November 2006: Week One: This Far and No Further

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"Make no mistake: President Bush will need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office. [Neoconservatives] need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes." -- neoconservative Joshua Muravchik, quoted by Seymour Hersh

November 1: Investigative reporter Robert Parry discusses the ramifications of the recently issued Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into how Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress deliberately duped an all-too-willing Bush administration into going to war in Iraq. The normal checks and balances, from both Congress and the national news media, did not function, as dissenting voices were bullied and intimidated into silence, or ignored and mocked, both by administration officials and right-wing, hardline opinion leaders. Parry writes, "Amid this enforced 'group think,' a self-interested band of Iraqi exiles found itself with extraordinary freedom to inject pro-war disinformation into the US decision-making process. Despite many reasons to challenge the truthfulness of Iraqi 'defectors' handled by the Iraqi National Congress, few in Washington did." The committee report is damning, not only because of its examples of how Iraqi defectors were coached to lie to intelligence analysts, but because of the failure of the US political and media systems to challenge the lies.
Most of the stories of coached and lying defectors have already been covered in this site, and are familiar to those of us who have made the effort to keep up. In one case, US intelligence analysts correctly concluded that an INC-supplied defector was a "fabricator/provocateur," but his claims about Iraq's supposed mobile weapons labs were never withdrawn and were cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003. Another INC source, a supposed nuclear engineer who made claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear program, couldn't answer relevant physics questions and kept excusing himself to run to the bathroom where he apparently reviewed notes given to him so he could deceive his American debriefers. Before interviewing that source, US analysts had received a warning from another Iraqi that an INC representative had instructed the source to "deliver the act of a lifetime." But with both the Bush administration and what Parry calls the "powerful right-wing political/media machine" both pressing for war, Parry writes that "the intimidated US intelligence process often worked like a reverse filter, screening out the gems of truth and letting through the dross of disinformation. Congress and the mainstream Washington press corps proved equally flawed, applying almost no quality controls and serving more as a conveyor belt to carry the polluted information down the line to the broader American public." As of yet, virtually no one in the process has been held accountable.
Parry gives us a detailed overview of the entire process, which is more than worth reading in its entirety. This item will hit the highlights. As many of us know, the Bush administration, to justify its unprovoked invasion of Iraq, needed to do two things: one, the American people had to be convinced that Saddam Hussein had a store of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and was well on his way to developing a nuclear weapon; and secondly, Hussein was secretly supporting Islamic terrorists, who in turn were likely planning to bring Hussein's weapons to the US. Only with these two aims achieved would the American people support the invasion of a country that presented no plausible threat to the US. In selling the war to a still-frightened and still-angry American public, the US's institutional capacity to separate fact from fiction, both in government and the news media, suffered a near-total breakdown. Newspaper editors and television news executives joined with administration officials as, in Parry's words, "enablers and collaborators in disinforming America." In September 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee released two reports, one evaluating the false intelligence that buttressed the claims of cooperation between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda terrorists, and the other on the Iraqi National Congress, an influential group of exiles who worked with American neoconservatives to sell the case for war with Iraq. Taken in tandem, the two reports, with all of their caveats, omissions, and obfuscation, are damning.
The CIA first approached Chalabi in May 1991, when then-President Bush wanted to help Iraqi dissidents in their efforts to undermine the Hussein regime. Chalabi, a secular Shi'ite who had not lived in Iraq since 1956, was not an ideal opposition candidate by any means. Chalabi was known as a slick financial operator and a fugitive from bank fraud and embezzling charges in Jordan. But, in a meeting in Vienna in June 1992, a group of Iraqi exiles, calling themselves the "Iraqi National Congress" and facilitated by the CIA, elected Chalabi their chairman and spokesman. However, it did not take long for CIA agents to learn that Chalabi was unreliable. They objected to the dubious quality of his information, the excessive size of his security detail, his lobbying of Congress, and his resistance to working as a team player. Chalabi himself did not see himself as an intelligence asset, but as an independent political leader. No matter that Chalabi's entire career as a political leader had been fomented and funded by the CIA from the get-go, Chalabi still insisted that he was an equal and independent player in the operation to overthrow and supplant Hussein. Chalabi and the INC, using CIA money for operational expenses, trundled, in the words of the committee report, "a steady stream of low-ranking walk-ins" to provide intelligence about the Iraqi military. Since the INC was openly creating propaganda to further its aims, the CIA was leery of its information; the fact that Chalabi was so cozy with the Shi'ite government of Iran caused even more worry.
Then the CIA found that Chalabi was double-dealing both sides when he falsely informed Iran that the United States wanted Iran's help in conducting anti-Hussein operations. "Chalabi passed a fabricated message from the White House to" an Iranian intelligence officer in northern Iraq, the CIA reported. According to one CIA representative, Chalabi used National Security Council stationery for the fabricated letter, a charge that Chalabi denied. What little faith in Chalabi was breached. The CIA, in December 1996, decided to terminate its relationship with Chalabi and the INC. "There was a breakdown in trust and we never wanted to have anything to do with him anymore," CIA Director George Tenet told the committee. However, in 1998, with the congressional passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, rammed through by the Republican majority in Congress, the INC was again one of the exile organizations that qualified for US funding. Starting in March 2000, the State Department agreed to grant an INC foundation almost $33 million for several programs, including more propaganda operations and collection of information about alleged war crimes committed by Hussein's regime. By March 2001, with George W. Bush in office and already focusing on Iraq, the INC was given greater leeway to pursue its projects, including an Information Collection Program.
The State Department raised fresh concerns about the INC's blurry responsibilities of both intelligence gathering and propaganda dissemination, but the National Security Council blocked the State Department's attempts to halt funding for the INC. Instead, the NSC shifted the INC operation to the control of the Defense Department, where neoconservatives wielded more influence. CIA officials warned their counterparts at the Defense Intelligence Agency about suspicions that "the INC was penetrated by Iranian and possibly other intelligence services, and that the INC had its own agenda." They were ignored. "You've got a real bucket full of worms with the INC and we hope you're taking the appropriate steps," the CIA told the DIA. The message fell on deaf ears, largely because the neocons and hardliners in the Pentagon were eager to buy what Chalabi was selling.
Meanwhile, Chalabi's disinformation and propaganda was flowing steadily into America's political discourse and into the news media. Parry writes, "Besides irrigating the US intelligence community with fresh propaganda, the INC funneled a steady stream of 'defectors' to US news outlets eager for anti-Hussein scoops. The 'defectors' also made the rounds of Congress where members saw a political advantage in citing the INC's propaganda as a way to talk tough about the Middle East. In turn, conservative and neoconservative think tanks honed their reputations in Washington by staying at the cutting edge of the negative news about Hussein, with human rights groups ready to pile on, too, against the brutal Iraqi dictator. The Bush administration found all this anti-Hussein propaganda fitting perfectly with its international agenda. So the INC's information program served the institutional needs and biases of Official Washington. Saddam Hussein was a despised figure anyway, with no influential constituency that would challenge even the most outrageous accusations against him. When Iraqi officials were allowed onto American news programs, it was an opportunity for the interviewers to show their tough side, pounding the Iraqis with hostile questions. The occasional journalist who tried to be evenhanded would have his or her professionalism questioned. An intelligence analyst who challenged the consensus view could expect to suffer career repercussions. A war fever was sweeping the United States and the INC was doing all it could to spread the infection. INC's 'defectors' supplied primary or secondary intelligence on two key points in particular, Iraq's supposed rebuilding of its unconventional weapons and its alleged training of non-Iraqi terrorists."
Ironically, Bill Clinton's attempt to appease the neoconservatives helped facilitate the flow of INC disinformation into US intelligence. In early 1993, the novice president gave James Woolsey the job of CIA director as an attempt to reach out to neoconservatives, feeling, as foreign policy advisor Sandy Berger once explained to a Democratic official, that his administration owed a favor to the neocons at the New Republic, who had given him some support among Washington's insiders. Operating from a more relaxed, post-Cold War position, Clinton's people almost viewed the CIA directorship as a political patronage plum. Woolsey, a foreign policy hawk who was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite Democrats, referred several INC sources to the DIA with his blessing. Woolsey, an ineffectual director unsuited to handling the challenges of his office, was replaced within two years, and, feeling abandoned by his former patrons, grew ever closer to Washington's extremist neocons, who were openly hostile to Clinton and what they perceived as his "softness" on using the US military to quash upstart regimes that dared to oppose the US, particularly in the Middle East. On January 26, 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century sent a letter to Clinton urging the ouster of Saddam Hussein by force if necessary. Woolsey was one of the 18 signers. By early 2001, he also had grown close to the INC, having been hired as co-counsel to represent eight Iraqis, including INC members, who had been detained on immigration charges.
DIA officials told the committee that the first INC "defectors" they saw came on Woolsey's referral, and told them all about Iraq's WMD programs and Hussein's cozy relationship with Islamic terrorists. (Woolsey says he can't remember making these referrals.) Parry writes, "The debriefings of 'Source One' -- as he was called in the Senate Intelligence Committee report -- generated more than 250 intelligence reports. Two of the reports described alleged terrorist training sites in Iraq, where Afghan, Pakistani and Palestinian nationals were allegedly taught military skills at the Salman Pak base, 20 miles south of Baghdad. 'Many Iraqis believe that Saddam Hussein had made an agreement with Usama bin Ladin in order to support his terrorist movement against the US,' Source One claimed, according to the Senate report.
After the 9/11 attacks, information from Source One and other INC-connected 'defectors' began surfacing in US press accounts, not only in the right-wing news media, but many mainstream publications." An influential column in the Washington Post a month after 9/11 used two Iraqi defectors as sources for its claim of "accumulating evidence of Iraq's role in sponsoring the development on its soil of weapons and techniques for international terrorism," including training at Salman Pak. Chief foreign correspondant Jim Hoagland was critical of the administration for not exploring a link between Iraq and the bombings. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times used one of the same Iraqi defectors (later identified as a former Iraqi intelligence official) and another member of Iraq's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, to source its description of Islamic militants training to hijack jetliners at Salman Pak, and of a German scientist working on biological weapons for Hussein. The article appeared in conjunction with a PBS Frontline documentary entitled "Gunning for Saddam." Times correspondant Chris Hedges recalls, "We tried to vet the defectors and we didn't get anything out of Washington that said, 'these guys are full of sh*t.'" PBS's Lowell Bergman says more judiciously, "The people involved appeared credible and we had no way of getting into Iraq ourselves."
By now, the US news media was beginning to compete in breaking anti-Hussein scoops, and the INC "defectors" were proving an invaluable source of disinformation. Hedges says of Chalabi, "I thought he was unreliable and corrupt, but just because someone is a sleazebag doesn't mean he might not know something or that everything he says is wrong." He says that Chalabi had an "endless stable" of ready sources who could fill in American reporters on any number of Iraq-related topics.
Of course, the entire Salman Pak story turned out to be a complete fabrication from what Parry calls "the INC's propaganda mill that would prove influential in the run-up to the Iraq War but would be knocked down later by US intelligence agencies." DIA investigators concluded in June 2006 that the training base at Salman Pak, used by Hussein's troops to train to actually repel and counter hijackers, had attention brought to it during Desert Storm, so "fabricators and unestablished sources who reported hearsay or third-hand information created a large volume of human intelligence reporting. This type of reporting surged after September 2001."
Unfortunately, many US intelligence analysts and officials, presented with the choice of endangering their careers by questioning the INC sources or going with the flow, choose to save their necks, and by doing so helped plunge the country into an unjustified war by approving and disseminating false intelligence. A July 2002 memo from an intelligence analyst calls Source One's information "highly credible and includes reports on a wide range of subjects including conventional weapons facilities, denial and deception; communications security; suspected terrorist training locations; illicit trade and smuggling; Saddam's palaces; the Iraqi prison system; and Iraqi petrochemical plants." State Department analysts who doubted Source One's information, particularly on Hussein's nuclear capabilities, were ignored and reviled. After US forces were free to move throughout Iraq, US intelligence officials began to realize how faulty Source One's information actually was. The report notes, "In early February 2004, in order to resolve...credibility issues with Source One, Intelligence Community elements brought Source One to Iraq. When taken to the location Source One had described as the suspect [nuclear] facility, he was unable to identify it. According to one intelligence assessment, the 'subject appeared stunned upon hearing that he was standing on the spot that he reported as the location of the facility, insisted that he had never been to that spot, and wanted to check a map.' Intelligence Community officers confirmed that they were standing on the location he was identifying. ...During questioning, Source One acknowledged contact with the INC's Washington Director [name redacted], but denied that the Washington Director directed Source One to provide any false information."
Other sources were caught out as well. After "Source Two"'s information about mobile biological laboratories was proven to be false and contradictory, the CIA issued a "fabrication notice" in May 2002, deeming him "a fabricator/provocateur" and asserting that he had "been coached by the Iraqi National Congress prior to his meeting with western intelligence services." However, the neocon-laden DIA refused to repudiate intelligence reports based on Source Two's information, so he continued to be cited in numerous intelligence assessments, and particularly in the pivotal National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, "as corroborating other source reporting about a mobile biological weapons program," according to the report. Source Two was one of the primary sources quoted by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February 2003 speech to the UN. One of Powell's analysts later gave an extraordinary explanation for why they were so dependent on the testimony of a fabricator: "[W]e lost the thread of concern...as time progressed I don't think we remembered." In other words, either we forgot that the source was unreliable, or we didn't care enough to bother to remember. A CIA supervisor added, "Clearly we had it at one point, we understood, we had concerns about the source, but over time it started getting used again and there really was a loss of corporate awareness that we had a problem with the source."
Another problem was caused by the sheer volume of INC "defectors" flooding the US intelligence agencies. Their sheer numbers tended to overwhelm internal contradictions and inconsistencies. "Source Five," for instance, claimed that Osama bin Laden had traveled to Baghdad for direct meetings with Saddam Hussein. "Source Six" claimed that the Iraqi population was "excited" about the prospects of a US invasion to topple Hussein. The source also said Iraqis recognized the need for post-invasion US control. By early February 2003, as the final invasion plans were underway, US intelligence agencies had progressed up to "Source Eighteen," who, as Parry writes, "came to epitomize what some analysts still suspected -- that the INC was coaching the sources." Source Eighteen is the one who another Iraqi exile told CIA analysts had been ordered to "deliver the act of a lifetime." CIA analysts weren't sure what to make of that piece of news, since Iraqi exiles frequently badmouthed each other, but the value of the warning soon became clear. US intelligence officers debriefed Source Eighteen the next day and discovered that "Source Eighteen was supposed to have a nuclear engineering background, but was unable to discuss advanced mathematics or physics and described types of 'nuclear' reactors that do not exist," according to the report. "Source Eighteen used the bathroom frequently, particularly when he appeared to be flustered by a line of questioning, suddenly remembering a new piece of information upon his return. During one such incident, Source Eighteen appeared to be reviewing notes," the report continued. While this particular source was discredited, dozens of his fellows were treated as reliable and honest. Why? Part of the answer is because the CIA, DIA, and other intelligence agencies were under tremendous pressure from senior White House officials to give them information about Hussein's WMDs and Hussein's links to al-Qaeda; it didn't matter whether the information was valid or not. All that mattered was that it could be made to sound valid.
The story of the INC "defector" codenamed "Curveball" has, like much of the other information in this item, been documented elsewhere in this site. Curveball supplied key information about Iraq's mobile biological warfare labs -- information that turned out to be dead wrong. Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA's European Division, said his office had issued repeated warnings about Curveball's accounts. "Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening," Drumheller said in April 2005. Nevertheless, Curveball was given ratings of "reliable" and "very reliable," and his information became a core element of the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq. Drawings of Curveball's imaginary bio-weapons labs were a central feature of Powell's presentation to the UN. Even after the invasion, US officials continued to promote Curveball's claims, portraying the discovery of a couple of trailers used for inflating artillery balloons as "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." Finally, on May 26, 2004, a CIA assessment of Curveball said "investigations since the war in Iraq and debriefings of the key source indicate he lied about his access to a mobile BW production product." The US intelligence community also learned that Curveball "had a close relative who had worked for the INC since 1992," but the CIA could never resolve the question of whether the INC was involved in coaching Curveball.
The Senate Intelligence Committee overrode the objections of the panel's senior Republicans and issued a report on the INC's contributions to the US intelligence failures in Iraq in September 2006. The report concluded that the INC fed false information to the intelligence community to convince Washington that Iraq was flouting prohibitions on WMD production. The panel also found that the falsehoods had been "widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war" and did influence some American perceptions of the WMD threat in Iraq. But, as Parry notes, it is not solely the fault of the INC that its disinformation and lies became the foundation for the rationale that drove the US into Iraq. The usual checks and balances of the Congress and the news media had completely broken down. Parry writes, "By 2002, that self-correcting mechanism -- a skeptical press, congressional oversight, and tough-minded analysts -- had collapsed. With very few exceptions, prominent journalists refused to put their careers at risk; intelligence professionals played along with the powers that be; Democratic leaders succumbed to the political pressure to toe the President's line; and Republicans marched in lockstep with Bush on his way to war.
Because of this systematic failure, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded four years later that nearly every key assessment of the US intelligence community as expressed in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's WMD was wrong: 'Postwar findings do not support the [NIE] judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program; ...do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq's acquisition of high-strength aluminum tubes was intended for an Iraqi nuclear program; ...do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake" from Africa; ...do not support the [NIE] assessment that "Iraq has biological weapons" and that "all key aspects of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program are larger and more advanced than before the Gulf war"; ...do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq possessed, or ever developed, mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents; ...do not support the [NIE] assessments that Iraq "has chemical weapons" or "is expanding its chemical industry to support chemical weapons production"; ...do not support the [NIE] assessments that Iraq had a developmental program for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle "probably intended to deliver biological agents' or that an effort to procure US mapping software "strongly suggests that Iraq is investigating the use of these UAVs for missions targeting the United States."'" Parry says that only the electoral process can begin to "exact some measure of accountability on individuals and institutions that sent more than 2,800 American soldiers to their death on false pretenses." (Consortium News)

Saudi study says Iraq a "lost battle"

November 1: An advisor to the Saudi government is calling the US-led war in Iraq a "lost battle," and says the country's "dire" plight seems certain to see it shatter along ethnic lines. The damning analysis, unveiled in a presentation at a two-day conference on US-Arab relations in Washington, sees violence in Iraq getting worse and alleges large-scale Iranian "interference" there set to grow. "It is already a lost battle," says Nawaf Obaid, Managing Director of the Saudi National Security Assessment project, at the annual policymakers conference of the National Council on US-Arab Relations. The question in Iraq is not "if the US succeeds -- it has failed by every single measure that you can think of," says Obaid, who is a private security and energy advisor to the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Turki al-Faisal. "The failure is only compounded by the fact that we just don't know what the endgame is." The presentation was released as debate on Iraq reached fever pitch on the US campaign trail ahead of crucial mid-term elections next week, and as foreign policy analysts here predict a possible change of US direction. The study concludes that a Kurdish drive for quasi-independence within Iraq would gather speed, as would the insurgency, and Iranian influence in the country could be expected to increase as American influence waned. Vice President Dick Cheney continues to echo the rosy characterizations of his administration, saying yesterday that violence would go on "for some considerable period of time in Iraq," but that progress had been made. (Press Trust of India/Hindustan Times)

Conservative columnist says Bush "delusional, unhinged," has "lost his mind"

November 1: Bush tells reporters that both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld "are doing fantastic jobs and I strongly support them." Bush says he fully intends to keep both of them on board throughout the end of his second and final term, and says that the situation in Iraq is going well and the generals in theater have "got what they can live with. ...I'm pleased with the progress we're making." Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan, once a staunch supporter of the Iraq war, is thoroughly dismayed at Bush's remarks. On CNN, he says that Bush is so delusional, "This is not an election anymore, it's an intervention." Sullivan says the president is "so in denial," comparing the Rumsfeld endorsement to applauding the job FEMA's Michael Brown did on Katrina: "It's unhinged. It suggests this man has lost his mind. No one objectively could look at the way this war has been conducted, whether you were for it, as I was, or against it, and say that it has been done well. It's a disaster. For him to say it's a fantastic job suggests the president has lost it, I'm sorry, there's no other way to say it.... These people must be held accountable." He then notes that Richard Perle, a leading neocon and Iraq war backer, has today called the administration "dysfunctional." (CNN, Editor and Publisher)
November 1: Bush tells conservative radio maven Rush Limbaugh, during Limbaugh's broadcast, that he is deeply concerned about the ramifications of the US pulling its troops out of the Middle East -- particularly for the Middle East's oil fields. Bush says, "Give me a second here, Rush, because I want to share something with you. I am deeply concerned about a country, the United States, leaving the Middle East." He says he worries that "rival forms of extremists will battle for power, obviously creating incredible damage if they do so; that they will topple modern governments, that they will be in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West. People say, 'What do you mean by that?' I say, 'If they control oil resources, then they pull oil off the market in order to run the price up, and they will do so unless we abandon Israel, for example, or unless we abandon allies.' You couple that with a country that doesn't like us with a nuclear weapon, and people will look back at this moment and say, 'What happened to those people in 2006?' and those are the stakes in this war we face. ...On the one hand we've got a plan to make sure we protect you from immediate attack, and on the other hand we've got a long-term strategy to deal with these threats, and part of that strategy is to stay on the offense. Part of the strategy is to help young democracies like Lebanon and Iraq be able to survive against the terrorists and the extremists who are trying to crush their hopes, and part of the democracy is for a freedom movement, which will help create the conditions so that the extremists become marginalized and unable to recruit." Limbaugh calls Bush's remarks "extremely visionary."
As he campaigns across the country, Bush is telling audiences that to leave Iraq would mean leaving Iraq's huge oil reserves in the hands of terrorists, who would use their control of the Iraqi oil fields to damage other countries. At one rally in Colorado, he says, "You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources. And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision.'" He says extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel."
Before the invasion, Bush officials systematically denied that the invasion and occupation had anything to do with Iraq's oil. In November 2002, Donald Rumsfeld told CBS's Steve Kroft, "There are certain things like that, myths, that are floating around. It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." "This is not about that," then-press secretary Ari Fleischer snapped at reporters. Now, the White House is taking a somewhat different tack. Spokesman Tony Fratto says that Bush's latest argument does not reflect a real shift. "We're still not saying we went into Iraq for oil. That's not true," he says. "But there is the realistic strategic concern that if a country with such enormous oil reserves and the corresponding revenues you can derive from that is controlled by essentially a terrorist organization, it could be destabilizing for the region."
Many oil industry analysts believe that Bush is wildly exaggerating the impact of of Iraq's oil production on world markets, and just how much damage on the oil markets extremists could inflict. Iraq has more than 112 billion barrels of oil, the second-largest proven reserves in the world, but it currently pumps just 2.3 million barrels per day and exports 1.6 million of that, according to the State Department's tracking report on the country, still well short of what it produced before the invasion. That represents a fraction of the 85 million barrels produced around the world each day and less than the surplus capacity of Saudi Arabia and other Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, meaning in a crisis they could ramp up their wells to make up for the shortfall. The United States also has 688 million barrels of oil in its Strategic Petroleum Reserve, enough to counter a disruption of Iraqi oil for 14 months. Even if Iraq did not sell oil to the United States, it would not matter as long as it sold it to someone because the international market is fungible and what counts is the overall supply and overall demand, according to analysts. If Iraq cut off exports altogether, it still would not have the dire effect on the world market that Bush predicts, the experts say. The price of oil began rising dramatically in 2002 as the confrontation with Iraq loomed, but many factors contributed, including increasing demand by China and problems in Nigeria, Venezuela and elsewhere.
The world, in fact, has already seen what would happen if Iraqi oil were cut off entirely, as Bush suggests radicals might do. Iraq effectively stopped pumping oil altogether in the months immediately after the invasion. And yet the price of oil has never topped $80, much less come anywhere near the $300 or $400 a barrel Bush cited as a possible consequence of a radical Iraqi regime withholding the country's oil. "They're a minor exporter," says Edward Morse, managing director and chief energy economist at Lehman Brothers. "They have potential to be a greater exporter. But it's ludicrous to suggest someone could hold the world hostage by withholding oil from the market, especially a regime that needs money." Disruptions of oil supplies certainly affect the markets, but not as drastically as Bush suggested, Morse says, noting that Venezuela's capacity has fallen by 1 million barrels a day since President Hugo Chavez came to power there and yet it has not given him any geopolitical leverage over the United States even though he is an avowed Bush foe. Fratto, the White House spokesman, counters by arguing that even if radicals could not move the markets dramatically with Iraqi oil, they would use the country as a base to topple other governments in the Middle East such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which would give them "a lot more oil to blackmail with" -- sort of an oil-based "domino theory" for the 21st century. (Raw Story, Washington Post)
November 1: Congressional incumbent Jim Gibbons, a Nevada Republican battling allegations that he assaulted a casino waitress and hid ab illegal kitchen worker in his basement, now faces allegations from a Wall Street Journal investigative piece that shows Gibbons granted exceptional favors to a campaign backer and "friend" from whom he received gifts and campaign donations. From Nevada software entrepreneur Warren Trepp, Gibbons received generous gifts, including a week-long family cruise valued at $10,000 (which he failed to report) and $100,000 in campaign contributions. Trepp also gave Gibbons gambling chips worth money, as well as cash, according to Trepp's old business partner. Gibbons then gave Trepp at least one multi-million dollar Congressional earmark, and a "plus-up" -- adding more money onto an existing contract than was originally agreed to. He also set up numerous meetings between Trepp and defense officials, worked to get Trepp paid when the government checks weren't coming on time, and personally flacked for Trepp's products. Both Gibbons and Trepp deny any wrongdoing. According to Senate records, Trepp's company hired scandal-prone lobbyist Letitia White to work on its behalf. White, a former top staffer to House appropriations chairman Jerry Lewis, is facing a federal investigation for her unsavory entanglements that may have involved corrupting the federal spending process. Though Trepp denies ever paying for a Washington lobbyist, financial records show White indeed lobbied on behalf of Trepp's firm, eTreppid. And e-mails from "a lobbyist acting for eTreppid in Washington" laud the favors Gibbons granted Trepp.
Meanwhile, the assault allegations against Gibbons continues to simmer. TPM Muckraker points out that except for the victim, waitress Chrissy Mazzeo, everyone connected with the case is also connected with Gibbons, ensuring that Gibbons receives as much favorable treatment as possible: "Through himself, his counsel and advisers, the accused is closely tied to the local sheriff whose force is investigating the assault charges against him; at least one of the two local newspapers covering the scandal; a key judge; the owners of the surveillance tape; and nearly everyone else in his drinking party that fateful night (i.e., witnesses). For starters." The videotapes from cameras in the parking garage where the assault allegedly took place have mysteriously gone missing, and may not be able to be authenticated even if "found." On the other hand, police finally admitted that there was a fourth 911 call from that night, from Mazzio's sister. Since the incident over two weeks ago, the police have denied they had any record of that call. (Wall Street Journal/TPM Muckraker, Las Vegas Sun/TPM Muckraker)
November 1: John Kerry apologizes for his botched joke of two days before when, meaning to jab George W. Bush, instead said that students who fail to get an education "end up stuck in Iraq." Republicans have hammered Kerry for two days about his supposed "insult to the troops;" Kerry, after an initial refusal to back down and a demand for apologies from Bush, Cheney, and other Republicans for sending troops to Iraq without a plan for victory and under false premises, decides that enough is enough. The media, of course, has leapt on Kerry with both feet; it is more than likely that Kerry decided that the entire flap was a distraction to Democrats' attempts to win votes for November 7. "Of course I'm sorry about a botched joke. You think I love botched jokes?" he says during a call to Don Imus' nationally syndicated morning radio program. "I mean, you know, it's pretty stupid." He says he meant no offense to troops when he made his remark. He also says that the White House was purposely twisting his words and continues to assert that it is Bush who owes troops an apology for a misguided war in Iraq. "I'm sorry that that's happened," he says, "but I'm not going to stand back from the reality here, which is, they're trying to change the subject. It's their campaign of smear and fear." After the lackluster apology, press secretary Tony Snow recommends that Kerry just say "I'm sorry." He says it 16 times, either to ensure that Kerry gets the point, or more likely, to push Kerry into an even more recalcitrant position to attempt to keep the issue alive. Some Democrats have asked Kerry to just apologize and make the issue go away, including Montana Senate candidate Jon Tester and Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford. "Whatever the intent, Senator Kerry was wrong to say what he said. He needs to apologize to our troops. However, Senator Kerry's words don't alter the fact that the stay-the-course strategy pursued by President Bush and supported by [Ford opponent] Bob Corker isn't working," says Ford. Kerry has canceled several campaign rally appearances, saying that he does not want to be a "distraction." But some Democrats have refused to back down. Sherrod Brown, a Senate candidate from Ohio, says that Republicans are merely trying to use the gaffe to distract voters: "The people who should apologize are George Bush and [his opponent] Mike DeWine for sending our troops into battle without body armor and without examining the cooked intelligence," he says. Brown is joined by DNC chairman Howard Dean, who says simply, "Bloopers happen,"
Later in the day, Kerry issues a more straightforward apology. He says, "I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member or American who was offended. As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: My poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and [was] never intended to refer to any troop." After the apology, he continues to state that the GOP is using his gaffe to distract voters from its own failures in Iraq. "It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy," he says. "I don't want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops." White House spokeswoman Dana Perino says Kerry's apology "came late, but it was the right thing to do." (AP/KVUE-TV, CNN)
November 1: MSNBC political pundit Keith Olbermann delivers what is perhaps his hardest-hitting "special commentary" yet, on the topic of how low the Bush administration, and the Republicans in general, will sink to keep their grasp on power. Olbermann's answer: we have not yet seen the bottom.
Olbermann uses as his "hook" the 1856 incident in which pro-slavery congressman Preston Brooks viciously attacked anti-slavery senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, and beat Sumner almost to death with his cane. Olbermann says, "Others will cite John Brown's attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry as the exact point after which the Civil War became inevitable. In point of fact, it might have been the moment -- not when Brooks broke his cane over the prostrate body of Senator Sumner -- but when voters in Brooks's district started sending him new canes." He then segues into 2006, when Bush and his Republicans are using the same tactics on a verbal and marketing level as Brooks used against Sumner. "There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame," he says. "There is no line this President has not crossed -- nor will not cross -- to keep one political party, in power. He has spread any and every fear among us, in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears -- some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency. And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him, whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people, is subtle and nuanced -- or laughably transparent."
Olbermann defends John Kerry's characterization of Bush as an uneducated liar, when Kerry, "in essence, called Mr. Bush stupid. The context was unmistakable: Texas;the state of denial;stuck in Iraq. No interpretation required. And Mr. Bush and his minions responded, by appearing to be too stupid to realize that they had been called stupid. They demanded Kerry apologize -- to the troops in Iraq. And so he now has. That phrase 'appearing to be too stupid' is used deliberately, Mr. Bush. Because there are only three possibilities here: One, sir, is that you are far more stupid than the worst of your critics have suggested; that you could not follow the construction of a simple sentence; that you could not recognize your own life story when it was deftly summarized; that you could not perceive it was the sad ledger of your presidency that was being recounted. This, of course, compliments you, Mr. Bush, because even those who do not 'make the most of it,' who do not 'study hard,' who do not 'do their homework,' and who do not 'make an effort to be smart' might still just be stupid -- but honest. No; the first option, sir, is, at best, improbable. You are not honest. The second option is that you and those who work for you deliberately twisted what Senator Kerry said to fit your political template. That you decided to take advantage of it, to once again pretend that the attacks, solely about your own incompetence, were in fact attacks on the troops -- or even on the nation itself. The third possibility is, obviously, the nightmare scenario; that the first two options are in some way conflated. That it is both politically convenient for you, and personally satisfying to you, to confuse yourself with the country for which, sir, you work."
Like the unwarranted attack on Kerry, Bush will use anything to make political hay, no matter how unfair or unseemly. Now that Kerry has issued his apology, Olbermann asks, will Bush now apologize to the troops "for having suggested, six weeks ago, that the chaos in Iraq, the death and the carnage, the slaughtered Iraqi civilians and the dead American service personnel, will, to history, quote 'look like just a comma'[?] This President must apologize to the troops -- because the intelligence he claims led us into Iraq proved to be undeniably and irredeemably wrong. This President must apologize to the troops -- for having laughed about the failure of that intelligence, at a banquet, while our troops were in harm's way. This President must apologize to the troops -- because the streets of Iraq were not strewn with flowers and its residents did not greet them as liberators. This President must apologize to the troops -- because his administration ran out of 'plan' after barely two months. This President must apologize to the troops -- for getting 2,815 of them killed. This President must apologize to the troops -- for getting this country into a war without a clue. And Mr. Bush owes us an apology for this destructive and omnivorous presidency. We will not receive them, of course. This President never apologizes. Not to the troops. Not to the people. Nor will those henchmen who have echoed him."
Olbermann then calls out Senator John McCain, who piled on to the Kerry gaffe with his own demand for a Kerry apology, saying that McCain "should be ashamed of himself tonight. He rolled over and pretended Kerry had said what he obviously had not. Only, the symbolic stick he broke over Kerry's head came in a context, even more disturbing: Mr. McCain demanded the apology, while electioneering for a Republican congressional candidate in Illinois. He was speaking of how often he had been to Walter Reed Hospital to see the wounded Iraq veterans, of how, quote 'many of the have lost limbs.' He said all this while demanding that the voters of Illinois reject a candidate who is not only a wounded Iraq veteran, but who lost two limbs there: Tammy Duckworth. Support some of the wounded veterans. But bad-mouth the Democratic one. And exploit all the veterans, and all the still-serving personnel, in a cheap and tawdry political trick, to try to bury the truth: that John Kerry said the President had been stupid. And to continue this slander as late as this morning -- as biased, or gullible, or lazy newscasters, nodded in sleep-walking assent. Senator McCain became a front man in a collective lie to break sticks over the heads of Democrats -- one of them his friend; another his fellow veteran, leg-less, for whom he should weep and applaud, or at minimum about whom, he should stay quiet. That was beneath the senator from Arizona. And it was all because of an imaginary insult to the troops that his party cynically manufactured -- out of a desperation, and a futility, as deep as that of Congressman Brooks, when he went hunting for Senator Sumner."
"This, is our beloved country now, as you have re-defined it, Mr. Bush. Get a tortured Vietnam veteran to attack a decorated Vietnam veteran, in defense of military personnel, whom that decorated veteran did not insult. Or, get your henchmen to take advantage of the evil lingering dregs of the fear of miscegenation in Tennessee, in your party's advertisements against Harold Ford. Or, get the satellites who orbit around you, like Rush Limbaugh, to exploit the illness -- and the bi-partisanship -- of Michael J. Fox -- yes, get someone to make fun of the cripple. Oh, and sir, don't forget to drag your own wife into it. 'It's always easy,' she said of Mr. Fox's commercials -- and she used this phrase twice -- 'to manipulate people's feelings.' Where on earth might the First Lady have gotten that idea, Mr. President? From your endless manipulation of people's feelings about terrorism? 'How ever they put it,' you said Monday of the Democrats, on the subject of Iraq , 'their approach comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses.' No manipulation of feelings there. No manipulation of the charlatans of your administration into the only truth-tellers. No shocked outrage at the Kerry insult that wasn't; no subtle smile as the First Lady silently sticks the knife in Michael J. Fox's back; no attempt on the campaign trail to bury the reality that you have already assured that the terrorists are winning. Winning in Iraq, sir. Winning in America, sir."
The chaos in Iraq goes right over Bush's head. Instead, we are given "deliberate, systematic, institutionalized lying and smearing and terrorizing -- a code of deceit, that somehow permits a President to say, quote, 'If you listen carefully for a Democrat plan for success, they don't have one.' Permits him to say this while his plan in Iraq has amounted to a twisted version of the advice once offered to Lyndon Johnson about his Iraq, called Vietnam. Instead of 'declare victory -- and get out' -- we now have 'declare victory -- and stay, indefinitely.' And also here, we have institutionalized the terrorizing of the opposition. True domestic terror: Critics of your administration in the media receive letters filled with fake anthrax. Braying newspapers applaud, or laugh, or reveal details the FBI wished kept quiet, and thus impede or ruin the investigation. A series of reactionary columnists encourages treason charges against a newspaper that published 'national security information' -- that was openly available on the Internet. One radio critic receives a letter, threatening the revelation of as much personal information about her as can be obtained -- and expressing the hope that someone will then shoot her with an AK-47 machine gun. And finally, a critic of an incumbent Republican Senator, a critic armed with nothing but words, is attacked by the Senator's supporters, and thrown to the floor, in full view of television cameras, as if someone really did want to re-enact the intent and the rage of the day Preston Brooks found Senator Charles Sumner."
"Of course, Mr. President, you did none of these things. You instructed no one to mail the fake anthrax. Nor undermine the FBI's case. Nor call for the execution of the editors of the New York Times. Nor threaten to assassinate Stephanie Miller. Nor beat up a man yelling at Senator Allen. Nor have the first lady knife Michael J. Fox. Nor tell John McCain to lie about John Kerry. No, you did not. And the genius of the thing, is the same, as in King Henry's rhetorical question about Archbishop Thomas Becket: 'Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?' All you have to do, sir...is hand out enough new canes." (MSNBC/Crooks and Liars [link to video])
November 1: Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan comes out forcefully against the Republicans' election chances on November 7. In an entry regarding the systematic lies told by Bush and Cheney about Iraq, Sullivan writes, "One reason to vote Democrat or abstain next week is that we have a president prepared to lie through his teeth about the central issue of our time. He is dishonoring his office and shirking his responsibility. In peacetime, this is disgrace enough. In wartime, it is unforgivable." (Daily Dish/Time)
November 1: Conservative columnist Ann Coulter may be charged with felonious vote fraud after refusing to cooperate with an investigation over whether she deliberately voted in the wrong precinct. Coulter lives in Palm Beach, Florida. Because Coulter has refused to cooperate with Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson's office, the matter will be turned over to state prosecutors. Anderson's office received a complaint in February 2006 that Coulter allegedly voted in the wrong precinct during a February 7 Palm Beach town council election. Since then, Anderson says he has made repeated attempts to resolve the matter with Coulter and her attorney but has been rebuffed. Anderson says an initial letter was sent to Coulter on March 27 requesting that she clarify her address for the voting records "or face the possibility of her voter registration being rescinded." Three more letters were sent to Coulter and her attorney over the next several months, but she has yet to respond with the information requested. Knowingly voting in a wrong precinct is a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney's office in West Palm Beach, says his office generally reviews such cases, then turns them over to local authorities for a full investigation that could result in an arrest if intent is proven. (Orlando Sun-Sentinel)

"Why is it the war on terrorism seems to be fought between September and November every even-numbered year?" -- Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr, November 2

Leaked report proves Diebold machines designed to be hacked and manipulated

November 2: A leaked report produced for the Maryland Board of Elections in September 2003 shows that the Diebold electronic voting machines they studied have tremendous flaws that were not reported to either the entire board, the governor of Maryland, or the citizenry. The study was originally produced by the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), but much of the study was redacted, edited, omitted, or even rewritten to give a far more favorable impression of Diebold than the original study reported. Diebold provides voting machines for the entire state of Maryland; those same machines are in heavy use around the country as well. The full Board of Elections, the govenor's office, and the Maryland voters were only provided with a 38-page sanitized version. The actual report is over 200 pages long. Rebecca Abramson of BradBlog, which focuses on voting rights issues, has obtained a complete version of the report and now shares it with the world. In short, the security flaws discovered are thus:
- The machines can be hacked, by the implanting of malicious code, at the factory
- The machines can be hacked during transport from the factory
- The machines can be hacked while on "sleepovers" before the election
- The machines can be hacked (in one minute with a fifty-cent mini bar key) during the election
- These machines can be hacked, at the tabulator, after the election
The report also shows that there are virtually no security protocols in place for many Diebold machines -- the recommended security protocols were purposely removed from the publicly released version of the report. The analyzed Diebold machines were not functional nor secure for use in elections, and there is serious doubt that they are any more ready to tally votes on November 7. In addition, the report documents that Diebold officials have repeatedly and systematically lied about their machines and about their own partisan political agenda.
The complete study, dated September 17, 2003, was commissioned in response to computer science professor Avi Rubin's research that cited severe security flaws in the Diebold touch screen machines, including a stunning lack of security (encryption) on the memory cards. The Maryland BOE wanted to know if the machines were safe for voters to use or not; Maryland, along with Georgia, was one of the two original "showcase states" to implement Diebold's new proprietary touch-screen DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machines. But Diebold, in return for allowing their super secret, proprietary machines to be examined by the independent laboratory, insisted on two huge concessions from the State of Maryland. First, SAIC would not be allowed to even look at the source code, the heart and guts of electronic voting machines. Second, Diebold officials would be allowed to go through the SAIC Report, line by line, and redact anything and everything that they felt was proprietary, had a potential for security breaches or could provide a roadmap for anyone who wanted to compromise the system. In other words, Diebold was given virtual carte blanche to rewrite the report to their satisfaction. And they did just that.
On November 7, 468 federal seats, and countless state and local seats, will be decided by the outcome of tallies made on machines manufactured by Diebold and three other companies. No one except officials from these four companies -- Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and Hart InterCivic -- is ever allowed to see or inspect the software, including the core source code, to ever know if the machines operated properly or if there was, or is, malicious software in place that could alter the vote. In essence, the voting machines are nothing more than computerized tabulators -- the source code should not be difficult to comprehend, overly complex, or secret from even elections officials.
Maryland's State Election Director, Linda Lamone, a Democrat, is a key player in this entire situation. The Maryland State Board of Elections, or SBE, was ordered by Governor Robert Ehrlich to hire another firm, Freeman Craft McGregor, to review the vulnerabilities reported in the SAIC study. FCM was supposed to be given the actual, unredacted report. Lamone has refused to release the results of the FCM study, made available in August 2006, and has even refused to discuss the report with Ehrlich or his staff, calling the FCM study "proprietory. Lamone consistently refused to allow the SBE chairman, Giles Berger, to see the original SAIC report, but has only provided Berger and his staff with the redacted Diebold version.
The BradBlog entry provides a number of comparisons between the original SAIC report and Diebold's corrections, which I will not reprint here, but which should be reviewed by the reader. The changes are astonishing. Experts who have seen the leaked original report say it is the "smoking gun" that proves not only Diebold machines to be irretrievably flawed, but that they were designed to be hacked and manipulated from their inception. Lamone's interest in protecting Diebold seems to be less motivated by political partisanship -- she is a Democrat, after all -- but because of her ties to Diebold and her interesting in helping sell Diebold systems to election directors around the country and even globally. Lamone, the former president of the National Association of State Election Directors, was chiefly responsible making recommendations to other states on which electronic voting machines they should use. She is acutely aware of the problems associated with Diebold voting machines, yet continues to defend them without question. When Abramson attempted to question her in an interview held in October, 2006, Lamone halted the interview, took off her microphone, and walked out of the studio when Abramson asked her about the source code and whether Lamone believed the software should remain secretly controlled by Diebold.
Like others, Abramson reminds us that, because of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the US has effectively turned control of its elections over to Diebold and the three other private, for-profit corporations who manufacture and provide the bulk of the voting machines used in American elections. Not only do Diebold, Hart InterCivic, Sequoia, and ES&S run the machines and tabulate the votes, they make the Electronic Poll (E-Poll) books that now hold America's voter rolls.
Abramson recommends the following, in her own words:
- Prove that the many recommendations, contained in the un-redacted SAIC Report, have been complied with.
- In Maryland, release the Freeman, Craft, McGregor report showing what, if anything, has been fixed since the SAIC report.
- Make the electronic voting machines and tabulators available immediately before, during and after the November 7 election for identified, certified computer scientists from the state government, (an "Election Swat Team") to inspect for evidence of tampering, factory installed malicious code, malicious code that might have been added after leaving the factory, malicious code that might have been added during the election.
- Make emergency paper ballots available for all voters who are not comfortable trusting the electronic machines. If the counties across this country have to pay Rush Fees to printers in their jurisdiction, so be it. Democracy demands nothing less.
Bush's own appointee to the chair of the US Elections Assistance Commission, the Reverend DeForest Soares, recently quit his post, declaring that "There is no prototype. There are no standards. There is no scientific research that would guarantee any election district that there's a machine that can be used to answer these very serious questions. And so, my sense is that the politicians in Washington have concluded that the system can't be all that bad because, after all, it produced them. And as long as an elected official is an elected official, then whatever machine was used, whatever device was used to elect him or her, seems to be adequate. But there's an erosion of voting rights implicit in our inability to trust the technology that we use and if we were another country being analyzed by America, we would conclude that this country is ripe for stealing elections and for fraud." So far both the Bush administration and Congress, under its Republican leadership and lacking leadership from the Democratic minority, have done nothing to protect either the voters or the democratic process. Abramson writes, "Congress has refused to require that the four manufacturers make the software available for inspection (the Independent Testing Authories, or ITA's, only perform tests on the machine's functionality and they are chosen and paid for by the manufacturers.) They do not even look (and they're not required to look) for vote-flipping malicious code inside the software. Their reports are also kept secret. Congress refused to require even so-called 'voter verified paper audit trails' where the voter would look at a paper receipt inside the machine (not taken home with them), verify that it was correct and then allow for it, the hard copy, to be stored separately for use in the eventuality of a recount. And, further, Congress has refused to require mandatory random audits at polling stations or any other verification that the totals that are reported by the machines are, in fact, anything close to what the voters had intended."
In the Senate, the fight to keep any legislation requiring voter-verified paper ballots and machine transparency from even reaching the floor for a vote was led by Senator Mitch McConnell; in the House, Representative Bob Ney (later convicted of conspiracy and fraud). Abramson concludes, "In other words, despite the brilliant rallying cry of their hero, Ronald Reagan, 'Trust but verify,' the Republican Leadership has, in fact, created a democracy where we are asked to do one but with no effort at all to do the other. The leaked, un-redacted SAIC Report makes it clear that these machines are not ready for our midterm elections next week and that Diebold, and, perhaps the three other manufacturers, have been fraudulently hiding serious operational and security flaws from the states and the voters. Unless there is emergency action undertaken by our states, we could have 468 mini-Florida 2000s and the control and direction of our Congress debated for many months to come. Nonetheless, absent the ability to properly inspect the software on these machines, the best safeguard may, indeed, be for everyone to vote. The larger the turnout and, conceivably, the larger the margin of victory, one way or another, the less likely these far from proven machines will be able to alter the vote in defiance of whatever exit polling there is left. Until we can get Diebold and the other manufacturers who hold our democracy in their corporate hand to tell the truth about their hardware and software, our democracy may hinge on people doing what it is really all about anyway: Getting out and voting." (BradBlog)
November 2: A military policeman convicted of using his dog to threaten and intimidate Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib has been sent back to Iraq to train Iraqis in police and security work. Sergeant Santos Cardona, convicted of dereliction of duty and aggravated assault, has just completed his sentence of 90 days at hard labor. Cardona's friends and family describe him as depressed and unwilling to return to Iraq, fearful that he will be treated as a pariah. According to one friend, Cardona said he had told at least one of his superiors that he feared for his safety in Iraq, especially because of his presence in the al-Qaeda video, but was told by an officer, "We need bodies [in Iraq]" and that he shouldn't worry about it. Cardona appears in at least one al-Qaeda propaganda video, menacing a cowering Iraqi with his dog, a fearsome Belgian Malinois. His unit, the 23rd MP Company, is to train a unit of Iraqi police often targeted for assassination and believed to be heavily infiltrated by insurgents. Many former senior US officials say sending Cardona back to Iraq gives the wrong signal at a time when the US is trying to prop up the fast-collapsing government in Baghdad. "If news of this deployment is accurate, it represents appallingly bad judgment," says retired General Barry McCaffrey, who commanded a division in the first Gulf War. "The symbolic message perceived in Iraq will likely be that the US is simply insensitive to the abuse of their prisoners." Retired Major General John Batiste agrees, saying, "You just have to wonder how far up the chain of command this decision was made." Cardona was acquitted of seven other charges, including including alleged attempts to harass a second prisoner with his dog. Cardona's lawyers argued that their client's actions at Abu Ghraib were condoned, if not approved in each case, by officers in charge of the prison, as well as senior officials in the Army command. (Time)

GOP congressional aides admit to discussing Foley scandal "damage control" two days before Foley's resignation

November 2: Two senior aides to National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds participated in "damage control" conference calls concerning correspondence between Congressman Mark Foley and a former congressional page two days before the scandal became public, and earlier than previously reported. The aides, NRCC Communications Director Carl Forti and Reynolds then chief-of-staff Kirk Fordham, both took part in the first call the evening of Wednesday, September 27, and one call the next day, Forti and others have confirmed the conference call. Forti's involvement and the NRCC's role in the run-up to the Foley scandal add another link between the disgraced former congressman and Reynolds, who has said he knew only indirectly of questionable emails, and that he reported them to his House superiors. They also reflect another moment at which House GOP leadership was aware of concerns about Foley and pages. Foley resigned Friday, September 29, soon after ABCNews presented him with a sexually explicit instant message correspondence with a page. The conference call, described by a Hill staffer familiar with its contents as focused on "damage control," also included Foley's Florida-based political consultant, Richard Johnston, and his communications director, Jason Kello. The participants were apparently unaware of the explicit instant messages that would force Foley's resignation two days later. Foley's aides were "seeking [Forti's] advice and keeping him abreast of" the ABCNews inquiry. Foley consultant Richard Johnston and Foley communications director Jason Kello were also on the phone, according to two people familiar with the call. Fordham, then Reynolds' chief of staff, and formerly Foley's chief of staff, played a central role throughout the affair. "Kirk was involved before the resignation -- in the days before -- helping, advising Foley with respect to how this would be handled in the context of his reelection campaign," says Fordham's lawyer, Timothy Heaphy, referring to the earlier, less damning email. "There were NRCC people involved in that discussion." Reynolds himself wasn't asked about the Wednesday and Thursday discussions during the 40-minute press conference he gave on the subject October 2. He said then he'd been told of months earlier -- but hadn't seen -- the first emails, which he described as "overly friendly chit-chat." (New York Daily News)
November 2: Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont, running for a Senate seat against independent Joe Lieberman, files a complaint against Lieberman with the Federal Election Commission over the $387,000 in petty cash Lieberman's campaign spent in the waning days before the August Democratic primary. Political committees may make expenditures of not more than $100 to any person or for a transaction out of the petty cash fund and are required to keep a written journal documenting the payments. While Lieberman, who is being heavily if quietly supported by the state and national GOP, claims no wrongdoing and is refusing to turn over any journals or documentation, interviews with some of the people brought in to help get out the vote in in the two weeks before the hotly contested August 8 primary describe situations that appear to be at odds with some campaign finance requirements. At least one man who was hired as a consultant, Tomas Reyes, says he has yet to be asked by the campaign to turn over material for the journal, which would justify expenditures of $8,250. The FEC requires the treasurer of the political committee to keep a written journal of all disbursements out of petty cash, including names, addresses, dates and purposes. Reyes and another man, Daryl Brooks, who ran a consultant service, say they each got one check from the campaign for their services, but they are listed in the third quarter campaign finance report as getting two checks, for a total of twice what the men said they received. The report lists Reyes as getting two checks for $8,250 apiece. Brooks received $12,200 twice. Several young men, who were paid $60 a day out of petty cash to canvass in Bridgeport, say they were paid in cash for aggregate earnings over $200. Michelle Ryan, a spokeswoman for the FEC, will not comment on specifics of the Lamont complaint, but says "in terms of itemization, it is required once the aggregate total to a recipient is in excess of $200." The size of the petty cash involved is raising eyebrows with the nonpartisan Public Campaign Action Fund, which asked the campaign to go beyond the legal requirements and disclose the particulars of the expenditures. "No other senatorial campaign that we know of has ever left undisclosed to the public a sum as large as this," says PCAF chairman Pete MacDowell, in a letter to the senator this week. MacDowell writes that the issue could impact future elections if the campaign found a new loophole and is setting a precedent "of opening up a serious breach in the campaign finance disclosure laws." (New Haven Register)
November 2: The political watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) file a complaint with the IRS about the conservative 527 group "Americans for Honesty on Issues." CREW alleges that AFHOI, an offshoot of the 2004 group "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," broke the law by failing to report expenditures and contributions. According to CREW, AFHOI failed to file financial reports with the IRS twice in October. Federal law requires 527s like AFHOI to disclose all contributions and expenditures to the IRS. Any 527 that fails to report its expenditures and contributions may be assessed a tax up to 35% of the unreported totals. CREW estimates that the IRS could fine AFHOI up to $1.68 million. "It appears that Americans for Honesty on Issues isn't being honest with the American people about its campaign activities," says Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director. "It is flagrantly breaking IRS law and should be investigated immediately." (CREW)
November 2: Republican congressman Don Sherwood, already forced to admit to having a mistress, Cynthia Ore, and battling charges that he physically abused her, has agreed to pay Ore $500,000 in a settlement. One interesting caveat: Ore doesn't get the money unless she stays quiet about Sherwood's alleged abuse of her until after Election Day. Sherwood agreed to settle Ore's $5.5 million lawsuit against him in November 2005; the terms of settlement have been, until now, kept confidential. Ore has been, and will continue, to be paid in installments; she will receive the bulk of the payments after the November 7 elections. The settlement information comes from a confidential source. A confidentiality clause requires Ore to forfeit much of the money if she talks publicly about the case, according to this source and two other people familiar with elements of the case. Sherwood admitted no wrongdoing, a standard provision in such agreements, says the source. Sherwood says in response to the story, "I can neither confirm nor deny because this was a private settlement. If I'd like to talk to you about it, I can't." According to a police report, Ore called 911 on her cell phone from the bathroom of Sherwood's Capitol Hill apartment in 2004 and reported that Sherwood had choked her while giving her a back rub. Eventually Sherwood admitted having an affair with Ore, but vehemently denied ever hurting her, and criminal charges were never filed. Ore, over 30 years younger than Sherwood, then sued for damages. (AP/Centre Daily Times)

GOP "robocalls" plaguing Democratic voters in likely vote-suppression tactic

November 2: A new and ugly tactic is being used by the National Republican Congressional Committee in tight House races all over the country -- plaguing voters with "robocalls" purporting to be from their Democratic opponents. So far, the NRCC is targeting at least 53 races in a number of states. The idea seems to be to fool committed Democratic voters into thinking they are receiving a barrage of automated calls from their own candidates' campaigns -- over and over again, sometimes ten or twenty times in a single evening. If the tactic works, the voter will become disgusted with the candidate and not vote for him or her. So far, several campaigns and voters have filed complaints with the FCC, but there doesn't seem much likelihood of the calls being stopped by Election Day. Daily Kos blogger "G2geek," a PBX technician with 20 years of industry experience, describes the technique thusly: "Desperate Republicans across the country are using robo-calls (automated dialing systems that play recorded messages) to harass voters. Your phone rings, there's a brief recorded intro that makes it appear the call is from a Democratic campaign or related group, and then a pause, and then a recorded message. If you hang up it calls you back six or seven times or more. The goal is to make people think they are being harassed by the Democrats, and p*ss them off enough to change their votes. It works well enough to potentially flip some close races."
Both Democrats and Republicans use automated calling, considered a relatively inexpensive and effective tactic to inform voters and create interest in voting. "As much as people complain about getting automated calls and saying they don't work, every politician is doing them," says Jerry Dorchuck, whose Pennsylvania-based Political Marketing International will make about 200,000 such phone calls each hour for mostly Democratic candidates. "Targeted calls play a key in very close races." But the Republicans have gone in a different, ugly direction by bombarding Democrats with calls which initially purport to be from their own candidate. Only if listeners let the entire message play out do they find that the calls are actually in support of a GOP candidate, and authorized either by the individual Republican candidate or the NRCC. If voters hang up, the system begins hammering them with return calls. A Pennsylvania Democratic voter, software engineer Bruce Jacobson, recently filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving the same message three times in four hours. The messages all began, "Hello, I'm calling with information about Lois Murphy," the Democrat running against two-term incumbent Republican Jim Gerlach in the Philadelphia-area district. "Basically, they go on to slam Lois," says Jacobson, who has filed a complaint with the FCC because the source of the call isn't immediately known. FCC rules say all prerecorded messages must "at the beginning of the message, state clearly the identity of the business, individual, or other entity that is responsible for initiating the call." During or after the message, they must give the telephone number of the caller. Often the GOP and NRCC messages do neither., though NRCC spokesman Ed Patru says his organization's ads "are in compliance with the law."
"They are violating the regulations that were set up," says Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who says the DCCC has employed one robocall this cycle and paid $500 for it. "I think the real point here is that the Republicans are using a desperate campaign tactic that is misleading, at worst violating the law and at best is a page out of Karl Rove's playbook," Psaki says. "They clearly are attempting to mislead voters." A Murphy spokeswoman, Amy Bonitatibus, says, "Because [voters] are getting so many, they are only listening to the first part of the message. ...Some of our biggest supporters have said, 'If you call me again, I'm not voting for Lois.' ...They're hoping to turn off our base. ...These are pretty much dirty tricks by the Republican Party." As opposed to $500 by the DCCC for robocalls, the NRCC has spent $2.1 million on those automated calls. Three separate robocalls target Chicago-area Democrat Tammy Duckworth, locked in a tight House race with her Republican opponent Peter Roskas. "Illinois families will be footing the bill for illegal immigrants who get government benefits," the voice says in one. In Connecticut's hotly contested 4th Congressional District, incumbent Republican Christopher Shays and Democrat Diane Farrell both say they are victims of misleading and annoying robocall campaigns. Farrell spokeswoman Jan Ellen Spiegel says the campaign has been a victim of "constant pummeling," including robocalls that begin with a recorded voice saying, "I'd like to talk with you about Diane Farrell." It's the same tactic employed in Murphy's district and elsewhere. In North Carolina's 11th Congressional District, Republicans are going after challenger Heath Shuler, whose campaign said the calls are coming as late as 2:30 am. "Calling people up, making people think it's me when it's actually them -- it's acts of desperation," says Shuler. "I think it's part of the corruption in Washington."
In Florida's 13th District, Democrat Christine Jennings is being victimized by similar robocalls sponsored by her opponent, incumbent Republican Vern Buchanan. The calls purport to be from Jennings, and use someone impersonating Jennings to make several minutes' worth of what the Jennings campaign calls "nasty and misleading" statements; the calls hit some voters' phones as many as 10 times in a single night. Only when the robocall is listened through to the end does the call reveal that it is a campaign advertisement from either Buchanan or the National Republican Congressional Committee.
"G2geek," the blogger quoted above, has a wealth of information available about dealing with the GOP's brand of robocalls, which he says are definitely illegal under many statutes and regulations, and arguably illegal under others. "If we pursue this nationally, we could bankrupt the GOP," he says. The full article can be found in this November 5 Daily Kos diary; some of the highlights are included here. The biggest problem with the calls is that they tie up the victims' phone lines, making it impossible for the telephone owners to dial out, especially in emergency situations. "The goal is that you should always be able to get a new dialtone by hanging up your phone for 1.5 seconds, whether you are the caller or the called party," he writes. This is not happening with the majority of the automated GOP calls. However, another set of laws is indeed being violated -- statutes defining "obscene, indecent, or harassing phone calls" as the placement of repeated calls to a subscriber who does not wish to be called. "[T]ypically the violation is a misdemeanor with a penalty of up to 1 year in prison or a $1,000 fine," the blogger writes. "It can be argued that the penalty should apply per call or per called subscriber, in any case this adds up to a potentially very large number of counts of that misdemeanor, which could bankrupt the GOP. Think of hundreds of thousands of calls, at a $1,000 fine each." The calls may also violate the intent of the "release the line" regulations, discussed above, because if a victim has Call Waiting, the additional incoming calls will trigger call waiting signals, which interrupt conversation briefly each time the system "beeps" the line, thereby interfering with the life-or-death conversations of emergency calls. "This angle is at least worth pursuing, and if nothing else, the R's attorneys will have to respond to it if it's raised as part of a civil action."
Some of the calls are using what is called "PRI service" to reset or cloak their outgoing caller ID. With political calls, this may constitute fraud, misrepresentation, or both.
"Go2geek," the veteran PBX technician, writes, "What we need is someone who will testify that they changed their vote as a result of these calls, and then subsequently learned that they had been deceived and feel that they have been cheated of their vote. To my mind (I am not a lawyer), that constitutes fraud. The more such people, the stronger the case. If this is going on across the country, it could be raised as a Federal RICO case. At minimum it should become the subject of a Congressional investigation after [Democrats] take back the House."
He gives the following advice to handling aggressive robocalls: First, hang up, count to five, then pick up the phone and see if you have a dial tone. "If you cannot get a new dial tone, i.e. the robocaller is still there, make a note of it. Hanging up and then getting silence on the line is not sufficient: you have to get a new dial tone, and if you don't, that may help prosecute these cases. If you don't get a new dial tone in 5 seconds, hang up again and count off 10 seconds. If that doesn't work, hang up again and count 20 seconds. Everything after 5 or at most 7 seconds is illegal, period. Take careful notes." Take note of the caller ID; record the date, time, and caller number. You may get a notation that the phone number is unavailable, or private, or a string of gibberish digits. If it seems like a valid phone number, call it back and make a note of who answers and what they say. If the callback gives you an automated message, either make careful notes to what is said, or record the calls using home recorder-connectors (recording pre-recorded messages is not against the law). If you get a robocall on your voicemail or answering machine, save it. The blogger notes, "Voiceprints can be identified with extraordinary precision so a recording can be used to identify the person's voice, and thus prove the name of the entity for whom they were working, later in the event of legal action. Make a backup copy of the messages by recording it onto audio tape or your hard drive." If you contact a real person, ask immediately what organization they are with, and what their telephone number is, and write everything down. "It appears that in some cases, people who have responded to poll questions in certain ways have immediately been put into robocall lists and gotten a bunch of harassing calls in a row. If a live campaign person calls you and does not provide satisfactory information, that fact itself is of interest. Also if the number they give you does not match the caller ID you receive, make note of that. In some cases this is legit: home phone-banks, i.e. people calling from home for an organization. In other cases this may lead to discovering more fraud, i.e. Rs claiming to be from a D organization.
He also suggests subscribing to Call Trace and turning over the phone number(s) you capture to your telephone company. "How it works: You receive a harassing call. You hang up, and then before the phone rings again, you pick up, listen for dialtone, and dial a specific feature code that your telco will provide for you. This causes the telco central office to immediately trace the correct originating number for the call. Then you file a police report on harassing calls, and this enables Telco Security to provide the phone number to the police for further action." He even gives pointers on how to alert your neighbors with flyers and bullhorns.
Columnist Jill Porter of the Philadelphia Daily News gives some straightforward advice. You can call the FCC to complain at 202-418-1440 or fax them your complaint at 202-418-0232. Or, probably less effective but more fun, send the NRCC your own robocalls telling them to quit. Porter recommends Voiceshot, an automated calling system that costs you 12 cents per call with no minimum. The NRCC's number is 202-479-7000.
Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall notes, "We won't be able to get to the bottom of this operation until after Tuesday, which is the point. ...A lot of these races remain inside the MOE, the margin of error. And that means the MOT, the margin of theft. If Dems want to pick up seats on Tuesday they'll have to get a lot of these races out of the MOT. Because as long as they're inside, the Republicans can still grab them with a mix of voter suppression, dirty tricks and election fraud." "G2geek" concludes, more hopefully, " DON'T let the Republican dirty-trick machine scare you. The only thing to fear is fear itself, not the fear-mongers. DO resolve to win regardless! The Rs are clearly desperate. We have them on the run. We are going to take back Congress, and then let the investigations begin!" (Boston Globe, Philadelphia Daily News, Christine Jennings/Daily Kos, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo)
November 2: George W. Bush's grades at Yale seem to be far lower than the ones published by the university, according to records of his grades stored at his former residence house. Yale houses its students at separate residential colleges: not dormitories, but smaller, more cohesive versions of the university. Bush's residence hall was Davenport, where his daughter Barbara also lived as a Yale student, graduating in 2004. Grades and other student records have traditionally been stored at the residence halls, a practice that stopped in the 1960s. Yet the older records still remain in storage. The residence hall records, which include disciplinary records, seem to be far less kind to Bush than his official records stored with the university registrar. According to several people who took the opportunity to dig through Davenport's original records, large disparities between Bush's residential hall records and the registrar's records exist, with some of the original grades physically altered and other, higher grades substituted. The alterations may have been made during Bush's first presidential term, or they may have been made during one or more visits to the campus by Bush's mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush. One recent Yale alumnus says there was a certain "sense of control" about Barbara Bush's visits: "The university was very uncomfortable," evidently from a sense of influence if not pressure for reasons not publicly clarified. Ties between the Bush family and the university donor base are deep and longstanding.
The disparities are widespread. One observer who has perused Bush's original records says, "We just honestly don't think he [Bush] went to history class." Bush has said he did attend, but the grade records indicate otherwise. "We don't think he was ever there," says the observer. The cached version of the official presidential biography, from the White House web site, says that Bush graduated from Yale with a BA in history. Davenport was renovated in 2004, and most of the records stored in the hall are no longer available and may have been destroyed.
Liberal blogger Margie Burns writes, "Issues here include the comparative lack of vetting Bush received as a candidate for the White House while other contenders were being put through the meat grinder. The Bush campaign in Texas and in DC adeptly presented its candidate as a homey Jimmy Stewart type, modest in his demeanor so that his modest accomplishments were a given, to be taken for granted. Thus the secrecy, drift and dishonesty in Bush's background were largely given a pass. The big question is why Bush or anyone connected to him would try altering grades, and the answer is Vietnam. John Kerry's clumsy witticism about being stuck in Iraq is a flashback to Vietnam, when any student who flunked out was genuinely liable to be shipped out if his name was not George W. Bush. Interestingly, the Ivy League, difficult as it was to get into, was notoriously gentle about flunking out a student once admitted, including legacy students like George Walker Bush who would be expected to get the gentleman's C in any case. At this stage, some question remains as to whether he attained even that. For family members to go so far as to pressure the institution to keep Bush inside the hedges to keep him stateside, if they did so, he must have been failing. Unfortunately, there is no inherent unlikelihood in this narrative, given the way Bush was leapfrogged over more than a hundred other applicants for the Texas Air National Guard."
Burns continues, "The deeper issue is character rather than grades. Assuming that these anecdotes are correct, and there is no reason to assume otherwise, they have frattitude written all over them. As any teacher knows, it is one thing to help your fellow students by filing professors' old tests and passing around copies from previous years; it is quite another to help by passing around answers to a test or copies of a test that students are not supposed to have seen. Studying from old tests rather than going to class may not be the ideal way to learn, but it is minimally legitimate, cramming rather than reading, something most of us have done at some point. The other is cheating. By the same token, it is one thing to oppose all grades, the grading system, on the basis of reasoned argument that grades do not well reinforce learning. It is quite another to game the existing grading system by dishonesty. Whatever one thinks of grade point averages, class standing, or the grading system in general, there can be no argument in favor of altering selected grades ex post facto." (Margie Burns)

Bush administration posts information on building nuclear weapons on the Internet

November 3: A Web site set up by the federal government to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war may have exposed nuclear technology to anyone, including terrorists and anarchists. The Bush administration set up the site at the behest of congressional Republicans who wanted to find new evidence of the pre-invasion dangers posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein. But in recent weeks, the site has posted documents that came from Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear development program, documents that taken together constitute a primer to building a nuclear bomb. The Bush adminstration hastily shut down the site after the New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, says that access to the site has been suspended "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing." Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, who have long feared that the information could help nations like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the US ambassador to the agency. One diplomat said the agency's technical experts "were shocked" at the public disclosures. The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that the nuclear experts say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs. "For the US to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible," says A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation's nuclear arms program. "There's a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so." Last spring, UN arms-control officials persuaded Bush officials to take down a report that told how to make the lethal nerve agents sarin and tabun.
Originally, the pressure to post the documents came from conservative publications and politicians, who argued the nation's spy agencies had failed to adequately analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized in Iraq since the 2003 invasion began. The chairs of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committee, Republicans Peter Hoekstra and Pat Roberts, told Bush officials that wide analysis and translation of the documents -- most of them in Arabic -- would reinvigorate the search for evidence that Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. Of course, such weapons were never found. Negroponte had resisted posting the information on the Internet, but Bush overruled Negroponte's objections after congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents' release. Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private group at George Washington University that tracks federal secrecy decisions, says the impetus for the Web site's creation came from an array of sources -- private conservative groups, congressional Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration -- who clung to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would show that Hussein's government had clandestinely reconstituted an unconventional arms programs. "There were hundreds of people who said, 'There's got to be gold in them thar hills,'" Blanton says.
The Web site, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair and maintenance of parachutes to handwritten notes from Hussein's intelligence service. It became a popular source of information for bloggers and amateur historians. Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for UN inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. A few experts said at the time preceding the invasion that Hussein's scientists were on the verge of building an atomic bomb, possibly being as little as a year away; other experts disputed that. Some of the nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the UN Security Council in late 2002, as the US prepared to invade Iraq, but unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.
Diplomats and nuclear experts in Europe were horrified when the documents were posted on the Web. "It's a cookbook," says one diplomat. "If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things." Peter Zimmerman, a physicist and former US government arms scientist now at the war studies department of King's College, London, calls the posted material "very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly secret restricted data." Ray Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, says "some things in these documents would be helpful" to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret. A senior US intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues says the documents show "where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures." He believes the documents would be less useful to terrorists and other private individuals who may want to make their own crude nuclear device, calling the documents "a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car."
The campaign to release the information on the Web was spearheaded by Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He and his Senate counterpart, Roberts, asked Negroponte to post the documents in November 2005. They said in their letter to Negroponte that the sheer volume of the documents had overwhelmed the intelligence community. Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents, translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess the intelligence agencies' view that Hussein did not have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to al-Qaeda. Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts, Hoekstra and Roberts argued. The documents were approved for release on March 16, 2006, with a terse disclaimer from Negroponte's office: "The US government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available." Hoekstra issued a statement on April 18, acknowledging the "minimal risks" of presenting the documents to the world but saying the site "will enable us to better understand information such as Saddam's links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and violence against the Iraqi people. ...It will allow us to leverage the Internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to limiting it to a few exclusive elites." On November 2, after the site was shut down, Hoekstra's spokesman Jamal Ware said that the complaints about the site "didn't sound like a big deal," and added, "We were a little surprised when they pulled the plug."
Most of the documents were placed on the Web after little more than a quick once-over by Arabic linguists; some of the first posted documents were about Iraq's efforts to make biological and chemical weapons. At the UN, the chemical papers raised alarms at the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which had been in charge of searching Iraq for all unconventional arms, save the nuclear ones. An objection from the commission's acting chief weapons inspector, Demetrius Perricos, resulted in the removal of documents discussing the manufacture of nerve agents such as tabun and sarin. In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and some soon raised concerns. On September 12, it posted a document it called "Progress of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995." That description is, of course, misleading, since the research occurred years earlier. The Iraqi document is marked "Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95)," meaning it was preparatory for the "Full, Final, Complete Disclosure" that Iraq made to United Nations inspectors in March 1996. The document carries three diagrams showing cross sections of bomb cores, and their diameters. On September 20, the site posted a much larger document, "Summary of technical achievements of Iraq's former nuclear program." It runs to 51 pages, 18 focusing on the development of Iraq's bomb design. Topics included physical theory, the atomic core and high-explosive experiments. By early October, diplomats and officials said, UN arms inspectors in New York and their counterparts in Vienna were alarmed and discussing what to do. (New York Times, New York Times/Chicago Tribune)
November 3: The New York Times reports that, in spite of how much the Iraqi and US governments need one another, their relationship is deteriorating into open rancor and mistrust. Since late October, Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki has rejected the notion of an American "timeline" for action on urgent Iraqi political issues; ordered American commanders to lift checkpoints they had set up around the Shiite district of Sadr City to hunt for a kidnapped American soldier and a fugitive Shiite death squad leader; blamed the Americans for the deteriorating security situation in Iraq; and demanded speeded-up Iraqi control of its own military. This is in spite of the fact that Maliki's government needs the US to protect it from its own people -- without US troops, the Maliki government would fall within hours -- and the Bush administration needs Maliki's government to be successful in order to keep its power base in the US and to allow for US troops to begin to successfully disengage from Iraq. None of this is happening.
Certainly Maliki has engaged in some political grandstanding, largely to rally support among divided and fractious Shi'ite political partners and to demonstrate that he is not Bush's lapdog. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the only beneficiaries of this growing rift will likely be the Sunni insurgents, their common enemy. Their aim has been to recapture the power the Sunnis lost with Hussein's overthrow, and hopefully to repeat the experience of the 1920s, when Shiites squandered their last opportunity to wrest power and handed the Sunnis an opening to another 80 years of domination.
The two sides -- Maliki and Bush -- have widely differing goals. The US wants Maliki to lead in forging a "national compact" that would begin to heal the deep and bitter rifts between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds over the division of political and economic power. The timeline that US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad set out last week, promptly rejected by Maliki, foresaw framework agreements over coming months. Central issues include disbanding the militias that have been responsible for a wave of sectarian killing, the future division of oil revenues, and a new approach to the Ba'athists, who were the bedrock of the Hussein government, that will strike a fairer balance between holding the worst accountable for their crimes and offering others rehabilitation. Maliki is showing increasing signs of reverting to his previous career as a Shi'ite religious stalwart and Sunni hater. A somber, reserved man, he lacks both the personality and the will to reach out to politicians and leaders from other communities, especially the hated Sunnis. Both Sunni and Shi'ite leaders are growing more recalcitrant and less willing to compromise with one another. For his part, Maliki has in recent weeks strayed from being a representative of all Iraq, and begun working strictly for the interests of his own Shi'a, leading to angry protests from Sunnis and Kurds alike.
The US seems most concerned about Maliki's refusal to crack down on the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia that is apparently the source of most of the death squad attacks on Sunnis. Maliki has the backing of Moqtada al-Sadr, the cleric who leads the Mahdi militias; his support is critical for Maliki remaining in power. Maliki is also attempting to stave off any possible power play by his Shi'ite rival, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Badr organization, another powerful Shi'ite militia and a political rival of Maliki's. Making it harder on Maliki is the increasing feeling among the beleagured Shi'ite citizens of Baghdad that the Shi'ite militias are their only real protection against the Sunni insurgents, who have killed thousands of Shiites with their bombings of marketplaces, mosques, weddings, funerals and other public gatherings. Both US and Iraq troops and security forces have completely failed to prevent these bombings, causing tremendous despair and anger among Shi'ites, and leading to any number of conspiracy theories that have the Americans and the Sunnis in bed together. In particular, Khalilzad is a target for Shi'ite rancor, becoming a figure of contempt among some senior Shi'ites for his efforts to bring the Sunnis into the national government. Khalilzad is, by birth, a Sunni Muslim, born and raised in Pashtun Afghanistan. Maliki continues to resist any attempts to disband the militias, asking instead for drawn-out diplomatic solutions. While the Americans continue to publicly back Maliki, in private they say that Iraq the country cannot wait while sectarian killing rages unabated.
American dissatisfaction with the Maliki government goes far beyond the ambivalence over the militias. When the government was sworn in on May 20, Khalilzad and General George Casey said it had six months to take a broad range of political actions that would build public support, and make the war winnable. When Bush made a six-hour visit to Baghdad in June, he said he had looked Maliki "in the eye" to determine if America had a reliable partner, and reported that he was convinced the new prime minister met the test. Apparently Bush's mind-reading techniques were unreliable. After a largely wasted year under Maliki's predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, both Iraq and the US called for a more effective Iraqi government. Instead, American officials have told reporters in background briefings that little has changed, with the budgets of many government departments, including the Health Ministry, controlled by officials loyal to Sadr, being used for what the Americans say amounts to wholesale looting.
Maliki's accusation that the poor security situation throughout Iraq is the US's fault has further spurred anger and recriminations from the Americans. Maliki is demanding more money from the US, in spite of the war's growing unpopularity among American citizens, for the buildup of Iraq's own forces and for reconstruction, on top of the $38 billion the Bush administration says it has already spent on civil and military aid to Iraq since the toppling of Hussein in 2003 and the nearly $400 billion for America's own deployments. Bush responded by dispatching his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, on an urgent trip to Baghdad on October 30, and agreeing to work on ways of accelerating the transfer of authority, especially in regard to the Maliki government's ability to control the deployment of Iraqi troops. Bush is not speaking about the deep frustration among American commanders at the continuing weakness of many Iraqi Army units, which have been plagued by high levels of indiscipline, absenteeism and desertion. Some American officers say that as many as half of the listed 137,000 Iraqi soldiers are effectively undeployable. The situation has its keenest effects in Baghdad, where American commanders say the war will ultimately be won or lost. In the stepped-up effort to clear the city of insurgents and death squads, begun in August and acknowledged by American commanders to be faltering, American troops have accounted for two-thirds of the 25,000 deployed, after Iraqi commanders delivered two of the six battalions they promised. The result, American officers involved in the operation have noted, is that what little security there is in the city -- and, ultimately, the survival of the Maliki government itself -- relies far more on American than Iraqi troops. (New York Times/US Labor Against the War)
November 3: The Bush administration is arguing that detainees held in secret CIA prisons shouldn't be allowed to describe in court how they were interrogated. The administration says that interrogation methods used by the CIA are among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets, and that their release "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage," according to recent court filings. Terrorists could incorporate the information into their counter-interrogation training, the government tells Judge Reggie Walton. The government is trying to block access to 14 detainees transferred in September from the secret prisons to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay. An attorney for the family of one of those detainees, Majid Khan, says in his own court filing that there is no evidence that he has top-secret information. "The executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority...to conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct." The government argues that detainees such as Khan have no right to speak to a lawyer under the new Military Commissions Act, which established separate military trials for terrorism suspects. Administration lawyers also argue that defense lawyers could pass information back and forth for detainees, a practice that is illegal and could result in disbarment and jail sentences. Detainee attorneys say they have followed the protocol to the letter, and none has been accused of releasing information without government clearance. Captives who have spent time in CIA prisons have said they were sometimes treated harshly with techniques like "waterboarding," which simulates drowning. Bush has declared that the administration will not tolerate the use of torture but has pressed to retain the use of unspecified "alternative" interrogation methods.
The federal case centers on Khan and 14 other Guantanamo detainees having the legal right to access to their attorneys. Khan's family says that they had not heard from him for three years while he was being held, without notice or representation, in a secret CIA prison. The administration is, in essence, asserting that because of US national security concerns, these prisoners should not be granted any legal rights, and the US public should never know what they do or do not know. One CIA official says that because Khan was detained by the CIA, he may have come into possession of top secret information, and that alone is enough to justify his indefinite detention without legal recourse or even criminal charges filed against him. Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, says the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.'"
Khan, a Pakistani national who has lived in the US for seven years, is accused of taking orders from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Mohammed allegedly asked Khan to research poisoning US reservoirs and considered him for an operation to assassinate Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. Khan has continually declared his innocence. Khan's attorneys have offered declarations from Khaled al-Masri, a released detainee who said he was held with Khan in a dingy CIA prison called "the salt pit" in Afghanistan. There, prisoners slept on the floor, wore diapers and were given tainted water that made them vomit, Masri said. American interrogators treated him roughly, he said, and told him he "was in a land where there were no laws." Khan's family did not learn of his whereabouts until Bush announced his transfer in September, more than three years after he was seized in Pakistan. The family said Khan was staying with a brother in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2003 when men, who were not in uniform, burst into the apartment late one night and put hoods over the heads of Khan, his brother Mohammad and his brother's wife. The couple's 1-month-old son was also seized. Another brother, Mahmood Khan, who has lived in the United States since 1989, adds that the four were hustled into police vehicles and taken to an undisclosed location, where they were separated and held in windowless rooms. His sister-in-law and her baby remained together. According to Mahmood, Mohammad said they were questioned repeatedly by men who identified themselves as members of Pakistan's intelligence service and others who identified themselves as US officials. Mohammad's wife was released after seven days, and he was released after three months, without charge. He was dumped on a street corner without explanation, he says. Periodically, people who identified themselves as Pakistani officials contacted Mohammad and assured him that his brother would soon be released and that they ought not contact a lawyer or speak with the news media. "We had no way of knowing who had him or where he was," he says, and adds that they complied with the requests because they believed anything else could delay his brother's release.
In Maryland, Khan's family was under constant FBI surveillance from the moment of his arrest, his brother said. The FBI raided their house the day after the arrest, removing computer equipment, papers and videos. Each family member was questioned extensively and shown photographs of terrorism suspects that Mahmood Khan said none of them recognized. For much of the next year, he said, they were followed everywhere. "Pretty much we were scared," he says. "We live in this country. We have everything here." (Washington Post, Washington Post/Reuters)
November 3: Vice President Dick Cheney, oblivious to the political decision to abandon the "stay the course" rhetoric as well as to, apparently, the realities of the situation in Iraq, says the Bush administration is going "full speed ahead" with its policy. "We've got the basic strategy right," Cheney tells George Stephanopoulos in an interview to be broadcast October 5 on ABC's This Week. Cheney says that while the administration's policy may not be popular, "[t]his is the right thing for us to be doing." Cheney says that even with pollsters predicting that Democrats would likely make gains in both houses of Congress Tuesday, voter sentiment would not influence Bush's Iraq policy: "It may not be popular with the public -- it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right." As for Democrats, Cheney continues the same rhetoric that has, until recently, served Republicans so well, saying, "They haven't offered up a plan, but they have several different positions -- withdraw, withdraw at some future date, cut off funding. The fact of the matter is, this is the right thing for us to be doing. We need to succeed here. It has a direct bearing on how we do around the world on the global war on terror." And, to round out the trifecta, Cheney blames the media for not giving the "good news" about the economy and Iraq: "Well, you guys don't help," he says of the media. "What's news is if there's bad news, and that gets coverage. But the good news that's out there, day after day after day, doesn't get as much attention." (ABC News)

Republican House leader surreptitiously terminates Iraqi oversight program

November 3: Republicans in Congress have engineered the firing of Stuart Bowen, a lawyer sent to Iraq to uncover corruption and mismanagement. Bowen, a Republican himself, has so far uncovered enough evidence to send several American occupation officials to jail on bribery charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces. Bowen's office has also inspected and audited Iraqi prisons. In return for his work, Bowen is being shown the door. The order was quietly inserted into the mammoth military authorization bill that Bush signed into law two weeks ago. His agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, is out of business as of Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation. Bowen's office, which began operation in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a permanent bureaucracy as the key to its aggressiveness and independence. But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become clear, opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle. One point of contention is exactly when the office would have naturally run its course without a hard end date. Moderate Senate Republican Susan Collins, who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree. "It's truly a mystery to me," she says. "I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time. The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion."
Collins, like many other House and Senate members, says she fears that the loss of oversight caused by the termination of the OSIGIR will allow even more rampant corruption, fraud, and mismanagement to plague the Iraqi reconstruction process, already perceived as a corporate playground for firms like Halliburton and others to rake in billions of taxpayer dollars and do little or nothing in return. Collins is working with several senators to reverse the termination. One of those senators is John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who says that Bowen and his office is "making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq. ...Given that his office has performed important work and that much remains to be done, I intend to join Senator Collins in consulting with our colleagues to extend his charter."
Congressional Democrats are more blunt about what they believe to be an under-the-table plan to eliminate oversight in Iraq. "It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq," says representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform. "I just can't see how one can look at this change without believing it's political," he says.
Investigation shows that the termination language was sneaked into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on October 30 that he plans to run for president in 2008. Josh Holly, the House Armed Services spokesman and a member of Hunter's staff, says that politics played no role in the termination of the office, and that there has been no direction from the administration or lobbying from the companies whose work in Iraq Bowen's office has severely critiqued. Three of the companies that have been a particular focus of Bowen's investigations, Halliburton, Parsons and Bechtel, all deny they made any efforts to lobby against his office. Holly says that the termination merely returns inspections to a non-wartime footing and makes it easier to plan for future oversight programs by the State Department and others. But investigations have long shown that there is little or no oversight of corporations and their actions in Iraq. Over a year ago, Democratic House member Dennis Kucinich forced the Pentagon's acting director, Thomas Gimble, to admit that he had no agents deployed in Iraq, more than two years after the invasion. According to the Pentagon, Gimble now has seven auditors in Baghdad and others working on what the Pentagon calls Iraq-related issues in the United States and elsewhere. Bowen's office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and about 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other oversight agency in the country. Kucinich and other lawmakers say that Iraq oversight could also be hurt by the loss of Bowen's mandate, which allows him to cross institutional boundaries, while the other inspectors general have jurisdictions only within their own agencies.
Bowen is unpopular with many White House and Pentagon officials, who consider him a "grandstander" and not a team player. Bowen says he sees to it that the results of his investigations are publicized in order to discourage further wrongdoing. Bowen himself intends to cooperate with the termination orders until further notice. "We will do what the Congress desires," he says.
Bowen's office has tracked billions in wasted, and sometimes stolen, funds from the $18 billion initially allocated by the Bush administration for Iraqi reconstruction. The companies, such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and others, blame a lack of security in the war-torn country for their failure to complete virtually any of the tasks set to them, but Bowen's office has shown that the lack of security is only one explanation. "This was a waste of money because the contractors were ordered to go to Iraq to work, but they weren't working," Bowen explains. Due to the deteriorating security situation, many contractors were forced to remain idle, but taxpayer dollars still had to pay for their food and housing while they waited to begin work in Iraq. "About $62 million was spent on overhead for contractors that only accomplished $26 million in construction work." Since that initial allocation, US taxpayers have been forced to cough up $20 billion more in reconstruction funding. Senator Susan Collins, the Republican chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wants to keep Bowen's office in business. "I strongly support the continuation of [Bowen's] office as long as American tax dollars are being spent on Iraq reconstruction," she says. "I am working with Senators Russ Feingold, John Warner and Joseph Lieberman and will propose legislation to extend the term of the SIGIR past the October 1, 2007, expiration date." (Note: the likelihood of Bowen's office being reinstated is much more likely after the Democrats' retaking of control of both houses of Congress.)
So what, exactly, has that $34 billion plus bought in Iraq, besides enormous profits -- and abuses -- by Republican-friendly companies? The quarterly OSIGIR report, released October 30, has some details.
- Tens of thousands of weapons purchased with reconstruction funds for Iraqi security forces have gone missing. "There were a mixture of pistols and assault rifles," said Bowen. "Primarily, 13,000 of them were semiautomatic nine millimeter pistols." Where the missing weapons are is unknown.
- Iraqi oil production is 12% below prewar levels, and continues to suffer from severe shortages from all fuels. Most Iraqis are forced to find their fuel on the black market, where they pay up to 800% more for oil and gas than the official government price.
- Electricity production is only up 6% above prewar levels, despite major US funding and 88% of American projects completed. Baghdad and other urban centers routinely suffer blackouts, and enjoy electricity on average less than five hours a day. The report states that "repairing power lines is nearly impossible because of sniper attacks and death threats to repair crews."
- While 4.6 million Iraqis have some access to water, and 5.1 million some access to sanitation, the sustainability is problematic, and many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have access to neither water nor sanitation services.
- Around 20% of the Iraqi workforce is involved in agriculture, but USAID estimates Iraq's grain yields in 2005 were less than half of the yields of neighboring countries.
- Only 48% of the Iraqi schools needing repair in 2003 have actually been repaired, but 100% of the US funding for education projects has been spent. Where this money actually went is a matter for speculation and investigation.
- Over 88% of the funding to rebuild Iraq's military and police forces has been spent, but the results are horrendous. The Iraq Security Forces are riven by sectarian divisions, crippled by corruption, and unable to stop insurgents from attacking even the most critically valuable infrastructure targets. "It's going to cost $3.5 billion dollars to support the Iraqi army in the field next year," says Bowen. "We were unable to determine in the course of our audit, and we tried, whether the Iraqi government has made provisions for this."
- While over 66% of US money allocated for health care projects has been spent, a mere 36% of these projects have been completed. The report blames problems with security and "management."
- In transportation, 88% of railway stations have been repaired, but "only a small number of trains continue to run nationwide because of security concerns." US projects have rehabilitated five Iraqi airports, and traffic is increasing, but "the rise is attributed to a recent increase in military" flights. Currently, only military and charter flights are permitted in Iraqi airspace.
The top contractor in Iraq is Bechtel, with $1.26 billion in contracts. Five other firms enjoy contracts worth over $500 million: Fluor, Parson Global Services, Parsons Iraq, KBR (the Halliburton subsidiary), and Washington Group. The Iraqi government is so riddled with corruption from top to bottom that it faces tremendous difficulty attracting international funds from sources other than Washington. Non-US donors have pledged $15 billion to Iraq reconstruction, less than 40% of the amount US taxpayers have paid out. It is not clear how much non-US donors have actually contributed to meet their pledges, versus the $38 billion U.S. taxpayers have committed. But it is clear that Iraq reconstruction will increasingly rely on non-US donors who are more skeptical of dealing with the Iraq government than with the Coalition's somewhat more transparent accounting. (New York Times, MSNBC)

Neocons abandon Bush Iraq policy

November 3: A number of leading neoconservatives, including Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and David Frum, all of whom were intimately involved in planning and executing the Iraq invasion and occupation, make a shocking break with the Bush administration. The general tone is that the incompetence of Bush and his administration have made a hash of their grand plan for Middle East domination. Perle, the former head of the Defense Policy Board and one of the architects of Bush's Iraq policy, now says that invading Iraq in the fashion Bush has carried out was a grave error. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says, and adds that total defeat -- an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state" -- is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," he says, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating." Perle says the underlying reason for the catastrophic failures in Iraq is what he calls the devastating dysfunction within the Bush administration. "The decisions did not get made that should have been," he says. "They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly. ...At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty." Perle says that, in hindsight, he would not have advocated invading Iraq. "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' ...I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
Reporter David Rose is frankly stunned by Perle's turnabout, writing, "If the much caricatured 'Prince of Darkness' is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East. I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope." David Frum is a former White House speechwriter who helped craft the infamous 2002 "Axis of Evil" State of the Union address. Frum now says that defeat in Iraq is all but inevitable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." Frum says the blame must be laid on "failure at the center," beginning with Bush. Perle's former colleague on the Defense Policy Board, Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who wrote in February 2002, "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk," is now singing a different tune. "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent," he says. "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." Adelman fears that even worse is yet to come, and worries that his linchpin neoconservative belief -- "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go."
Rose is working on a much more comprehensive article for December, featuring the voices of many other neoconservatives, but he reports that he is now finding that "none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played. Their dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is something America knows how to do." He quotes Perle: "In the administration that I served [as assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."
American Enterprise Institute scholar and eminent neocon Michael Ledeen says bluntly, "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes." Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy, says, "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity." Adelman again: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former CIA director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer -- three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq." Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer, says., "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did." Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that." (Editor's note: Anyone who peruses this site's many items about Perle knows that this is patently not true.) Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.... Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.... I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me." Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board, says, "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.... I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.... The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it." (Vanity Fair)
Further comments by Washington-based neocons, and the responses to their comments, are illuminating. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum writes, "It's worth saying very plainly what's going on here: the neocons are using these interviews to make the case that neoconservatism is in no way to blame for the disaster in Iraq. If they had been in charge things would have been different." Of course, this is, to put it politely, a crock. In 1997, the Project for a New American Century, the cradle of modern neoconservatism, issued a widely discussed "Statement of Principles" signed by, among others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, and Elliot Abrams. "All of these men were deeply involved in the formulation, planning, and execution of the Iraq war," writes Drum.
He continues, "The neocon creed was part and parcel of every move they made. What's more, despite their conveniently-timed hand wringing about incompetent execution, there's little evidence that the apologists would have done anything very different -- in fact, little evidence that they cared very much about anything beyond 'bringing down Saddam.' Rather, neocons have always been focused on conventional military power, and plenty of it, primarily aimed at potential enemies like China. (Despite the revisionist history spit out now and again by their supporters, terrorism simply wasn't a major neocon focus prior to 9/11.) But conventional military power wasn't the problem in Iraq. The problem was in the occupation, an area that neocons have never cared a fig about. Peacekeeping forces? Nation building? Multilateral legitimacy? Language and cultural training? Counterinsurgency? Economic engagement? It's easy to cherry-pick the neocon archives to find bits and pieces where they talked up some of this stuff. But their overall focus has always been on the use of overwhelming force and intimidation, with a sideline in democracy promotion rooted more in fantasy than in a hard look at what it takes to actually make democracy take root in a region with none of the economic or institutional infrastructure to support it. Anybody with ground-level experience in nation building could have explained the problems, but they didn't want to listen. A sufficient show of force was supposed to be enough to make democracy flower. The neocons have always been idealists, and their ideals saw full flower in the Iraq war. A show of force in one country, plenty of threats against its neighbors, a disdain for multilateral action, and an occupation designed to be a showpiece of conservative ideology rather than a serious attempt at reconstructing a society. That's what the neocons wanted, and that's what they got. The rest is details. The failure of Iraq is inherent in the naive idealism and fixated ideology of neoconservatism, and shame on us if we let them get away with suggesting otherwise. This is one rehabilitation project that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks."
In an amazing piece of revisionism, neocon scholar Michael Ledeen writes, in the blog of the National Review, that the Vanity Fair article is engaging in "disinformation" by blandly asserting that he never supported the invasion of Iraq: "I do not feel 'remorseful,' since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place and I advocated -- as I still do -- support for political revolution in Iran as the logical and necessary first step in the war against the terror masters."
This is an astonishing lie, and one that is easily disproven. In an August 2002 article entitled "Scowcroft Strikes Out," Ledeen wrote, "So it's good news when [Brent] Scowcroft [the former Bush I national security advisor] comes out against the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the terror masters. As usual, Scowcroft has it backwards. ...President Bush knows by now that the Palestinian question can only be addressed effectively once the war against Saddam and his ilk has been won." In the same article, Ledeen mocked Scowcroft for worrying that an invasion of Iraq "could turn the whole region into a cauldron and destroy the War on Terror," scoffing, "One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That's our mission in the war against terror." He also advanced the hoary claim that Saddam Hussein was actively backing terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Abu Nidal, claims that were being heavily questioned even as he wrote his article. In an August 2002 interview in David Horowitz's Front Page, Ledeen was asked, "Okay, well if we are all so certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?" Ledeen's response: "Yesterday." And in September 2002, Ledeen wrote in an AEI-sponsored op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, "Saddam Hussein is a terrible evil, and President Bush is entirely right in vowing to end his reign of terror.... If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support. They will join us if they believe we are serious, and they will only believe we are serious when they see us winning. Our first move must therefore show both our power and our liberating intent.... And just as a successful democratic revolution in Iran would inspire the Iraqis to join us to remove Saddam, it is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom had come to Iraq. Syria would follow in short order."
Gleen Greenwald, one of the most thoughtful and informed bloggers on the left, writes, "For Ledeen to now deny in National Review that he ever supported the invasion of Iraq -- and, more astoundingly, to affirmatively claim that he 'opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place' -- is outright lying, and there is no other way to put it. And the lie has to be deliberate -- what other explanation is possible? Ledeen exists in the most extreme warmongering habitats -- the AEI and National Review. The invasion of Iraq was sort of an important topic in those places over the last four years at least. I think Ledeen knows what his views of the war were. I don't think any sentient human being will believe that Ledeen forgot that he was a proponent of this invasion. It is clear that he simply wants to disassociate himself from the worst strategic disaster made by our country in a long time, if not ever, by lying about his support for it. He's trying to preserve his credibility in order to enable himself, NR, and the AEI to continue to drive our country's foreign policy -- particularly the additional regime change adventures they want in many more countries -- and it is intolerable for this to be permitted. ...I think it is quite telling that one of the most vocal and revered warmongers in our country -- at least revered by Bush-worshipping, warmongering institutions like AEI and NR -- is so ashamed of the war in Iraq that he has taken to outright lying about having supported it. That is a powerful reflection of what this war has become." Greenwald wants to know why the Review's editor, Rich Lowry, hasn't issued a correction of Ledeen's lie, or why the AEI hasn't publicly asked why Ledeen, one of its "Freedom Scholars," is lying about his positions. "The AEI is one of the most dangerous organizations in this country and Ledeen...is one of its most extremist and dangerous 'scholars,' especially now that the next target on the neocon Dream List is Iran. Ledeen is literally obsessed with changing the governments in a whole host of countries that are hostile to Israel and/or the US, most particularly Iran. And the kind of dishonesty that is so glaring in this one instance is par for the course in how he and his fellow neocon warmongers argue and advocate."
Greenwald also notes that neocon blogger Paul Mirgenoff of Powerline, an influential rightist blog, blames the Iraqis themselves for the debacle in their country. "The Iraqis failed to do this when they voted in the Shia-militia-friendly Maliki government, thereby making it difficult, if not impossible, for the US to work with the current government to curb sectarian violence," Mirgenoff writes. Greenwald counters acidly, "We invaded their country, removed their government, disbanded their military, shattered their infrastructure, and -- for the last three years -- all but stood by while the country was taken over by murderous gangs and lawless militias and predictably collapsed into civil war. But it's all their fault because they voted for the wrong candidate six months ago. If only the Iraqis had elected [neocon darling] Ahmad Chalabi as Prime Minister, it would have all worked out great. What makes Paul's excuse-making extra disgusting is that -- like so many of these war advocates who are blaming others for this debacle by claiming that it's all due to past mistakes by other people which they never criticized at the time -- Paul praised Maliki's election in April as the key event for achieving 'national unity.' ...Anyone who advocated and defended this war for this long has great culpability. But the inability of so many of them to accept basic responsibility for what they have done -- pretending that it's everyone else's fault other than their own and simply lying about their prior views in order to make it seem like it all would have worked out great if everyone had just listened to them -- is just pathological." Greenwald also notes that Mirgenoff wrote in February 2006 that anyone who talked about an imminent civil war in Iraq was guilty of passing off "malicious lies" and claimed that "the [Bush] administration has dealt skillfully with the politics of post-invasion Iraq." (Washington Monthly, National Review, National Review, Powerline/Unclaimed Territory, Front Page/Unclaimed Territory)
November 3: Democratic elections officials in Ohio are battling with state officials over absentee ballots sent in without the proper postage. Democrats want the votes counted; the state officials, led by officials from Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's office, want the votes discarded. In Ohio, absentee ballots require more than one stamp; thousands of ballots were mailed with a single first-class stamp affixed. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Republicans have opened what they are calling a "recount account," and have set aside $500,000 to pay lawyers who will answer telephones on Election Day and monitor polls to see whether officials demand proper voters' identification. In Maryland, lawyers representing candidates for senator and governor from both parties met recently and swapped cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses to smooth out the logistics of potential litigation, while Democrats plan how to counter aggressive Republican poll-watchers who plan to challenge voters. Democrats say they are most concerned that voters will be prevented from voting by long lines or poll workers' demanding unnecessary forms of identification, while Republicans say they are guarding against ineligible people trying to vote, though virtually no cases of identity fraud as related to voting have been proven in decades. Democrats are sending teams of lawyers and volunteers to 18 states to monitor elections and file lawsuits and restraining orders as the need arises. "We're not going to make the mistake we did last time, which was to wait until after the election for litigation," says Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. The Republican Party is countering with teams of its own lawyers. "What is unfortunate is that it appears Democrats are following their playbook from 2004 and alleging voter suppression where it does not exist, in an effort to launch a pre-emptive strike," says Tracey Schmitt, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. Apparently Schmitt does not want to acknowledge the rampant and widespread voter suppression efforts by her GOP in 2004. "Both sides are lawyering up," says Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project. "Election night is not necessarily the finish line anymore." (New York Times)
November 3: Several electronic voting cards, used to cast ballots, are missing from a polling place in Memphis, according to the Tennessee Republican Party. In a letter to the Shelby County Election Commission, state GOP chairman Bob Davis Jr. charges the "lack of oversight and control" over the so-called Smartcards "has created a situation which could allow for voter fraud." Davis says the missing cards could lead to illegal votes being cast in Tuesday's election. "Once cast, an illegal vote made with the reprogrammed Smartcard would be indistinguishable from a legally cast vote," Davis writes. His letter does not cite specific numbers of cards missing or what voting site was involved. He calls on local election officials to locate the cards as soon as possible and establish procedures to ensure no other cards are lost on Election Day. (Memphis Commercial Appeal)

President of National Association of Evangelicals resigns over allegations of gay sex, drug use

November 3: Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, has resigned his post while a church panel investigates allegations he paid a man for sex and bought methamphetamine, an illegal street drug. Haggard has been an outspoken opponent of homosexuality and of gay marriage. Haggard, married and with five children, is accused by admitted male escort Mike Jones of paying Jones for sex once a month for three years. In his resignation statement, Haggard denies the allegations, but says he will seek "spiritual advice and guidance," He also seems to attempt to shift the blame for his resignation onto the media, saying that he could "not continue to minister under the cloud created by the accusations made on Denver talk radio this morning." The board of Hoggard's church, New Life Church in Colorado Springs, is investigating the charges. The acting senior minister at New Life, Ross Parsley, says that in a private meeting with the church's board of overseers, Haggard has admitted that some of the charges are true, but refuses to give details; Haggard later admits to buying crystal meth out of temptation but threw it away without using it. He denies ever meeting Jones. (Jones tells a very different story.) Jones partially fails a polygraph test, but the examiner says the results are unreliable because Jones was exhausted; Jones wants to retake the polygraph. Interestingly, Haggard's story begins to change; he now claims he contacted Jones to buy the meth, and to get a "massage," but did not use the drugs he bought, and did not have sex with Jones. Haggard says that he received the recommendation for Jones as a masseuse from a Denver hotel, but Jones says no hotel has him listed as any sort of contact.
Jones says he decided to go public because of Haggard's hypocrisy in supporting state Constitutional amendments that would ban any forms of gay marriage. "I just want people to step back and take a look and say, 'Look, we're all sinners, we all have faults, but if two people want to get married, just let them, and let them have a happy life,'" says Jones, who has no known connections to any political group. Jones says he became angry when he found that Haggard and the church were in public opposition to same-sex marriage. "It made me angry that here's someone preaching about gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex," he says. "You can't put yourself in the position he was in and want respect and people to follow your words when you're actually doing the opposite behind their backs."
Jones says he was contacted three years ago through his Internet escort ads on Rentboy.com by a man who called himself "Art." (Haggard's middle name is Arthur.) Jones says Haggard introduced himself as being from Kansas City, but Jones says he later knew otherwise because his caller ID showed the calls as coming from Colorado Springs pay phones. But he didn't confront him because Haggard was a client. Jones says that "Art" often snorted methamphetamines before their sexual encounters to heighten his pleasure. Jones says he later recognized Haggard from a television broadcast. He says their last encounter was in August. Jones has more than just his word: he has audiotaped voice mail messages from Haggard, as well as an envelope that Haggard used to send him cash. A Denver television station, KUSA-TV, has released portions of one of the audiotapes in Jones's possession, which detail "Art"'s request for more methamphetamine. "Hi Mike, this is Art," begins one call. "Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply. And I could pick it up really anytime, I could get it tomorrow or we could wait till next week sometime, and so I also wanted to get your address. I could send you some money for inventory but that's probably not working, so if you have it then go ahead and get what you can and I may buzz up there later today, but I doubt your schedule would allow that unless you have some in the house. Okay, I'll check in with you later. Thanks a lot, bye." Another message, left hours later, says, "Hi Mike, this is Art, I am here in Denver and sorry that I missed you. But as I said, if you want to go ahead and get the stuff, then that would be great. And I'll get it sometime next week or the week after or whenever." A voice recognition expert says that the voice of "Art" is probably Haggard's. "Overall, I would say it's probably the same person, from a scientific standpoint," says expert Richard Sanders after listening to the voice mails.
Haggard is a powerful political figure among the nation's evangelicals. He has participated in conservative Christian leaders' conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied members of Congress last year on Supreme Court appointees after Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement. Haggard is also a personal spiritual and political confidante of George W. Bush, who, like many others, calls him "Pastor Ted." After Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, Haggard and others began organizing state-by-state opposition. Last year, Haggard and officials from the nearby Christian ministry Focus on the Family announced plans to push Colorado's gay marriage ban for the 2006 ballot. At the time, Haggard said that he believed marriage is a union between a man and woman rooted in centuries of tradition, and that research shows it's the best family unit for children. The White House is now attempting to distance itself from Haggard, listed in Time's group of the 25 most influential evangelicals because of his access to Bush and senior White House officials. Bush spokesman Tony Fratto says it is inaccurate to portray Haggard as being close to the White House, and insists Haggard was only an occasional participant in weekly conference calls between West Wing staff and leading evangelicals. "He has been on a couple of calls," Fratto says. "He's been to the White House one or two times." In reality, Haggard has been a once-a-week participant in the conference calls between Bush and leading rightist evangelicals. (AP/AOL News, KUSA-TV, KRDO-TV, Denver Post, Pensito Review, New York Times, CNN)
November 3: Pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle's Mars Hills, a conservative evangelical "mega-church," gives an interesting explanation for why Pastor Ted Haggard succumbed to temptation with a gay prostitute and drugs. Driscoll writes, "Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either." Driscoll says in carefully couched terms what sex blogger Dan Savage says more coarsely: "I'm sure Ted Haggard is saying something along these lines to his wife right now: 'Oh, honey...I wouldn't have been having those meth-fueled *ss-banging sessions with that gay hooker if you hadn't have let yourself go like that!'" Driscoll's attempt to shift the blame for Haggards's -- and others in his position who have given in to temptation, or embraced it whole-heartedly -- transgressions on his "fat, lazy wife" is hard to take seriously. (Huffington Post)
November 3: The Associated Press reveals that in 2001, incumbent Republican senator Conrad Burns, locked in a tight battle for his seat with Democrat Jon Tester, accepted a $2,000 campaign donation from an attorney one day before recommending him for a federal judgeship. Burns denies any wrongdoing. The Senate confirmed the judicial nominee, Sam Haddon, by a vote of 95-0 on July 20, 2001. Haddon and his wife, Betty, gave $2,000 to Burns' campaign on February 12, 2001, one day before Burns and fellow senator Max Baucus, a conservative Democrat, announced their recommendation of Haddon to be a US district judge for Montana. The information was buried in Burns's FEC filings, and located by members of Tester's campaign staff and quickly given to the press. Tester has tried throughout the Senate campaign to link Burns to a "culture of corruption" in Washington. Burns took about $150,000 in campaign contributions from convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his clients and associates, all of which he has since given away. "It doesn't smell right," says Tester. "It's not the way representative government is supposed to work." Haddon and his wife are regular Republican donors. Baucus says that he gave Haddon his support based on Burns's recommendation. "Now I have serious concerns about these new revelations and how this nomination may have come about," he says. (AP/Billings Gazette)
November 3: Montana Republicans have decided how they will handle the Mark Foley and Ted Haggard homosexuality scandals sweeping the GOP -- smear Democrats with gay-bashing innuendo. The Montana GOP has launched an ad campaign called "Brokebank Democrats" (harking back to the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain, which centered on the story of two gay cowboys in the West). The tagline: "They just can't fight their nature." While Republicans insist that the reference is to taxes, and the ad merely says that Democrats can't help but tax Americans, the implication is quite clear. (The link below contains the video; readers are invited to see for themselves.) The ad was paid for by the Free Enterprise Fund; FEC filings show the FEF is bankrolled almost entirely by Swift Boat Vets funder Bob Perry. In addition, the phone number given in the ad, which exhorts viewers to call and express their outrage to Democratic Senate candidate Jon Tester, is Tester's home phone number, a violation of FEC and privacy laws. (TPM Cafe [link to video], Talking Points Memo)
November 3: Republican representative John Sweeney, already under fire for attending a fraternity keg party with underage drinkers in April 2006, is now trying to dodge allegations of spouse abuse arising from a December 2005 911 call. Sweeney is saying that recent reports of police documents showing he abused his wife are forgeries (according to his campaign, they are "a piece of campaign propaganda," obviously implying that his opponent, Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, is responsible for the charge), and says he will consent to releasing the originals so voters can see that they are being duped. But he continues to refuse to sign the order allowing those documents to be made public. As per Sweeney's request, the media has been rebuffed for ten months in its attempts to have the documents provided so the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of the story can be ascertained. Earlier this week, the New York Daily News and the Albany Times-Union both published accounts of a police blotter report that showed that an officer had been called to the Sweeneys home in December 2005 on a domestic abuse call. Sweeney's wife allegedly told a 911 dispatcher that he was "knocking her around the house," and when an officer arrived, he was told that Sweeney had "grabbed [his wife] by the neck and pushed [her] around the house," but by the time the police arrived, things had settled down. Sweeney has confirmed that there was a 911 call made from his home, but says the police blotter report is a forgery. All it would take to settle the issue is for Sweeney to agree to have the official report released; though Sweeney has agreed to do so, he just hasn't quite gotten around to it yet. Instead, his campaign has released the following statement: "This barley [sic] legible document that is currently being circulated is a piece of campaign propaganda in the continued smear campaign against Congressman John Sweeney and his family. It is not authentic. It is false and it is a concoction by our opposition. ...If any media outlet plans to run a story based on this unauthentic, false and concocted document the outlet should be prepared to deal directly with our counsel. The document is hardly legible and there is no signature, date, or seal on the document. It's unethical, it's disgusting and it is beyond reproach." In 2001, Sweeney was not charged after crashing his car in a one-car incident; he was not given a sobriety test even though he admitted at the time that he had been drinking. (Albany Times-Union, TPM Muckraker)
November 3: Another Democratic lawmaker is targeted for what apparently is an anthrax scare. A staffer at Senator Charles Schumer's office opens a letter with no return address, and finds white powder in the envelope. Police are immediately called; preliminary screenings show the powder to be non-toxic. Letters containing anthrax -- usually in the form of a white powder -- were mailed to several Congressional Democrats, a television news office in New York and a tabloid newspaper in Florida in 2001. Five people were killed in the incidents. (AFP/Yahoo! News)
November 3: Republican House incumbent Vern Buchanan, running for re-election in Florida's 13th District, is discombobulated by a barrage of laughter from the audience during a debate with his Democratic opponent, when he insists that the Bush administration has a strategy for the war in Iraq. The debate, at Sarasota's Manatee Civic Center, is attended by a group of veterans, most of whom seem to support Christine Jennings. Buchanan says the crowd doesn't reflect the views of the 106,000 veterans living in the district. Buchanan objects to Jennings's repeating her frequent charge that the Bush administration doesn't have a strategy for winning the war. "But there is a strategy and it needs to be flexible," he says, drawing derisive laughter that interrupts his statement. Jack Gerwe, a veteran from Palm-Aire, says the candidates' responses on veterans' benefits struck him as "pretty standard answers." What he is looking for, Gerwe says, is whether he trusts their commitment. "I do believe what they said," he notes. Buchanan's repeated comments about phasing in benefit increases for veterans and pay increases for military personnel don't play well with John Wyand, a Sarasota veteran who wears a Jennings sticker. Wyand, who describes himself a lifelong Republican, says, "Everything's phased in. This'll be the first time I won't vote for the party." Asked whether, if elected, she would vote for a resolution to withdraw troops from Iraq, Jennings responds, "My opponent has said that I want to surrender and retreat and I want you to know that I resent this. This is a totally false and inaccurate statement." But Buchanan says, echoing Republican talking points, "The [Democratic] Party and, I believe, her, want this cut-and-run mentality. ...We can't forget that 3,000 people were murdered [on 9/11]." (Sarasota Herald Tribune)
November 3: Republican incumbent Tim Murphy, running for re-election in Pennsylvania's 18th District, confronts a KDKA-TV reporter who shows Murphy evidence that Murphy skirted election law statutes by forcing his staffers to work on his campaign outside the parameters of the law (see item in the October 2006 page of this site). Murphy angrily snatches the documents from the reporter on camera. Daily Kos blogger "Finnegan" notes laconically, "Someone needs to tell the Congressman about mimeograph machines." (KDKA-TV/Daily Kos [link to video])
November 3: A Republican smear attempt against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, alleging that Pelosi has been "suspiciously absent" in the last week of frenzied campaigning, falls flat when a little fact-checking shows that Pelosi has been quite visible on the campaign trail, campaigning in her home state of California and appearing on CNN, among other appearances. The interesting thing about this unsuccessful little smear campaign is how enthusiastically it was received and supported by members of the media, particularly MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell. The allegation that Pelosi is supposedly "in hiding" during the last weeks of campaigning begins, apparently, on the Web site of embattled Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner, and quickly gains national play when Republican shill and gossip mongerer Matt Drudge repeats and extends the allegations on his Web site, the Drudge Report. The smear spreads to cable news outlets Fox and MSNBC, whose chief Washington correspondent Norah O'Donnell asked of Pelosi, "Where's she been the last week?" NBC News producer and congressional correspondent Mike Viqueira responds by rejecting out of hand the suggestion that Pelosi has been absent, noting Pelosi's campaign appearances and saying Pelosi "has been conducting some interviews, a fundraiser, she's still been flying around the country doing some fundraising events." Pelosi is also staying close to her daughter, who is expected to give birth to Pelosi's sixth grandchild any day now. Republicans allege that Democrats want Pelosi, who is expected to be the House Majority Leader if Democrats take over the House after the November 7 elections, to lay low in response to Republicans' attempts to scare voters with the prospects of a Pelosi-led Democratic majority. (MediaMatters)
November 3: Conservative talk show host John DePetro, whose show used to air over Boston's WRKO-AM, is fired after he makes derogatory comments about the weight and sexuality of a Green-Rainbow party candidate running for Massachusetts governor. The station pulled DePetro off the air on November 2 minutes after he called candidate Grace Ross a "fat lesbian;" he is fired earlier today. "In the context of what he said and the tone with which he said it, the comments were completely inappropriate, derogatory and will not be tolerated," says Jason Wolfe, the vice president of AM programming and operations for station owner Entercom Boston. DePetro says he has called Ross to apologize. In a Boston Globe interview, he says he made the remark because he was Ross and independent candidate Christy Mihos were eating up time during a debate earlier in the week that included Republican candidate Kerry Healey and Democrat Deval Patrick. He said it was then that he told listeners he wished someone would "tell the fat lesbian to shut up." DePetro defends his remarks by adding, "I just think both her and Christy have served their purpose and I had a problem with them still thrusting themselves into the debate. I think I vocalized what a lot of people were thinking -- will you just shut up and let them go at it. I added a little more." Ross, who is openly gay, laughs when told of the comments, but says the comment is indeed offensive. "Big, fat? I guess that's supposed to be his way of saying he doesn't like somebody," she says. After hearing DePetro had been fired, she says, "I think that the comment was offensive in general, so I hope that many people in the state were offended by it and will help set a standard of what political debate is supposed to be about." DePetro had also been reprimanded by station management in July for using a slur often aimed at gays in reference to Matt Amorello, the former chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. Wolfe says that after DePetro was suspended in that case, the host was warned that "any further comments of this kind would be dealt with in a severe way. ...I have no doubt that terminating John's employment was the right action to take." (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 3: Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes that if Democrats do indeed win a majority of the electoral races on November 7, it will be because the Republicans, led by Bush and Karl Rove, did "not adequately rouse [voters] into a state of heart-pounding, knee-knocking, teeth-chattering fear." This isn't for lack of trying, he notes. "The Karl Rove formula for political victory has been to draw a bright line between 'us' and 'them' and then paint those on the other side not as opponents but as monsters," Robinson writes. "Thus Bush openly accused those who disagree with his policy in Iraq of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. 'The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses,' he said the other day. Call me naive, but I never thought a president of the United States would stoop so low as to accuse current and prospective members of Congress -- a number of whom, by the way, are decorated war veterans, unlike Bush or anyone in his inner circle -- of being pro-terrorist. But this administration has so lowered the bar on political discourse in this country that it's now more of a limbo stick: How low can you go?" Robinson writes that this goes far beyond other now-standard scare tactics, such as Republicans' incessant reminders that "Democrats want to raise your taxes" even knowing full well that Democrats only intend to roll back the most egregrious of Bush's tax cuts on the wealthy and on large corporations. "But in the context of today's political culture," Robinson writes, "this kind of distortion doesn't even warrant a raised eyebrow." The demonization of individual Democrats -- this year's target is Nancy Pelosi -- is taken for granted, as is the usual attempts to play to "wedge" issues such as gay marriage as some kind of dire threat to Americans' family values. "This effort has been oddly halfhearted, though," Robinson writes. "Maybe GOP strategists worry that stigmatizing homosexuality won't work so well in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, which laid bare the party's essential hypocrisy. It's hard to portray the Democrats as the party of Sodom and Gomorrah now that everyone knows there are many powerful gay Republicans working on Capitol Hill."
But Bush's recent efforts have gone beyond even the usual slime tactics we have come to know and loathe, he writes. "[C]laiming that 'the terrorists win' if Democrats are elected to Congress -- a statement whose only conceivable purpose is to make Americans afraid -- is something entirely different. The president knows, and at times has acknowledged, that there are people of good will in both parties who differ with him on Iraq. He also knows, or should know, that fear diminishes us as a nation -- that fear appeals to our baser instincts, not our best ideals; that it makes us smaller, meaner, less noble. He should know all this, but he uses fear anyway, because fear is effective. John Kerry may have chosen an inopportune time (or just the right moment, from the Republicans' perspective) to demonstrate his inestimable comedic timing and his finely tuned political ear. But while Kerry's recent gaffe produced some last-minute outrage, mere outrage probably isn't enough this time. The only thing that might work is fear, and so far not enough Americans have been made to quake in their boots." (Washington Post)
November 3: Rick Perlstein, author of the recent biography of Richard Nixon, Nixonland, writes of the unsettling similarities between Nixon and Senate candidate Joseph Lieberman. Lieberman, who lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut to Ned Lamont, is running as an independent against Lamont, with large amounts of Republican support. Perlstein writes, "[A]fter spending five years writing a book on Nixon, I couldn't help but notice some similarities with Connecticut's junior senator -- and I don't just mean the mystery of how Joe Lieberman spent the mysterious $387,000 his campaign listed as 'petty cash' in the days before the August 8 primary." Lieberman has echoed Nixon's words about Vietnam in his speeches in support of the Bush policies of Iraq, currently being used in an Internet ad. Perlstein writes, "As a historian, I find the ad fair -- uncannily so. ...Richard Nixon said one thing and did another. So, it seems, does Joseph Lieberman. Once, everyone knew Joe Lieberman was a hawk. But now that the war is unpopular, he's striking a Nixonian position. He says things like: 'no one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do and bring our troops home.' And that anyone else's way of bringing the troops home, as he put it a month ago, will be 'a formula for defeat and disaster.' Is Joe Lieberman working to bring the troops home? The only way to judge is by his actions. But every time a smart resolution has come up in the Senate to change course in Iraq, Lieberman has voted against it. What he has done is choose only to see, after completing a trip to Iraq -- a trip few Americans will be able to take for ourselves -- 'real progress there.' ...What is not reasonable, I'm afraid, is the Nixonian trait I see in Joe Lieberman: the way he makes the argument -- with a sanctimoniousness too often present among politicians trying to distract the public. ...Joe Lieberman is running by touting his experience. But it is clear that experience has taught him one of Nixon's favorite tricks -- saying he's against the war, yet continuing to push it." (In These Times)

Ney resigns from House over criminal convictions

November 4: Republican House member Bob Ney, who pleaded guilty last month to a number of criminal charges resulting from the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling investigation, resigns from Congress. "I can confirm the letter has been delivered to the speaker," says Ney's chief of staff David Popp. Ney pleaded guilty October 13 to conspiracy and making false statements, acknowledging taking trips, tickets, meals and campaign donations from disgraced lobbyist Abramoff in return for official actions on behalf of Abramoff clients. (See the items in the October 2006 page.) House Republicans had threatened to expel Ney if he didn't quit by the time lawmakers returned to Washington after Tuesday's elections. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, says Ney's resignation four days before the elections was late. "The Republican leadership has allowed Bob Ney to receive his paycheck and benefits for seven weeks after his admission of guilt to criminal conspiracy charges -- it is an embarrassment to this institution and an insult to the American taxpayer," she says. Ohio State Senator Joy Padgett, chosen by Ney and the Ohio GOP to run for his seat, is facing her own charges of improper financial and business dealings. She says, "Bob Ney's resignation from Congress has come seven weeks too late. I called on Mr. Ney to resign the day he admitted guilt, and I remain disappointed that he chose not to do so." Ney faces up to 10 years in prison, but the Justice Department has recommended a much more modest 27 months. Ney's letter of resignation says that he resigned after completing "all outstanding work in my congressional office." His resignation takes effect at the end of business on Friday, November 3. Like so many other Republicans facing scandal and criminal accusations, Ney is blaming alcohol abuse for his misdeeds, and has checked into an alcohol rehabilitation program. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 4: Leading neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Ken Adelman now say that, had they known how incompetent the Bush administration's policies in Iraq would turn out to be, they never would have recommended invading Iraq. Meanwhile, the Military Times Media Group, which publishes the Army Times and other military-oriented periodicals, will publish an editorial on November 6 calling for the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (See specific items below.)
Perle, the former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and the chairman of the Defense Policy Board under the current administration, says that if he had been able to foresee where the invasion of Iraq would lead the country, he would not have advocated the invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein. "I probably would have said, 'Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,'" he says in an interview with Vanity Fair. Other prominent conservatives join Perle in his criticism of Bush's failed war policies, including Perle's former DPB colleague Adelman, who says he is "crushed" by Rumsfeld's performance. Perle says, "[Y]ou have to hold the president responsible" because he didn't recognize "disloyalty" by some in the administration. He says the White House's National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly. A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam's military power and liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." But he now says he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's national security. "They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," he says. "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe says of the criticism, "We appreciate the Monday-morning quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to succeed in Iraq and we are going forward with it."
The Military Times editorial says active-duty military leaders are beginning to voice misgivings about the war's planning and execution and dimming prospects for success. It declares that "Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large." The editorial concludes by saying that regardless of which party wins in next week's election, the time has come "to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go." (AP/Yahoo! News)

Saddam Hussein sentenced to death for crimes against Iraqis

November 5: Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging. He is convicted of crimes related to the murder of 148 Iraqis in the largely Shi'a town of Dujail following an assassination attempt on him in 1982. Hussein's half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti, and Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar, are also sentenced to death; former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan gets life in jail and three others receive 15-year prison terms. Another co-defendant, Baath party official Mohammed Azawi Ali, is acquitted. Hussein and the others have the right to appeal, but the appeals will be quick and are expected to end in failure. Hussein shouts upon hearing the verdict, "Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!" To the judge, he snarls, "Damn you and your court." Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki hails the conviction in a televised address, saying that the sentence is "not a sentence on one man, but a sentence against all the dark period of his rule." Maliki adds, "Maybe this will help alleviate the pain of the widows and the orphans, and those who have been ordered to bury their loved ones in secrecy, and those who have been forced to suppress their feelings and suffering, and those who have paid at the hands of torturers. ...The Saddam Hussein era is in the past now, as was the era of Hitler and Mussolini. We want an Iraq where all Iraqis are equal before the law. The policy of discrimination and persecution is over." US president George W. Bush calls the verdict a "milestone" in the efforts of the Iraqi people "to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."
Reactions across Iraq are strong, and varied. In the Shi'ite-dominated districts of Baghdad's Sadr City, and in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, citizens celebrate in defiance of a curfew. In Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, citizens there also defy the curfew to protest the verdict and show their support for Hussein, with some shouting, "By our souls, by our blood we sacrifice for you, Saddam. ...Saddam, your name shakes America." The verdict is expected to raise, not ease, tensions in Iraq. The Interior Ministry closes two Sunni satellite TV stations accused of inciting sectarian violence, but in Sadr City, Shi'ites celebrating the verdict burn pictures of Hussein and run shouting through the streets. Kurds also celebrate the verdict, with one Kurdish taxi driver saying, "Thank God I lived to see the day when the criminals received their punishment."
Many legal observers around the world view the verdict as the expected outcome of what was virtually a kangaroo court, with the US steering the case towards a well-timed guilty verdict. Some believe that the verdict was announced in time to help Republicans gain votes in the US midterm elections. Before the sentencing session began, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark was ejected from the courtroom after handing the judge a note in which he called the trial a "travesty." Many of Hussein's defense lawyers have accused the Iraqi government of interfering in the proceedings, a complaint backed by US group Human Rights Watch. President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, says, "I think the trial was fair. Those people had the full right to say what they intended." But Clark says that Hussein suffered what he calls "victor's justice." Clark says, "It's an unfair trial in more ways than you can count. ...To let there be worse than victors' justice and the revenge of all enemies at a time like this for Iraq is something history and humanity should not have to bear. It will create violence maybe for generations to come. The trial will go down in history as politically forced, it was a disaster for justice. It just went on for too long with lawyers killed and judges kicked off." Clark says Hussein should be tried by an independent UN-sponsored court, and is highly critical of the timing of the verdict, saying it was plainly timed to effect the US elections. "We call it the corruption of justice, the abuse of the judicial system for political ends," he says. "It's a crime and a very serious crime because it impacts on the integrity of government."
Hussein is also in the middle of another trial involving the 1988 Anfal campaign, the government offensive in the country's Kurdish region. Hussein is charged in that case with genocide. (BBC, CNN, Reuters)

Haggard fired for sexual immorality

November 5: Evangelist and mega-church pastor Ted Haggard is fired from his position by the board of overseers at the Colorado Springs New Life Church after confessing to many of the allegations that he had sex with a male prostitute and regularly used methamphetamines to enhance his sexual pleasure. Haggard calls himself a "deceiver and a liar" who has been battling with his "dark side" for most of his adult life. "The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality," he says. "And I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life." Haggard has already resigned as the president of the National Evangelicals Association, a powerful religious and political organization with over 35 million members. Until Haggard's seamy private life was revealed, he was a weekly participant in a conference call with George W. Bush and other senior White House officials. He still denies having actual sex with the prostitute, Mike Jones, and still insists he bought, but did not take, crystal meth, but the board fired him for sexual immorality. Some of the church members still support Haggard. "Worshippers are always challenged by crisis," says Haggard's replacement, the Reverend Ross Parsley. "And when tragedy and crisis strikes it is at that moment that you truly decide if you are a worshipper of the most high god. And today as the worship pastor of this church I am very proud of you." Parishoners Ryan Price and Karen Geyer seem impressed by the sincerity of Haggard's confession. "It seemed genuine -- from the heart. It's unfortunate but it happens," says Geyer. Price adds, "He's reaching out and asking for forgiveness." Jones, who outed Haggard when Haggard began publicly speaking out against gay marriage, says, "I am sad for him and his family. I know this is a tough day for him also. I wish him well. I wish his family well. My intent was never to destroy his family. My intent was to expose a hypocrite." (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 5: Reacting to the November 6 Military Times editorial calling for the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (released on the Internet on November 4), and other editorials around the country calling for Rumsfeld to be replaced, White House press secretary Tony Snow calls the Military Times editorial "shabby." Bush is "shrugging off" the editorial, Snow says, and feels it is nothing more than "grandstanding." (The editorial is excerpted, and linked, in its own November 6 item.) He also calls the editorial "a caricature" and a "shabby piece of work" filled with inaccuracies, and denies the editorial's assertions that the administration has done nothing but make rosy, misleading assessments of the situation in Iraq. Snow even says that the military papers, produced for military personnel by a subsidiary of Gannett, are biased, in that Gannett does not, according to Snow, have a single newspaper with a conservative editorial page. In reality, Gannett owns a number of papers with a conservative editorial page. Snow claims that the editorial is filled with "cheesy old partisan talking points" and says that the editorial misrepresents how many in the military feels about the occupation and the violence from insurgents and civilians. Snow claims that the Military Times merely wants to influence the November 7 vote -- I mean, if they didn't want it to influence the elections, they could have published it Wednesday." (Editor and Publisher)
November 5: The National Republican Congressional Committee has agreed to stop its automated calling campaign to New Hampshire residents on the federal do-not-call list, according to the state Democratic Party. However, the NRCC says it will continue the campaign, which has resulted in a flood of calls to the state Democratic Party from angry voters who think the messages are made on behalf of Paul Hodes, the Democratic challenger of incumbent Republican Charles Bass. Instead, they were coming from the National Republican Congressional Committee but sound, at first, as though they may be from the Hodes' campaign. "It's a clear effort on behalf of the Republican Party to annoy and upset New Hampshire residents...and people are under the assumption they are coming from Paul Hodes," Democratic Party spokeswoman Kathleen Strand says. Democrats worked with the New Hampshire Attorney General's office and the NRCC's lawyers to end the calls to people on the do-not-call list, she says. "We were informed by the attorney general's office that the NRCC has agreed to immediately stop the calls to people on the do-not-call list." But the NRCC notes that the calls to people not on the do-not-call list will not be terminated. "We have not agreed to stop the calls," says Alex Burgos, a spokesman for the NRCC. "Our calls will continue independently of the Charlie Bass campaign and in compliance with all applicable laws." The Democrats asked the state attorney general's office to order the committee to stop the calling and are criticizing Bass for not publicly making the same demand. "Charlie Bass did nothing to stop his Republican supporters from harassing New Hampshire voters," says Hodes's campaign manager, Dana Houle. "Charlie Bass won't stand up to the president on the Iraq war, and he won't stand up to his party when they harass New Hampshire voters."
The attorney general's office began investigating after a Hillsborough woman filed a complaint accusing the committee of violating a state law with a prerecorded political phone call. Martha Child, an independent who generally votes for Democrats, complained she received five calls from the National Republican Congressional Committee in two days despite having her number listed on a federal do-not-call list. Under state law, delivering prerecorded political messages to numbers on any federal do-not-call list is punishable by a fine of $5,000 per call. Jim Kennedy, an election law attorney in the attorney general's office, says it doesn't matter where a group is located or who is making the calls -- if they are being made to New Hampshire residents, they are illegal. It is estimated that more than 200,000 of the calls were made. One of the calls features a woman who opens by saying "Hello. I'm calling with information about Paul Hodes." She goes on to criticize his position on rolling back some of the recent federal tax cuts and ends by saying the call was paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to a tape recording of the call released by the state Democratic Party. "The calls are designed to make you hang up right after the words 'Paul Hodes,'" Hodes campaign spokesman Reid Cherlin says. (AP/WHDH-TV)

November 6: The Military Times group of publications, which includes the Army Times, Marine Corps Times, Navy Times, and Air Force Times, prints a scathing, powerful editorial demanding that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resign or be fired. The editorial is doubly powerful because it is considered quite representative of the feelings and positions of most military commanders and senior officers, as well as representative of the feelings of much of the "boots on the ground" soldiery. The editorial was released on the Internet on November 4, but is officially published today.
The editorial says that Rumsfeld, along with Bush, Cheney, and other administration officials, have systematically lied about the planning for the Iraq invasion, and the status of the occupation. "One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: 'mission accomplished,' the insurgency is 'in its last throes,' and 'back off,' we know what we're doing, are a few choice examples," it observes. "Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors. Now, however, a new chorus of criticism is beginning to resonate. Active-duty military leaders are starting to voice misgivings about the war's planning, execution and dimming prospects for success." The editorial continues, "For two years, American sergeants, captains and majors training the Iraqis have told their bosses that Iraqi troops have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don't show up for duty and cannot sustain themselves. Meanwhile, colonels and generals have asked their bosses for more troops. Service chiefs have asked for more money. And all along, Rumsfeld has assured us that things are well in hand. Now, the president says he'll stick with Rumsfeld for the balance of his term in the White House. This is a mistake. It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads. ...Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt. This is not about the midterm elections. Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go." (Army Times)
November 6: Bob Bauer, the general counsel for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has sent a cease and desist letter to his counterpart, Don McGahn of the National Republican Campaign Committee, demanding a halt to what he calls an illegal form of random calling of voter's residences using recorded political messages, or robocalling. The letter reads in part, "The NRCC calls do not identify at the outset, and as required, that they are sponsored by the NRCC. These calls do no contain a telephone number. This failure to comply with the law denies callers effective sponsorship information. Without the benefit of a number, they are also unable to request that they not be called again. And we have received reports that individuals have been contacted multiple times by your prerecorded calls, despite their continued refusal to accept the calls." McGahn has replied with his own letter denying that the NRCC is breaking the law and accusing the DCCC of starting the practice. NRCC Communications director Carl Forti says that the NRCC has made no phone calls past 8 PM, which would constitute a violation. (Editor's note: The calls have been reported as early as 5:30 AM and as late as 2:30 AM, both of which are flagrant violations of the telemarketing and privacy statutes.)
Bloggers at the Daily Kos are busily compiling data on robocalling efforts. So far at least 19 House districts are being targeted for Republican robocalls, with more information coming in. This is a single, national, co-ordinated campaign by the NRCC and a marketing firm in Virginia, Conquest Communications Group. Many of the calls begin with the phrase, "Hi. I'm calling with information about [Dem candidate]," then, after the hangups, begin barraging voters with callbacks, sometimes into the late night and early morning hours. Many voters are complaining to the Democratic candidates, who are spending time allocated to get-out-the-vote efforts to assuage angry voters who believe the Democrats are behind the harassment. (ABC News, Daily Kos)
November 6: Voter suppression efforts continue in New Mexico, with the state Democratic Party accusing the New Mexico GOP of calling Democratic voters and falsely telling them their polling place has changed. New Mexico Republicans say it only happened once, and it was a mistake. The NMDP is asking a judge to bar the GOP from calling any registered Democratic voters in the state. How such a "mistake" can be made is something of a mystery, but New Mexico GOP director Marta Kramer gives it a try: "It was one woman. There were three other people in the voter file with the same name. The volunteer said 'Hi' and identified herself and left a phone number. She (the voter) called back and said this is who I am and gave her address and we gave her the correct information." However, New Mexico Democratic Party director Matt Farrauto says the GOP had given incorrect information to more than just one Democrat. "I am standing in front of four people who had it happen to them, and there's a fifth woman who contacted me this morning," Farrauto tells TPM Muckraker reporter Justin Rood. The group was standing in the courthouse lobby, he said, waiting to meet with a judge who could order the GOP's calls to stop. (AP/TPM Muckraker)
November 6: Voter suppression by the GOP is reaching new lows in Virginia. A Democratic voter, Tim Daly from Clarendon, received a phone call saying that if he votes Tuesday, he will be arrested. The transcript from his voicemail reads: "This message is for Timothy Daly. This is the Virginia Elections Commission. We've determined you are registered in New York to vote. Therefore, you will not be allowed to cast your vote on Tuesday. If you do show up, you will be charged criminally." Daly has been registered to vote in Virginia since 1998, and he has voted for the last several cycles with no problem. He has filed a criminal complaint with the Commonwealth's attorney in Arlington. Other examples, compiled by the senatorial campaign of Democrat Jim Webb, include a raft of calls to Democrats telling them, falsely, that their polling place location has changed, from GOP operatives posing as Webb volunteers. The Secretary of the State Board of Elections, Jean Jensen, has logged dozens of similar calls, finding heavy trends in Accomack County (middle peninsula) and Essex County (outer peninsula), as reported by the counties' registrars. And in Buckingham County, RNC-sponsored fliers posted in African-American communities read, "SKIP THIS ELECTION... (and then in smaller print): Don't Let the Tax and Spend Liberals Win."
Jack Young, co-chair of the organization Promote the Vote, says, "There are now credible reports from multiple jurisdictions around the Commonwealth that establish a pattern of dirty tricks being employed to confuse and frustrate Virginia's voters from exercising their right to vote tomorrow. In addition to reports that have been received by the Democratic Party of Virginia, these local election officials have been receiving reports from concerned voters." Webb's campaign is filing formal complaints. (Jim Webb/Daily Kos [link to audio file], American Chronicle)
November 6: Missouri Republicans are demanding photo IDs from early voters, and are instructing poll workers in Missouri to demand IDs from voters on Tuesday. Though Missouri passed a law requiring photo IDs to vote last year, the courts struck down the law as unconstitutional. Even Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, who oversees the state's elections, was pulled aside when she tried to cast an absentee ballot on November 3 and told to produce ID three separate times, a clear violation of Missouri law. Carnahan showed the poll worker a paper voter card mailed out by the local election authority, an acceptable form of identification under Missouri law. Carnahan says she tried to explain a photo ID was not necessary, but the election worker replied that she was instructed to ask for one anyway. Carnahan was eventually allowed to vote without displaying a photo identification. According to Missouri law, any one of the following is acceptable ID: Identification issued by the state of Missouri, an agency of the state, or a local election authority of the state; identification issued by the United States government or agency thereof; identification issued by an institution of higher education, including a univeristy, college, vocational and technical school, located within the state of Missouri; a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, government check or other government document that contains the name and address of the voter; or a driver's license or state identification card issued by another state. Even if a voter possesses none of these forms of identification, he or she may still cast a ballot if two supervising election judges, one from each major political party, attest they know you. In Missouri, the number to call to report any voter suppression or voter fraud is 816-753-7931. The Democrats' national voter protection hotline is 1-888-DEM-VOTE. (AP/Daily Kos)
November 6: Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele of Maryland releases an election guide flyer to prospective voters lauding his endorsements by fellow African-Americans Kwesi Mfume, Jack Johnson, and Wayne Curry. Problem is, two of these people never endorsed Steele. The flyer is designed to confuse voters into believing Steele is a Democrat -- even the candidates recommended within the flyer are Democrats with the important exceptions of Steele and GOP gubernatorial candidate Robert Ehrlich. Mfume and Jackson have endorsed Steele's opponent, Ben Cardin. Steele has already implied numerous times during the campaign that he is a Democrat, most recently with bumperstickers and flyers. (Daily Kos)
November 6: San Diego Registrar Mikel Haas has been sending pre-programmed, election-ready (and eminently hackable) Diebold touchscreen voting machines home with poll workers on what he calls "sleepovers" since October 16. Some of these machines have been sent home with high school students, who will also be manning the machines on November 7. (BradBlog)
November 6: Conservative talk radio station KFBK-AM in Sacramento uses the federal Emergency Alert System to broadcast an ad by Republican Senate candidate Dick Mountjoy. Mountjoy is running against incumbent Democrat Dianne Feinstein. The use of the EAS for such purposes is illegal, of course, but it forces other stations to automatically broadcast the transmission. It is not yet known how many stations were forced to run the ad. KFBK officials call the broadcast a "training error." (San Francisco Chronicle)
November 6: Republican representative Katherine Harris, running for a Senate seat in Florida, is revealed to be under official investigation by both the Justice and Defense Departments for her ties to Mitchell Wade, a convicted defense contractor and former head of MZM Inc. In 2004, Wade made $32,000 worth of illegal contributions to Harris's House campaign. Wade also treated Harris to at least two dinners at a trendy Georgetown restaurant, the meals costing over $6,000, far in excess of the monetary amounts of gifts allowed to be given to House members. During the second dinner, prosecutors say Wade requested that Harris help secure $10 million in federal funds for a project benefiting his firm in Sarasota. Harris soon submitted a request for the earmark to the House Appropriations Committee, but it was not granted. Harris has not yet been subpoenaed or interviewed, but numerous former staff members have been, and her 2006 campaign records have been subpoenaed. Harris, of course, denies any wrongdoing. (PR Watch)
November 6: The Indiana Republican Party fires Conquest Communications, one of the firms responsible for harrassing GOP-sponsored robocalls. The Indiana GOP fires Conquest not because the firm's calls are necessarily harrassing, but because they are automated, which is a violation of Indiana state law. State GOP spokesman Robert Vane says that Virginia-based Conquest Communications Group has used recorded messages in calls for a number of GOP candidates around Indiana. "That is not what we contracted for," says Vane, so the party has fired Conquest and is refusing to pay the company. The Republicans intended for all campaign calls to be conducted "100 percent live," Vane says, but instead Conquest used a live introduction followed by a recording. Under Indiana law, a recorded message can be delivered over the phone only if it is first introduced by a person who seeks and gets permission to play it. (Indianapolis Star/TPM Muckraker)
November 6: Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Fox News and the New York Post, among other media outlets, says he has no regrets about about supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq, and argues that the US death toll in the conflict is "minute" from a historical perspective. "The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," he says. "Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis killing each other." He continues, "I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes. But that's easy to say after the event. It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too. "I think that one forgets that American foreign policy for the whole of the [20th] century saved the world from terrible things three times, for which they certainly got no thanks and for which they never had imperial ambitions at all." (Times of India)
November 6: Another questionable tactic used by Republicans in the final days before the election is the "push poll." Such polling, which asks prospective voters misleading and provocative questions about the Democratic opponent, became famous in the 2000 Republican primaries, when George W. Bush's campaign used push polling in South Carolina to smear opponent John McCain about fathering illegitimate black children and his supposed mental instability. This year, the polls are more sophisticated, and differ depending on the opponent. In Montana, voters are asked if they want judges who "push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy" to be controlled; if the answer is yes, then the voice tells the listener that they don't want to vote for Democratic Senate candidate Jon Tester. In Maryland, listeners are told that only Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele would support keeping the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, listeners are told that Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford wants to give foreign terrorists "the same legal rights and privileges" as Americans. It is a powerful, if highly misleading, marketing tactic previously used to steer consumers towards buying specific products and now adapted for political purposes. Five states featuring tight Senate and House races are being inundated with the calls; Democrats are calling foul.
The Ohio-based conservatives behind the new campaign, who include current and former Procter & Gamble managers, say the automated system can reach vast numbers of people at a fraction of the cost of traditional volunteer phone banks and is the most ambitious political use of the telemarketing technology ever undertaken. But critics say the automated calls are a twist on push polls, a campaign tactic often criticized as deceptive because it involves calling potential voters under the guise of measuring public opinion, while the real intent is to change opinions with questions that push people in one direction or the other. Steele's opponent, Benjamin Cardin, calls the automated calls "gutter politics" that distort his record. But Harold Swift, one of the organizers of the Ohio group, says the calls are merely a "very sophisticated approach to voter education." The goal, he said, is to “make people aware of the candidate's stand on the issues that are important to them." Swift says his group, Common Sense Ohio, is a nonprofit advocacy organization, though financed by wealthy Republican donors. A sister organization, Common Sense 2006, has received a donation from the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee, an affiliate of the Republican Governors Association. Under federal law, the groups are not required to disclose their donors publicly or reveal how much money they have raised. Swift says that if some critics think the group's polling approach seems deceptive, "I grant that they can reach that conclusion."
During the automated calls, which last about a minute, the moderator first asks whether the listener is a registered voter or which candidate he favors. Voters receive different sets of questions depending on how they answer. The system then asks a series of "yes" or "no" questions about different issues, and each answer guides the system forward. For instance, in the Montana race, if a voter agrees that liberal-leaning judges seem to go too far, the moderator quickly jumps to another question that highlights the differences between Tester and Republican incumbent Conrad Burns: "Does the fact that Jon Tester says he would have voted against common-sense, pro-life judges like Samuel Alito and John Roberts, and Conrad Burns supported them, make you less favorable toward Jon Tester?" In Tennessee, after listeners are asked if terrorists should have the same rights as Americans, this comparison between Ford and Bob Corker, the Republican, is given: "Fact: Harold Ford Jr. voted against the recommendations of the 9/11 commission and voted against renewing the Patriot Act, which treats terrorists as terrorists. Fact: Bob Corker supports renewal of the Patriot Act and how it would treat terrorists." The calls are misleading at best; for example, both Ford and Tester are said to have voted for multiple tax increases, but the calls never mention the many votes they have cast for tax cuts. Cardin, who supports stem cell research, says he is incensed that the issue has been reduced to the notion that he voted to allow "research to be done on unborn babies," while his opponent, Steele, "opposes any research that destroys human life." Swift shrugs off such criticism with the excuse, "[I]t is very challenging to take something as complex as a person's background and track record and communicate it in a 30-second sound bite. ...This is a time of year for pretty strongly worded positions on all sides."
Interestingly, Common Sense Ohio contracts with ccAdvertising to actually place the calls; the advertising group is run by Donald Hodel, a former Reagan cabinet member and the former president of both the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. (New York Times)
November 6: Neoconservative Josette Sheeran, a State Department official and former managing editor of the conservative Washington Times, is slated to be approved as the new head of the UN World Food Program. Both UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Jacques Diouf, head of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the umbrella agency for WFP, have signed off on her nomination. The post has gone to an American for the past 14 years, and Sheeran, the undersecretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs since August 2005, is the Bush administration's candidate. Sheeran is a former deputy US trade representative before joining the State Department in August 2005. She had also worked as managing director of Starpoint Solutions, a Wall Street technology firm, as was managing editor of the Washington Times. Sheeran was a member of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church from1975 through 1997, and was married in a mass wedding before leaving the church. She will follow Americans James Morris, who has served for more than two years, and Catherine Bertini, who held the post for 10 years until April 2004. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 6: The White House doctors its Web video of the infamous May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech to obliterate the "Mission Accomplished" banner hanging over Bush's head. A link to the video (provided by Inside Politics's Mike McIntee) gives a nice walkthrough of the White House's crude editing job as well as, of course, visual evidence of the Orwellian edit job. (YouTube/Daily Kos [link to video])
November 6: In a Vanity Fair article written just before the elections, posted to the Web just after the elections, and intended for the December issue, journalist and writer Todd Purdum provides an intensive examination of political guru Karl Rove, whose divide-and-conquer strategies dominated the Republican campaigns. Rove has a far grander political strategy than anything centered around a single election. He envisions what he calls a "rolling re-alignment" of Americans behind the Republican Party. To this end, he continues with the microtargeting and slice-and-dice tactics that brought him, and his Republicans, this far. A rival Republican strategist says of Rove's planning, "I think the strategy is completely transparent. I think you could literally have written this playbook in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It's a sort of classic leverage play: play upon the fears of the public, and leverage that into all the policies you've got that are unpopular. I've never seen a group of people who as consistently try to divide the public along the fault lines they already know exist, rather than try to unite it around something." Purdum writes, "For Rove, all politics is partitive, and there is almost nothing he can't explain by slicing up the electorate and slotting it into place. ...It's nothing personal. It's all in service to the numbers, getting the electorate to divide in just the right way."
Microtargeting is a key to Rove's accomplishments. One example of this comes from the Republican National Committee's huge database of information on the American electorate called the "Voter Vault." For many voters, Rove and the RNC have a wealth of information on them that the NSA would envy. "We target voters the way that Visa targets credit-card customers," says RNC chairman and Rove protege Ken Mehlman. "That's the difference from before. We used to target them based on their geography. We now target them based on what they do and how they live." Canvassing efforts based on neighborhood breakdowns used to routinely miss Republican voters in largely Democratic neighborhoods -- no more. The RNC gathers information on your shopping habits, your credit card purchases, your Web site surfing, your television viewing habits, and targets you accordingly. The RNC has long run heavy ad campaigns on cable specialty channels that are favorites among Republican voters, such as the Golf Channel and ESPN. In 2004, when RNC marketing experts found that the situation comedy "Will and Grace" was extremely popular among Republican voters, the RNC bought almost 500 ad slots during its broadcast, thereby reaching Republican voters that might have otherwise gone unaffected. Purdum observes, "It was a neat trick: the Bush campaign managed to ratchet up turnout among one core group of voters by touting the president's proposal for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and at the same time to attract another group of voters by running commercials on a television comedy that sympathetically portrayed urban gay life."
In general, the same Democrats who revile his tactics can't help but admire, in a backhanded fashion, his success, and the qualities that makes him so successful. Charles Schumer, the Democrat who chairs his party's Senate campaign committee, hates Rove's tactics, but has to give the devil his due: "People think he's totally ruthless. There are few people who have come along who have, whatever the opposite of elevated is, who have helped politics descend by finding newer and nastier and more effective ways to practice it." Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000 and has shared occasional lunches with Rove in the years since, says, "I get blogged all the time for my, quote unquote, relationship with Karl Rove. ...Yes, he's hated. Yes, he's demonized. But I try to tell people, 'You should add another word: respected.' He knows how to play the game. I don't like the way Karl can go into a race and divide and conquer, but he has a maniacal focus on winning."
While little more of the article is of a timely nature, there is a great deal of personal detail about Rove's life, career, and personality that is well worth the read. (Vanity Fair)

Democrats retake House in sweep; Senate still in contention

November 7: It may not have been a "tsunami," as some commentators use the term, but Democrats sweep Republicans across the board to retake control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994, with what at this time appears to be a 232-203 division. A party needs 218 seats to control the House. As of early November 8, votes were still being counted and some districts have not yet been decided, but so far Democrats took 27 Republican-controlled seats and lost no seats. Over a dozen seats remain in contention. "From sea to shining sea, the American people voted for change," says House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, slated to become the first woman Speaker of the House in American history. "Today we have made history," she says, "now let us make progress." The current Speaker, Dennis Hastert, is expected to resign his post and perhaps even retire from the House, even though he won re-election from his Illinois district. (Hastert later declares that he will not stand for the position of House Minority Leader in January.) One of the biggest triggers for the Democratic wave is the public's strong opposition to the Iraq war. Even some conservatives voted Democratic, and most moderates and independents, along with liberals and traditional Democrats, generally supported Democratic candidates. Perhaps even more crucial was the public's disgust with the roster of Republicans perceived to be corrupt. At least seven Republicans accused of one sort of malfeasance or another are defeated, including Don Sherwood, the Pennsylvania Republican accused of choking his mistress, Curt Weldon, another Pennsylvania Republican mired in a fraud investigation, Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who recently admitted to stalking underage House pages for sex, and others whose misdeeds are chronicled in this site, including California's Richard Pombo, John Hostettler, and John Sweeney. (Foley's name was on the ballot in his district, though he would have been replaced by fellow Republican Joe Negron had he won.) The Texas seat fornerly held by Tom DeLay, who faces multiple criminal charges of fraud and influence-peddling, goes to a Democrat, Nick Lampson. Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison becomes the first Muslim to win a Congressional seat. For more information on how strong Democrats' grasp of political power is in Congress, and for access to individual results, visit CNN's elections page.
The Senate, formerly controlled by the Republicans, is still a toss-up, with Republicans retaining 49 seats and Democrats controlling 47 along with two independents who will caucus with the Democrats, giving them an effective total of 49. (Connecticut's Joe Lieberman is one of those independents, defeating Democratic challenger Ned Lamont, but Lieberman is expected to be welcomed back into the Democratic ranks. The other is leftist Bernie Sanders of Vermont.) Two extremely close races still remain to be called: Montana, with Democratic challenger Jon Tester holding a narrow lead over Republican incumbent Conrad Burns, and Virginia, with Democratic challenger Jim Webb holding a slim lead over Republican incumbent George Allen. Either or both of those races may end up going to recounts, leaving the question of which party controls the Senate as yet undecided. Most, but not all, of the other close races went to Democrats, with Claire McCaskill narrowly defeating Jim Talent in Missouri, and Sheldon Whitehouse defeating Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island. Republican Bob Corker wins a tight race in Tennessee over Democratic challenger Harold Ford; Corker will take the seat vacated by retiring House Majority Leader Bill Frist. And in Arizona, Republican incumbent Jon Kyl held off a challenge by Democrat Jim Pederson; Pederson was given an outside chance at best of taking Kyl's seat. Other significant wins for Democratic Senatorial candidates include Sherrod Brown's rout of Mike DeWine in Ohio, Ben Cardin's defeat of Michael Steele in Maryland, Bob Nelson's handy rebuff of Katherine Harris in Florida, Amy Klobuchar's win in Minnesota over Mark Kennedy, and Bob Casey's plastering of Rick Santorum, one of Bush's closest senatorial allies, in Pennsylvania.
Blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga reminds us that neither George Allen nor Conrad Burns had anything good to say about recounts after the November 2000 elections, when Florida was in doubt and Democrat Al Gore was calling for recounts. Burns said after the Florida vote was certified, on November 28, 2000, Gore "appears more and more like a man who wants to win at any cost. ...It is time, as some have said, for Vice President Gore to stop being a litigant and start being a patriot. The good of our nation is greater than any one man, and it is time for Mr. Gore to end these challenges and bow out gracefully. ...Mr. Gore should step aside and let the Bush team begin its orderly transition to the presidency." And the morning after Election Day 2000, when Florida was counting absentee ballots, Allen said, "[W]e'll need to move America forward as soon as those votes are cast."
Democrats made major inroads into the nation's governorships as well, gaining six states overall. Significant victories include Tim Strickland's rout of Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio, Eliot Spitzer succeeding George Pataki, the Republican who is retiring from office, in New York, Martin O'Malley's narrow defeat of Maryland incumbent Robert Ehrlich, Mike Beebe's defeat of Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas (to replace term-limited Republican Mike Huckabee), and Deval Patrick's win in Massachusetts, becoming the first black governor of that state since Reconstruction. The biggest win for Republicans is in California, where incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger handily defeats Phil Angelides.
The mood among Republicans was somber and sometimes angry. Bush, whose unpopularity is one of the main causes of the Republicans' historic losses, takes, for one of the very few times in his career, a modicum responsibility for the Republican losses: " He says, in an attempt to somewhat spin the Republican debacle, "The message yesterday was clear: The American people want their leaders in Washington to set aside partisan differences, conduct ourselves in an ethical manner, and work together to address the challenges facing our nation. ...I'm obviously disappointed with the outcome of the election and, as the head of the Republican Party, I share a large part of the responsibility." However, he says that the Democrats' victory may not mean a significant change in his policies towards Iraq. "I know there's a lot of speculation on what the election means for the battle we're waging in Iraq. I recognize that many Americans voted last night to register their displeasure with the lack of progress being made there," he says. "Yet, I also believe most Americans and leaders here in Washington from both political parties understand we cannot accept defeat. In the coming days and weeks, I and members of my national security team will meet with the members of both parties to brief them on latest developments and listen to their views about the way forward." Bush has spoken with Pelosi on the phone to congratulate her on the Democrats' victory and says, in press secretary Tony Snow's words, "we look forward to working with you." For the Democrats, Pelosi responds, "The American people voted for a new direction to restore civility and bipartisanship in Washington, DC, and Democrats promise to work together in a bipartisan way for all Americans."
Republican House member Thomas Davis, who survived the Democratic takeover, says that bipartisanship and cooperation may be little more than skin deep. "They're going to be setting the agenda. He's going to be reacting to it," Davis says. "He's going to be reacting to subpoenas flying, investigations. If we tended to underinvestigate, I think you'll see Democrats tend to overinvestigate." Democrats themnselves insist that they will "govern from the middle:" according to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who will most likely be the new Senate Majority Leader, "We have learned from watching the Republicans -- they would not allow moderates a voice in their party. We must work from the middle." As for Republicans, many of their sentiments are echoed by Republican strategist John Weaver, who says that the Democrats didn't necessarily win because they had a better plan than the Republicans have been enacting -- "they didn't offer one." Instead, "It's about how we as Republicans set aside our principles to try to stay in power. We decided to try to spend money like Democrats, we decided not to reform or tackle big issues. And at the end of the day, the American voters said, 'Enough is enough.'" (So Republicans were replaced by Democrats because Republicans acted like Democrats...?) Democrats intend to operate as a far-ranging coalition of liberals, progressives, moderates, and conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats. And, as many of the items below show, the Democrats indeed have a plan -- several of them. (AP/Yahoo! News, Roll Call, Roll Call, CNN, Washington Post, AP/Yahoo! News, Washington Post, Daily Kos)
November 7: After totaling up the late decisions that take place in the days and weeks to come, the totals show that the House Democrats hold a total of 233 seats, more seats than Republicans have held since 1952, and a larger share of the House than the vaunted 1994 "Republican Revolution," which has been held up as a "complete takeover" of Congress for twelve years running. Chris Bowers, the Democratic proprietor of the blog My DD, writes, "So much for the vaunted Republican political machine, which recorded record voter contacts, record fundraising, and record early voting this cycle. With their best effort, we beat them harder than they ever beat us." Fellow Democratic blogger Markos Moulitas Zuniga adds, "This is a progressive country. All the talk of a 'conservative' majority destroyed with a Democratic majority that towers over the best the Republican 'revolution' could ever muster." (Daily Kos)
November 7: Democrats rack up big gains in many state legislatures as well as in the US Congress. From New Hampshire to Oregon, Democrats gain approximately 275 state legislative seats and took control of nine chambers, mainly in the Midwest. The shift is not as dramatic as when the GOP gained 472 seats during the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, or when Democrats enjoyed a similar landslide in 1974. Nonetheless, says political analyst Tim Storey of the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver, "All the movement went in one direction. Democrats gained seats in almost every legislative chamber," and six governorships as well. Control of state legislatures is an important part of public policy in the United States. State lawmakers spend more than a half-trillion dollars a year on such things as roads, education, and health care. In addition, both parties have been pouring money into state legislative campaigns, grooming new lawmakers who may end up in Congress or other national positions of prominence, and much influence on a variety of social issues is wielded in state legislatures. Perhaps the most important aspect, from a national viewpoint, is the authority wielded by state legislatures to redraw districting maps. Last June, the US Supreme Court upheld the authority of Texas to, in essence, "gerrymander" its districts to give Republicans the clear advantage. Democrats may well attempt to redraw some state district maps to give themselves more of an even playing field, or more. "Because state legislative campaigns often have less visibility, they are more susceptible to strong national trends," says John McGlennon, professor of government at William & Mary. "In 1974 and 1994, for instance, landslide midterm elections for the Democrats and Republicans respectively produced swings of hundreds of state legislative seats for the winning party. ...The increase in competition is another piece of evidence that Americans are becoming more, not less, active politically." Until this week's election, the nation's 7,382 state legislative seats were almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans -- Democrats had a scant 21-seat majority -- with Republicans controlling 20 legislatures, Democrats controlling 19, and 10 legislatures split between parties. Nebraska's legislature is nonpartisan. While the results in Pennsylvania, Montana, and Washington State are not yet determined, Democrats now control both houses of the legislatures in 23 states, Republicans in 15 states, and nine states are split. (Christian Science Monitor)
November 7: CNN's exit polls show that American voters were not focused solely on Iraq as they voted; in fact, their overriding concern was not just for Iraq, but over the corruption of Congress. 42% say that corruption is a very important issue for them, with 40% naming terrorism as a very important issue, 39% naming the economy, and 37% naming Iraq. John Halpin reminds us, "The reporting on the importance of national issues is off -- again. It's not correct to say that Iraq is less important than corruption or terrorism to people's vote -- it's solely a function of question wording. The items listed on television are rated individually as 'How important is this issue to you' and not against one another or as a motivator for voting." (CNN/Think Progress)

Massive problems with electronic voting machines plague precincts in state after state

November 7: Early reports show widespread problems with touchscreen and other electronic voting machines in state after state. In Cleveland, the site of massive problems in 2004 which denied thousands a chance to vote, voters are having to wait hours while technicians and poll workers attempt to get the machines working properly. Cleveland is, of course, a large Democratic stronghold. One Democratic voter arrives at his Cleveland Heights precinct to vote at 6:30 AM; all five electronic voting machines are malfunctioning, and the voter does not get to cast his vote until 10:15 AM. Poll workers at the precinct were told that help would arrive in five to ten minutes...for three hours. Finally, a precinct worker from another precinct arrives, with two Diebold technicians, and within minutes, they are able to fix the electronic machines. Many, many voters do not choose to wait, but instead leave without voting, or vote on provisional ballots (the poll workers scrawl "Regular" on the ballots, showing that the votes would have been cast on the touchscreen machines had the machines been working). The voter, Daily Kos blogger "BobcatJH," writes, "In case you're unfamiliar with the area in which I live, it's one of the bluest parts of a blue city, Cleveland. It's also home to a sizable minority population. From what I was hearing, the problems I had experienced were widespread, especially in areas near mine. This, to me, is no coincidence." In one precinct in the predominantly black district of East Cleveland, when voting opens, all 12 voting machines mysteriously malfunction, causing voters to have to wait two hours to even begin casting votes. Poll officials refuse to hand out paper ballots until a lawyer for the watchdog group Election Protection shows up. "The machines weren't working and they were just turning people away," says the attorney, Fred Livingstone. "They are not allowed to do that." In another Cleveland precinct, lines stretching out of the building are reported as early as 7 AM, partly due to a cut in the number of available voting machines. As of mid-morning, over 250 problems so far have been reported so far throughout Ohio polling places, according to an Election Protection watchdog operation run by a minority rights group and other non-governmental organizations. Almost all of the problems are reported within heavily Democratic areas.
In Columbus, many Democratic voters have the phrase "Must vote provisional" by their names on the voter-roll. Obviously these voters had been flagged as "suspect" even before showing up. One such voter says he has voted in the same precinct every primary and general election for 18 years without incident. An official of the election watchdog group Election Protection suggests that this flagging may be due to the state's new central database, and the too-stringent controls on "database discrepancies;" apparently the Ohio database is set to flag differences such as "E. 1st Ave" vs "1st Ave E."
Chicago-areas report a raft of problems. In District 12, many voters leave without voting, after arriving at 6:30 AM, because all of the machines are down. Another precinct, #20, is two hours late in opening because of machines refusing to operate properly. A voter in that precinct writes, "This beautiful neighborhood has a very large minority population, coincidence?" Several precincts have their voting booths rendered almost inaccessible due to parking lots being closed for street cleaning. Another voter writes, "Used the touch screen voting machine -- if this is the new technology, forget it. When I would touch on the candidate of my choice, in several instances the check mark would jump to the other candidate. After finally resolving this I reviewed my choices on the screen (before seeing a printout) only to find that six candidate choices had mysteriously changed, so again I went back to correct these 'mistakes.' Finally, everything looked good so I ran the printout to review my choices only to find that again choices (different ones) were wrong so I went back and made the changes -- imagine my dismay when this happened two more times after that. At last everything was right so I pushed the final button to have my votes cast - or were they??? Sure hope so!"
Poor poll worker instruction and combative Republican poll workers plague Ohio voting, according to member statements compiled by Progress Ohio. Republican poll workers and staffers are challenging Democratic volunteers in a number of precincts, including attempts at physical intimidation and threats to have them "hauled out of here." Many stories are being reported of voters improperly required to use provisional ballots. Stories abound of voting machines being plentiful in Republican-heavy precincts but scarce in heavily Democratic precincts. Some voters report being asked for as many as four (!) ID verifications. Flyers are popping up in some districts misdirecting voters to the wrong polling places. Over 40 precincts in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) report problems with voting machines; at least four Cleveland precincts begin the morning by turning away voters because their machines are not up and running. Some precincts in what one person describes as "liberal-leaning" areas have quietly shifted their polling areas without informing voters. In Columbus, precinct 49C has so many problems with long lines and malfunctioning machines that "voters [are] leaving in droves." Franklin County (Columbus) elections offices are overwhelmed with so many calls to complain about problems with voting machines that the phone system cuts out. One Cleveland Heights voter, who wages a losing battle with a balky Diebold machine and well-meaning but untrained poll workers, writes, "Am I amazed that Nicaragua can run an apparently smooth election and we can't? Darn right, bubba. Do I think that our state's chief election official and the chair and executive director of the County Board of Elections has let us down? You bet your asterisk I do. Shame."
Interestingly enough, photojournalists attempting to film Republican representatives John Boehner and Jean Schmidt as they go to vote are threatened with arrest. Schmidt is unable to get the optical-scan machine in her Loveland district to accept her vote -- the first vote of the day cast in that precinct -- and is forced, with others, to put her ballot into a box for later scanning.
In several St. Louis, Missouri districts, several instances of "vote flipping" are reported by 8 AM, where a voter tries to vote for one candidate but the machine insists on recording the vote for the other candidate. The nonpartisan group Missouorians for Honest Elections recommends that all Missouri voters use paper ballots, which by law the state must accept as alternatives to electronic voting.
The problems are not just plaguing Democrats. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford is not allowed to vote at his home precinct because he did not have his voter registration card. He was able to vote later in the morning.
These types of problems are not limited to Ohio. In Indiana's Marion County, perhaps a fifth of the precincts are being forced to use paper ballots because their machines are not operating correctly; a similar problem is happening in Indiana's Delaware County. The same thing is happening in Ohio and Florida. Other problems are being reported in precincts throughout Florida, New York, Pennsylvania (where some counties are extending voting hours), Colorado, Virginia, Mississippi, and Maryland. (MSNBC, Daily Kos, AFP/Yahoo! News, CNN, NBC5-TV, Missourians for Honest Elections/BradBlog, WAGT-TV, Progress Ohio)
November 7: The FBI is investigating complaints of voter intimidation and suppression in Virginia, centering around the Senate race between Republican George Allen and Democrat Jim Webb. As documented in earlier items, Democratic voters have received phone calls telling them, falsely, that the site of their polling places had changed, and at least one registered Democrat has received a call threatening him with arrest if he attempts to vote. Jean Jensen, secretary of the State Board of Elections, says, "Voters should not be intimidated or deceived by phone messages purporting to be from election officials. Any communication from federal, state or local election officials will always be in a written form clearly identifying the official source." State Democratic Party counsel Jay Myerson suggests that Republicans are behind efforts to suppress votes for Webb: "We've seen this tactic before, and it is about time the Republicans learned that it will not work." The state GOP denies any illegal activities. (Richmond Times-Dispatch, MSNBC)
November 7: The GOP-generated robocalls continue throughout the day, harassing and angering voters. One woman calls the Washington Post in tears to tell reporters that she cannot keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls. Pamela Lorenz, a retired nurse in California, calls her own experience "harassment as far as I'm concerned" and says, "If I were voting right now, the opponent who's doing this, he'd be off my list for throwing that much trash." Lorenz's home has received dozens, perhaps hundreds, of calls, hour after hour, day after day, from the National Republican Congressional Committee attacking Democrat Charlie Brown and touting Republican John Doolittle as part of the hard-fought House campaign. "It is a recorder calling," she says. "I can't call it back to get them to stop." Virginia resident Angela Elliot, who has been getting both Democrat and Republican automated calls, says, "I hang up as soon I hear it start. I've already heard most of what people have to say. I don't have time to listen to them." But unlike the harassing calls reported in other areas, Northern Virginia voters say that the calls they are receiving are almost all positive in nature.
This is not the case in many other areas, where NRCC phone messages masquerade, for the first part of the message, as calls from a Democratic campaign. The idea is to make harassed voters believe they are receiving repeated calls from Democrats, and generate anger and resentment against those candidates. Democrats cite federal records indicating that the NRCC recently spent about $600,000 in at least 45 contested House districts for robo-calls, which are among the least expensive campaign tools. The brief calls typically begin with a speaker offering "some information" about the Democratic nominee and then immediately accusing the nominee of seeking to raise taxes, among other perceived wrongs. Many voters hang up as soon as a robo-call begins, without waiting for the criticisms or the NRCC sign-off at the end, so they think it was placed by the Democratic candidate named at the start. "Our candidates are inundated with phone calls from furious Democrats and independents saying...'I'm outraged and I'm not going to vote for you anymore,'" says the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's Sarah Feinberg. Feinberg says some voters have received robo-calls late at night, despite federal rules barring such calls after 9 PM. NRCC spokesman Carl Forti says his organization ends all calls by 9 nightly. Democrats also cite Federal Communications Commission guidelines saying the originators of automated calls must identify themselves at the beginning of each call. Republican Party lawyers, however, said the requirement does not apply to political nonprofit organizations. They rebuffed a "cease and desist" letter sent yesterday by the DCCC (see earlier item). In a conference call with reporters yesterday, DCCC chairman Rahm Emanuel compared the widespread robo-calling to a 2002 Republican effort in New Hampshire to jam Democratic phone lines to prevent the Democrats' get-out-the-vote effort. The Republican National Committee has spent more than $2 million to defend its officials in the case, he said. "Make no mistake, this is a dirty trick, one they've done before, one they've gotten caught on and one they continue to do," Emanuel said.
Some GOP-generated robocalls are actually using the Democratic candidate's prerecorded voice in their ads, in an attempt to fool the listener into believing they are being harassed by the Democratic and not the Republican candidate. One example (of several) involves Nebraska Democratic House candidate Scott Kleeb, running in NE-03 against Adrian Smith. One Kleeb campaign official says, "[The voters will] probably find out who's doing this, but it won't be today or tomorrow, and by then it will be too late." Such practices are, of course, illegal.
Karyn Hollis, a Villanova University English professor who supports Democrat Lois Murphy in her bid to oust Republican Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania, says she has received numerous robo-calls attacking Murphy. "You just get sick of these calls," Hollis says. A quick hang-up can lead the recipient to conclude that Murphy supporters placed the call, she says, but listening to the full message subjects the voter to a litany of attacks against Murphy. "It's a double thing," says Hollis. "Either way they win." (Washington Post, Nebraska Independent/AmericaBlog)
November 7: Investigations led by Daily Kos blogger "G2geek" proves that Republicans have unleased a barrage of "robocalls" with intent to deceive. The investigations have recorded robocalls made by GOP congressional committees that use technology to mask their outgoing phone numbers from caller ID systems -- a clear violation of the law. Instead of allowing their correct phone numbers to be displayed, callers are seeing the string "000-000-0000" coming up on their displays. This can only be done by outgoing callers reprogramming their system to hide their correct phone numbers. It is clear proof of an intent to deceive. Secondly, circumstantial evidence is mounting that the robocalls are a Republican scam of Democratic voters. Evidence on this front is still being collected. (Daily Kos)
November 7: Maryland Republican candidates Michael Steele and Robert Ehrlich, running for Senate and gubernatorial posts respectively, distribute flyers throughout African-American communities the morning of the election labeled "Official Election Guide" that falsely claim the two are Democrats, and falsely claim the endorsements of several prominent black Democrats. The flyers are distributed by people bused in from Pennsylvania and Delaware, who are greeted by Ehrlich's wife Kendel before being sent into the neighborhoods. One volunteer, Erik Markle, says he was recruited at a Philadelphia homeless shelter; Markle says almost all the volunteers are poor and black. (Washington Post/AmericaBlog)
November 7: In a truly egregrious example of GOP voter intimidation, Republican operatives armed with handguns harass and intimidate Hispanic voters in Tucson, Arizona. Nina Perales, a senior poll-watcher for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), reports that in Tucson's Iglesia Bautista precinct, three men regularly approach Latino voters and, while demanding identification from the voters, take close-up videotapes of the voters being questioned. One of the three men clearly sports a pistol in a side holster. In Arizona, carrying a visible weapon is legal, but not in certain places, such as schools, government buildings, and polling places. (TPM Muckraker/Daily Kos)
November 7: While electronic voting machine problems and phone-based voter suppression tactics dominate the news, this apparent Republican fix in a small Utah county seems almost quaint by comparison. Daggett County has registered 947 voters for today's election, four more than the county's entire population. A spokesman for Attorney General Mark Shurtleff says complaints of vote-stuffing in the county are being investigated. Democrats suspect County Clerk Vickie McKee is letting outsiders swell the Daggett County registration rolls to give Republicans an advantage. The Democrats also say the father of a Republican deputy running for sheriff has 14 adults registered at his household. (CNN)
November 7: Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham exhorts her listeners to make crank calls to the Democratic voter fraud hotline in an attempt to jam the system and make it impossible for real voters to call with problems and questions. The number, for actual callers who have experienced problems in voting, is 1-888-DEM-VOTE (1-888-336-8683). (Laura Ingraham/FireDogLake)
November 7: Volunteers for the Jay Fawcett campaign, the Democrat running for the House seat in the 5th District of Colorado, arrive at Fawcett campaign headquarters this morning to find that vandals have wreaked havoc in the offices. The Fawcett campaign also reports the third death threat of the campaign to the local police, sent via e-mail. The district includes Colorado Springs, the center of a large right-wing evangelical movement, and is heavily Republican. The finance director of Fawcett's campaign had his car vandalized last week while it was parked in front of the county Republican offices. "I find it disgusting that, as we are fighting for democracy in Iraq, people are besmirching democracy here in Colorado Springs," says Fawcett's campaign manager Wanda James. "Death threats and childish illegal activities will not deter us from getting out the vote to victory today." (Jay Fawcett/Daily Kos)
November 7: The liberal political organization MoveOn.org is offering a $250,000 reward for evidence leading to a conviction over organized efforts at election fraud. The reward seems to be focused on an array of illegal tactics used by Republicans in the days before the election, particularly on "robocalls" and voter suppression attempts. And progressive organization People for the American Way is calling for Congressional hearings into the robocalls, and other voter intimidation and voter suppression tactics. "These voter deception and voter suppression tactics are despicable and unacceptable," says PFAW president Ralph Neas. "Regardless of the outcome of today's elections, the new Congress must investigate these attacks on the integrity of our elections." (US NewsWire, People for the American Way)
November 7: South Dakotans roundly reject a ballot initiative that, if passed, would constitute the nation's toughest ban on abortion, which would have outlawed abortions even in the cases of rape or incest and only allowed them to save a mother's life. South Dakotan lawmakers, who passed the bill in the state legislator, had hoped that judicial challenges to the bill would give the US Supreme Court the opportunity to overturn the key 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Five states approve increases in their minimum wage, while Arizona passes four measures targeting illegal immigrants, including one making English the state's official language. In Michigan, voters passed an initiative that weakens affirmative action policies in state government and university admissions. Missouri's amendment allowing stem cell research remains too close to call at the moment, but many observers feel the issue energized voters to take down Republican Senate incumbent Jim Talent, who strongly opposes stem cell research, in favor of his Democratic challenger, Claire McCaskill. Eight states -- Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado, and South Dakota -- either pass amendments banning gay marriage or still have the measures pending final vote tallies. (Washington Post)
November 7: Daniel Ortega, once the bete noire of Ronald Reagan's Central American foreign policy and the target of the Iran-Contra conspiracy, wins election as Nicaragua's new president. While Ortega is not yet claiming victory over his four opponents, the vote tallies clearly show that Ortega, who is working to moderate his once-fiery rhetoric and opposition to US policies, has won the battle. The elections were monitored by an organization headed by former US president Jimmy Carter. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the United States would respect the decision of the Nicaraguan people and see what policies the next government follows before making decisions about future relations. Ortega joins a growing number of elected leftist leaders in Central and South America. Ortega wins the election without a straight majority of votes largely because his right-wing opposition was split between two candidates. Ortega will take office January 10. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 7: Ohio Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Blackwell has, in essence, outsourced the Ohio vote counting chore to an Internet-based private firm in Chattanooga, Tennessee, instead of having the votes counted by a publicly accountable Ohio organization. (ePluribus Media)
November 7: Focus on the Family founder James Dobson withdraws from the team overseeing counseling for Reverend Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor who was fired over his indulgences in gay sex and drug use (see above items). Dobson says he just didn't have time for the task. "Emotionally and spiritually, I wanted to be of help -- but the reality is I don't have the time to devote to such a critical responsibility," he says. The other two members of the team, Pastors Jack Hayford of The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, Calif., and Tommy Barnett of First Assembly of God in Phoenix, have declined to comment. The counseling process, called restoration, could take years, says H.B. London, vice president for church and clergy at Focus on the Family. (AP/Yahoo! News)

Back to November 2006 | On to November 2006: Week Two

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

November 2006

Week One

Saudi study says Iraq a "lost battle"

Conservative columnist says Bush "delusional, unhinged," has "lost his mind"

Leaked report proves Diebold machines designed to be hacked and manipulated

GOP congressional aides admit to discussing Foley scandal "damage control" two days before Foley's resignation

GOP "robocalls" plaguing Democratic voters in likely vote-suppression tactic

Bush administration posts information on building nuclear weapons on the Internet

Republican House leader surreptitiously terminates Iraqi oversight program

Neocons abandon Bush Iraq policy

President of National Association of Evangelicals resigns over allegations of gay sex, drug use

Ney resigns from House over criminal convictions

Saddam Hussein sentenced to death for crimes against Iraqis

Haggard fired for sexual immorality

Democrats retake House in sweep; Senate still in contention

Massive problems with electronic voting machines plague precincts in state after state

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