August 2004: Week Four: Page Three: This Far and No Further

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August 27: Mid-level Pentagon official Larry Franklin, a part of the "axis of neocons" brought into the Defense Department by Donald Rumsfeld, is under FBI investigation for illegally passing classified information to Israel. Franklin is as a desk officer in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Bureau, one of six regional policy sections; he worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency before moving to the Pentagon's policy branch three years ago. Franklin is also a key member of William Luti's shadowy Office of Special Plans (detailed elsewhere in this site), which helped massage and fabricate intelligence on Iraq, and helped codify Bush's plans to invade Iraq. It is not yet clear whether the case will rise to the level of espionage or end up involving lesser charges such as improper disclosure or mishandling of classified information. While Franklin and possibly other Pentagon officials have been under investigation for months, the press only learns of it today. The classified information allegedly passed by Franklin went to Israel through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying organization. The information was said to have been the draft of a presidential directive related to US policies toward Iran. In addition to Franklin, the FBI investigation is focusing on at least two employees at AIPAC, which denies any wrongdoing by any of its officials. It is later learned that the FBI secured hard evidence against Franklin after raiding the offices of AIPAC policy director Steve Rosen and examining his computer drives.
Franklin's name surfaced in news reports last year that disclosed he and another Pentagon specialist on the Persian Gulf region had met secretly with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a discredited expatriate Iranian arms merchant who figured prominently in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s. That meeting, according to Pentagon officials, took place in late 2001. It had been formally sanctioned by the US government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. Franklin and the other Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, met with the Iranians over three days in Italy. Ghorbanifar attended these meetings. Rumsfeld has said that the information received at the meetings led nowhere.
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy, says that Franklin's alleged leaks to Israel damages the US image abroad: "it hurts us from the standpoint that the perception was that the reason we went into Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and had more to do with securing Israel's future. And I'm not saying that securing Israel's future is a bad thing, but that was really perceived by many in the world as the real reason behind the war in Iraq." Johnson also says that the Franklin spy allegations are connected to the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson: "And you know it is—it actually is tied into the forged memo regarding the sale of uranium to Iraq from Niger. ...What I've been told is that there's a strong belief that the forgery was carried out by Israel in an effort to help build up the evidence to allow the United States to justify going to war. So, this whole thing that started with the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA officer, started growing and expanding when they saw that there's this forged memo and then people linked to the office of -- in the office of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas [Feith] at the Department of Defense were seen as having some very close contacts and sharing information with the Israeli intelligence sources."
But others see the Franklin case as much farther reaching than a simple instance of an overenthusiastic Pentagon official passing along secret documents to the US's closest ally. The Washington Monthly says the Franklin case is indicative of "the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a 'regime change' agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself." A strong allegation, but one supported by the facts surrounding the Franklin incident.
Middle East expert and Iraq war opponent Juan Cole writes that Franklin's investigation is "an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran." (Some Defense neocons wanted Syria included in that list.) They would use the 9/11 attacks as an excude to "use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv...." Cole says that when Franklin moved to the Defense Department, he became Paul Wolfowitz's and Douglas Feith's "go to" person on Iran -- a tragedy, "since Franklin is not a real Iranist." Apparently Franklin's main task at the Pentagon was to push the policy of regime change in Iran. Cole writes, "This project has been pushed by the shadowy eminence grise, Michael Ledeen, for many years, and Franklin coordinated with Ledeen in some way. Franklin was also close to Harold Rhode, a long-time Middle East specialist in the Defense Department who has cultivated far right pro-Likud cronies for many years, more or less establishing a cell within the Department of Defense."
Both the Washington Monthly and Cole note Rhode's close association with Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, as well as both Franklin and Rhode's numerous meetings with Iranian arms merchant and con man Manucher Ghorbanifar, a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. The now-famous December 2001 meetings in Rome, which included Ledeen, Franklin, Rhode, Ghorbanifar, the director of Italy's military intelligence service, SISMI, and Italy's minister of defense, the overthrow of the Iranian government was a central topic of discussion. Links between Italy deepen when one remembers, as Cole does, that the rightist Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi is a stalwart ally of Bush and a supporter of the Iraq occupation, and the forged documents purporting to prove that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger originated with a former SISMI agent. What is not as well documented is that those forged documents also tried to implicate Iran, and painted a lurid, if far-fetched, picture of a joint Iran-Iraq nuclear plot -- in fact, it was this idea that first alerted the State Department's own intelligence service that the document were too outrageous in their implications to be real.
Cole writes, "So Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode, all of them pro-Likud operatives, just happen to be meeting with SISMI (the proto-fascist purveyor of the false Niger uranium story about Iraq and the alleged Iran-Iraq plot against the rest of the world) and corrupt Iranian businessman and would-be revolutionary, Ghorbanifar, in Europe. The most reasonable conclusion is that they were conspiring together about the Next Campaign after Iraq, which they had already begun setting in train, which is to get Iran." And Cole quotes the Jerusalem Post as reporting that one goal of the meetings was to find a way to undermine any possibility of improved US-Iranian relations: "The purpose of the meeting with Ghorbanifar was to undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government. At the time, Iran had considered turning over five al-Qaeda operatives in exchange for Washington dropping its support for Mujahadeen Khalq [MEK], an Iraq-based rebel Iranian group listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department." Cole believes that the support for MEK among Washington's neoconservatives is "presumably [because] its leaders have secretly promised to recognize Israel if they ever succeed in overthrowing the ayatollahs in Iran. When the US recently categorized the MEK as a terrorist organization, there were howls of outrage from 'scholars' associated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (a wing of AIPAC), such as ex-Trotskyite Patrick Clawson and Daniel Pipes. MEK is a terrorist organization by any definition of the term, having blown up innocent people in the course of its struggle against the Khomeini government. (MEK is a cult-like mixture of Marx and Islam). The MEK had allied with Saddam, who gave them bases in Iraq from which to hit Iran. When the US overthrew Saddam, it raised the question of what to do with the MEK. The pro-Likud faction in the Pentagon wanted to go on developing their relationship with the MEK and using it against Tehran.
A trade of captured MEK members for five high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives would have been a good thing for the US by any measure, but not for Ledeen, Franklin, and their ad hoc cabal: they worked with Ghorbanifar and SISMI to scotch the transfer, Cole writes: "It would have led to better US-Iran relations, which they wanted to forestall, and it would have damaged their proteges, the MEK." And, Cole notes, "Since high al-Qaeda operatives like Saif al-Adil and possibly even Saad Bin Laden might know about future operations, or the whereabouts of bin Laden, for Franklin and Rhode to stop the trade grossly endangered the United States."
Cole doesn't believe that the fact of Franklin's passing of a draft presidential directive to AIPAC is anything more than the tip of a very ugly iceberg. "Franklin was not giving the directive to AIPAC in order to provide them with information," he writes. "He was almost certainly seeking feedback from them on elements of it. He was asking, 'Do you like this? Should it be changed in any way?'" Franklin, according to Cole, wanted to alert AIPAC to the directive to better prepare it for its upcoming lobbying campaign to pressure Congress into authorizing military action against Iran, and to give the Israelis a chance to see the directive and have their own input. "...AIPAC and Israel were helping write US policy toward Iran, just as they had played a key role in fomenting the Iraq war."
What is the purpose of all of this shadowy manuevering? Cole writes that with Iran and Iraq in chaos, Israel's rightists could do pretty much what it pleased in the Middle East without fear of serious reprisal -- expel the Palestinians to Jordan, annexing a long-coveted portion of south Lebanon, choke off Iranian support for Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas. Perhaps most importantly, at least for Bush officials, the closed economies of Iran and Iraq would be wide open, easy prey for US, Italian, and British corporations. Cole concludes, "Franklin's movements reveal the contours of a rightwing conspiracy of warmongering and aggression, an orgy of destruction, for the benefit of the Likud Party, of Silvio Berlusconi's business in the Middle East, and of the neoconservative right in the United States. It isn't about spying. It is about conspiring to conscript the US government on behalf of a foreign power or powers." (CBS News, Washington Post, MSNBC, Informed Comment, Washington Monthly)
August 27: The number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.3 million last year, while the ranks of the uninsured swelled by 1.4 million, the Census Bureau reports. It was the third straight annual increase for both categories. The double increase makes for particularly bad news for both the Bush re-election attempt and for the poor and uninsured of the country. Approximately 35.8 million people lived below the poverty line in 2003, or about 12.5 percent of the population, according to the bureau. That was up from 34.5 million, or 12.1 percent in 2002. The rise was more dramatic for children: there were 12.9 million living in poverty last year, or 17.6 percent of the under-18 population. That was an increase of about 800,000 from 2002, when 16.7 percent of all children were in poverty. Nearly 45 million people lacked health insurance, or 15.6 percent of the population. That was up from 43.5 million in 2002, or 15.2 percent, but was a smaller increase than in the two previous years. Meanwhile, the median household income, when adjusted for inflation, remained basically flat last year at $43,318. Whites, blacks and Asians saw no noticeable change, but income fell 2.6 percent for Hispanics to nearly $33,000. Asians had the highest income at over $55,000, while whites made $47,800 and blacks less than $30,000. "Under George Bush's watch, America's families are falling further behind," says John Kerry; administration officials blame the Senate's failure to pass Bush's health care plan for the rise in the uninsured. (AP/NewsMax)
August 27: A Florida judge rules that all voting machines used in the state must be able to provide for manual recounts if necessary, placing 15 counties who have bought touchscreen voting machines in possible legal jeopardy. Those touchscreen machines do not provide paper "receipts" for recounts, which violates Florida law, according to Judge Susan Kirkland. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, who issued the ruling preventing manual recounts in touchscreen counties in April, is considering appealing the decision, which would likely keep the rule in place until after the November election. (AP/Florida Times-Union)
August 27: In a bizarre exercise of "secrecy," the Justice Department redacts, or blacks out, part of a publicly available Supreme Court decision used as a portion of an ACLU filing in a lawsuit against the Justice Department. The ACLU is suing the DOJ over the unconstitutionality of the Patriot Act. The DOJ is allowed to black out portions of the court documents that might legitimately threaten national security, but it proves the entirely political nature of its redactions by blacking out the following quote from a Supreme Court decision used by the ACLU to justify its contentions: "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent." It seems as if the DOJ has proven the ACLU's case for it in its choice of censorship. (The Memory Hole)
August 27: Former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, who played a critical role in getting the young George W. Bush a coveted slot in the Texas Air National Guard in order for Bush to avoid serving in Vietnam, now says he is "very ashamed" of his role in getting Bush the position. "I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas National Guard when I was lieutenant governor, and I'm not necessarily proud of that," he says in a video released by the Kerry campaign. "But I did it. I got a lot of other people in the National Guard because I thought that was what people should do when you're in office, and you help a lot of rich people." Barnes continues, "I walked to the Vietnam Memorial the other day, and I looked at the names of the people that died in Vietnam, and I became more ashamed of myself than I have ever been, because it was the worst thing I ever did, was help a lot of wealthy supporters and a lot of people who had family names of importance get into the National Guard. And I'm very sorry about that, and I'm very ashamed, and I apologize to you as voters of Texas." Barnes then says, "I tell you that for the Republicans to jump on John Kerry and say that he is not a patriot after he went to Vietnam and was shot at and fought for our freedom and came back here and protested against the war, he's a flip-flopper, let me tell you: John Kerry is a 100 times better patriot than George Bush or Dick Cheney." (Salon)
August 27: The Bush-Cheney campaign continues its attempts to tar John Kerry by saying Kerry is the preferred presidential candidate of Osama bin Laden (including providing bumper stickers reading "Kerry is bin Laden's Man/Bush is Mine"). Ohio Republican county chairman Jack Richardson says, "Is there anybody that can honestly say bin Laden wouldn't prefer Kerry over Bush? If I was in bin Laden's shoes, I sure as heck would want Kerry." But others say that bin Laden may well prefer Bush. A recent Doonesbury comic suggested just that, with the strip blaming the Iraq war for creating "an incubator for a whole new generation of holy warriors" and for "so carelessly squandering America's moral authority." The final caption reads, "May he be re-elected! God willing! I'm Osama bin Laden, and I approve this message." Middle East expert Juan Cole agrees. "My guess is that al-Qaeda wants Bush," he says, adding that Bush has become the poster boy for jihadi recruiters seeking men, money and munitions to fight the invading Americans. Cole cites Bush's unequivocal support for Israel and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as fuel for bin Laden's anti-American fervor. "Their message is that Americans are coming to invade your country, rape your women and humiliate your men," Cole says. "They wanted the US to attack Afghanistan [and] Iraq. Al-Qaeda wants a series of escalating fights so that, ultimately, they'll have a really big battle. They think Bush is a sucker for this." The Cato Institute's Patrick Basham notes, "If you take Kerry at his word, it would appear that he would do less to irritate, rightly or wrongly, the fundamentalist Arab world. [But] there is every reason to believe that a Kerry administration, at this point in the nation's political evolution and context, would pursue an equally aggressive policy against al-Qaeda." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Global Security)
August 27: Newsweek columnist Eleanor Clift speculates that the rationale for the Bush campaign's tacit endorsement of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's charges against Kerry, no matter how far afield they go or how roundly they are refuted, is because the entire discussion takes voters' minds away from the debacle in Iraq. "This is essentially a net zero politically," says pollster James Zogby. "It's great kindling wood for the Republicans. It's the kind of stuff they need to hear just as Dems need to hear from Michael Moore." (Author's note: except that Moore, while indulging in propaganda tactics at times, tells the truth; the SBVT tells nothing but lies.) Zogby says that while most independent voters aren't listening to the debate, it does fire up the conservative base. "It's still the phony war period," says Zogby. Clift concludes, "For an incumbent president in as much trouble as Bush, fighting a war that's been over for nearly 30 years takes voters' minds off Iraq." (MSNBC)
August 27: West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran Gordon Livingston fires off a blast at what he calls the "Vietnam-era chickenhawks" such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who are busily tarring John Kerry's Vietnam service while ducking questions about their own failures to serve their country. He calls the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "contemptible," and charges Bush, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and others who refused to serve then, but now criticize Kerry's service, hypocrites. Livingston writes, "Whether he deserved his medals, whether he bled enough to justify three Purple Hearts, is irrelevant. That he went, in contrast to our current bellicose commander in chief, is enough, one would think, to earn the respect of those who chose not to. We have all, especially veterans, had enough of this contrived issue. ...I, too, opposed the war when I got home, based on what I had seen there. I am prouder of that than anything I did with a rifle in my hands. Like Kerry, I believed I had earned the right to speak out. I would prefer not to be criticized by those who didn't go at all." (Baltimore Sun/Seattle Times)

August 28: The New York Times reports on the secretive meeting of the Council for National Policy held just days before the GOP convention. As detailed elsewhere in this site, the CNP is one of the most powerful and least well-known organizations behind the rise of conservatism in America, with strong representation from evangelical Christian, political, and business figures. The meeting was held in New York, with its last day given to an unusually public political rally in support of Bush at the Plaza Hotel. At this meeting, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist accepted an award from the CNP, and told the gathering, "The destiny of our nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement." Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says, "The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren't going to be visible on television next week. ...But they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real powers in the party." Bush campaign spokesman Trent Duffy denies that the CNP or any other "secret group of conservatives" has any influence on the administration, even though Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and many other senior administration officials are either members of the CNP or have appeared at their meetings. Campaign advisor Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, spoke at the meeting on the topic of the November elections. The meeting this year included speeches by Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and Michael Peroutka of the ultraconservative Constitution Party. (New York Times/Yurica Report)
August 28: Secretary of State Colin Powell cancels his planned trip to the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Athens, Greece, citing a busy work schedule. The real reason seems to be the firestorm of protests slated to greet Powell upon his arrival. One of the organizers of the demonstrations, Yiannis Sifakakis, says the cancellation of the visit marks a "huge victory." Sifakakis says, "Of course, the cancellation was linked to our protests. It is very clear why he is not coming even if he is trying to come up with excuses. But whenever he should decide to come we will lay on the same welcome." (BBC)
August 28: Robert Lambert, a Swift Boat sailor decorated during the same firefight wherein John Kerry earned his Bronze Star, confirms that Kerry's boat indeed took severe fire from Viet Cong along the riverbank that day, and that his own boat commander, Larry Thurlow, a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who has maintained that Kerry falsified the story of the firefight to fraudulently receive his medal, was too distracted to notice Kerry's boat taking fire. Lambert, a retired chief petty officer, got his own Bronze Star for pulling Thurlow out of the Bay Hap River on March 13, 1969. Thurlow had jumped onto another Swift Boat to aid sailors wounded by a mine explosion but fell off when the out-of-control boat ran aground. Thurlow has said there was no enemy fire during the incident. Lambert, however, supports the Navy account that says all five Swift Boats in the task force "came under small arms and automatic weapon fire from the river banks" when the mine detonated. "Thurlow was far too distracted with rescue efforts to even realize he was under fire," Lambert recalls. "He was concentrating on trying to save lives." Lambert is no fan of Kerry's, and does not plan to vote for him because of Kerry's efforts against the war. But, Lamber says, "I don't like the man himself, but I think what happened happened, and he was there." Thurlow's contention that there was no firefight on the river that day is contradicted by Navy accounts, by the recollections of nearly a dozen American survivors of that mission, and by Thurlow's own receipt of a Bronze Star for his own valor in that battle. "When they blew the [mine under the third Swift Boat], everyone opened up on the banks with everything they had," Lambert recalls. "That was the normal procedure. When they came after you, they came after you. Somebody on shore blew that mine." (MSNBC)
August 28: On CNN's The Capital Gang, conservative pundit Robert Novak supports the claims of Rear Admiral William Schachte, who says he was the commander on the December 2, 1968 Swift Boat mission that saw John Kerry earn his first Purple Heart. Schachte says Kerry did not earn the medal. Unfortunately, Novak contradicts his own August 16 syndicated column in which he wrote that he had contacted Patrick Runyon and William Zaladonis, the two enlisted men who said they were on Kerry's boat during the mission. "Each said they did not know whether there was enemy fire and did not know how Kerry was wounded. But each said he was certain that they alone were in the boat with Kerry and did not even know Schachte," Novak wrote. Tonight, Novak touts Schachte's claims that he was on the mission and his denial that the boat ever took enemy fire. Even though an increasing stack of evidence shows that Schachte is lying, his claims are presented as fact by the New York Post, the Washington Times, and Capital Gang weekly panelist and National Review Washington editor Kate O'Beirne have all joined Novak in advancing Schachte's assertions. Novak tells co-panelist Al Hunt that he believes Runyon and Zaladonis may have changed their story, an assertion backed up with no facts whatsoever. Worse, Schachte himself described the mission in an April 2003 interview with the Boston Globe, calling it a "firefight" and saying of Kerry, "He got hit." In that interview, Schachte did not challenge Kerry's Purple Heart. The SBVT website itself says that only Kerry and the two enlisted men were on the Swift Boat, contradicting Schachte's claims that he was on board commanding the mission. Schachte's claims that he is "nonpartisan" and a "political independent" are also lies. Schachte has a history of political contributions heavily weighted to Republicans, including $1,000 contributions to George W. Bush's presidential campaigns in both 2000 and 2004. In addition, David Norcross, Schachte's colleague in the Washington office of Blank Rome, is chairman of the Republican convention in New York. Blank Rome made a large amount of money from the Bush administration by landing a $40 million federal contract for the firm Free Ship to build a new marine cargo terminal. (Media Matters, Washington Post)
August 28: A New Hampshire judge rules that Nashua police acted unlawfully when they arrested 83-year-old Betty Hall, a former state representative, for refusing to back away while protesting Bush's last trip to the city in March. Police physically carried her into a squad car after repeatedly demanding that she leave the designated "safety zone," sometimes called "free speech zones," where Hall sat on a portable stool and propped up a sign reading "Bush is bad for America." Before Bush's motorcade arrived, she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Judge Clifford Kinghorn says he cannot find Hall guilty because she had not substantially interfered with the police's traffic and pedestrian management efforts, as the state's criminal code requires for a conviction. Hall, who had earlier defined her case as a matter of civil rights, calls the decision an affirmation of her right to speak freely. "I still live in a free country and a free state," she says. Bush plans on appearing in Nashua again for another campaign rally, and police promise that they will arrest anti-Bush protesters who refuse to stay within the designated zone. (Pro-Bush protesters were not arrested during the March rally, and were not required to stay within any "zones.") Hall says she will likely be at the upcoming rally. In court testimony, Hall said she was arrested after she had already moved twice at police officers' requests, and was fed up with being asked to move a third time. Hall walks with the help of a cane and told the officers it would be hard for her to move again, she testified. In any case, she said, it wasn't fair. "I didn't think it was lawful to make me move," she told the court. "I was all by myself. I wasn't threatening anybody." Apparently the officers wanted to ensure that Bush could not see her and her sign during his drive through Nashua. "I just feel our country is going down the wrong road, telling people they can't stand up for what they believe in," she said in court. (New Hampshire Union-Leader/GrannyInsanity)
August 28: James Moore, author of the political biography of Karl Rove, Bush's Brain, delineates strong circumstantial evidence of Rove's involvement with the Swift Boat smear campaign against Kerry. "[I]t is a politically fatal form of naivete to think senior Bush political strategist Karl Rove has been sitting idly in his West Wing office hoping that a group might spontaneously arise to question John Kerry's credibility as a commander," Moore writes. "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the whisper campaign against Ann Richards that questioned her sexuality, the attacks on John McCain's mental health in South Carolina, and the questioning of his environmental record in the New York primary were all products of the fastidious work of Karl Rove. And it does not take an FBI agent to make the connections." The prime connection between SBVT founder John O'Neill and SBVT financier Bob Perry of Houston, Texas is their mutual relationship with Rove; Perry financed the 1986 gubernatorial candidacy of Republican Bob Clements, a campaign managed by Rove. Rove used his experience with the Clements campaign to begin building the political career of George W. Bush.
Moore writes, "The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is nothing more than another example of Rove's tactic of using surrogates to do his candidate's dirty work and there is a clear, bright line running from the current headlines back to Texas. When it came time for an organization like SBVT to magically appear, Rove already was the acknowledged master of the third-party surrogate slur. As he was rebuilding the Republican Party in Texas, Rove developed a template for smearing opponents. The goal was to have his candidates hover above the fray while urging their opponents to concentrate on issues, thereby constantly putting them in a position of having to play defense and deny unfounded accusations. Eventually, the Rove client, according to the script, would step out to demand an end to the ugliness. Of course, Rove wrote the narrative of these plans in such a way that calling for a truce would not occur until the damage had already been done to his opposition." This, of course, is precisely the strategy employed by the Bush campaign in regards to the SBVT. (Salon)

August 29: Dick Cheney kicks off the Republican National Convention in New York City with a pre-convention speech at Ellis Island that focuses on the two themes of the convention: 9/11 and the war on terror, and attacking John Kerry. Cheney hails Bush as a "war leader" and evokes images of future terrorist attacks similar to the one that altered New York's skyline, visible behind his podium, where the World Trade Center once stood. As with previous GOP conventions, this convention will feature moderate speakers such as Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain instead of the red-meat conservatives who form the base of Bush's support; the party does not want to scare off middle-of-the-road voters. "They're going to run a kind of Potemkin convention, where they will have people on the stage who don't run the Congress, don't run the administration, but are going to be putting the kinder and gentler, compassionate-conservative look on this administration," says Democratic senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. "The show that the Republicans will put on is not going to fool the American people this time."
In an interview with Time published today, Bush makes an eye-opening concession: that some of his administration's planning and conduct of the Iraq occupation has been less than effective. "Had we had to do it over again," he says, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day." Vice presidential candidate John Edwards is quick to respond. "The president is now describing his Iraq policy as a catastrophic success," he says. "I, like most Americans, have no idea what that means, but it is long past time for this president to accept personal responsibility for his failures and for his performance." The Iraq war and subsequent occupation, Edwards says, "has clearly been a failure." Meanwhile, while her husband admits that Kerry's service in Vietnam was "more heroic" than his own checkered service in the Texas Air National Guard, Laura Bush defends the SBVT ads smearing Kerry with the rationale that Bush has been victimized by "millions of terrible ads against my husband." (Washington Post)
August 29: ABC is abrogating its agreement with other networks to allocate equal coverage to the GOP convention than it provided for the Democratic convention in July. Instead, ABC will provide extensive additional coverage during prime time, including a report to be aired during halftime of Monday Night Football. The halftime coverage will likely feature that evening's speakers, John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani. In a related issue, Media Matters cofounder David Brock writes an open letter to CNN's executive producer Sharon van Zwieten, asking her to conform to a similar format with George W. Bush's acceptance speech as CNN did with John Kerry's acceptance speech. Brock writes, "During the week of the Democratic National Convention, your program, CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown, followed Senator John Edwards's speech on July 28 with commentary from Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and regional chairman of the Bush-Cheney '04 reelection campaign, and followed Senator John Kerry's speech on July 29 with commentary from Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie. I assume we can expect that you will follow a similar format, then, in your coverage of the acceptance speeches given by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney at the Republican National Convention, in that you will invite guests that do not hold similar viewpoints to those speakers." Brock is destined to be disappointed.
As an August 31 analysis of coverage shows, all of the major networks give significantly more coverage to the Republican convention than they did the Democrats. Fox News gives 74 minutes of live coverage to the prime-time speeches at the RNC as opposed to the 41 minutes given to the Democrats. The disparate coverage comes after Fox host Cal Thomas said that, in order to be "fair and balanced," the coverage would not differ from the DNC coverage, and after Fox host Bill O'Reilly announced that his show would air the same amount of coverage of RNC speeches as it did of DNC speeches. MSNBC gives 17 more minutes to RNC speeches the first night than it did to the first night of DNC speeches. CNN gives five more minutes. On the opening night of the RNC, FOX airs live coverage of speeches by 9/11 victims' family members Deena Burnett, Debra Burlingame, and Tara Stackpole. Yet on the first night of the DNC, the network did not air any of a speech by Haleema Salie, whose pregnant daughter and son-in-law were on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11. CNN and MSNBC did show Salie's speech. And while FOX airs the national anthem live during the RNC, the network refused to air it during the DNC. (MediaMatters, MediaMatters, MediaMatters)
August 29: Voting machine problems in Riverside, California, are predicted to cause massive vote dysfunction during the November elections. Jeremiah Akin, a computer programmer volunteering to assist the Riverside County Logic and Accuracy Observation Group, took part in a recent test of Sequoia voting machines to be used in the elections. During the demonstration and testing, county registrar Mischelle Townsend, who has no real-world computer programming experience, made a point of telling the testing observation group that people who questioned the accuracy of voting machines were "ignorant" and needlessly caused others to lose faith in the voting process. She also emphasized that some other manufacturer's voting machines used Microsoft Windows as part of their programming, thus leaving them more vulnerable to tampering. "When I asked Ms. Townsend if the Sequoia machines could leave a paper trail that would verify the votes, she stated that they did," Akins says. However, it turned out that instead of printing out copies or receipts of each vote, which could be verified by the voter, then dropped into a bin for later use if needed, the Sequoia merely prints out the information stored in it at the end of the day. When Akin pointed out to Townsend that this was not a true paper trail, she insisted that printers cannot be trusted and paper receipts were a senseless "duplication of effort."
Akin and the other members of the observation group were then shown Sequoia's Direct Recording Equipment card. Akin says, "This is a little gray object that looks roughly like a thick credit card," the piece of hardware on which the votes are actually stored. They were told that once the card was plugged into a voting kiosk, it could not be removed and plugged into another kiosk. If this occurred, the kiosk would shut down. Each kiosk was to be paired with its own partner card. "We watched as cards were loaded into several kiosks. We were not allowed to verify the information on the cards before insertion. We were told it would take a while, so while the results were running, we examined an optical scanning voting system which worked very well in our presence, yet was scorned by Ms. Townsend," says Akin. Before going to lunch, some of the others signed what they thought were attendance forms. After lunch, Akin recalls, "I was taken to the room where the kiosks were. None of the machines were running then, and I was told the tests had been completed and the cards removed." When he questioned this action, a Sequoia employee appeared, popped a card into a machine, and printed out a paper ticket. "I had no way of knowing if it was the same card I had seen put into the kiosk before, nor did I know what had been on the card in the first place, so I could not verify the results," he says. Akin quickly learns that the Sequoia machines use Microsoft Windows for its tallying procedure, making the machines vulnerable to the same flaws as Townsend had disparaged earlier. "I then asked...why the Observation Group had only been able to see part of the pre-election test mode and none of the election test mode or post-election test mode," he remembers. Not seeing the voting machines in these modes meant that the test did not cover what would typically happen on Election Day during voting, or what would happen later during vote tallying.
It was at this point that Akin was asked to sign a document. "I realized that it was a statement saying that I had witnessed and verified the test. With dismay I saw that the other five people had already signed the document, even though none of them had stayed to see the end of the test or the results." There was no place on the document for a person to sign saying they had not seen the test completed satisfactorily. Another test adminstrator pressured Akin to sign the document, and grew angry with his questioning. "After I refused to sign the document, he hissed at me," Akin recalls. Akin says the entire experience troubled him. He saw firsthand the failings in the system and he wondered what to do about them. Akin's research proved that the Sequoia system does indeed use a Windows program, WinEds, to do the tallying procedure. This means that, like the Diebold System, which uses the Windows Access Program, in WinEds any unscrupulous election staffer, voting machine system employee, or a hacker can modify the system or any data they wish and nobody will be the wiser. And, he says, "since the software used in the Logic and Accuracy test was run with special test settings, rather than the setting that would be used in an actual election, there is absolutely no guarantee that during a real election the voting system will behave in the same way it did during the Logic and Accuracy test." He adds, "It is also known that in at least one version of Sequoia's WinEDS software, the special test mode specifically avoids testing all the parts of the voting software that run during an election. Sequoia has been silent on this issue, not telling anyone that they have made software that has a test mode that does not exactly mirror what happens in an actual election. Sequoia has also offered no evidence that this problem has been fixed in later versions of their software."
Mischelle Townsend, in her presentation to the Riverside Observation Group, stated that the Sequoia system was secure because people outside the company would not know how to hack into it. This philosophy is known as "security through Obscurity." Jeremiah likens "security through Obscurity" to visiting a casino and having your cards dealt to you under the table. Yes, no one else can see your cards, but you have no idea if the dealer is handling your cards honestly. This philosophy makes no provision for what may happen if the code falls into the hands of someone who knows how to manipulate it. At least one version of WinEDS, a program used in the Sequoia system, has been discovered on the Internet. Even though the software was supposed to be kept secret and secure by Riverside County, it somehow ended up on a publicly accessible site on the Internet in an unencrypted form. (A Google search in August 2006 reveals several sites allowing downloads of the software. Townsend calls Akin "dishonest," though she refuses to comment on this article.
The problems with the Sequoia system used in Riverside County is emblematic of problems facing voters and voting machines across the country. Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org writes, "If electronic equipment is used to record and count the votes for federal offices, there will be a questionable election. Lawsuits will abound in every key state, the delays will raise tension beyond the breaking point, millions of citizens will object to the final outcome, and the new President and Congress will not have the support of the country. There is a solution: All votes for federal offices must be cast on paper and counted by hand. This will avert a national crisis in November. Nothing else will." (Intervention Magazine)

Bush says war on terror unwinnable

August 30: In an interview with the early-morning Today show to kick off the Republican National Convention, Bush, when asked by interviewer Matt Lauer, "Can we win?" the war on terror, replies, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the -- those who use terror as a tool are -- less acceptable in parts of the world." He adds that retreating from the war on terror "would be a disaster for your children. ...You cannot show weakness in this world today because the enemy will exploit that weakness. It will embolden them and make the world a more dangerous place." The Kerry campaigh is quick to pounce on Bush's sudden flip-flop: "After months of listening to the Republicans base their campaign on their singular ability to win the war on terror, the president now says we can't win the war on terrorism," says vice presidential candidate John Edwards. "This is no time to declare defeat. ...The war on terrorism is absolutely winnable." Kerry spokeswoman Allison Dobson adds, "First George W. Bush said he miscalculated the war in Iraq, then he called it a catastrophic success and blamed the military. Now he says we can't win the war on terror. Is that what Karl Rove means when he calls for steady leadership?" The next day, Bush backpedals on his statement, saying that we can indeed win the war on terrorism, just not in a conventional sense.
Liberal pundit William Rivers Pitt writes, "One defeats terrorism by undermining the conditions which breed terrorists. Economic inequality, crushing poverty, shattered educational infrastructures, rampant violence and a total lack of hope are the soil in which suicide bombers germinate. Until you get rid of those, you will always have terrorism. Period. ...It is too bad that Bush's Iraq adventure has created economic inequality, crushing poverty, shattered educational infrastructures, rampant violence and a total lack of hope among the people of that nation. If he has suddenly come around to a new mindset on how to deal with terrorism, he will have to start by cleaning up the terrorist mass-production line he has activated there. But, of course, he won't. Soon after Bush's comment to Lauer, his campaign spokespeople came boiling out of the woodwork to clarify that the President didn't really mean to say what he said, and that despite his new vision on the matter of dealing with terrorism, there will be absolutely no policy changes in the way the Terror War is being waged. In other words, folks, ignore the Republican candidate. He's just flapping his lips." (New York Daily News, MSNBC [transcript of interview], MSNBC, Truthout/Bellaciao)

General Sanchez approved use of attack dogs on Iraqi prisoners, according to an Army report

August 30: In September 2003, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US military commander in Iraq, asked for and was given approval to use more aggressive prisoner interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities, based on the methodology used at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Sanchez also received permission to use one technique never before used in Iraq: the use of attack dogs on prisoners. In his cable, sent secretly to his superior officer at US Central Command, Sanchez said he intended to "[e]xploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations." Sanchez was allowed to not only exploit prisoners' "fear" of dogs, but to use isolation; "sleep management;" "yelling, loud music, and light control...to create fear, disorient detainees and capture shock;" deception, including fake documents and reports; and "stress positions," such as forced kneeling for as many as four hours at a time. The authorization placed no restrictions on the use of dogs on "detainees" and "security internees," but said any use involving enemy prisoners of war would require Sanchez's direct approval. Within a month, Sanchez's cable was rescinded on instructions from senior officials at US Central Command and replaced with a more cautious memo that allowed the use of muzzled dogs during interrogations only when Sanchez gave his direct approval -- something he told investigators he was never asked to do. Sanchez's order calling on police dog handlers to help intimidate detainees at Abu Ghraib prison into talking -- a practice later documented in photographs that have caused an outcry over the world -- was one of a handful of documents written by senior officials that Army officials now say helped sow the seeds of prison abuse in Iraq. Army General Paul Kern, who oversaw the drafting of a recent report on interrogation tactics as used in Iraq, said that Sanchez "wrote a policy which was not clear," and that by doing so, he allowed junior officers to conclude mistakenly that they were following an official policy as they stepped over a legal line. Whatever Sanchez's intent or policy, the practice of "abusing detainees with dogs started almost immediately" after the Army brought several dog teams to Abu Ghraib in November 2003, Kern's report said. No one above the military grade of the top intelligence commander at Abu Ghraib was legally "culpable" for the abuse, the report concludes. This interpretation, that top officers committed sins of omission, rather than commission by writing ambiguous instructions and failing to police subordinates, is likely to be challenged in court, according to lawyers for some of the soldiers on trial in connection with the abuse. (Seattle Times)

Republican National Convention anoints Bush for re-election, tars Kerry, promotes fear of future terrorist attacks

August 30: The Republican National Convention, a four-day extravaganza held in New York City's Madison Square Garden, opens. The first night features Bush addressing the convention along with tremendous protests outside the Garden and elsewhere in the city. The keynote speaker is former senator Zell Miller, a conservative Democrat who has bolted his party to join the Republicans. Bush will not stay overnight in New York City, but will be flown to a secure location in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to spend the night.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich writes of the convention, "In thematic keeping with Bush's careening down a runway in a Top Gun flight suit [referring to Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech of May 2003], a special Madison Square Garden runway was built for Bush's acceptance speech, a giant phallus thrusting him into the nation's lap. ('To me that says strength,' was how his media advisor, Mark McKinnon, previewed the set's intent to the New York Times.) ...Instead of the minstrel antics of the 2000 convention, which was designed to fictionalize the party as a utopia of racial diversity, the 2004 model laid on the testosterone. The prime speakers were the former New York mayor [Rudolph Giuliani] who had not dallied to read a children's story on 9/11, a senator [John McCain] who had served in the Hanoi Hilton rather than the Texas Air National Guard, and a newly elected governor from California [Arnold Schwarzenegger] who could play the role of a warrior on-screen more convincingly than a former cheerleader." (CNN, Frank Rich p.141)
Of the two conventions, Al Franken writes, "And so, as the Democrats organized their national convention around the positive, uniting, uplifting these of 'Reliving the Vietnam War,' the fiendishly clever Republicans went with '9/11/24/7.'" Osama bin Laden will be mentioned exactly twice during the Republican gathering, once by New York governor George Pataki and once by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. In contrast, using only speeches by eight major speakers (Pataki, John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani, Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dick Cheney, Zell Miller, and Bush), Saddam Hussein and Iraq will be mentioned 62 times, terrorism and terrorists 79 times, and 9/11 37 times. (Al Franken)
Huge, well-orchestrated protests take place in and around New York City before and during the GOP convention. Though dozens of groups are involved, two umbrella groups, United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of more than 800 anti-war and social justice groups, and International ANSWER, are responsible for the majority of the protests. The protests are often raucous and vituperative, but the incidents of actual violence and criminal behavior is surprisingly low, considering the charged atmosphere. Even so, over 1800 individuals will be arrested by convention's end, though nearly all of the charges against the protesters are eventually dropped. (Interestingly, one of the most infamous instances of violence involves a male right-wing "Communists for Kerry" protester throwing a female leftist protester to the ground and kicking her, captured on videotape. The victim decides not to press charges.) The generally leftist and anti-war protesters are countered by small but active groups of conservative, pro-Bush counter-protesters. The protests cause tremendous problems for automotive and pedestrian traffic and number well over 120,000, according to police estimates, and 400,000 by organizer estimates; although they constitute by far the largest set of protesters ever gathered for a party nominating convention, receive little attention from the mainstream media.
One protester, marching with a group identifying itself as "Republicans for Kerry/Edwards," says, "I'm an elected Republican districtman from my district in Somerset County, New Jersey. In the last election, I worked very hard for Bush. On phone banks. I contributed financially. I persuaded people to vote. But I slowly turned against the Bush administration and particularly George Bush because of the terrible lies. The WMD lies. They all lied, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and the rest of the cabinet, to fortify their decision to attack Iraq. We lost all those wonderful young men for those rotten lies." A middle-aged Texan woman says, "If this administration were Democratic, I would be going out of my mind trying to get them out of office. It's not that I'm anti-Republican. I'm anti-George Bush, anti-Dick Cheney, anti-Ashcroft." Another woman, marching with her husband and daughter, says simply, "We have family values and we're not going to be afraid." A defense industry worker in the march adds, "I'm against W. Just wholeheartedly. I'm not a liberal, not a radical. I'm such a centrist. I'm into balanced budgets. When W was elected, I was somewhat relieved and excited. Maybe he wouldn't meddle so much in the world. He had promised no nation-building. But it was all lies, lies, lies." And a legal observer says, " It was significant that the crowd was so well-behaved, orderly, and determined. But I just wonder to what degree the demonstration will be heard, given that the media is so controlled."
John Sellers of the Ruckus Society, one of the largest and most stringently peaceful protest groups in the nation, recalls the heavy police presence and war-like preparations by the security forces. Sellers, a committed nonviolent protester, is labeled before the convention as "one of the twenty most dangerous anarchists in the country" by ABC's Nightline before the convention. Sellers saw hundreds of protesters penned inside plastic mesh cages and arrested en masse, and notes the tremendous surveillance methods being used against the protesters. Arrested during the protests, Sellers is given an outrageous bail of $1 million before all charges are dropped. Very few of the hundreds of protesters arrested and incarcerated are actually charged with any crime whatsoever. (Wikipedia, TomDispatch, John Sellers/Bill Kavotsky)
August 30: One of the first highlighted speakers of the convention is Senator John McCain, who has apparently put aside his well-documented antipathy for Bush's policies and campaign tactics and is now embracing Bush wholeheartedly. The most popular comment of his speech was an indirect slap at liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who is reporting from the gallery for USA Today. McCain says of Iraq and the war on terror, "Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat." Obviously tipped off to the comment forthcoming, television cameras focus on Moore when McCain says, "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise -- not our political opponents, and certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe...." Jeers and boos aimed at Moore interrupt McCain as Moore, sporting a red baseball cap, acknowledges the outburst with waves and smiles. For nearly a minute, the anti-Moore jeering continues, punctuated by growing chants of "Four more years! Four more years!" Moore continues to smile and wave to the crowd and the cameras, though at one point, he holds up his index finger and thumb in the shape of an "L," the symbolic gesture for "loser." When the noise dies down, McCain quips, "That line was so good, I'll use it again." To another round of cheers and jeers, he continues his reference to a "disingenuous filmmaker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when, in fact, it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls." (CNN)
August 30: One of the most embarrassing "highlights" of the first night of the GOP convention is the appearance of Bush's twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, who speak in support of their father. The daughters, who have been kept out of the public eye since several tabloid appearances featuring them indulging in underage drinking and club-hopping caused brief media sensations, take the stage dressed somewhat less conservatively than some in the audience appreciate, and launch into a breathless, Valley Girl-ish bit laced with unintentional comedy and incoherent pop culture references. Jenna opens with a crack directed at her grandmother: "Gammie, we love you dearly, but you're just not very hip. She thinks 'Sex and the City' is something married people do, but never talk about." She continues, "We spent the last four years trying to stay out of the spotlight. Sometimes we did a little better than others. We kept trying to explain to Dad that when we are young and irresponsible...well, we're young and irresponsible." Moderate-conservative pundit Jeff Greenfield responds to the speech by observing, "whoever wrote that material will be walking the coast" in Alaska. Barbara, the "other" twin, closes with a somewhat safer and more palatable paean to her family, saying they taught her and her sister "what matters in life. About unconditional love. About focus and discipline. They taught us the importance of a good sense of humor. Of being open-minded and treating everyone with respect. And, we learned the true value of honesty and integrity." The twins' short presentation is followed by a far more serious speech from their mother, Laura Bush, which is received with an almost palpable sigh of relief from the delegates. Observers say that the twins' appearance does not contrast well with the far more sober and well-informed speeches given by Kerry's children at July's Democratic convention. (Washington Post)
August 30: Conservative columnist Robert Novak has been one of the loudest supporters of the SBVT book Unfit for Command, praising it on his CNN show Crossfire and in other venues, but what he has not revealed is his own personal connection to the book. Novak's son, Alex Novak, is the director of marketing for the book's publisher, Regnery. Regnery and the younger Novak have profited handsomely from sales of the book. "I don't think it's relevant," says Novak of the familial connection. "I'm just functioning as a columnist with a point of view, and a strong point of view." (New York Times)
August 30: In yet another wildly slanderous claim by a conservative source against a liberal, Newt Gingrich claims that billionaire George Soros, who has sunk millions of dollars into MoveOn.org and other anti-Bush organizations, is working to engineer the defeat of Bush because Soros wants to legalize heroin: Soros "wants to spend $75 million defeating George W. Bush because Soros wants to legalize heroin," he says. Gingrich's remark, aired live from the Republican National Convention and broadcast on Fox News's talk show Hannity and Colmes,, echoes a smear of Soros made one day earlier by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert on the August 29 edition of Fox News Sunday: "I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from. ...George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." When asked by host Chris Wallace if Hastert thought Soros "may be getting money from the drug cartel," Hastert responded, "I'm saying I don't know where groups -- could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know." (After debunking Hastert's character assassination, Slate writer Jack Shafer calls Hastert "an absolute nut job." The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum sarcastically retorts, "And I think maybe George Bush got tossed out of the National Guard because he crashed a plane while he was high on coke and then spent the next five months in Alabama in a rehab center. I mean, we just don't know, do we?") It goes without saying that Gingrich's and Hastert's claims have absolutely no basis in fact; though Soros has previously come out in favor of the legalization of certain drugs, mostly as a criticism of the failed "war on drugs," Kerry is in favor of no such legalizations, and there is absolutely no evidence that Kerry intends to push for any such legalizations as president. Gingrich is also tremendously off-base in his estimate that Soros has spent anywhere close to $75 million on funding anti-Bush organizations; the number is closer to $12 million.
Gingrich has also made the equally astounding claim that Soros is paying convicted felons to go door-to-door in get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of Kerry, including at least one convicted murderer and a convicted rapist. This claim is equally false. Soros has written a letter to Gingrich demanding a retraction and an apology; none has been forthcoming. Hastert has backed off of some of his claims, and notes that Soros has donated money to a number of drug-legalization organizations such as The Drug Policy Foundation, which is a far cry from receiving money from drug cartels. Investigation shows that Hastert's allegations have likely come from right-wing conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, who also believes that the British royal family is a cartel of Communist agents. (Media Matters [another site which receives funding from Soros, but has never advocated legalization of any illicit drugs], Slate)
August 30: Michael Cudahy, a former national campaign staff member for President George H.W. Bush, executive director for Elliot Richardson's Committee for Responsible Government, and national communications director for the Republican Coalition for Choice, calls the Republican National Convention's stated agenda, and the Bush campaign's agenda, "chaotic and increasingly disingenuous." Cudahy writes that the Bush campaign and the RNC will say and do almost anything to appeal to the moderate, more independent voters who in 2000 were attracted to Bush's "compassionate conservative" platform, and have been alienated by four years of extreme right-wing policies. Hence the featured speakers at the convention are moderate Republicans and not the core Congressional and White House officials who have shaped the Bush agenda during the first term, and the hard-core evangelicals who consider themselves to be important contributors to the agenda of the Bush presidency. Cudahy calls the convention a "four-day, $100 million infomercial" for viewers to "be served up significant portions of shameless bait and switch, presented by moderate keynote speakers who are a pale reflection of this administration's hard line neoconservative agenda. Moderate surrogates who seek to soften and reinterpret the train wreck that has been the last three and a half years of George Bush's presidency."
Cudahy knows full well the depths to which the Bush campaign will sink: "In the mid 1990s, as National Communications Director for the Republican Coalition for Choice, I worked with thousands of other traditional party members to fight the emergence of what we now know as the neoconservative agenda. The tool our opponents used so effectively was a weapon they learned from Bush friend and mentor Lee Atwater -– stealth. Work invisibly, say whatever needs to be said, and when the occasion demands call upon nameless, faceless surrogates to do your dirty work for you. Atwater protege and Bush political advisor Karl Rove learned well from his old boss. If transparent dishonesty and insincerity advance the team's agenda then Rove will do whatever is required." Cudahy concludes, "The unaswered question is whether Americans suffering from economic and unemployment worries at home and deep concerns over George Bush's interventionist foreign policies abroad will be fooled by the Republicans' shameless abuse of the truth. It is a cynical strategy that has worked well for them repeatedly in the past. What's to keep it from working now?" (AlterNet)
August 30: Evelyn Pringle, the founder of Citizens for Honest Fighter Pilots, a small grassroots organization attempting to outflank the SBVT accusations, writes that since some of the SBVT accusers who are now attacking Kerry were the same ones who wrote reports and recommendations that helped Kerry receive his medals, they should be arrested for either falsifying military documents or lying about actual military operations. She writes, "Official Naval records obtained by members of the various media organizations reveal that several members of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth actually wrote the reports and recommendations that led to Kerry being awarded his 5 medals. Some even wrote the citations that accompany the medals. In light of this fact, I think somebody needs to tell these guys that they can't have it both ways. They either falsified war-time events in official military records, reports and citations 35 years ago in Vietnam; or they are lying now and destroying the honorary military service records of not only John Kerry, but of all the other men who served with Kerry, many of whom received their own medals for their actions in the same battles. In effect, they have attacked the integrity of the Navy itself, and its process for awarding medals to soldiers for heroic action in combat. So, which is it? Were they lying back then or are they lying now? I think its safe to say that either way, such conduct would be illegal and would represent a grave breach of the military code of conduct. Maybe its time for some of these lying criminals to be arrested, or in the alternative court-martialed." (Buzzflash)
August 30: UPI correspondant Helen Thomas, who has covered nine presidents over her 57-year career, says that much of the mainstream media is an active and knowing collaborator with the Bush administration in its attempt to stop any true reflection and discourse among Americans about the important issues facing the country. She cites the supposedly liberal Washington Post as one of the main culprits for unquestioned support of Bush's plans to invade and occupy Iraq, a mindset that still pervades the newspaper today.
Of Bush's foreign policy, she says, "I think that America doesn't invade countries without provocation, and that's what we've done. And I think that it has tainted us throughout the world. We've really damaged our psyche, our soul, our image. ...I never think of my country as being pro-war. I think it's a last thing that would happen to us. Of course, if you're attacked, it's different. But for us to invade a country? It's shocking to me." Asked how he accomplishes such support among the citizenry for his dangerous and ignorant policies, Thomas responds, "He plays the fear card. From 9/11 on, everybody felt they had to be a patriotic American. And then it segued into a war where they continued that. And I think reporters contributed a lot by not rocking the boat. And afraid of being also tainted as called un-American. But I really think that we fell down on the job, from that aspect. In terms of the Americans, I think that the very fact that the president keeps saying that he had a right to go in and so forth, they want to believe him. But pure logic shows us that everything he said about going into war, the reasons, have proved to be untrue. And I don't know how that can be acceptable to any human being." (Democracy Now)
August 30: Leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, reviled by most conservatives, writes his first column from the Madison Square Garden convention venue for USA Today. The newspaper tried a similar experiment with counter-coverage of the Democratic convention in July, but they chose not to print any of the articles generated by their selection, Ann Coulter, after they decided that Coulter's essays were disrespectful and slanderous to the point of being unpublishable. (Coulter was replaced by less abrasive conservative Jonah Goldberg.) Moore manages not to sink to Coulter's level, but gets in some digs of his own at the Bush administration. Moore writes in part, "Welcome, Republicans. You're proud Americans who love your country. In your own way, you want to make this country a better place. Whatever our differences, you should be commended for that. But what's all this talk about New York being enemy territory? Nothing could be further from the truth. We New Yorkers love Republicans. We have a Republican mayor and governor, a death penalty and two nuclear plants within 30 miles of the city. New York is home to Fox News Channel. The top right-wing talk shows emanate from here -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly among them. The Wall Street Journal is based here, which means your favorite street is here. Not to mention more Fortune 500 executives than anywhere else. You may think you're surrounded by a bunch of latte-drinking effete liberals, but the truth is, you're right where you belong, smack in the seat of corporate America and conservative media." Moore goes on to "commend" Republicans for showing the relentless resolve to "[get] up before dawn [to figure] out which minority group shouldn't be allowed to marry today. Our side is full of wimps who'd rather compromise than fight. Not you guys."
Moore says that he has spoken with a number of delegates who don't treat him as if he is the devil incarnate, and that "[t]alking to them, I discover they're like many people who call themselves Republicans but aren't really Republicans. At least not in the radical-right way that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Co. have defined Republicans. I asked one man who told me he was a 'proud Republican,' 'Do you think we need strong laws to protect our air and water?' 'Well, sure,' he said. 'Who doesn't?' I asked whether women should have equal rights, including the same pay as men. 'Absolutely,' he replied. 'Would you discriminate against someone because he or she is gay?' 'Um, no.' The pause -- I get that a lot when I ask this question -- is usually because the average good-hearted person instantly thinks about a gay family member or friend. I've often found that if I go down the list of 'liberal' issues with people who say they're Republican, they are quite liberal and not in sync with the Republicans who run the country. Most don't want America to be the world's police officer and prefer peace to war. They applaud civil rights, believe all Americans should have health insurance and think assault weapons should be banned. Though they may personally oppose abortion, they usually don't think the government has the right to tell a women what to do with her body. There's a name for these Republicans: RINOs or Republican In Name Only. They possess a liberal, open mind and don't believe in creating a worse life for anyone else.
"so why do they use the same label as those who back a status quo of women earning 75 cents to every dollar a man earns, 45 million people without health coverage and a president who has two more countries left on his axis-of-evil-regime-change list? I asked my friend on the street. He said what I hear from all RINOs: 'I don't want the government taking my hard-earned money and taxing me to death. That's what the Democrats do.' Money. That's what it comes down to for the RINOs. They do work hard and have been squeezed even harder to make ends meet. They blame Democrats for wanting to take their money. Never mind that it's Republican tax cuts for the rich and billions spent on the Iraq war that have created the largest deficits in history and will put all of us in hock for years to come. The Republican Party's leadership knows America is not only filled with RINOs, but most Americans are much more liberal than the delegates gathered in New York. The Republicans know it. That's why this week we're seeing gay-loving Rudy Giuliani, gun-hating Michael Bloomberg and abortion-rights advocate Arnold Schwarzenegger. As tough of a pill as it is to swallow, Republicans know that the only way to hold onto power is to pass themselves off as, well, as most Americans." (USA Today)
August 30: The Secret Service shuts down an interview between USA Today correspondant Michael Moore and NPR reporter Andrea Seabrook in an interview area on the floor of Madison Square Garden, during the convention. Moore is barely able to introduce Moore before Secret Service agents intervene to halt the interview. Seabrook reports, "[T]he Secret Service has blocked off that area. They're calling it a...a hazard because of the number of people who are a gathered around him [Moore]. There aren't that many people, but the Secret Service won't let me around him anymore, so I think a the access to him might be cut off for a moment." Minutes later, Seabrook reports, "Yes, I am in the middle of a...you might be able to hear the Secret Service yelling into my mic at the same time. There, there are a bunch of Secret Service that have surrounded Michael Moore's section. There are three or four reporters with him right now, but they are trying to kick all of the reporters and press photographers who are around him out of his area. The convention staff is also here. They're standing here telling us that we have to move from this are...they're obviously disturbed by the fact that Michael Moore is here and want as little public here as possible." She adds, "It's Secret Service which is interesting because the Secret Service of all agencies is the one that remains...is the least involved in the sort of political...political kinds of things, but of course they always cover the candidates and they have to be involved in the convention like this. They claim that what they're doing is for safety reasons, although there is a almost nobody around Michael Moore right now." The interview never takes place. The next day, Moore's credentials are taken from him and he is forced to leave the convention. (NPR/Inner Frenchman)

Bush official investigated for spying for Israel

August 31: The FBI is investigating Defense Department policy analyst Lawrence Franklin for passing classified information to the Israeli lobbying organization AIPAC, which in turn is believed to have passed that information to the Israeli government. Franklin works in the office of Douglas Feith, the third-most powerful official in the Department of Defense, and formerly worked with William Luti in the secretive Office of Special Plans. Luti and Franklin's colleague, Middle East expert Harold Rhode, are also under investigation for passing classified information to Israel. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at unauthorized back-channel meetings between Iranian dissidents and advisors in Feith's office, which more senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up. Franklin and Rhode were the two officials involved in the back-channel, which involved on-going meetings and contacts with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and government officials. Ghorbanifar is a storied figure who played a key role in embroiling the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair. The meetings were both a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq and part of a bitter administration power-struggle pitting officials at DoD who have been pushing for a hard-line policy of "regime change" in Iran, against other officials at the State Department and the CIA who have been counseling a more cautious approach. FBI and media investigations now show that the meetings were far more extensive and much less under White House control than originally reported. One of the meetings, which Pentagon officials have long characterized as merely a "chance encounter," seems in fact to have been planned long in advance by Rhode and Ghorbanifar. Another has never been reported in the American press. The administration's reluctance to disclose these details seems clear; the DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a "regime change" agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself.
The first meeting took place in Rome in December, 2001. Participants included Franklin, Rhode, and neoconservative writer and Feith consultant Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. Also in attendance: Ghorbanifar and several other Iranians, including a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security service. The meeting was also attended by Nicolo Pollari, the head of SISMI, Italy's military intelligence agency, and Italy's minister of defense, Antonio Martino, a close friend of Washington neoconservatives. Days later, the US ambassador to Italy, Mel Sembler, learned of the meeting over a dinner with Ledeen and Martino. Sembler knew that any US government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is legally supposed to be overseen by the CIA, Sembler asked the CIA station chief in Rome about the meeting, only to learn that he, too, was in the dark. Soon both Sembler and the Rome station chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Department and CIA headquarters, raising alarms on both sides of the Potomac. The CIA considers Ghorbanifar a serial liar and forbids its officers to have any dealings with him. CIA officials also wanted to know why mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA. And Sembler was personally embarrassed, having recently cautioned the Italians to restrain their contacts with "rogue" states like Iran at the behest of the State Department. Eventually, both the State Department and the CIA eventually brought the matter to the attention of the White House -– specifically, to Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security Council, Stephen Hadley. Later, Pollari raised the matter privately with CIA director George Tenet, who went to Hadley in early February 2002. Goaded by Tenet, Hadley sent word to the officials in Feith's office and to Ledeen to cease all such activities. Hadley then contacted Sembler, assuring him it wouldn't happen again and to report back if it did.
The second meeting took place in Rome in June 2002. According to Ghorbanifar, he arranged the meeting after faxing memos back and forth with Rhode. Ghorbanifar was not at the second meeting, but he says the meeting consisted of an Egyptian, an Iraqi, and a high-level US government official, whose name he refuses to reveal. The first two briefed the American official about the general situation in Iraq and the Middle East, and what would happen in Iraq, "And it's happened word for word since," says Ghorbanifar. No one at the US embassy in Rome seems to have known about this second Rome meeting. But a month later, Ledeen informed Sembler that he would be back in Rome in September for further meetings with the Iranians. Sembler informed Washington, and Hadley told Ledeen to stop immediately.
Again, Hadley's orders went unheeded. In June 2003, more meetings took place between Rhode and Ghorbanifar in Paris. Ghorbanifar says the purpose of the meeting was for Rhode to get more information on the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. "In those meetings we met, we gave him the scenario, what would happen in the coming days in Iraq. And everything has happened word for word as we told him," Ghorbanifar says. "We met in several different places in Paris. Rhode met several other people -– he didn't only meet me."
In the summer of 2003, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had begun to get wind of the Ghorbanifar-Ledeen-DoD back-channel meetings and made inquiries at the CIA. A month later, Newsday broke the original story about the secret Ghorbanifar channel. Faced with the disclosure, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld acknowledged the December 2001 meeting but dismissed it as routine and unimportant. "The information has moved around the interagency process to all the departments and agencies," he told reporters after a meeting with the vacationing Bush. "As I understand it, there wasn't anything there that was of substance or of value that needed to be pursued further." Later that day, another senior Defense official acknowledged the second meeting in Paris in June 2003, but insisted that it was the result of a "chance encounter" between Ghorbanifar and a Pentagon official. The administration has kept to the "chance encounter" story to this day. "Run into each other?" laughs Ghorbanifar. "We had a prior arrangement. It involved a lot of discussion and a lot of people." Over the last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has conducted limited inquiry into the meetings, including interviews with Feith and Ledeen. But under terms of a compromise agreed to by both parties, a full investigation into the matter was put off until after the November election. Republicans on the committee, many of whom sympathize with the "regime change" agenda at DoD, have been resistant to such investigations, calling them an election-year fishing expedition. Democrats, by contrast, see such investigations as vital to understanding the central role Feith's office may have played in a range of a dubious intelligence enterprises, from pushing claims about a supposed partnership between Iraq and al-Qaeda and overblown estimates of alleged Iraqi stocks of WMD to what the committee's ranking minority member Jay Rockerfeller calls "the Chalabi factor" (Rhode and others in Feith's office have been major sponsors of the Iraqi exile leader, who is now under investigation for passing U.S. intelligence to Iran).
The FBI "stung" Franklin by having him pass a fake tip regarding a plan by Iran to attack Israeli operations in the Kurdish regions of Iraq. Franklin's AIPAC contacts Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman pass the information on and fall into the trap. The FBI then raids the AIPAC offices. As time goes on, Franklin will later stop helping the FBI, fire his public defender, and hire a top a DC defense lawyer. (Alternet, Christian Science Monitor/Washington Times/Daily Kos)
August 31: Though Palm Beach County (Florida) elections supervisor Theresa LePore supervises her own election, she will lose to Democratic challenger Art Anderson, who ran on a platform opposing LePore's paperless voting machines. Unfortunately, LePore will retain office just long enough to oversee Palm Beach's November elections. LePore is famous for designing the "butterfly ballot," which denied thousands of votes properly cast for Al Gore in 2000. LePore then refused to carry out a hand recount of the disputed votes. In the upcoming election for elections supervisor, even though the law requires her to certify poll-watchers to observe the count, she has refused to certify a single one, and intends to count the votes herself. She has already begun counting absentee ballots. Although 37,000 citizens have requested absentee ballots, she says she'd only received 22,000 when she began the count. She has so far refused to release the list of those who have had their votes counted. LePore is also reserving the right to decide which ballots have acceptable signatures. Anderson has requested that she use certified hand-writing experts, instead of own her hand-picked staff, to check the signatures. Unfortunately, while Federal law requires her to allow a voter to correct a signature rejection when registering, the law does not require her to permit challenges to absentee ballot rejections. It is likely that LePore is basing some of her judgments on the party affiliation of the ballot, which is printed on the outside of each return envelope. Journalist Greg Palast writes, "[P]lease take note of the implications of this story for the big vote in November. Millions have sought refuge in absentee ballots as a method to avoid the dangers of the digitizing of democracy. Florida and other states are reporting 400%-plus increases in absentee ballot requests due to fear of the new computer voting machinery. Some refuge. LePore is giving us an early taste of how the Bush Leaguers intend to care for your absentee ballot." (CommonDreams/Greg Palast)
August 31: In his speech to the Republican National Convention, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, lionized for his leadership on 9/11 while Bush was nowhere to be found, tells the audience, "At the time, we believed we would be attacked many more times that day and in the days that followed. Spontaneously, I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and said to Bernie, 'Thank God George Bush is our president.' And I say it again tonight. Thank God George Bush is our president." Interestingly, the story of the spontaneous outburst of divine thanks does not appear in Giuliani's biography Leadership, which includes a detailed account of his actions on 9/11. (Al Franken)
August 31: Christian Science Monitor journalist Tom Regan reports on the protests outside and around the convention. Regan, who writes that he has never believed any protester who claimed to have been the target of police intimidation, is horrified at what he sees the New York City police doing to handle the crowd. He describes the protesters as orderly and compliant with police instructions; the police, on the other hand, are often anything but. "I just have to pause here for a moment to make an observation," he writes. "How many times have I seen an interview with an arrested protester who claimed he or she had done nothing to provoke the police. Almost always my reaction has been, 'Yeah, sure.' Only now I was seeing this very situation unfold in front of my eyes. These protesters, while certainly noisy, had obeyed police instructions down the entire length of the street. Now they were being treated as if they had gotten wildly out of control, but they hadn't. I know, because I was there. I saw scenes like this repeated throughout Tuesday night. There would be an uneasy equilibrium between the police and the protesters, and then for some reason, the police would start arresting people. I saw it happen at Herald Square, and near 6th Ave and 29th St. In each case, the police seemed to lose control of the situation, often in ways that they were responsible for themselves." He watches as police shove several protesters who were doing nothing but standing in the appropriate spot, he documents numerous arbitrary arrests: "the police would just start picking people out of the crowd and arresting them. From what I saw, there was often no rhyme or reason behind who they picked to arrest. While the arrests often seemed arbitrary and done in an overly aggressive fashion, I saw no overt acts of police brutality. While Tuesday night was chaotic, it wasn't Chicago 1968."
Regan writes, "Meanwhile, back on 33rd Street, the police had pushed us into a tight corner. We had no room to move in any direction -– we were practically standing on top of each other. Then the police moved forward again, and started pulling people from the crowd, mostly other reporters. When one of the young people asked what was going on, the captain who had pushed a few of them around earlier told her she and her friends were being arrested for blocking the sidewalk. Well, that's a neat trick, I said to myself, considering that the only reason we were blocking the sidewalk was that the police has pushed us there. 'Just let us through and we'll leave,' one young protester pleaded. One of the motorcycle cops snarled back, 'Yeah, and where will you go?' Finally, the police captain came to me. I kept quiet. I wanted to see where they would go. But he saw the convention credential in my shirt pocket. 'Get him out of here,' he said. As another officer grabbed me, I asked the captain, 'Why are you arresting these people? What have they done wrong?' He ignored me. I continued to shout the question at the captain as I was pulled away. 'Why are you guys doing this?' I said to the young officer who was pushing me away from the crowd. When we reached the end of the street, he let me go, smiled and said 'Thank you sir.'" (Christian Science Monitor)
August 31: James Moore, author of the Karl Rove political biography Bush's Brain, confirms what many already believe: that Rove's ultimate intention is to reduce America to a one-party state with Republicans in complete and unchallenged control of the entire governmental apparatus. Moore writes, "Bush's Brain will die happy the day he achieves his two greatest goals. The first of these is to turn the US into what is fundamentally a one-party system. Secondly, he wants the federal government to have so little money that it can do nothing to get in the way of business interests; nor will it be able to sustain any kind of socially progressive assistance for disadvantaged Americans. His desire to destroy the Democratic Party is not about fair play politics. Rove sees a country where there is only symbolic opposition and democracy is more of a 'Potemkin Village' show than an actually tallying of votes and a discussion of issues. He and the Republicans believe they know what is best for America. They do not consider ideas from the left or the center. Those people are simply wrong to them. Of course, the irony is lost on Rove and his henchmen that a one-party nation, at the worst, turns us into something akin to a communist country or, as a minimum, the pseudo-democracy maintained for decades by Mexico. But Karl doesn't care. America is not important. Political victory is what matters, the control of power, and the economy. This isn't conspiracy theory nonsense. He's taking the steps. And they are working."
Moore outlines what he believes is Rove's "three-step plan" for the final subversion and destruction of American democracy. Rove began when he created a Texas political organization called the Civil Justice League. After years of political machinations, Rove and the CJR helped to dismantle Texas's criminal justice system as we know it, all but removing trial lawyers -- a large financial support base for the Democratic Party -- from the system. Rove is attempting the same thing on a national level. "If President Bush is re-elected, we will see sweeping reforms that drastically limit the amount of money any lawyer can earn in a liability lawsuit," Moore writes. "Trial lawyers will discover, as they already are, that they cannot afford to take most contingency cases. Damage caps generally will not cover costs of preparing for trial. This accomplishes Rove's first step: Lawyers without money mean the Democratic Party has lost a critical source of funding."
The second part of Rove's plan is to destroy America's labor unions as a viable political force. Unions not only are another large source of financial support for Democrats, they serve as a tremendous force for equality in the workplace, giving workers the ability and wherewithal to challenge their employers for fairer working conditions and better wages. "Every chance he gets, Rove has a Republican member of congress drop a provision into a bill that weakens collective bargaining rights. This was the Democrats' main complaint against the Bush-backed version of the Homeland Security Bill. A key provision reduced the ability of federal workers to negotiate for better pay. Every time an industry is on its knees, Rove sees a chance to get government to help them, but only if its workers will make concessions to get the company going again. These are always about the strength of unions. If he can destroy unions, Rove will take away another critical source of money for Democrats. If Mr. Bush wins another term, there will be draconian measures enacted reducing the negotiating power of unions in this country and their right to organize and negotiate."
The third leg of the plan concerns Israel and America's Jewish voters. Although Jewish voters make up only 2% of the population, at times they have contributed as much as 40% of the funds for the Democrats, making them a critical bloc for Democrats to mobilize and engage. Rove has attempted, with some success, to neutralize this group by having Bush step away from any criticism of Israel whatsoever, and has consistently refused to pressure Ariel Sharon to make any concessions towards peace with the Palestinians and with its Arab neighbors. "America's interests are Israel's interests and since our sworn enemy is Arab Muslim, this calculus is easy for Rove," Moore writes. "The Bush White House has been the most disengaged on the question of Israel and Mideast peace of any in the past half century. And don't think the Arab world does not further resent us for this policy. While Rove and company rattle their sabers at Iran for building a nuclear reactor, Israel has not even formally acknowledged to the world that it has a nuclear program, even though its arsenal is estimated to be the world's third largest. Israel has not signed the non-proliferation treaty nor has it ever undergone nuclear inspections by an international team. Many Democratic Jewish voters (who tend to be more sympathetic to the Israeli Labor Party) are angry about Sharon's policies and the Bush administration's tolerance of them, but others are beginning to send money to the Republicans. I interviewed a Jewish industrialist in the south last summer while doing research for a book and he told me he had been a Democrat his entire life until Bush came along. When I asked why the switch he said simply, 'He cares about Israel.' This man is now a Bush Pioneer and has raised $100,000 on three occasions for the president."
Rove believes that by drying up the Democrats' traditional funding sources, he and the Republicans can begin to permanently neutralize the Democrats as a viable political party. After that, his intention is to begin doing the same to the federal government: "Eventually, the Washington bureaucracy will be a vestigial organ, a government that cannot govern because it has no money. There will be no social programs to help the poor. Businesses will develop risky products without the risk of liability and the great institutions, which have nurtured the growth of our nation, will begin to falter and fail. This, of course, has already begun to happen. We move closer each day to an imperial presidency and a one party nation while Section 8 Housing for the poor is reduced and more homeless are created and state governments are given the option to bail out of Head Start funding, a program the president promised to protect when he was campaigning. As we reduce assistance for the poor, we still manage to send our troops into combat without bulletproof vests or armored plating on their outdated vehicles. But the president smiles and says things are getting better. And we believe him because Americans choose to believe their president. Rove knows that, too. He knows that we are all too busy worrying about our jobs and retirement and health care or paying for our children's college education that we don't have time to pay attention to the details of issues. Few of us read the three thousand word stories in the newspaper. We read the headlines. We watch the news with the sound turned down. We're too busy. But citizenship is a job, too. And while we're worrying about the mortgage, Karl Rove is busy stealing our democracy. The plan is working perfectly." (Buzzflash)
August 31: Democratic activist and former lobbyist Tom Krajewski reports that he has received "push poll" phone calls from Bush campaign operatives that seem to be coordinated with the SBVT attack campaign. As yet, the Bush campaign refuses to identify who is paying for the survey, as required by state law. The calls, made by private firm Moore Incorporated, are part of a Bush campaign get-out-the-vote effort. According to Krajewski, he was asked, "Whose position do you think is closer to the truth -- those 'veterans who served with John Kerry' and say that he does not deserve the medals that he received, or John Kerry, who disagrees with the veterans that he served with and who appear in the ad?" Krajewski says the question is inappropriately slanted and proves that the Bush campaign is working on some level with the SBVT campaign. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
August 31: Republican congressman Ed Schrock of Virginia abruptly and without explanation drops out of the race for his reelection, citing unspecified "allegations" that he says "will not allow my campaign to focus on the real issues facing our nation and region." On August 19, gay activist Michael Rogers claims on a Web site that Schrock is a closet homosexual. Like many Republicans, Schrock is virulently anti-gay in public. Rogers says his claims about Schrock are motivated by anger over what he says is the hypocrisy of Schrock's opposition to gay rights while leading a gay life. Rogers says the purpose of his Web site is to make public the names of lawmakers and other politicians who engage in such hypocrisy. "Why should my community protect him?" he asks. "He's the enemy." Rogers has what he says are audiotapes of Schrock soliciting sex on a gay telephone liason service. In 2000, Schrock became known as an outspoken opponent of the Clinton-era "don't ask, don't tell" policy of homosexuals in the military. "You're in the showers with them, you're in the bunk room with them, you're in staterooms with them," Schrock told the press. "You just hope no harm would come by folks who are of that persuasion. It's a discipline thing." Schrock will be replaced on the ballot by fellow Republican Thema Drake, who will win the election. ()
August 31: Retired Army sergeant-major and Vietnam veteran Charlie Carlson writes a blistering open letter to Bush regarding the Iraq war and his own family's service. Carlson writes that after his son's return from Iraq, his third deployment into a war zone, he was "fed up with Bush lies and back-to-back deployments." The younger Carlson applied to be discharged from his "indefinite enlistment" status. "six days later he was under investigation for making 'disloyal comments' about George Bush...which amounted to saying in general conversation with other soldiers that 'Bush should have never started the war' and 'Bush is no military leader.' He was charged under Article 15 and was denied an attorney and could not cross-examine the case against him. His 14 years of military service up to this point was flawless, he was an excellent soldier, and in spite of numerous superiors who testified in his favor, he was demoted and sentenced to 45 days of extra duty. His crime involved nothing more than expressing his personal political opinion as guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, the very document that he had risked his life defending. Our government claims to be fighting for democracy, however those who risk their lives for democracy are being denied their basic rights of freedom of speech and opinion. My friends, the Bill of Rights and democracy are dead under the Bush Administration. This is only a sampling of what will happen if this administration is re-elected. For generations we have been a loyal and faithful military family; however with this recent action taken against a member of our family, we will no longer encourage military service to our future generations. In other words, we are going to do the same thing that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and most members of Congress do, WE AIN'T SERVING NO MORE!! The Iraq War was based on lies and exaggerations, poor intelligence, a mass deception with no rhymne nor reason for invading Iraq. For those who still have kids and loved ones in this illegal war, our blessings and best wishes go out to you. We pray for their safe return." (Bellaciao)
August 31: A US soldier serving in Iraq, who identifies himself only as Spiros D., writes an editorial about Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root's request to use US soldiers as unpaid bodyguards. "KBR manages many of the solider services that we have here on the base; things like running the food service, waste disposal, pumping the latrines, laundry services, movement and control, and the central distribution center. KBR is also scheduled to take over all fuel hauling and freight hauling in general. When things started to heat up earlier this year KBR put a hold on taking over hauling operations. Now that things are seeming to come back under some control KBR is looking at taking over again. ...KBR is now requesting, and the army is allowing, US soldiers to ride "shotgun" in KBR convoys hauling KBR goods all over Iraq. KBR is afraid to be out on the roads alone and want our US soldiers to risk their lives riding shot gun for their missions. KBR is currently staffed by mainly non-US international personnel along with a growing number of Iraqis. Most do not speak English, none have had military training on defensive driving, proper convoy operations, avoiding ambushes, navigating around IED's, proper procedure for calling in support or medivac or fire support, procedures to follow after taking enemy fire, the list goes on. These drivers are simply paid drivers that are making roughly 5 -8 times our wages and get paid whether the freight arrives or not. KBR is requesting that US soldiers risk their lives at the hands of inexperienced and improperly trained individuals to provide them with security. Now there is no doubt that we need to protect KBR's missions but we have suggested and to date have been denied the opportunity to run the convoys with properly modified and equipped military vehicles." Spiros asks that US lawmakers investigate KBR's improper use of American soldiers, and that American citizens protest the practice. (Straight Talk/Truthout)

Back to August 2004

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

August 2004: Week Four

Page Three

Bush says war on terror unwinnable

General Sanchez approved use of attack dogs on Iraqi prisoners, according to an Army report

Republican National Convention anoints Bush for re-election, tars Kerry, promotes fear of future terrorist attacks

Bush official investigated for spying for Israel

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