including his current bureau chief and boss, Tim Russert) "versus the vice president's chief of staff," with whom Mr. Williams served in the Pentagon when Mr. Cheney was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration.
The Liberal Media
Corrupt, Incompetent and 'Off Center'
ERIC ALTERMAN With leading Republicans facing the slammer and Bush in a tailspin, fate has given liberals a huge opportunity. Americans already share our values--we need a new language to help connect peoples' deepest needs to the liberal vision.
ERIC ALTERMAN With leading Republicans facing the slammer and Bush in a tailspin, fate has given liberals a huge opportunity. Americans already share our values--we need a new language to help connect peoples' deepest needs to the liberal vision.
A Grave Indictment, but Grave Questions Remain
David Corn
If a senior White House official leaks classified information that identifies an undercover CIA officer to reporters in order to undermine a critic of the administration, he is not entitled to lie about it to FBI agents and a grand jury charged with the task of determining if such a leak violated the law. That was special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's message, as he held a dramatic press conference at the Justice Department to explain the five-count indictment his grand jury issued against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. "This is a very serious matter," he insisted.
The indictment charged Libby with two counts of making false statements to the FBI, two counts of committing perjury (by lying twice to the grand jury) and one count of obstruction of justice. All these charges referred to Libby's account of how he came to learn of Valerie Wilson, the undercover CIA official who was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a White House critic, and who was outed in a July 14, 2003 Bob Novak column. During interviews with FBI agents and in his testimony before the grand jury, Libby--who, before the Novak column was published, told Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA--repeatedly claimed that he was merely passing along information he had heard from other reporters. For instance, on March 5, 2004, Libby, answering questions about a July 12, 2003 conversation with Cooper, told the grand jury,
All I had was this information that was coming in from the reporters....I said, reporters are telling us that [about Valerie Wilson's employment at the CIA]. I don't know if it's true. I was careful about that because among other things, I wanted to be clear I didn't know Mr. Wilson. I don't know--I think I said, I don't know if he has a wife, but this is what we're hearing.
On March 24, 2004, Libby, in another appearance before the grand jury, said,
All I had was that reporters are telling us that, and by that I wanted them to understand it wasn't coming from me and that it might not be true....So I wanted to be clear they [the reporters to whom he spoke] didn't, they didn't think it was me saying it. I didn't know if it [the information about Valerie Wilson] was true, and I wanted them to understand that.
But, according to the indictment, Libby had actively gathered information on Joseph Wilson and his wife after newspaper stories appeared about a trip that Joseph Wilson had taken to Niger for the CIA in February 2002, during which he had concluded that the allegation that Iraq had been shopping there for weapon-grade uranium was highly dubious. In May 2003, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, using Wilson as a source, wrote about this trip without naming Wilson. The Washington Post did the same the following month. And on July 6, 2003, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times describing his mission to Niger and his findings, which undercut the Bush administration's use of the Niger allegation in making a case for war.
In late May 2003--after the first Kristof column and before Wilson went public with his op-ed--Libby asked Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman for information on the unnamed ambassador's trip to Niger. Grossman ordered the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report on the ambassador and the trip and subsequently told Libby that Wilson had been the ambassador. On June 9, 2003, according to the indictment, classified CIA documents that covered Wilson and the Niger trip (without mentioning Wilson by name) were faxed from the CIA to Libby. Two or three days later, Grossman told Libby, the indictment says, that "Wilson's wife worked at the CIA." About that time, Libby spoke with a senior CIA officer, who also informed Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Also about the time, the indictment states, Cheney told Libby that Wilson's wife was employed at the CIA in the counterproliferation division. This is an intriguing fact. Usually in Washington, principles ask their subordinates to dig up information for them. Apparently, Cheney was doing his own fact-finding on the Wilson front. The indictment does not explain what Cheney was up to or why. It notes that "Libby understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA." Cheney had a back-channel behind his back-channel (Libby).
Libby was not done gathering information on Joseph and Valerie Wilson. On or about June 14, 2003--still weeks before Wilson's op-ed article appeared--Libby, according to the indictment, met with a CIA briefer and "discussed with the briefer, among other things, 'Joseph Wilson' and his wife 'Valerie Wilson' in the context of Wilson's trip to Niger." (Fitzgerald's use of quotation marks in this passage of the indictment suggests he has notes from this meeting.)
Libby, as depicted in the indictment, was aware of the sensitive nature of the material he had collected on the Wilsons. When an assistant asked if information on Wilson's trip could be shared with the press to rebut the charge that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger (an allegation never made by Wilson, who had said that his trip was a response to a request that had come to the CIA from Cheney's office), Libby told his aide that he could not talk about this topic on a nonsecure telephone line.
Yet days later--on June 23, 2003--Libby met with Judy Miller and told her that Wilson's wife might work at the CIA. And the day after Joseph Wilson's op-ed piece appeared, Libby had lunch with White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and informed him that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, adding that this was not widely known. That week, Libby twice more discussed Valerie Wilson with Miller. And on July 10 or 11, 2003, Libby, according to the indictment, spoke to a senior White House official--identified as "Official A" and possibly White House aide Karl Rove--who told Libby that earlier in the week he (Official A) had discussed Wilson's wife and her CIA employment with Novak, who would be writing a column about her.
If the indictment is correct, Libby was not only in the loop regarding Valerie Wilson and her connection to the CIA; he had helped to create it. Yet Fitzgerald's indictment quotes Libby declaring over and over he only had heard--and passed along--scuttlebutt received from other reporters. To prop up this cover story, Libby told the FBI agents that it had been NBC News' Tim Russert who had said to him that Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA and that "all the reporters knew it." Russert told the grand jury that he had not discussed Wilson's wife with Libby and that in this particular conversation Libby had complained to him about an MSNBC reporter (who goes unnamed in the indictment).
Libby appears to have concocted a rather clumsy cover story, especially in that he pointed to a specific reporter as his source--Russert--for the information on Valerie Wilson that he shared with Miller and Cooper. A reasonable assumption is that even if Libby was not a source for the Novak column that identified Valerie Wilson, he was attempting to distance himself--and perhaps Cheney--from the administration's effort to find and leak information on Wilson and his wife (even if it might be classified) to undercut Wilson's criticism. During the press conference, Fitzgerald noted that Libby was the first official who talked to a reporter about Valerie Wilson when he discussed her with Miller on June 23, 2003.
If a senior White House official leaks classified information that identifies an undercover CIA officer to reporters in order to undermine a critic of the administration, he is not entitled to lie about it to FBI agents and a grand jury charged with the task of determining if such a leak violated the law. That was special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's message, as he held a dramatic press conference at the Justice Department to explain the five-count indictment his grand jury issued against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. "This is a very serious matter," he insisted.
The indictment charged Libby with two counts of making false statements to the FBI, two counts of committing perjury (by lying twice to the grand jury) and one count of obstruction of justice. All these charges referred to Libby's account of how he came to learn of Valerie Wilson, the undercover CIA official who was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a White House critic, and who was outed in a July 14, 2003 Bob Novak column. During interviews with FBI agents and in his testimony before the grand jury, Libby--who, before the Novak column was published, told Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA--repeatedly claimed that he was merely passing along information he had heard from other reporters. For instance, on March 5, 2004, Libby, answering questions about a July 12, 2003 conversation with Cooper, told the grand jury,
All I had was this information that was coming in from the reporters....I said, reporters are telling us that [about Valerie Wilson's employment at the CIA]. I don't know if it's true. I was careful about that because among other things, I wanted to be clear I didn't know Mr. Wilson. I don't know--I think I said, I don't know if he has a wife, but this is what we're hearing.
On March 24, 2004, Libby, in another appearance before the grand jury, said,
All I had was that reporters are telling us that, and by that I wanted them to understand it wasn't coming from me and that it might not be true....So I wanted to be clear they [the reporters to whom he spoke] didn't, they didn't think it was me saying it. I didn't know if it [the information about Valerie Wilson] was true, and I wanted them to understand that.
But, according to the indictment, Libby had actively gathered information on Joseph Wilson and his wife after newspaper stories appeared about a trip that Joseph Wilson had taken to Niger for the CIA in February 2002, during which he had concluded that the allegation that Iraq had been shopping there for weapon-grade uranium was highly dubious. In May 2003, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, using Wilson as a source, wrote about this trip without naming Wilson. The Washington Post did the same the following month. And on July 6, 2003, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Times describing his mission to Niger and his findings, which undercut the Bush administration's use of the Niger allegation in making a case for war.
In late May 2003--after the first Kristof column and before Wilson went public with his op-ed--Libby asked Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman for information on the unnamed ambassador's trip to Niger. Grossman ordered the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report on the ambassador and the trip and subsequently told Libby that Wilson had been the ambassador. On June 9, 2003, according to the indictment, classified CIA documents that covered Wilson and the Niger trip (without mentioning Wilson by name) were faxed from the CIA to Libby. Two or three days later, Grossman told Libby, the indictment says, that "Wilson's wife worked at the CIA." About that time, Libby spoke with a senior CIA officer, who also informed Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Also about the time, the indictment states, Cheney told Libby that Wilson's wife was employed at the CIA in the counterproliferation division. This is an intriguing fact. Usually in Washington, principles ask their subordinates to dig up information for them. Apparently, Cheney was doing his own fact-finding on the Wilson front. The indictment does not explain what Cheney was up to or why. It notes that "Libby understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA." Cheney had a back-channel behind his back-channel (Libby).
Libby was not done gathering information on Joseph and Valerie Wilson. On or about June 14, 2003--still weeks before Wilson's op-ed article appeared--Libby, according to the indictment, met with a CIA briefer and "discussed with the briefer, among other things, 'Joseph Wilson' and his wife 'Valerie Wilson' in the context of Wilson's trip to Niger." (Fitzgerald's use of quotation marks in this passage of the indictment suggests he has notes from this meeting.)
Libby, as depicted in the indictment, was aware of the sensitive nature of the material he had collected on the Wilsons. When an assistant asked if information on Wilson's trip could be shared with the press to rebut the charge that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger (an allegation never made by Wilson, who had said that his trip was a response to a request that had come to the CIA from Cheney's office), Libby told his aide that he could not talk about this topic on a nonsecure telephone line.
Yet days later--on June 23, 2003--Libby met with Judy Miller and told her that Wilson's wife might work at the CIA. And the day after Joseph Wilson's op-ed piece appeared, Libby had lunch with White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and informed him that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, adding that this was not widely known. That week, Libby twice more discussed Valerie Wilson with Miller. And on July 10 or 11, 2003, Libby, according to the indictment, spoke to a senior White House official--identified as "Official A" and possibly White House aide Karl Rove--who told Libby that earlier in the week he (Official A) had discussed Wilson's wife and her CIA employment with Novak, who would be writing a column about her.
If the indictment is correct, Libby was not only in the loop regarding Valerie Wilson and her connection to the CIA; he had helped to create it. Yet Fitzgerald's indictment quotes Libby declaring over and over he only had heard--and passed along--scuttlebutt received from other reporters. To prop up this cover story, Libby told the FBI agents that it had been NBC News' Tim Russert who had said to him that Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA and that "all the reporters knew it." Russert told the grand jury that he had not discussed Wilson's wife with Libby and that in this particular conversation Libby had complained to him about an MSNBC reporter (who goes unnamed in the indictment).
Libby appears to have concocted a rather clumsy cover story, especially in that he pointed to a specific reporter as his source--Russert--for the information on Valerie Wilson that he shared with Miller and Cooper. A reasonable assumption is that even if Libby was not a source for the Novak column that identified Valerie Wilson, he was attempting to distance himself--and perhaps Cheney--from the administration's effort to find and leak information on Wilson and his wife (even if it might be classified) to undercut Wilson's criticism. During the press conference, Fitzgerald noted that Libby was the first official who talked to a reporter about Valerie Wilson when he discussed her with Miller on June 23, 2003.
Harness Racing Picks for 10-30-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (241)
Place (70)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Colonial Downs
Race # 6
Horse: ANTHONY'S BLISS
Post Position: # 4
Win (241)
Place (70)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Colonial Downs
Race # 6
Horse: ANTHONY'S BLISS
Post Position: # 4
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Harness Racing Results for 10-29-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (241)
Place (70)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 7
Horse: NESTER WINDSWEPT (Place)
Post Position: # 5
****************************
Raceway Park
Race # 10
Horse: TRULY AMERICAN (Won)
Post Position: # 4
Win (241)
Place (70)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 7
Horse: NESTER WINDSWEPT (Place)
Post Position: # 5
****************************
Raceway Park
Race # 10
Horse: TRULY AMERICAN (Won)
Post Position: # 4
Joseph C. Wilson IV: Our 27 Months of Hell
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday 29 October 2005
After the two-year smear campaign orchestrated by senior officials in the Bush White House against my wife and me, it is tempting to feel vindicated by Friday's indictment of the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Between us, Valerie and I have served the United States for nearly 43 years. I was President George H. W. Bush's acting ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, and I served as ambassador to two African nations for him and President Clinton. Valerie worked undercover for the CIA in several overseas assignments and in areas related to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
But on July 14, 2003, our lives were irrevocably changed. That was the day columnist Robert Novak identified Valerie as an operative, divulging a secret that had been known only to me, her parents and her brother.
Valerie told me later that it was like being hit in the stomach. Twenty years of service had gone down the drain. She immediately started jotting down a checklist of things she needed to do to limit the damage to people she knew and to projects she was working on. She wondered how her friends would feel when they learned that what they thought they knew about her was a lie.
It was payback - cheap political payback by the administration for an article I had written contradicting an assertion President Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address. Payback not just to punish me but to intimidate other critics as well.
Why did I write the article? Because I believe that citizens in a democracy are responsible for what government does and says in their name. I knew that the statement in Bush's speech - that Iraq had attempted to purchase significant quantities of uranium in Africa - was not true. I knew it was false from my own investigative trip to Africa (at the request of the CIA) and from two other similar intelligence reports. And I knew that the White House knew it.
-----MORE-----
Saturday 29 October 2005
After the two-year smear campaign orchestrated by senior officials in the Bush White House against my wife and me, it is tempting to feel vindicated by Friday's indictment of the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Between us, Valerie and I have served the United States for nearly 43 years. I was President George H. W. Bush's acting ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, and I served as ambassador to two African nations for him and President Clinton. Valerie worked undercover for the CIA in several overseas assignments and in areas related to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
But on July 14, 2003, our lives were irrevocably changed. That was the day columnist Robert Novak identified Valerie as an operative, divulging a secret that had been known only to me, her parents and her brother.
Valerie told me later that it was like being hit in the stomach. Twenty years of service had gone down the drain. She immediately started jotting down a checklist of things she needed to do to limit the damage to people she knew and to projects she was working on. She wondered how her friends would feel when they learned that what they thought they knew about her was a lie.
It was payback - cheap political payback by the administration for an article I had written contradicting an assertion President Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address. Payback not just to punish me but to intimidate other critics as well.
Why did I write the article? Because I believe that citizens in a democracy are responsible for what government does and says in their name. I knew that the statement in Bush's speech - that Iraq had attempted to purchase significant quantities of uranium in Africa - was not true. I knew it was false from my own investigative trip to Africa (at the request of the CIA) and from two other similar intelligence reports. And I knew that the White House knew it.
-----MORE-----
Maureen Dowd: Who's on First?
The New York Times
Saturday 29 October 2005
It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.
But this Irish priest of the law, Patrick Fitzgerald, neither Democrat nor Republican, was very strict, very precise. He wasn't totally gratifying in clearing up the murkiness of the case, yet strangely comforting in his quaint black-and-white notions of truth and honor (except when his wacky baseball metaphor seemed to veer toward a "Who's on first?" tangle).
"This indictment's not about the propriety of the war," he told reporters yesterday in his big Eliot Ness moment at the Justice Department. The indictment was simply about whether the son of an investment banker perjured himself before a grand jury and the F.B.I.
Scooter does seem like a big fat liar in the indictment. And not a clever one, since his deception hinged on, of all people, the popular monsignor of the trusted Sunday Church of Russert. Does Scooter hope to persuade a jury to believe him instead of Little Russ?
Good luck.
There is something grotesque about Scooter's hiding behind the press with his little conspiracy, given that he's part of an administration that despises the press and tried to make its work almost impossible.
Mr. Fitzgerald claims that Mr. Libby hurt national security by revealing the classified name of a CIA officer. "Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life," he said.
He was not buying the arguments on the right that Mrs. Wilson was not really undercover or was under "light" cover, or that blowing her cover did not hurt the CIA
"I can say that for the people who work at the CIA and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected," he said, adding: "They run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees."
To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty. Unfortunately for them, this time they Swift-boated an American whose job gave her legal protection from the business-as-usual smear campaign.
The back story of this indictment is about the ongoing Tong wars of the CIA, the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon: the fight over who lied us into war. The CIA, after all, is the agency that asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate how one of its own was outed by the White House.
The question Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to answer yesterday - Dick Cheney's poker face has finally met its match - was whether this stops at Scooter.
No one expects him to "flip," unless he finally gets the sort of fancy white-collar criminal lawyer that The Washington Post said he is searching for - like the ones who succeeded in getting Karl Rove off the hook, at least for now - and the lawyer tells Scooter to nail his boss to save himself.
But what we really want to know, now that we have the bare bones of who said what to whom in the indictment, is what they were all thinking there in that bunker and how that hothouse bred the idea that the way out of their Iraq problems was to slime their critics instead of addressing the criticism. What we really want to know, if Scooter testifies in the trial, and especially if he doesn't, is what Vice did to create the spidery atmosphere that led Scooter, who seemed like an interesting and decent guy, to let his zeal get the better of him.
Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson's name from the CIA and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the CIA to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on the altar of faith-based intelligence.
Vice spent so much time lurking over at the CIA, trying to intimidate the analysts at Langley into twisting the intelligence about weapons, that he should have had one of his undisclosed locations there.
This administration's grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they're promoting national security when they're hurting it; they say they're squelching terrorists when they're breeding them; they say they're bringing stability to Iraq when the country's imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)
And the most dangerous opposite of all: W. was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn't have been listening to, and not listening to his real father, who deserved to be listened to.
Saturday 29 October 2005
It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.
But this Irish priest of the law, Patrick Fitzgerald, neither Democrat nor Republican, was very strict, very precise. He wasn't totally gratifying in clearing up the murkiness of the case, yet strangely comforting in his quaint black-and-white notions of truth and honor (except when his wacky baseball metaphor seemed to veer toward a "Who's on first?" tangle).
"This indictment's not about the propriety of the war," he told reporters yesterday in his big Eliot Ness moment at the Justice Department. The indictment was simply about whether the son of an investment banker perjured himself before a grand jury and the F.B.I.
Scooter does seem like a big fat liar in the indictment. And not a clever one, since his deception hinged on, of all people, the popular monsignor of the trusted Sunday Church of Russert. Does Scooter hope to persuade a jury to believe him instead of Little Russ?
Good luck.
There is something grotesque about Scooter's hiding behind the press with his little conspiracy, given that he's part of an administration that despises the press and tried to make its work almost impossible.
Mr. Fitzgerald claims that Mr. Libby hurt national security by revealing the classified name of a CIA officer. "Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life," he said.
He was not buying the arguments on the right that Mrs. Wilson was not really undercover or was under "light" cover, or that blowing her cover did not hurt the CIA
"I can say that for the people who work at the CIA and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected," he said, adding: "They run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow government employees."
To protect a war spun from fantasy, the Bush team played dirty. Unfortunately for them, this time they Swift-boated an American whose job gave her legal protection from the business-as-usual smear campaign.
The back story of this indictment is about the ongoing Tong wars of the CIA, the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon: the fight over who lied us into war. The CIA, after all, is the agency that asked for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate how one of its own was outed by the White House.
The question Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly declined to answer yesterday - Dick Cheney's poker face has finally met its match - was whether this stops at Scooter.
No one expects him to "flip," unless he finally gets the sort of fancy white-collar criminal lawyer that The Washington Post said he is searching for - like the ones who succeeded in getting Karl Rove off the hook, at least for now - and the lawyer tells Scooter to nail his boss to save himself.
But what we really want to know, now that we have the bare bones of who said what to whom in the indictment, is what they were all thinking there in that bunker and how that hothouse bred the idea that the way out of their Iraq problems was to slime their critics instead of addressing the criticism. What we really want to know, if Scooter testifies in the trial, and especially if he doesn't, is what Vice did to create the spidery atmosphere that led Scooter, who seemed like an interesting and decent guy, to let his zeal get the better of him.
Mr. Cheney, eager to be rid of the meddlesome Joe Wilson, got Valerie Wilson's name from the CIA and passed it on to Scooter. He forced the CIA to compromise one of its own, a sacrifice on the altar of faith-based intelligence.
Vice spent so much time lurking over at the CIA, trying to intimidate the analysts at Langley into twisting the intelligence about weapons, that he should have had one of his undisclosed locations there.
This administration's grand schemes always end up as the opposite. Officials say they're promoting national security when they're hurting it; they say they're squelching terrorists when they're breeding them; they say they're bringing stability to Iraq when the country's imploding. (The U.S. announced five more military deaths yesterday.)
And the most dangerous opposite of all: W. was listening to a surrogate father he shouldn't have been listening to, and not listening to his real father, who deserved to be listened to.
Indictments put focus on neoconservatives
Boston Globe 10/29/05
"WASHINGTON -- The indictment and resignation of I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby yesterday deprives the White House of one of its most influential national security thinkers, a powerful advocate for some of the Bush administration's most far-reaching foreign policy decisions since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
His pending legal battle, however, could also bring new scrutiny to the actions of the close-knit group of officials, many of them his old friends and colleagues from previous Republican administrations, who had long agitated for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and who are accused of exaggerating the threat from Iraq to achieve their goal, according to current and former government officials and specialists.
As the point man in the seat of power for the so-called neoconservatives, Libby was perfectly suited to carry their message: In 1992, as a senior Pentagon official, he coauthored a secret military blueprint asserting that the United States must ''act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated" to protect its interests by force. The draft document was never approved, but had a key word -- ''preempt" -- that became synonymous with a more aggressive, unilateral US foreign policy.
A decade later, as chief of staff and Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser, Libby persuaded President Bush and Cheney, his boss, to adopt a strategy of preemptive war in Iraq, arguing inside the White House on behalf of like-minded allies such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, and former undersecretary of state John Bolton. Feith has left government service, Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, and Bolton is the US ambassador to the United Nations.
"WASHINGTON -- The indictment and resignation of I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby yesterday deprives the White House of one of its most influential national security thinkers, a powerful advocate for some of the Bush administration's most far-reaching foreign policy decisions since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
His pending legal battle, however, could also bring new scrutiny to the actions of the close-knit group of officials, many of them his old friends and colleagues from previous Republican administrations, who had long agitated for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and who are accused of exaggerating the threat from Iraq to achieve their goal, according to current and former government officials and specialists.
As the point man in the seat of power for the so-called neoconservatives, Libby was perfectly suited to carry their message: In 1992, as a senior Pentagon official, he coauthored a secret military blueprint asserting that the United States must ''act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated" to protect its interests by force. The draft document was never approved, but had a key word -- ''preempt" -- that became synonymous with a more aggressive, unilateral US foreign policy.
A decade later, as chief of staff and Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser, Libby persuaded President Bush and Cheney, his boss, to adopt a strategy of preemptive war in Iraq, arguing inside the White House on behalf of like-minded allies such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, and former undersecretary of state John Bolton. Feith has left government service, Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, and Bolton is the US ambassador to the United Nations.
From Sen. Kennedy
Scooter Libby and Vice President Cheney withheld critical documents in the Senate's investigation of the use and misuse of intelligence in the decision to go to war and in the management of the war.
Today's an ominous day for the country, a new low since Watergate in terms of openness and honesty in our government.
This indictment is far more than an indictment of one individual. It's an indictment of the lengths to which Administration officials were willing to go to cover up their failed intelligence. It's an indictment of their distortions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and their serious blunders taking us to war and their vindictive efforts to discredit anyone who challenges their misrepresentations.
These documents must be handed over, because the American people deserve answers.
We need answers, not cover-ups, by the Administration about these serious issues.
Sign his Petition:
"I ask the White House to turn over all documents withheld from the United States Senate during its investigation of the use of intelligence during the planning of the Iraq war."
http://www.tedkennedy.com/page/petition/iraqdocuments
Today's an ominous day for the country, a new low since Watergate in terms of openness and honesty in our government.
This indictment is far more than an indictment of one individual. It's an indictment of the lengths to which Administration officials were willing to go to cover up their failed intelligence. It's an indictment of their distortions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and their serious blunders taking us to war and their vindictive efforts to discredit anyone who challenges their misrepresentations.
These documents must be handed over, because the American people deserve answers.
We need answers, not cover-ups, by the Administration about these serious issues.
Sign his Petition:
"I ask the White House to turn over all documents withheld from the United States Senate during its investigation of the use of intelligence during the planning of the Iraq war."
http://www.tedkennedy.com/page/petition/iraqdocuments
Smoking Guns and Red Herrings
By Elizabeth de la Vega
TomDispatch.com
Friday 28 October 2005
What should we expect now that Fitzgerald has announced the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby?
The Grand Jury supervised by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has returned an indictment charging Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide and reputed "alter-ego" I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby with perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements to the grand jury. But this indictment does not end the story; rather, a close reading suggests that these charges are most likely merely a chapter in a long and tragic story. Here, from a former federal prosecutor, are thoughts about four things we should expect, four things we shouldn't, and one question we should all be asking.
We should not expect a final resolution any time soon. Complex cases usually take years to proceed through the courts. In addition, the indictment released today describes a chronology of close to two years and a complicated set of facts. Obviously, Fitzgerald is taking a "big picture" approach to this case. This mirrors his approach to previous cases. In December 2003, for example, Fitzgerald announced the indictment of former Illinois Governor George Ryan on corruption charges in Operation Safe Road, which began in 1998. In that year, the investigation of a fatal accident revealed that truckers were purchasing commercial licenses from state officials. Indictments were announced in stages, culminating in the indictment of Ryan, who was the 66th defendant in the case. In the Libby case, the allegations suggest he was merely one of many officials - including an unnamed Under Secretary of State and "Official A," a Senior White House Official - who were involved in revealing classified information about Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame. No other individuals are named as defendants, and they should not be considered so at this point, but the complexity of the indictment suggests that the investigation may follow a pattern similar to that used by Fitzgerald in the Illinois corruption case.
------MORE-----
TomDispatch.com
Friday 28 October 2005
What should we expect now that Fitzgerald has announced the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby?
The Grand Jury supervised by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has returned an indictment charging Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide and reputed "alter-ego" I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby with perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements to the grand jury. But this indictment does not end the story; rather, a close reading suggests that these charges are most likely merely a chapter in a long and tragic story. Here, from a former federal prosecutor, are thoughts about four things we should expect, four things we shouldn't, and one question we should all be asking.
We should not expect a final resolution any time soon. Complex cases usually take years to proceed through the courts. In addition, the indictment released today describes a chronology of close to two years and a complicated set of facts. Obviously, Fitzgerald is taking a "big picture" approach to this case. This mirrors his approach to previous cases. In December 2003, for example, Fitzgerald announced the indictment of former Illinois Governor George Ryan on corruption charges in Operation Safe Road, which began in 1998. In that year, the investigation of a fatal accident revealed that truckers were purchasing commercial licenses from state officials. Indictments were announced in stages, culminating in the indictment of Ryan, who was the 66th defendant in the case. In the Libby case, the allegations suggest he was merely one of many officials - including an unnamed Under Secretary of State and "Official A," a Senior White House Official - who were involved in revealing classified information about Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame. No other individuals are named as defendants, and they should not be considered so at this point, but the complexity of the indictment suggests that the investigation may follow a pattern similar to that used by Fitzgerald in the Illinois corruption case.
------MORE-----
Harness Racing Picks for 10-29-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (240)
Place (69)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 7
Horse: NESTER WINDSWEPT
Post Position: # 5
****************************
Raceway Park
Race # 10
Horse: TRULY AMERICAN
Post Position: # 4
Win (240)
Place (69)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 7
Horse: NESTER WINDSWEPT
Post Position: # 5
****************************
Raceway Park
Race # 10
Horse: TRULY AMERICAN
Post Position: # 4
Friday, October 28, 2005
Harness Racing Results for 10-28-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (240)
Place (69)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Freehold Raceway
Race # 9
Horse: TICKET TO GLIDE (Place)
Post Position: # 7
****************************
Fraser Downs
Race # 4
Horse: RED STAR BIGGIRL (Won)
Post Position: # 3
Win (240)
Place (69)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Freehold Raceway
Race # 9
Horse: TICKET TO GLIDE (Place)
Post Position: # 7
****************************
Fraser Downs
Race # 4
Horse: RED STAR BIGGIRL (Won)
Post Position: # 3
Harness Racing Picks for 10-28-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (239)
Place (68)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Freehold Raceway
Race # 9
Horse: TICKET TO GLIDE
Post Position: # 7
****************************
Fraser Downs
Race # 4
Horse: RED STAR BIGGIRL
Post Position: # 3
Win (239)
Place (68)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Freehold Raceway
Race # 9
Horse: TICKET TO GLIDE
Post Position: # 7
****************************
Fraser Downs
Race # 4
Horse: RED STAR BIGGIRL
Post Position: # 3
Take a Tour of Arnold's Neighborhood
Arnold has been masquerading as a "moderate Republican" since he took office, but underneath that garb, he is all conservative.In response to Schwarzenegger's deception, Phil Angelides has released ArnoldsNeighborhood.com , a cartoon exposing Schwarzenegger's relationships with some of the most prominent right-wing figures.
ArnoldsNeighborhood.com tells the true story of Arnold's relationships with some of today's most recognizable right-wing figures:
- George W. Bush - "Bush Bird"
- Dick Cheney - "The Cheney Monster"
- Karl Rove - "Rover"
- Bill O'Reilly - "O'Reilly the Grouch"
- And the rest of the gang
Watch ArnoldsNeighborhood.com
STEELER'S FOOTBALL WEEK #8
The Steelers host the Baltimore Ravens on Monday, October 31 at Heinz Field. Kickoff for the game is at 9:00 p.m. EST. The Steelers are 4-2 and coming off a win over the Cincinnati Bengals. The Ravens are 2-4 after losing to the Chicago Bears.
Steelers-Ravens Game Day Coverage
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Iraq Scandal Taints 2,000 Firms
BBC
More than 2,000 firms linked to the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq were involved in making illicit payments to the Iraqi government, a report says.
It found Saddam Hussein received $1.8bn (£1bn) from firms including Daimler Chrysler and Volvo, and it also named individuals said to have benefited.
Some of those issued denials or declined to comment at this stage.
The UN report said the firms would not necessarily have known about the bribes and surcharges.
Paul Volcker, who led the inquiry, said corruption would not have been so pervasive had there been better discipline by UN management and he emphasised the need for wide-ranging UN reforms.........
PDF Report
More than 2,000 firms linked to the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq were involved in making illicit payments to the Iraqi government, a report says.
It found Saddam Hussein received $1.8bn (£1bn) from firms including Daimler Chrysler and Volvo, and it also named individuals said to have benefited.
Some of those issued denials or declined to comment at this stage.
The UN report said the firms would not necessarily have known about the bribes and surcharges.
Paul Volcker, who led the inquiry, said corruption would not have been so pervasive had there been better discipline by UN management and he emphasised the need for wide-ranging UN reforms.........
PDF Report
Cheney, Libby Blocked Papers To Senate Intelligence Panel
National Journal
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.
The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.
The disclosures also come as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up the nearly two-year-old CIA leak investigation that has focused heavily on Libby's role in discussing covert intelligence operative Valerie Plame with reporters. Fitzgerald could announce as soon as tomorrow whether a federal grand jury is handing up indictments in the case.
Central to Fitzgerald's investigation is whether administration officials disclosed Plame's identity and CIA status in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador and vocal Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who wrote newspaper op-ed columns and made other public charges beginning in 2003 that the administration misused intelligence on Iraq that he gathered on a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa.
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.
The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.
The disclosures also come as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up the nearly two-year-old CIA leak investigation that has focused heavily on Libby's role in discussing covert intelligence operative Valerie Plame with reporters. Fitzgerald could announce as soon as tomorrow whether a federal grand jury is handing up indictments in the case.
Central to Fitzgerald's investigation is whether administration officials disclosed Plame's identity and CIA status in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador and vocal Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who wrote newspaper op-ed columns and made other public charges beginning in 2003 that the administration misused intelligence on Iraq that he gathered on a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa.
Harness Racing Results for 10-27-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (239)
Place (68)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Harrington Raceway
Race # 10
Horse: BANK SHOT (Won)
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Meadows
Race # 1
Horse: CLEVELAND (Won)
Post Position: # 3
****************************
Plainridge Race Course
Race # 5
Horse: SECURED ALIBI (Show)
Post Position: # 6
Win (239)
Place (68)
Show (15)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Harrington Raceway
Race # 10
Horse: BANK SHOT (Won)
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Meadows
Race # 1
Horse: CLEVELAND (Won)
Post Position: # 3
****************************
Plainridge Race Course
Race # 5
Horse: SECURED ALIBI (Show)
Post Position: # 6
This is How Republican's Support the Troops
Wife fired for missing work after soldier left for war.....worked for Bush Backer, and part of the health insurance industry, Benefit Management Administrators Inc.......
On Oct. 16 at an Army airfield in Indiana, Suzette Boler wrapped her arms around her husband and through tears wished him the best. Army Spc. Jerry Boler, 45, was bound for Fort Dix, N.J., and duty in Iraq. He expects to put his life on the line guarding convoys from insurgent attacks.
Suzette Boler, of Caledonia, returned home that Sunday night and prepared the next day to return to her receptionist job at a small Caledonia employee benefits firm. She had taken four unpaid days off to see her husband of 22 years off to war.
Late Monday afternoon, Boler, 40, answered the phone. She was told to come in the next day and pick up her things.
She was fired.
Officials at Benefit Management Administrators Inc. confirmed Boler was fired for failing to show up for work the day after she bid goodbye to her husband.
"We gave her sufficient time to get back to work," said Clark Galloway, vice president of operations for Benefit Management.
"We are totally supportive of our troops and anything that is necessary to equip them and to encourage them as a company."
mlive.com
On Oct. 16 at an Army airfield in Indiana, Suzette Boler wrapped her arms around her husband and through tears wished him the best. Army Spc. Jerry Boler, 45, was bound for Fort Dix, N.J., and duty in Iraq. He expects to put his life on the line guarding convoys from insurgent attacks.
Suzette Boler, of Caledonia, returned home that Sunday night and prepared the next day to return to her receptionist job at a small Caledonia employee benefits firm. She had taken four unpaid days off to see her husband of 22 years off to war.
Late Monday afternoon, Boler, 40, answered the phone. She was told to come in the next day and pick up her things.
She was fired.
Officials at Benefit Management Administrators Inc. confirmed Boler was fired for failing to show up for work the day after she bid goodbye to her husband.
"We gave her sufficient time to get back to work," said Clark Galloway, vice president of operations for Benefit Management.
"We are totally supportive of our troops and anything that is necessary to equip them and to encourage them as a company."
mlive.com
Federal Grand Jury Indicts Prominent GOP Contributor
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - A coin dealer and major GOP donor at the center of a scandal in Ohio state government was charged Thursday with illegally funneling $45,400 in contributions to President Bush's re-election bid.
Tom Noe was accused in a federal indictment of giving money directly or indirectly to 24 friends and associates, who then made the campaign contributions in their own names. In that way, he skirted the $2,000 limit on individual contributions, prosecutors said.
"It's one of the most blatant and excessive finance schemes we have encountered," said Noel Hillman, section chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's public integrity section.
Calls to the White House and Noe's attorneys were not immediately returned. Prosecutors said the Bush campaign has cooperated with their investigation.
Tom Noe was accused in a federal indictment of giving money directly or indirectly to 24 friends and associates, who then made the campaign contributions in their own names. In that way, he skirted the $2,000 limit on individual contributions, prosecutors said.
"It's one of the most blatant and excessive finance schemes we have encountered," said Noel Hillman, section chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's public integrity section.
Calls to the White House and Noe's attorneys were not immediately returned. Prosecutors said the Bush campaign has cooperated with their investigation.
IF FOX NEWS HAD BEEN AROUND THROUGHOUT HISTORY
Source: CMG Web
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze1ldyn/id2.html
Screen capture photos of what Fox News would have looked like if it had covered the Civil Rights struggle, the Last Supper, the Boston tea party, etc. HILARIOUS!! (Featuring Geraldo and Shep Smith.)
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze1ldyn/id2.html
Screen capture photos of what Fox News would have looked like if it had covered the Civil Rights struggle, the Last Supper, the Boston tea party, etc. HILARIOUS!! (Featuring Geraldo and Shep Smith.)
Harness Racing Picks for 10-27-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (237)
Place (68)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Harrington Raceway
Race # 10
Horse: BANK SHOT
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Meadows
Race # 1
Horse: CLEVELAND
Post Position: # 3
****************************
Plainridge Race Course
Race # 5
Horse: SECURED ALIBI
Post Position: # 6
Win (237)
Place (68)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Harrington Raceway
Race # 10
Horse: BANK SHOT
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Meadows
Race # 1
Horse: CLEVELAND
Post Position: # 3
****************************
Plainridge Race Course
Race # 5
Horse: SECURED ALIBI
Post Position: # 6
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
New Information: First the Website, Now the New Office Space
Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding not only into a new website -- but also into more office space.
Fitzgerald's office is at 1400 New York Avenue, NW, 9th Floor in Washington. What I have learned is that the Office of the Special Counsel has signed a lease this week for expanded office space across the street at 1401 New York Avenue, NW.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/
Fitzgerald's office is at 1400 New York Avenue, NW, 9th Floor in Washington. What I have learned is that the Office of the Special Counsel has signed a lease this week for expanded office space across the street at 1401 New York Avenue, NW.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/
Harness Racing Results for 10-26-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (237)
Place (68)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Northfield Park
Race # 10
Horse: CG'S JOEY (Won)
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 1
Horse: NEAR THE LIMIT (Place)
Post Position: # 1
Race # 2
Horse: SANTINO'S ROSA (Out of the Money)
Post Position: # 1
****************************
Windsor Raceway
Race # 6
Horse: THEA SEELSTER (Won)
Post Position: # 5
Win (237)
Place (68)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (63)
****************************
Northfield Park
Race # 10
Horse: CG'S JOEY (Won)
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 1
Horse: NEAR THE LIMIT (Place)
Post Position: # 1
Race # 2
Horse: SANTINO'S ROSA (Out of the Money)
Post Position: # 1
****************************
Windsor Raceway
Race # 6
Horse: THEA SEELSTER (Won)
Post Position: # 5
The True Meaning of Fitzmas
October 26, 2005 · While we wait for Patrick Fitzgerald to fill our stockings with indictments, let's take a moment to remember the true meaning of Fitzmas: the Valerie Plame leak is a direct result of a media increasingly dominated by right-wing operatives. By Jon Maxson
Maureen Dowd: Dick at the Heart of Darkness
The New York Times
Wednesday 26 October 2005
After W. was elected, he sometimes gave visitors a tour of the love alcove off the Oval Office where Bill trysted with Monica - the notorious spot where his predecessor had dishonored the White House.
At least it was only a little pantry - and a little panting.
If W. wants to show people now where the White House has been dishonored in far more astounding and deadly ways, he'll have to haul them around every nook and cranny of his vice president's office, then go across the river for a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the Pentagon.
The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how un-shocking it all is.
It's exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we'd actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.
Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his Praetorian guard all these years that it's been hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and candid talk from Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he's been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice.
According to a Times story yesterday, Scooter Libby first learned about Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. wife from his boss, Mr. Cheney, not from reporters, as he'd originally suggested. And Mr. Cheney learned it from George Tenet, according to Mr. Libby's notes.
The Bush hawks presented themselves as protectors and exporters of American values. But they were so feverish about projecting the alternate reality they had constructed to link Saddam and Al Qaeda - and fulfilling their idée fixe about invading Iraq - they perverted American values.
Whether or not it turns out to be illegal, outing a C.I.A. agent - undercover or not - simply to undermine her husband's story is Rove-ishly sleazy. This no-leak administration was perfectly willing to leak to hurt anyone who got in its way.
Vice also pressed for a loophole so the C.I.A. could do torture-light on prisoners in U.S. custody, but John McCain rebuffed His Tortureness. Senator McCain has sponsored a measure to bar the cruel treatment of prisoners because he knows that this is not who we are. (Remember the days when the only torture was listening to politicians reciting their best TV lines at dinner parties?)
Colonel Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Colin Powell, broke the code and denounced Vice's vortex, calling his own involvement in Mr. Powell's U.N. speech, infected with bogus Cheney and Scooter malarkey, "the lowest point" in his life.
He followed that with a blast of blunt talk in a speech and an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times, saying that foreign policy had been hijacked by "a secretive, little-known cabal" that hated dissent. He said the cabal was headed by Mr. Cheney, "a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces," and Donald Rumsfeld, "a secretary of defense presiding over the death by a thousand cuts of our overstretched armed forces."
"I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less," Colonel Wilkerson wrote. "More often than not, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal."
Brent Scowcroft, Bush Senior's close friend, let out a shriek this week to Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker, revealing his estrangement from W. and his old protégé Condi. He disdained Paul Wolfowitz as a naïve utopian and said he didn't "know" his old friend Dick Cheney anymore. Vice's alliance with the neocons, who were determined to finish in Iraq what Mr. Scowcroft and Poppy had declared finished, led him to lead the nation into a morass. Troop deaths are now around 2,000, a gruesome milestone.
"The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful," Mr. Scowcroft said. "If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."
W. should take the Medal of Freedom away from Mr. Tenet and give medals to Colonel Wilkerson and Mr. Scowcroft.
Wednesday 26 October 2005
After W. was elected, he sometimes gave visitors a tour of the love alcove off the Oval Office where Bill trysted with Monica - the notorious spot where his predecessor had dishonored the White House.
At least it was only a little pantry - and a little panting.
If W. wants to show people now where the White House has been dishonored in far more astounding and deadly ways, he'll have to haul them around every nook and cranny of his vice president's office, then go across the river for a walk of shame through the Rummy empire at the Pentagon.
The shocking thing about the trellis of revelations showing Dick Cheney, the self-styled Mr. Strong America, as the central figure in dark conspiracies to juice up a case for war and demonize those who tried to tell the public the truth is how un-shocking it all is.
It's exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we'd actually hear the lurid details: Cheney and Rummy, the two old compadres from the Nixon and Ford days, in a cabal running the country and the world into the ground, driven by their poisonous obsession with Iraq, while Junior is out of the loop, playing in the gym or on his mountain bike.
Mr. Cheney has been so well protected by his Praetorian guard all these years that it's been hard for the public to see his dastardly deeds and petty schemes. But now, because of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and candid talk from Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Wilkerson, he's been flushed out as the heart of darkness: all sulfurous strands lead back to the man W. aptly nicknamed Vice.
According to a Times story yesterday, Scooter Libby first learned about Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. wife from his boss, Mr. Cheney, not from reporters, as he'd originally suggested. And Mr. Cheney learned it from George Tenet, according to Mr. Libby's notes.
The Bush hawks presented themselves as protectors and exporters of American values. But they were so feverish about projecting the alternate reality they had constructed to link Saddam and Al Qaeda - and fulfilling their idée fixe about invading Iraq - they perverted American values.
Whether or not it turns out to be illegal, outing a C.I.A. agent - undercover or not - simply to undermine her husband's story is Rove-ishly sleazy. This no-leak administration was perfectly willing to leak to hurt anyone who got in its way.
Vice also pressed for a loophole so the C.I.A. could do torture-light on prisoners in U.S. custody, but John McCain rebuffed His Tortureness. Senator McCain has sponsored a measure to bar the cruel treatment of prisoners because he knows that this is not who we are. (Remember the days when the only torture was listening to politicians reciting their best TV lines at dinner parties?)
Colonel Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Colin Powell, broke the code and denounced Vice's vortex, calling his own involvement in Mr. Powell's U.N. speech, infected with bogus Cheney and Scooter malarkey, "the lowest point" in his life.
He followed that with a blast of blunt talk in a speech and an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times, saying that foreign policy had been hijacked by "a secretive, little-known cabal" that hated dissent. He said the cabal was headed by Mr. Cheney, "a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces," and Donald Rumsfeld, "a secretary of defense presiding over the death by a thousand cuts of our overstretched armed forces."
"I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less," Colonel Wilkerson wrote. "More often than not, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal."
Brent Scowcroft, Bush Senior's close friend, let out a shriek this week to Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker, revealing his estrangement from W. and his old protégé Condi. He disdained Paul Wolfowitz as a naïve utopian and said he didn't "know" his old friend Dick Cheney anymore. Vice's alliance with the neocons, who were determined to finish in Iraq what Mr. Scowcroft and Poppy had declared finished, led him to lead the nation into a morass. Troop deaths are now around 2,000, a gruesome milestone.
"The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful," Mr. Scowcroft said. "If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."
W. should take the Medal of Freedom away from Mr. Tenet and give medals to Colonel Wilkerson and Mr. Scowcroft.
Ex-FDA (Crawford) head held shares in regulated firms-paper
More from the Party of Corruption:
WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Former U.S. Food and Drug Commissioner Lester Crawford or his wife owned stock in companies regulated by the agency as late as 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Crawford, who abruptly resigned his post in September, filed a financial disclosure form in June 2005 stating that he held shares in four companies until 2004 that ethics officers believed he had sold in early 2002, the report said.
The stocks in question are $15,001 and $50,000 holdings in Teleflex Inc. (TFX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , Sysco Corp. (SYY.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Kimberly-Clark Corp. (KMB.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Embrex Inc. (EMBX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and a $50,001 and $100,000 holding in PepsiCo Inc. (PEP.N: Quote, Profile, Research)
The paper obtained the disclosure forms under the Freedom of Information Act.
.........
Unlike prior disclosures, the June form lacks an ethics official's signature. A signature would indicated that the information complied with laws and regulations, the paper reported.
WASHINGTON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Former U.S. Food and Drug Commissioner Lester Crawford or his wife owned stock in companies regulated by the agency as late as 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Crawford, who abruptly resigned his post in September, filed a financial disclosure form in June 2005 stating that he held shares in four companies until 2004 that ethics officers believed he had sold in early 2002, the report said.
The stocks in question are $15,001 and $50,000 holdings in Teleflex Inc. (TFX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , Sysco Corp. (SYY.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Kimberly-Clark Corp. (KMB.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Embrex Inc. (EMBX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and a $50,001 and $100,000 holding in PepsiCo Inc. (PEP.N: Quote, Profile, Research)
The paper obtained the disclosure forms under the Freedom of Information Act.
Unlike prior disclosures, the June form lacks an ethics official's signature. A signature would indicated that the information complied with laws and regulations, the paper reported.
Harness Racing Picks for 10-26-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (235)
Place (67)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (62)
****************************
Northfield Park
Race # 10
Horse: CG'S JOEY
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 1
Horse: NEAR THE LIMIT
Post Position: # 1
Race # 2
Horse: SANTINO'S ROSA
Post Position: # 1
****************************
Windsor Raceway
Race # 6
Horse: THEA SEELSTER
Post Position: # 5
Win (235)
Place (67)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (62)
****************************
Northfield Park
Race # 10
Horse: CG'S JOEY
Post Position: # 2
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 1
Horse: NEAR THE LIMIT
Post Position: # 1
Race # 2
Horse: SANTINO'S ROSA
Post Position: # 1
****************************
Windsor Raceway
Race # 6
Horse: THEA SEELSTER
Post Position: # 5
Bishops warn not to rebuild Gulf Coast on backs of poor
Houston Chronicle
Letter from Catholics implores Congress not to cut essential services to pay for recovery
By TARA DOOLEY
Calling the task of recovering after hurricanes Katrina and Rita "an important sign of what kind of nation we are and wish to be," American Roman Catholic leaders have called on Congress to make principled, compassionate and bipartisan decisions as they rebuild the Gulf Coast.
In a letter co-signed by Galveston-Houston Archbishop Joseph A. Fiorenza, a task force of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged lawmakers not to divert money from the poor as they seek to fund programs for hurricane recovery.
.......
"It would be wrong to cut essential food, housing and health care for the poor while the rest of us make no real sacrifice and, in fact, benefit from recent tax cuts," the letter states.
"The efforts of those motivated by compassion and charity in responding to the hurricanes' devastation, while essential, cannot take the place of a strong federal commitment to just public policies and wise public investment," the letter states.
Letter from Catholics implores Congress not to cut essential services to pay for recovery
By TARA DOOLEY
Calling the task of recovering after hurricanes Katrina and Rita "an important sign of what kind of nation we are and wish to be," American Roman Catholic leaders have called on Congress to make principled, compassionate and bipartisan decisions as they rebuild the Gulf Coast.
In a letter co-signed by Galveston-Houston Archbishop Joseph A. Fiorenza, a task force of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged lawmakers not to divert money from the poor as they seek to fund programs for hurricane recovery.
.......
"It would be wrong to cut essential food, housing and health care for the poor while the rest of us make no real sacrifice and, in fact, benefit from recent tax cuts," the letter states.
"The efforts of those motivated by compassion and charity in responding to the hurricanes' devastation, while essential, cannot take the place of a strong federal commitment to just public policies and wise public investment," the letter states.
Cheney Might be Indicted............IN FRANCE?
FreeMarketNews.com
In the context of all the indictments, both impending and already served, concerning PlameGate, it may seem overkill to consider what other countries are up to. However, according to a report on Uruknet.org, there is a distinct possibility that a French court might indict U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, on charges of bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
The issue involves a $6 billion gas liquification factory, built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton - the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President - and in partnership with Technip, a large French petroengineering company. The story says Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke, a renowned French jurist, has been probing the Nigeria deal since last October.
According to accounts in the French press, it says, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret "retrocommissions" paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery's construction.
In the context of all the indictments, both impending and already served, concerning PlameGate, it may seem overkill to consider what other countries are up to. However, according to a report on Uruknet.org, there is a distinct possibility that a French court might indict U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, on charges of bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets.
The issue involves a $6 billion gas liquification factory, built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton - the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President - and in partnership with Technip, a large French petroengineering company. The story says Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke, a renowned French jurist, has been probing the Nigeria deal since last October.
According to accounts in the French press, it says, Judge van Ruymbeke believes that some or all of $180 million in so-called secret "retrocommissions" paid by Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery's construction.
KABOOOOOM!
La Repubblica's Scoop, Confirmed Italy's intelligence chief met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley just a month before the Niger forgeries first surfaced.By Laura RozenWeb Exclusive: 10.25.05 /American Prospect/
************
In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.
Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.
Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."
************
In an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy's military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.
Today's exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that Pollari met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.
Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi's director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, "I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley."
Norman Solomon: Iraq Is Not Vietnam. But ...
Monday 24 October 2005
Many politicians and pundits have told us that "Iraq is not Vietnam." Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.
Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of US military intervention in the two countries - while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge - are far from identical.
Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States.
War after war, decade after decade, the US news media have continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military intervention.
From the US media's fraudulent reporting about Gulf of Tonkin events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the 21st century, the US news media have been fundamental to making war possible for the United States.
We need to confront the roles of the corporate media in helping to drag the United States into one war after another. In a country with significant elements of democracy, it matters what people think. The propaganda functions of media are crucial for the war makers............
Many politicians and pundits have told us that "Iraq is not Vietnam." Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.
Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of US military intervention in the two countries - while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge - are far from identical.
Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States.
War after war, decade after decade, the US news media have continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military intervention.
From the US media's fraudulent reporting about Gulf of Tonkin events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the 21st century, the US news media have been fundamental to making war possible for the United States.
We need to confront the roles of the corporate media in helping to drag the United States into one war after another. In a country with significant elements of democracy, it matters what people think. The propaganda functions of media are crucial for the war makers............
Senator Patrick Leahy: Bring Them Home
Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy
The War in Iraq
Senate Floor
Tuesday 25 October 2005
Following is Sen. Patrick Leahy's address on Iraq, delivered Tuesday morning on the Senate floor. Leahy (D-Vt.) is the ranking member of the Appropriations panel that handles the Senate's work in funding the State Department and US foreign operations and aid, and he also is a senior member of the Appropriations panel with jurisdiction over the annual defense budget bill. Leahy was one of 23 senators who voted against the resolution that authorized the invasion of Iraq.
Mr. Leahy: Three years ago when the Congress and the country debated the resolution to give President Bush the authority to launch a preemptive war against Iraq, reference was often made to the lessons of Vietnam.
Unheeded Lessons
There are many lessons, both of that war and of the efforts to end it. But one that made a deep impression on me came from former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the architect of that war, who said our greatest mistake was not understanding our enemy.
Vietnam was a relatively simple country that had changed little in the preceding 3,000 years. It was, for the most part, racially, ethnically, linguistically and religiously homogenous. One would have thought it would have been easy for U.S. military and political leaders to understand.
Apparently it was not. The White House and the Pentagon, convinced that no country, particularly not a tiny impoverished land of rice farmers, could withstand the military might of the United States, never bothered to study and understand the history or culture of Vietnam, and they made tragic miscalculations. They lacked the most basic knowledge of the motivation, the capabilities and the resolve of the people they were fighting.
At the start of the Iraq war, those who drew some analogies to Vietnam were ridiculed by the Pentagon and the White House. Iraq is not Vietnam, they insisted. Our troops would be greeted as liberators. Troop strength was not a concern. Our mission would be quickly accomplished. Democracy would spread throughout the Middle East. Freedom was on the march.
It is true that Vietnam and Iraq are vastly different societies. But the point was not that they are similar, but that some of the same lessons apply. We did not understand Vietnam - a simple country - and we paid a huge price for our ignorance and our arrogance.
Iraq - a complex country comprised of rival clans, tribes and ethic and religious factions who have fought each other for centuries - we understand even less.
If this were not apparent to many at the start of this ill-conceived and politically motivated war - a war I opposed from the beginning - it should be obvious today. Yet to listen to the Secretary of Defense, or to the President or the Vice President, one would never know it.
Misled into War
We know today that President Bush decided to invade Iraq without evidence to support the use of force and well before Congress passed the resolution giving him the authority to do so - authority he did not even believe he needed - despite the Constitution which invests in the Congress the power to declare war. Twenty-three Senators voted against that resolution, and I was proud to be one of them.
We know today that the motivation for a plan to attack Iraq, hatched by a handful of political operatives, had taken hold within the White House even before 9/11, and without any connection to the war on terrorism that came later.
We know that the key public justifications for the war - to stop Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons and supporting al Qaeda - were based on faulty intelligence and outright distortions and have been thoroughly discredited. United Nations weapons inspectors, who were dismissed by the White House as naïve and ineffective, turned out to have gathered far better information with a tiny fraction of the budget than our own intelligence agencies.
And we know that the insurgency is continuing to grow along with American casualties - 1,999 killed and at least 15,220 wounded, as of yesterday - despite the same old light at the end of the tunnel assertions and clichés by the White House and top officials in the Pentagon.
The sad but inescapable truth, which the President either does not see or refuses to believe or admit, is that the Iraqi insurgency has steadily grown, in part because of our presence there.
'Bring Them On'
After baiting the insurgents to "bring them on," we got what the President asked for. More than two years later, the pendulum swung against us, and the question is no longer whether we can stop the insurgency, but how to extricate ourselves.
According to soldiers who volunteered for duty in Iraq believing in the mission and who have returned home, many Iraqis who detest the barbaric tactics of the insurgents have grown to despise us. They blame us for the lack of water and electricity, for the lack of jobs and health care, for the hardships and violence they are suffering day in and day out.
Unlike our troops and their families who make great sacrifices, most Americans have been asked to sacrifice nothing for this war. The bills are being sent to our children and grandchildren, by way of our rapidly escalating national debt and annual deficits. Yet as the hundreds of billions dollars to pay for the war continue to pile up and domestic programs like Medicaid, job training and programs for needy students are cut, the sacrifices will be felt today as well.
Slogans have become little more than political rallying cries for the White House. Slogans as empty and unfulfilled as "mission accomplished." Our troops were sent to fight an unnecessary war without sufficient armor against these ruthless and barbaric bombing attacks, without adequate reinforcements, without a plan to win the peace, and without adequate medical care and other services when they return home on stretchers or crutches or with eye patches, unable to walk, to work, to pay their mortgages, or to support their families. Many of our veterans have been treated shamefully by their government when it sent them into harm's way under false pretences, and again after they returned home.
Today I worry about places like Ramadi, where more than 300 members of the Army National Guard from my State of Vermont are currently serving valiantly alongside their comrades in the Marine Corps and the Pennsylvania National Guard. Dozens of other citizen-soldiers from the Vermont Guard are serving across Iraq, while hundreds are deployed throughout the Persian Gulf region.
Many Vermonters have been killed in Ramadi and elsewhere by roadside bombs and all-too accurate sniper attacks.
The insurgents too often seem to attack and then escape with impunity. You can open a newspaper and see photos of armed insurgents walking the streets in broad daylight. Many of these cold-blooded attacks are by people who are willing to trade their own lives to kill civilians, security guards, and our soldiers who have no way of knowing who they can trust among the general population.
'More of the Same' Is Not Working
The President has no plan to deal with Ramadi, let alone the rest of Iraq, except doing more of what we have been doing for more than two years, at a cost of $5 billion a month - money we do not have and that future generations of Americans will have to repay. Nor has he proposed a practical alternative to our wasteful energy policy that guarantees our continued dependence on Persian Gulf oil for decades to come.
I am sure that what our military is doing to train the Iraqi Army and what our billions of dollars are doing to help rebuild Iraq - whatever is not stolen or wasted by profiteering contractors - are making a difference. Iraq is no longer governed by a corrupt, ruthless dictator, and there have been halting but important steps toward representative government.
I applaud the Iraqis who courageously stood in long lines and cast their ballots for a new constitution, despite the insurgents' threats. There are many profiles in courage among the Iraqi people, just as there are in the heroic daily endeavors of U.S. soldiers there.
But this progress masks deeper troubles and may be short lived, threatened by a widening insurgency and a divisive political process that is increasingly seen as leading to a Shiite dominated theocracy governed by Islamic law and aligned with Iran, or the dissolution of Iraq into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite states.
Escalating Toll, Escalating Costs
Mr. President, this war has been a costly disaster for our country. More than half of the American people now say they have lost confidence in the President's handling of it.
Far from making us safer from terrorists, in fact it has turned Iraq into a haven and recruiting ground for terrorists and deflected our attention and resources away from the fight against terrorism. If anything, it has emboldened our enemies, as it has become increasingly apparent that the most powerful army in the world cannot stop a determined insurgency.
Regrettably, it is no longer a secret how vulnerable we are, and Hurricane Katrina showed how tragically unprepared we are to respond to a major disaster - four years after 9/11 and after wasting billions on an unnecessary war.
Our cities are little further than the drawing board when it comes to developing workable evacuation plans for a terrorist attack or other emergency, not to mention how to feed, house and provide for millions of displaced people.
This war has caused immense damage to our relations with the world's Muslims, a religion practiced by some 1.2 billion people and about which most Americans know virtually nothing. We cannot possibly mount an effective campaign against terrorism without the trust, the respect and the active support of Muslims, particularly in the Middle East where our image has been so badly damaged. Our weakened international reputation is another heavy price that our country has paid for this war.
Each day, as more and more Iraqi civilians, often children, lose their lives and limbs from suicide bombers and also from our bombs, the resentment and anger toward us intensifies.
And every week, the number of U.S. service men and women who are killed or wounded creeps higher, will soon pass 2000, and shows no sign of diminishing.
This war has isolated us from our allies, most of whom want no part of it, and if we continue on the course the President has set it could also divide our country.
Course Correction
Other Senators and Representatives, Republicans and Democrats, have expressed frustration and alarm with the President's failure to acknowledge that this war has been a costly mistake, that more of the same is not a workable policy, and that we need to change course. My friend Senator Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, has pointed out the increasing similarities with Vietnam. We learned this week that the Administration has even resumed the discredited Vietnam-era practice of measuring progress by reporting body counts.
White House and Pentagon officials, and their staunchest supporters in Congress, warn of a wider civil war if we pull our troops out. They could be right. In fact, it could be the first thing they are right about since the beginning of this reckless adventure.
My question to them is, when and how then do we extract ourselves from this mess? What does the President believe needs to happen before our troops can come home, and what is his plan for getting to that point? If we cannot overcome the insurgency, what can we realistically expect to accomplish in Iraq, and at what cost, that requires the continued deployment of our troops?
What is it that compels us to spend billions of dollars to rebuild the Iraqi military, when our own National Guard is stretched to the breaking point and can't even get the equipment it needs?
Unfortunately I doubt that the President or the Secretary of Defense will answer these questions. Instead of answers, we get rhetoric that conflicts with just about everything we hear or read, including from some of this country's most distinguished retired military officers who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
Six months ago the Vice President said the insurgency was in its last throes. That was just the latest in a long string of grossly inaccurate statements and predictions and false expectations about Iraq.
Secretary Rice, when asked recently when U.S. forces could begin to come home assuming the Administration's rosy predictions come true, could not, or would not, even venture a guess.
Without answers - real answers, honest answers - to these questions, I will not support the open-ended deployment of our troops in a war that was based on falsehoods and justified with hubris.
Even though I opposed this war, I have prayed, like other Americans, that it would weaken the threat of terrorism and make the world safer, that our troops' sacrifices would prove to have been justified and that the President had a plan for completing the mission.
Instead, it has turned Iraq into a training ground for terrorists, it is fueling the insurgency, it is causing severe damage to the reputation and readiness of the U.S. military, and it is preventing us from addressing the inexcusable weaknesses in our homeland security. The Iraqi people, at least the Shiites and Kurds, have voted for a new constitution, as hastily drafted, flawed and potentially divisive as it may be.
Saddam Hussein, whose capacity for cruelty was seemingly limitless, is finally facing trial for his heinous crimes.
And elections for a new national government are due by the end of the year.
By then, it will be more than two and a half years since Saddam's overthrow, and we will have given the Iraqi people a chance to chart their own course. The sooner we reduce our presence there, the sooner they will have to make the difficult decisions necessary to solve their own problems.
Our military commanders say that Iraq's problems increasingly need to be solved through the political process, not through military force. We must show Iraq and the world that we are not an occupying force, and that we have no designs on their country or their oil. The American people need to know that the President has a plan that will bring our troops home.
Once a new Iraqi government is in place, I believe the President should consult with Congress on a flexible plan that includes pulling our troops back from the densely populated areas where they are suffering the worst casualties and to bring them home. Those consultations should begin in earnest as soon as Iraq's new government is in place. It is also long overdue for the White House and the Congress to reassess our policy towards the region. The President has declared that democracy is taking root throughout the Middle East, and there have been small, positive steps. But they are dwarfed by the ongoing threat posed by Iran, Syria's continued meddling in Iraq and Lebanon, repression and corruption in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the danger that the momentum for peace from Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will be lost as settlement construction accelerates in the West Bank, and the widespread - albeit mistaken - belief among Muslims that the United States wants to destroy Islam itself.
Just as the White House's obsession with Iraq has diverted our resources and impeded our efforts to strengthen our defenses against terrorism at home, so has it made it more difficult to work constructively with our allies to address these regional threats. Mr. President, as I have said, I did not support this war, and I believe that history will not judge kindly those who got us into this debacle by attacking a country that did not threaten us, after deceiving the American people and ridiculing those who appealed for caution and for instead mobilizing our resources directly against the threat of terrorism.
I worry that many of our young veterans - nearly one million so far - who have gone to Iraq and experienced the brutality and trauma of war and who may already feel guilty for having survived, will increasingly question its purpose. As the architects of this war move on to other jobs, fear that we are going to see another generation of veterans, many of them physically and psychologically scarred for life, who feel a deep sense of betrayal by their government.
Mounting Trade-Offs
If President Bush will not say what remains to be done before he can declare victory and bring our troops home, then the Congress should start voting on what this war is really costing this Nation.
We should vote on paying for the war versus cutting Medicaid, as some of those across the aisle are proposing.
Or versus cutting VA programs that are already unable to pay the staggering costs of treatment and rehabilitation for our injured veterans.
Or versus rebuilding our National Guard.
Or rebuilding FEMA.
Or securing our ports and our borders.
Or investing in our intelligence so we can finally capture Osama bin Laden.
Or investing in health care for the tens of millions of Americans who can not afford to get sick.
Or fixing our troubled schools, so our children can learn to do a better job than we have of making the world a safer place for all people.
Mr. President, these, and the tarnished reputation of a country that so many once admired as not only powerful but also good and just, are the real costs of this war.
-------
The War in Iraq
Senate Floor
Tuesday 25 October 2005
Following is Sen. Patrick Leahy's address on Iraq, delivered Tuesday morning on the Senate floor. Leahy (D-Vt.) is the ranking member of the Appropriations panel that handles the Senate's work in funding the State Department and US foreign operations and aid, and he also is a senior member of the Appropriations panel with jurisdiction over the annual defense budget bill. Leahy was one of 23 senators who voted against the resolution that authorized the invasion of Iraq.
Mr. Leahy: Three years ago when the Congress and the country debated the resolution to give President Bush the authority to launch a preemptive war against Iraq, reference was often made to the lessons of Vietnam.
Unheeded Lessons
There are many lessons, both of that war and of the efforts to end it. But one that made a deep impression on me came from former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the architect of that war, who said our greatest mistake was not understanding our enemy.
Vietnam was a relatively simple country that had changed little in the preceding 3,000 years. It was, for the most part, racially, ethnically, linguistically and religiously homogenous. One would have thought it would have been easy for U.S. military and political leaders to understand.
Apparently it was not. The White House and the Pentagon, convinced that no country, particularly not a tiny impoverished land of rice farmers, could withstand the military might of the United States, never bothered to study and understand the history or culture of Vietnam, and they made tragic miscalculations. They lacked the most basic knowledge of the motivation, the capabilities and the resolve of the people they were fighting.
At the start of the Iraq war, those who drew some analogies to Vietnam were ridiculed by the Pentagon and the White House. Iraq is not Vietnam, they insisted. Our troops would be greeted as liberators. Troop strength was not a concern. Our mission would be quickly accomplished. Democracy would spread throughout the Middle East. Freedom was on the march.
It is true that Vietnam and Iraq are vastly different societies. But the point was not that they are similar, but that some of the same lessons apply. We did not understand Vietnam - a simple country - and we paid a huge price for our ignorance and our arrogance.
Iraq - a complex country comprised of rival clans, tribes and ethic and religious factions who have fought each other for centuries - we understand even less.
If this were not apparent to many at the start of this ill-conceived and politically motivated war - a war I opposed from the beginning - it should be obvious today. Yet to listen to the Secretary of Defense, or to the President or the Vice President, one would never know it.
Misled into War
We know today that President Bush decided to invade Iraq without evidence to support the use of force and well before Congress passed the resolution giving him the authority to do so - authority he did not even believe he needed - despite the Constitution which invests in the Congress the power to declare war. Twenty-three Senators voted against that resolution, and I was proud to be one of them.
We know today that the motivation for a plan to attack Iraq, hatched by a handful of political operatives, had taken hold within the White House even before 9/11, and without any connection to the war on terrorism that came later.
We know that the key public justifications for the war - to stop Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons and supporting al Qaeda - were based on faulty intelligence and outright distortions and have been thoroughly discredited. United Nations weapons inspectors, who were dismissed by the White House as naïve and ineffective, turned out to have gathered far better information with a tiny fraction of the budget than our own intelligence agencies.
And we know that the insurgency is continuing to grow along with American casualties - 1,999 killed and at least 15,220 wounded, as of yesterday - despite the same old light at the end of the tunnel assertions and clichés by the White House and top officials in the Pentagon.
The sad but inescapable truth, which the President either does not see or refuses to believe or admit, is that the Iraqi insurgency has steadily grown, in part because of our presence there.
'Bring Them On'
After baiting the insurgents to "bring them on," we got what the President asked for. More than two years later, the pendulum swung against us, and the question is no longer whether we can stop the insurgency, but how to extricate ourselves.
According to soldiers who volunteered for duty in Iraq believing in the mission and who have returned home, many Iraqis who detest the barbaric tactics of the insurgents have grown to despise us. They blame us for the lack of water and electricity, for the lack of jobs and health care, for the hardships and violence they are suffering day in and day out.
Unlike our troops and their families who make great sacrifices, most Americans have been asked to sacrifice nothing for this war. The bills are being sent to our children and grandchildren, by way of our rapidly escalating national debt and annual deficits. Yet as the hundreds of billions dollars to pay for the war continue to pile up and domestic programs like Medicaid, job training and programs for needy students are cut, the sacrifices will be felt today as well.
Slogans have become little more than political rallying cries for the White House. Slogans as empty and unfulfilled as "mission accomplished." Our troops were sent to fight an unnecessary war without sufficient armor against these ruthless and barbaric bombing attacks, without adequate reinforcements, without a plan to win the peace, and without adequate medical care and other services when they return home on stretchers or crutches or with eye patches, unable to walk, to work, to pay their mortgages, or to support their families. Many of our veterans have been treated shamefully by their government when it sent them into harm's way under false pretences, and again after they returned home.
Today I worry about places like Ramadi, where more than 300 members of the Army National Guard from my State of Vermont are currently serving valiantly alongside their comrades in the Marine Corps and the Pennsylvania National Guard. Dozens of other citizen-soldiers from the Vermont Guard are serving across Iraq, while hundreds are deployed throughout the Persian Gulf region.
Many Vermonters have been killed in Ramadi and elsewhere by roadside bombs and all-too accurate sniper attacks.
The insurgents too often seem to attack and then escape with impunity. You can open a newspaper and see photos of armed insurgents walking the streets in broad daylight. Many of these cold-blooded attacks are by people who are willing to trade their own lives to kill civilians, security guards, and our soldiers who have no way of knowing who they can trust among the general population.
'More of the Same' Is Not Working
The President has no plan to deal with Ramadi, let alone the rest of Iraq, except doing more of what we have been doing for more than two years, at a cost of $5 billion a month - money we do not have and that future generations of Americans will have to repay. Nor has he proposed a practical alternative to our wasteful energy policy that guarantees our continued dependence on Persian Gulf oil for decades to come.
I am sure that what our military is doing to train the Iraqi Army and what our billions of dollars are doing to help rebuild Iraq - whatever is not stolen or wasted by profiteering contractors - are making a difference. Iraq is no longer governed by a corrupt, ruthless dictator, and there have been halting but important steps toward representative government.
I applaud the Iraqis who courageously stood in long lines and cast their ballots for a new constitution, despite the insurgents' threats. There are many profiles in courage among the Iraqi people, just as there are in the heroic daily endeavors of U.S. soldiers there.
But this progress masks deeper troubles and may be short lived, threatened by a widening insurgency and a divisive political process that is increasingly seen as leading to a Shiite dominated theocracy governed by Islamic law and aligned with Iran, or the dissolution of Iraq into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite states.
Escalating Toll, Escalating Costs
Mr. President, this war has been a costly disaster for our country. More than half of the American people now say they have lost confidence in the President's handling of it.
Far from making us safer from terrorists, in fact it has turned Iraq into a haven and recruiting ground for terrorists and deflected our attention and resources away from the fight against terrorism. If anything, it has emboldened our enemies, as it has become increasingly apparent that the most powerful army in the world cannot stop a determined insurgency.
Regrettably, it is no longer a secret how vulnerable we are, and Hurricane Katrina showed how tragically unprepared we are to respond to a major disaster - four years after 9/11 and after wasting billions on an unnecessary war.
Our cities are little further than the drawing board when it comes to developing workable evacuation plans for a terrorist attack or other emergency, not to mention how to feed, house and provide for millions of displaced people.
This war has caused immense damage to our relations with the world's Muslims, a religion practiced by some 1.2 billion people and about which most Americans know virtually nothing. We cannot possibly mount an effective campaign against terrorism without the trust, the respect and the active support of Muslims, particularly in the Middle East where our image has been so badly damaged. Our weakened international reputation is another heavy price that our country has paid for this war.
Each day, as more and more Iraqi civilians, often children, lose their lives and limbs from suicide bombers and also from our bombs, the resentment and anger toward us intensifies.
And every week, the number of U.S. service men and women who are killed or wounded creeps higher, will soon pass 2000, and shows no sign of diminishing.
This war has isolated us from our allies, most of whom want no part of it, and if we continue on the course the President has set it could also divide our country.
Course Correction
Other Senators and Representatives, Republicans and Democrats, have expressed frustration and alarm with the President's failure to acknowledge that this war has been a costly mistake, that more of the same is not a workable policy, and that we need to change course. My friend Senator Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, has pointed out the increasing similarities with Vietnam. We learned this week that the Administration has even resumed the discredited Vietnam-era practice of measuring progress by reporting body counts.
White House and Pentagon officials, and their staunchest supporters in Congress, warn of a wider civil war if we pull our troops out. They could be right. In fact, it could be the first thing they are right about since the beginning of this reckless adventure.
My question to them is, when and how then do we extract ourselves from this mess? What does the President believe needs to happen before our troops can come home, and what is his plan for getting to that point? If we cannot overcome the insurgency, what can we realistically expect to accomplish in Iraq, and at what cost, that requires the continued deployment of our troops?
What is it that compels us to spend billions of dollars to rebuild the Iraqi military, when our own National Guard is stretched to the breaking point and can't even get the equipment it needs?
Unfortunately I doubt that the President or the Secretary of Defense will answer these questions. Instead of answers, we get rhetoric that conflicts with just about everything we hear or read, including from some of this country's most distinguished retired military officers who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
Six months ago the Vice President said the insurgency was in its last throes. That was just the latest in a long string of grossly inaccurate statements and predictions and false expectations about Iraq.
Secretary Rice, when asked recently when U.S. forces could begin to come home assuming the Administration's rosy predictions come true, could not, or would not, even venture a guess.
Without answers - real answers, honest answers - to these questions, I will not support the open-ended deployment of our troops in a war that was based on falsehoods and justified with hubris.
Even though I opposed this war, I have prayed, like other Americans, that it would weaken the threat of terrorism and make the world safer, that our troops' sacrifices would prove to have been justified and that the President had a plan for completing the mission.
Instead, it has turned Iraq into a training ground for terrorists, it is fueling the insurgency, it is causing severe damage to the reputation and readiness of the U.S. military, and it is preventing us from addressing the inexcusable weaknesses in our homeland security. The Iraqi people, at least the Shiites and Kurds, have voted for a new constitution, as hastily drafted, flawed and potentially divisive as it may be.
Saddam Hussein, whose capacity for cruelty was seemingly limitless, is finally facing trial for his heinous crimes.
And elections for a new national government are due by the end of the year.
By then, it will be more than two and a half years since Saddam's overthrow, and we will have given the Iraqi people a chance to chart their own course. The sooner we reduce our presence there, the sooner they will have to make the difficult decisions necessary to solve their own problems.
Our military commanders say that Iraq's problems increasingly need to be solved through the political process, not through military force. We must show Iraq and the world that we are not an occupying force, and that we have no designs on their country or their oil. The American people need to know that the President has a plan that will bring our troops home.
Once a new Iraqi government is in place, I believe the President should consult with Congress on a flexible plan that includes pulling our troops back from the densely populated areas where they are suffering the worst casualties and to bring them home. Those consultations should begin in earnest as soon as Iraq's new government is in place. It is also long overdue for the White House and the Congress to reassess our policy towards the region. The President has declared that democracy is taking root throughout the Middle East, and there have been small, positive steps. But they are dwarfed by the ongoing threat posed by Iran, Syria's continued meddling in Iraq and Lebanon, repression and corruption in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the danger that the momentum for peace from Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will be lost as settlement construction accelerates in the West Bank, and the widespread - albeit mistaken - belief among Muslims that the United States wants to destroy Islam itself.
Just as the White House's obsession with Iraq has diverted our resources and impeded our efforts to strengthen our defenses against terrorism at home, so has it made it more difficult to work constructively with our allies to address these regional threats. Mr. President, as I have said, I did not support this war, and I believe that history will not judge kindly those who got us into this debacle by attacking a country that did not threaten us, after deceiving the American people and ridiculing those who appealed for caution and for instead mobilizing our resources directly against the threat of terrorism.
I worry that many of our young veterans - nearly one million so far - who have gone to Iraq and experienced the brutality and trauma of war and who may already feel guilty for having survived, will increasingly question its purpose. As the architects of this war move on to other jobs, fear that we are going to see another generation of veterans, many of them physically and psychologically scarred for life, who feel a deep sense of betrayal by their government.
Mounting Trade-Offs
If President Bush will not say what remains to be done before he can declare victory and bring our troops home, then the Congress should start voting on what this war is really costing this Nation.
We should vote on paying for the war versus cutting Medicaid, as some of those across the aisle are proposing.
Or versus cutting VA programs that are already unable to pay the staggering costs of treatment and rehabilitation for our injured veterans.
Or versus rebuilding our National Guard.
Or rebuilding FEMA.
Or securing our ports and our borders.
Or investing in our intelligence so we can finally capture Osama bin Laden.
Or investing in health care for the tens of millions of Americans who can not afford to get sick.
Or fixing our troubled schools, so our children can learn to do a better job than we have of making the world a safer place for all people.
Mr. President, these, and the tarnished reputation of a country that so many once admired as not only powerful but also good and just, are the real costs of this war.
-------
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Conservative Crackup; How the neocons have developed a political exit strategy
President George W. Bush may have no military exit strategy for Iraq, but the “neocons” who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own—a political one: Blame the Administration. Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.
The flight of the neocons—just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about —is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.
msnbc.msn.com
The flight of the neocons—just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about —is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.
msnbc.msn.com
Russia to have bird flu vaccine ready by March
MOSCOW, October 25 (Itar-Tass) - Russia's research institute for influenza is launching clinical trials of a bird flu vaccine on volunteers, institute director Oleg Kiselyov said at the 3rd congress of the Russian society of biotechnologists on Tuesday. "We developed a vaccine in May; it's now necessary to try it on people for effectiveness," Kiselyov said noting that tests will begin "any day." The Health and Social Development Ministry together with the Rospotrebnadzor federal agency for the Protection of Consumer Rights and Human Welfare have allowed clinical trials in which 20 volunteers will take part.
Indictments Coming Tomorrow; Targets Received Letters Today
October 25, 2005
An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN:
1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.
2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.
3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and "filed" tomorrow.
4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.
The shoe is dropping.
More soon.
An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN:
1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.
2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.
3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and "filed" tomorrow.
4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.
The shoe is dropping.
More soon.
Harness Racing Results for 10-25-05
Record since 04-26-05
Win (235)
Place (67)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (62)
****************************
Harrington Raceway
Race # 6
Horse: IMA PRINCE TOO (Place)
Post Position: # 5
Race # 7
Horse: PHARLAPATROSS (Out of the Money)
Post Position: # 7
Race # 12
Horse: TRY KACY (Won)
Post Position: # 4
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 1
Horse: VERONICA SPEEDWELL (Out of the Money)
Post Position: # 7
Race # 5
Horse: TY'S MAN (Won)
Post Position: # 1
Win (235)
Place (67)
Show (14)
Out of the Money (62)
****************************
Harrington Raceway
Race # 6
Horse: IMA PRINCE TOO (Place)
Post Position: # 5
Race # 7
Horse: PHARLAPATROSS (Out of the Money)
Post Position: # 7
Race # 12
Horse: TRY KACY (Won)
Post Position: # 4
****************************
Pocono Downs
Race # 1
Horse: VERONICA SPEEDWELL (Out of the Money)
Post Position: # 7
Race # 5
Horse: TY'S MAN (Won)
Post Position: # 1
Help stop conservative misinformation about the CIA leak investigation
As special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald completes his investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, conservatives are launching an aggressive misinformation campaign.
To fight this campaign, Media Matters for America has documented and corrected the top falsehoods in the press (included below), but we need your help to stop these falsehoods from spreading.
Don't let conservative misinformation dominate the discussion in the days and weeks ahead. Help us make sure your friends and neighbors aren't misled by conservative misinformation:Please pass on the article below!
(As news of developments in the investigation breaks, visit Media Matters to see the latest conservative misinformation.)
Top CIA leak investigation falsehoods
As U.S. attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald's two-year investigation into the CIA leak case reportedly draws to a close, the long-standing debate over the origins of the scandal, the merits of the federal investigation, and the legal authority of the prosecutor has intensified greatly. At issue is the disclosure to the press of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, which first appeared in syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak's July 14, 2003, column. Bush administration officials allegedly leaked her identity in order to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a vocal critic of the White House's decision to go to war with Iraq.
In this rhetorical environment characterized by limited information and boundless speculation, those defending the officials at the center of Fitzgerald's probe have advanced numerous falsehoods and distortions. As Media Matters for America documents below, the media have not only failed to challenge many of these claims, but also repeated them.
Falsehood: It is legally significant whether the leakers disclosed Plame's name in their conversations with reporters Shortly after Newsweek published an email by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to Time Washington bureau chief Mike Duffy saying that, according to White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, "Wilson's wife" worked at the CIA, Rove's lawyer responded by noting that his client had not stated her actual name. Several news outlets went on to report Rove's response as if his reported omission of Plame's name was relevant to whether he violated the law. Simultaneously, commentators such as former presidential adviser David Gergen and Washington Times chief political correspondent Donald Lambro, as well as the Republican National Committee (RNC), began to advance the argument that because Rove didn't specifically name her, he did not reveal her identity.
But whether leakers identified Plame as "Valerie Plame," "Valerie Wilson," or "Wilson's wife" is irrelevant, both as a practical matter and likely as a legal matter. Practically speaking, a quick Google search of Joseph Wilson at the time would have produced Plame's actual name. As such, administration defenders have declared that whether her name was mentioned to reporters likely has no bearing on whether there was a violation of the law.
Despite having previously implied that there is a meaningful distinction between disclosing her name and her identity before, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, later conceded that drawing such a line was "too legalistic." Similarly, Victoria Toensing, the Republican lawyer who helped draft the potentially applicable 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), agreed that the use of her name is "not an important part of whether this is a crime or not."
Nonetheless, numerous media figures recently revived this claim in the wake of New York Times reporter Judith Miller's revelation that the source who told her that Plame worked at the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, also never disclosed her actual name.
Falsehood: Wilson said that Cheney sent him to Niger
An RNC talking points memo made public on July 12 accused Wilson of falsely claiming "that it was Vice President Cheney who sent him to Niger." The allegation that Wilson had lied about the genesis of his trip was soon repeated by RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, who argued that this fact justified the purported leaking of Plame's identity to the press and that the White House had simply been attempting to set the record straight.
New York Times columnist David Brooks made this argument at least twice (here and here). And a string of journalists and commentators -- including CNN's Dana Bash, The Washington Post's Mike Allen, Newsweek's Jon Meacham, and U.S. News and World Report's Michael Barone -- parroted the allegation during news reports and media appearances in the following weeks. NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell recently repeated the claim as a guest on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews.
But Wilson never said that Cheney sent him to Niger. To support this accusation, the RNC had misrepresented his July 6, 2003, op-ed in The New York Times and distorted a remark he made in an August 3, 2003, interview on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. Contrary to their allegation, Wilson clearly stated in the op-ed that "agency officials" had requested he travel to Niger. Further, in the CNN appearance, he stated it was "absolutely true" that Cheney was unaware he went on the trip.
.....MORE......
To fight this campaign, Media Matters for America has documented and corrected the top falsehoods in the press (included below), but we need your help to stop these falsehoods from spreading.
Don't let conservative misinformation dominate the discussion in the days and weeks ahead. Help us make sure your friends and neighbors aren't misled by conservative misinformation:Please pass on the article below!
(As news of developments in the investigation breaks, visit Media Matters to see the latest conservative misinformation.)
Top CIA leak investigation falsehoods
As U.S. attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald's two-year investigation into the CIA leak case reportedly draws to a close, the long-standing debate over the origins of the scandal, the merits of the federal investigation, and the legal authority of the prosecutor has intensified greatly. At issue is the disclosure to the press of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, which first appeared in syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak's July 14, 2003, column. Bush administration officials allegedly leaked her identity in order to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a vocal critic of the White House's decision to go to war with Iraq.
In this rhetorical environment characterized by limited information and boundless speculation, those defending the officials at the center of Fitzgerald's probe have advanced numerous falsehoods and distortions. As Media Matters for America documents below, the media have not only failed to challenge many of these claims, but also repeated them.
Falsehood: It is legally significant whether the leakers disclosed Plame's name in their conversations with reporters Shortly after Newsweek published an email by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to Time Washington bureau chief Mike Duffy saying that, according to White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, "Wilson's wife" worked at the CIA, Rove's lawyer responded by noting that his client had not stated her actual name. Several news outlets went on to report Rove's response as if his reported omission of Plame's name was relevant to whether he violated the law. Simultaneously, commentators such as former presidential adviser David Gergen and Washington Times chief political correspondent Donald Lambro, as well as the Republican National Committee (RNC), began to advance the argument that because Rove didn't specifically name her, he did not reveal her identity.
But whether leakers identified Plame as "Valerie Plame," "Valerie Wilson," or "Wilson's wife" is irrelevant, both as a practical matter and likely as a legal matter. Practically speaking, a quick Google search of Joseph Wilson at the time would have produced Plame's actual name. As such, administration defenders have declared that whether her name was mentioned to reporters likely has no bearing on whether there was a violation of the law.
Despite having previously implied that there is a meaningful distinction between disclosing her name and her identity before, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, later conceded that drawing such a line was "too legalistic." Similarly, Victoria Toensing, the Republican lawyer who helped draft the potentially applicable 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), agreed that the use of her name is "not an important part of whether this is a crime or not."
Nonetheless, numerous media figures recently revived this claim in the wake of New York Times reporter Judith Miller's revelation that the source who told her that Plame worked at the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, also never disclosed her actual name.
Falsehood: Wilson said that Cheney sent him to Niger
An RNC talking points memo made public on July 12 accused Wilson of falsely claiming "that it was Vice President Cheney who sent him to Niger." The allegation that Wilson had lied about the genesis of his trip was soon repeated by RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, who argued that this fact justified the purported leaking of Plame's identity to the press and that the White House had simply been attempting to set the record straight.
New York Times columnist David Brooks made this argument at least twice (here and here). And a string of journalists and commentators -- including CNN's Dana Bash, The Washington Post's Mike Allen, Newsweek's Jon Meacham, and U.S. News and World Report's Michael Barone -- parroted the allegation during news reports and media appearances in the following weeks. NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell recently repeated the claim as a guest on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews.
But Wilson never said that Cheney sent him to Niger. To support this accusation, the RNC had misrepresented his July 6, 2003, op-ed in The New York Times and distorted a remark he made in an August 3, 2003, interview on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. Contrary to their allegation, Wilson clearly stated in the op-ed that "agency officials" had requested he travel to Niger. Further, in the CNN appearance, he stated it was "absolutely true" that Cheney was unaware he went on the trip.
.....MORE......