November 2006: Week Three: This Far and No Further

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November 15: General John Abizaid faces contentious and angry questioning from both Senate and House lawmakers over the US policy in Iraq. Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, warns that the US only has "four to six months" to secure Iraq before the country slips into chaos, but rejects the need for more American troops to end the violence. "The sectarian violence, if not brought under control soon, can actually destroy our hope for a stable Iraq," he tells the House Armed Services Committee. "The situation could be bleak." Abizaid also warns that proposals for setting fixed timetables would be counterproductive. In the Senate, incoming Armed Service Committee chairman Carl Levin, a Democrat, says, "The American people do not want our troops caught in a crossfire between Iraqis if they insist on squandering that opportunity through civil war and sectarian strife." Abizaid tells senators that he had publicly hoped in January that US forces could be reduced from 140,000 to 100,000 by the end of 2006, but his optimism was misplaced. The sectarian bloodletting and insurgent attacks remain "unacceptably high," he says, particularly in Baghdad and Sunni-dominated areas such as al-Anbar province. "I would not say we've turned the corner." Asked by Democratic Senator Jack Reed to estimate how much time the US has to curb the violence in Iraq before it becomes uncontrollable, Abizaid responds, "Four to six months." He says that the key to success in Iraq is not to experiment with increased or decreased numbers of American troops, but instead to continue to focus on accelerating the training of Iraqi military forces and giving them the lead role within 12 months. "I believe more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, taking more responsibility for their future," says Abizaid. But he also recommends against troop withdrawals because that will embolden warring sects and al-Qaeda operatives, and signal a lack of US resolve.
Democrats and Republicans both oppose many of Abizaid's proposals. Democratic leaders have called for a phased withdrawal of US forces beginning within four months, while Republican senator John McCain favors sending an additional 20,000 troops to confront Iraq's illegal militias, a plan supported by George W. Bush.
Levin opens bluntly, "We are 3 1/2 years into a conflict which has already lasted longer than the Korean conflict and almost as long as World War II. ...We should put the responsibility for Iraq's future squarely where it belongs -- on the Iraqis. We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves. The only way for Iraqi leaders to squarely face that reality is for President Bush to tell them that the United States will begin a phased redeployment of our forces within four to six months." For himself, McCain accuses Abizaid of promoting a failed military plan that ignores the reality in Iraq. Current troop levels have failed to prevent increases in attacks against Americans, Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians, McCain says, and challenges Abizaid's statement about "encouraging" signs of progress in Iraq. "I'm of course disappointed that basically you're advocating the status quo here today, which I think the American people in the last election said is not an acceptable condition. ...Was it encouraging when in the broad daylight [Tuesday] or the day before that people dressed up in police uniforms are able to come in and kidnap 150 people? General, it's not encouraging to us. I regret deeply that you seem to think that the status quo and the rate of progress we're making is acceptable. I think most Americans do not." Abizaid says he is "optimistic" the security situation in Iraq will improve, contending the intensity of violence in Iraq is down from last summer. He does acknowledge that success hinges on the Iraqi government moving immediately to crack down on sectarian death squads in Baghdad, while also giving more power to Iraq's military. "That has yet to be demonstrated," Abizaid says, prompting a sharp retort from Democratic senator Hillary Clinton: "Hope is not a strategy. Hortatory talk about what the Iraqi government must do is getting old.... The brutal fact is, it is not happening." She says that the constant patter of encouraging talk about the situation is "getting tired. I have heard over and over again, 'the government must do this, the Iraqi army must do that.' Nobody disagrees with that. The brutal fact is, it is not happening."
American lawmakers are increasingly impatient with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has recently rejected a US-proposed timeline to disband Shi'ite militias headed by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Al Maliki, whose government relies on support from Shi'a parties loyal to al-Sadr, two weeks ago ordered American troops to end a blockade in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. "The Iraqi political leaders do not understand that there is a limit to the blood and treasure that Americans are willing to spend, given the unwillingness of the Iraqis themselves to put their political house in order," says Levin. Despite skepticism from senators, Abizaid says it is his "professional opinion" that Iraqis could restore calm if the US rapidly accelerates training of the country's military forces. "I have confidence that the Iraqi army is up to the job, providing the Iraqi government shows the confidence in its own army and gives support to its own army to take the lead the way that they should," Abizaid says. "Why aren't they doing it?" retorts Republican Senator Lindsey Graham; Abizaid responds, "I believe they are starting to do it." He does admit that "there is some infiltration" of Iraqi security forces by Shi'ite death squads.
Abizaid also acknowledges that the Pentagon erred by ignoring pre-war recommendations by Army head General Eric Shinseki that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed to secure Iraq. Shinseki was overruled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and left the military shortly after the invasion. "Shinseki was right," Abizaid says. (Canada.com, Toronto Star)
November 15: The disputed House race in North Carolina's 8th District keeps going, with Republican incumbent Robin Hayes demanding that the various county boards not count hundreds of provisional votes cast in last week's election. The public documents filed on behalf of Hayes request the suppression of votes cast in Cabarrus, Cumberland, Stanly, Union, Scotland, Richmond and Hoke Counties for a variety of reasons, including registered North Carolina voters that didn't check a tiny box claiming US citizenship and completed forms not signed by precinct officials -- both examples of historically valid provisional ballots. Democratic challenger Larry Kissell writes, "My opponent continues to disappoint the folks that sent him to Washington in the first place. Mr. Hayes is running his legal challenge against voters like he ran his campaign -- scared, desperate and loose with the truth." Two days later, Hayes spokeswoman Carolyn Hern says of attempts to count the votes in and around Fort Bragg, the largest military base in North Carolina, "It's bizarre that the Kissell campaign is fighting for the votes of convicted felons and unregistered individuals." As recounting progresses, Kissell is steadily gaining ground; on November 17, the votes are so close that Kissell would have to gain merely 2 votes per precinct to defeat Hayes. "I'm completely frustrated," says Hayes; North Carolina Democratic Party chairman Jerry Meek retorts, "Robin Hayes doesn't know frustration. Losing a job, not having health care and struggling to make ends meet while your Congressman works overtime to deny your vote is cause for frustration." (Daily Kos, AP/WRAL-TV/Daily Kos)
November 15: Senate "Independent Democrat" Joseph Lieberman is showing signs of being as big a thorn in the sides of the Democratic leadership as many of his Democratic opponents have feared. Not only is Lieberman continuing to tease Senate leaders with the threat that he might consider caucusing with the Republicans -- thereby eliminating the Democrats' control of the Senate and causing a 50-50 split -- but he is virtually the only Democratic voice coming out in opposition to any withdrawal of any kind from Iraq. After steering General John Abizaid and Ambassador David Satterfield towards recommending against any withdrawals in today's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lieberman says, "Both General Abizaid and Ambassador Satterfield were quite clear and to me convincing, that for congress to order the beginning of a phased redeployment, a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq within the next 4 to 6 months would be a very serious mistake and would endanger ultimate the United States." Democratic senator Carl Levin, who is to become the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee when Democrats take control of the chamber in January, said on November 14 that a phased withdrawal is the only way Iraqi forces will take responsibility for their country. (CNN, Boston Globe)
November 15: Another example of the Bush administration's definition of bipartisanship comes from the White House, who resubmits six judicial nominees deemed by Democrats to be too extremist and radicially conservative for the federal bench. Five nominees were the subject of an angry exchange in August 2006, when Democrats said their selection was a sop to the president's conservative base. The White House submits Terrence Boyle of North Carolina and William Haynes of Virginia to the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia; Michael Wallace of Mississippi to the 5th Circuit in New Orleans; Peter Keisler of Maryland to the District of Columbia Circuit; and William Gerry Myers and Norman Smith, both of Idaho, for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. Everyone except Keisler has generated intense opposition from Democrats. "Democrats have asked the president to be bipartisan, but this is a clear slap in the face at our request," says Democratic senator Charles Schumer, a member of the Judiciary Committee. "For the sake of the country, we hope that this is an aberration because the president feels he must placate his hard-right base, rather than an indication of things to come." Republican senator Jon Cormyn, a vocal backer of many of Bush's judicial picks, says he thinks it will be "very tough" to get the nominees through the Senate during the lame-duck session. But, he added, "Hope springs eternal." Cormyn attempts to turn the renominations into a test of Democrats' bipartisanship, saying, "We'll see whether now that they're in majority status, if we're going to have ideological litmus tests for judges." Bush's picks for the federal bench, largely consisting of radical ideologues, have sparked angry debate in the Senate. The incoming majority leader, Harry Reid, once threatened to filibuster Boyle's nomination if it came to the full Senate. Haynes was an architect of the Bush administration's eventually abandoned policy on the treatment of terrorism detainees. He later told a Senate panel that reversing the policy was the "right thing to do."
Bush this week also has sent several nonjudicial nominees to the Senate. One was Kenneth Tomlinson, renominated as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that directs US overseas broadcasts. His nomination has bogged down because allegations of misconduct. A report released in August by the State Department's inspector general said Tomlinson misused government funds for two years as the board chairman. Tomlinson disputes the allegations. (National Examiner)
November 15: Lame-duck Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist reverses himself after years of insisting that "tremendous progress" is being made in Iraq, and now says that the US is "not winning in Iraq." In July 2006, Frist said the conservative national security message for 2006 was, "We're for staying the course in Iraq and the war on terror." And as recently as last month, Frist said, "I'm confident that we are making tremendous progress in hunting down and killing the murderers of Islamic fascism, in stabilizing the democratic governments of Afghanistan and Iraq and in winning the generational struggle that is the war on terror." Tonight he tells Fox News's Sean Hannity, when asked "[W]hat do you think happened a week ago?". "[C]learly, number one, the fact that we were not winning in Iraq dominated, and people just want change. And it will result in thoughtful consideration here [in Washington] over the next several days and weeks." (Fox News/Think Progress)
November 15: Incoming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell provides a priceless moment of what is apparently unintended irony when he declaims on right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt's show, talking about the Democrats' consideration of six right-wing extremists for federal judiciary positions. McConnell says of the Senate Democrats, "We expect from them the same level of cooperation we extended to President Clinton. We decided he'd been elected president, and we were not entitled to deny him all of his judges." McConnell declines to note that, after being fairly cooperative during Clinton's first term, Senate Republicans in 1996 decided to block one judicial appointee after another -- not by holding hearings and denying the nominees on the Senate floor, but by refusing to hold hearings at all. In 1999, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings for almost six months on any of 16 circuit-court and 31 district-court nominations Clinton had sent up. Three appeals-court nominees who did manage to obtain a hearing in Clinton's second term were denied a committee vote, including Allen Snyder, a distinguished Washington lawyer, Clinton White House aide, and former law clerk to right-wing Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist, who drew lavish praise at his hearing but never got a committee vote. Some 45 district-court nominees were also denied hearings, and two more were afforded hearings but not a committee vote. Even votes that did occur were often delayed for months and even years. In late 1999, New Hampshire Republican Bob Smith blocked a vote on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Richard Paez for months by putting an anonymous hold on the nomination. When Majority Leader Trent Lott could no longer preserve the hold, Smith and 13 other Republicans tried to mount a filibuster against the vote, but cloture was voted and Paez easily confirmed -- four years after his nomination. (Hugh Hewitt/Tristam Shandy)
November 15: Telemarketer Shaun Hansen of Spokane, Washington, pleads guilty to two federal counts of conspiracy to commit interstate telephone harassment, in a case stemming from the Election Day 2002 phone jamming by Republicans of get-out-the-vote and ride-to-the-polls phone lines run by New Hampshire Democrats and a nonpartisan firefighters union. The charges carry a total maximum sentence of seven years in prison and $500,000 fine. In 2002, Hansen was owner of Idaho-based Mylo Enterprises, a telemarketing company prosecutors say received $2,500 to place hundreds of hang-up telephone calls to Democratic ride-to-the-polls phone lines on Election Day 2002, the year of a hotly contested US senate race in which Republican John Sununu narrowly defeated Democratic governor Jeanne Shaheen. Three former Republican officials have already been convicted in the phone jamming plot. Former state Republican Committee Executive Director Chuck McGee served seven months in federal prison after admitting to devising the scheme, which tied up phone lines in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont for about two hours before it was called off. Allen Raymond, former president of the northern Virginia company GOP Marketplace LLC, pleaded guilty to executing the plan and served a three-month sentence. Prosecutors say it was Raymond who hired Hansen's company to make the calls. Raymond and McGee both testified against James Tobin, the former New England chairman of Bush's re-election campaign, who was convicted on telephone harassment charges last December and sentenced to 10 months in prison. Tobin remains free while his appeal is decided. (Boston Globe)
November 15: Outgoing Republican senator Conrad Burns shows his grace and self-control in the face of defeat when he begins hurling obscenities and invective against a reporter who asks him about the status of an Interior appropriations bill in the lame-duck session. "I'm not going to negotiate my problems with the g*ddamn press," Burns snarls. "Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye! ...You don't run this place. You think you do. But you don't." Burns currently chairs the Appropriations Interior Subcommittee, but will go home in January 2007 after being ousted by Democrat Jon Tester. A number of Montana news outlets reported similar incidents during the election campaign. For example, the senator was criticized at one point for telling a group of firefighters that they had "done a poor job" in combating a 92,000-acre fire in which several firefighters died. Burns later told a representative from the state's natural resource agency, "See that guy over there? He hasn't done a goddamned thing. They sit around.... It's wasteful." Burns later apologized for that remark. (Congressional Quarterly)

Iraq already engulfed in civil war; problem now is to keep war from involving other countries

November 16: It seems that only Bush officials and senior military commanders are still insisting that Iraq is not yet engulfed in civil war. Political and cultural experts, lawmakers, and ordinary citizens in Baghdad and throughout the Middle East say that just such a civil war is already well under way, and that the real worry is not stopping the war from taking place -- it already has begun -- but to keep the conflict from destroying the fragile Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries as well. No matter what the US does or does not do in Iraq, the prospect of leaving behind a country that does not threaten US interests or regional peace is unlikely at best. "We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, says Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group. "The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body." Nawaf Obaid, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an advisor to the Saudi government, said last week, "All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state." Between 2% and 5% of Iraq's 27 million people have been killed, wounded or uprooted since the Americans invaded in 2003, calculates Anthony Cordesman of the Center for International and Strategic Studies. "This is civil war," he says.
Perhaps the worst thing the US could do would be to oversee a partitioning of Iraq into three separate states, one each for Kurds, Shi'ites, and Sunnis. "To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said October 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited." In a recent statement to Germany's Der Spiegel, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said, "When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too. It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."
The prospect of several neighboring countries becoming yanked in to the Iraq war is likely. In an analysis published last month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Obaid said sectarian conflicts could make Iraq a battleground for the region. He described widespread interference by Iranian security forces within Iraq. He urged Saudi Arabia, which is building a 560-mile wall on its border with Iraq, to warn Iran "that if these activities are not checked," Saudi Arabia "will be forced to consider a similar overt and covert program of its own." A Syrian analyst close to the Assad government warns that other countries would intervene if Iraq descended into full-scale civil war. "Iran will get involved, Turkey will get involved, Saudi Arabia, Syria," he says. "Regional war is very much a possibility," says Hiltermann. Iraq's neighbors "are hysterical about Iranian strategic advances in the region." US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad last month ranked Syria and Iran with al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the country's principal Sunni Arab insurgent groups, in terms of destabilizing influences in Iraq. Despite that assessment, the United States has not held substantive talks with Syria regarding Iraq since 2004 or with Iran since the war began in 2003. Diplomats and analysts increasingly are urging the Bush administration to reach out to both countries as part of a regional approach to quelling Iraq's troubles. Former secretary of state James Baker, leader of the Iraq Study Group, which is preparing a set of policy recommendations for the Bush administration, has already endorsed the idea of seeking the help of Iran and Syria. "The thing is, because Iran and Syria both have spoiling power in Iraq, if you could neutralize them," it would ease some of the many pressures within Iraq, Hiltermann says. But he said the two countries may demand trade-offs that the Bush administration would resist: for Syria, US help with its biggest stated aim, winning back the Golan Heights from Israel; for Iran, US compromise over its nuclear program. Hiltermann acknowledges the difficulty. "I'm saying it's required," he says. "I'm not saying it's possible." (Washington Post)

Bush plans to increase US military presence in Iraq

November 16: Apparently "changing strategies" in Iraq means something else to George W. Bush than it does to the majority of Americans. Bush is telling senior advisors that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers. Bush's insistence on escalating hostilities and the US troop presence in Iraq may be dovetailing with the recommendations expected to be made by the Iraq Study Group, the 10-member committee chaired by Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James Baker. Although the panel's work is not complete, its recommendations are expected to be built around a four-point "victory strategy" developed by Pentagon officials advising the group. The strategy, along with other related proposals, is being circulated in draft form and has been discussed in separate closed sessions with Baker and vice-president Dick Cheney, an Iraq war hawk. Point one of the strategy calls for an increase rather than a decrease in overall US force levels inside Iraq, possibly by as many as 20,000 soldiers. This figure is far fewer than that called for by the Republican presidential hopeful, John McCain. But by raising troop levels, Bush will draw a line in the sand and defy Democratic pressure for a swift drawdown. The reinforcements will be used to secure Baghdad, scene of the worst sectarian and insurgent violence, and enable redeployments of US, coalition and Iraqi forces elsewhere in the country. Point two of the plan stresses the importance of regional cooperation to the successful rehabilitation of Iraq. Point three is an attempt to revive the reconciliation process between Sunni, Shia and other groups in Iraq. Point four involves asking Congress for more resources to train and equip Iraqi security forces.
Regional cooperation to help rehabilitate Iraq could involve the convening of an international conference of neighboring countries or more direct diplomatic, financial and economic involvement of US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. "The extent to which that [regional cooperation] will include talking to Iran and Syria is still up for debate," says Patrick Cronin of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "Externally, US policy is focused on what is achievable. Some quarters believe Syria in some ways could be helpful. There are more doubts about Iran but Iran holds more cards. Some think it's worth a try." A State Department official says that Bush officials are prepared, in principle, to discuss with Iran its activities in Iraq. To reconcile differences between Shi'a, Sunni, Kurdish, and other groups, the report will recommend the creation of a credible political framework that will help persuade Iraqis and neighboring countries alike that Iraq can become a fully functional state.
Initial post-invasion ideas about imposing Western democratic standards, a linchpin of neoconservative ideology concerning Iraq, is considered impossible, and will not be recommended. The report is also expected to warn that de facto tripartite partition within a loose federal system, as advocated by Democratic senator Joe Biden and others, would lead not to peaceful power-sharing but a large-scale humanitarian crisis.
Despite the November election returns and his own calls for bipartisanship and a change in direction in Iraq, Bush is unconvinced that his administration's policies in Iraq need to be changed. "You've got to remember, whatever the Democrats say, it's Bush still calling the shots," says a former senior administration official. "He believes it's a matter of political will. That's what [Henry] Kissinger told him. And he's going to stick with it. [Bush] is in a state of denial about Iraq. Nobody else is any more. But he is. But he knows he's got less than a year, maybe six months, to make it work. If it fails, I expect the withdrawal process to begin next fall." The "last push" strategy is also intended to give Bush and the Republicans "political time and space" to recover from their election drubbing and prepare for the 2008 presidential campaign, says the official. "The Iraq Study Group buys time for the president to have one last go," he says. "If the Democrats are smart, they'll play along, and I think they will. But forget about bipartisanship. It's all about who's going to be in best shape to win the White House. ...Bush has said 'no' to withdrawal, so what else do you have? The Baker report will be a set of ideas, more realistic than in the past, that can be used as political tools. What they're going to say is: lower the goals, forget about the democracy crap, put more resources in, do it." (Guardian)
November 16: Congressional Democrats vote unanimously for Nancy Pelosi to become Speaker of the House; Steny Hoyer is voted in as House Majority Leader, defeating opponent John Murtha by a 149-86 margin. Murtha was Pelosi's choice for majority leader, prompting the news media to cast the race for the position, and Pelosi's backing of Murtha, as evidence of a "deeply divided" Democratic Party. Some Hoyer supporters were not pleased with the pressure being brought to bear on them to vote for Murtha. "Steny was more where the mainstream of where the party was," says Barney Frank, the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. A similarly contentious race is brewing in the Republican Party, where John Boehner and Mike Pence are vying for the post of minority leader.
On the Republican side of the aisle, Senator Trent Lott, forced to step down as the Senate's majority leader in 2002 over racist remarks, won a 25-24 vote to become the minority whip, edging out Lamar Alexander. The Senate Republican leadership unanimously chooses Mitch McConnell to be minority leader. Lott won the vote by telling his colleagues that, in a split Senate, his expertise at dealmaking would be critical in getting legislation passed under the Democratic leadership. For the Democrats, minority leader Harry Reid and minority whip Dick Durbin will ascend to the same posts as majority leader and majority whip. House Republicans, in a closely divided and apparently contentious vote, pick John Boehner over the more extreme conservative Mike Pence to be House Minority Leader.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this story is the reaction of the media to the two parties' leadership races. The Democrats are almost uniformly portrayed as bitter, divisive, and contentious, with Pelosi slammed for trying to "railroad" Murtha, her "handpicked candidate," over the more popular Hoyer. On the other side of the aisle, the Republican race is downplayed, with media attention focusing on the "rehabilitation" of Lott from his former status as a disgraced ex-leader. Iconoclastic liberal blogger Arianna Huffington has a more realistic take on the Democrats' leadership competition, noting that, with his upcoming position on the House Armed Forces Committee, Murtha will still be the Democrats' most powerful voice on Iraq. As for Pelosi, Huffington writes, "Even though her guy lost, this was still a big win for her. A victory for taking a stand -- and for her leadership. Because that's what real leaders do, they take stands. They listen to their hearts and follow their gut. If you only jump into the fights you're sure you can win -- notches in the W column that will look good on your political resume -- you're a hack, not someone who can move the party and the country forward. It's not about trying to have a spotless record; it's about knowing which battles are worth fighting, whatever the outcome. It bodes well for Pelosi that she was willing to spend her political capital right off the bat -- especially on the issue that will define her time at the helm. Far too many modern politicians save their political capital until it's lost all its value."
Media watchdog group Media Matters notes the coverage of the two parties' leadership battles, and cites the New York Times and others as focusing on the "recriminations, finger-pointing and infighting" that have, in its words, "cast a cloud over the [Democratic] party's post-election celebration," but ignored the perhaps more contentious GOP contests. The Times trumpets the Murtha-Hoyer contest as an example of "the latest episode of that familiar Washington series, Democrats in Disarray." Meanwhile, closely contested and harshly disputed contests among Republican leaders are either ignored or downplayed. Indeed, the bitter battle for the position of House Majority Leader in early 2006 between Republicans John Boehner, Roy Blunt, and John Shadegg was likened to a "campaign for class president." In contrast, the race between Murtha and Hoyer was characterized by Times reporter Adam Nagourney as "a reminder of just how much Democrats like to rumble." Times reporter Carl Hulse reported that Democrats were "squabbling" and described Republicans as "enjoying the spectacle." A third Times article portrayed the race as a "bruising fight" that would require some "healing." While the Times depicted the Democratic contest for House majority leader as "bruising" and "bare-knuckle[d]," its coverage of the race between Boehner and Pence for the post of House minority leader included no similar characterizations. In fact, while Hulse noted in his November 15 article on the GOP leadership dispute that Republicans "may be divided and dispirited," he immediately emphasized that they agree on what they are looking for in their new leader and even described them as "soul-searching." A November 14 Los Angeles Times article was more evenhanded.
The media has reported heavily on the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, but has consistently downplayed the rancorous debate within the party over whether Rumsfeld should have been fired before the election, thereby possibly reducing the losses suffered on November 7. While other media outlets, most notably the Associated Press, released numerous reports on the fallout from the Rumsfeld firing, including one November 9 article headlined, "Bush Faces GOP Ire Over Rumsfeld Timing." the Times and other mainstream outlets downplayed the dispute, burying references to it deep in related articles. Similarly, while the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets reported on the divide in the Republican Party over the naming of Senator Mel Martinez to head the Republican National Committee, the New York Times failed to do so.
Progressive blogger Glenn Greenwald, one of the most thoughtful and well-considered voices on the Internet, gives an acerbic take on the entire media "tempest in a teapot" coverage of the Democrats' leadership contests, calling the media coverage "mindless group-think" and decrying its portrayal of Pelosi: "She's not even Speaker yet, and they've already pronounced her to be a b*tchy, vindictive shrew incapable of leading because she's consumed by petty personal bickering rather than serious and substantive considerations. And all of this is based on nothing." After citing one media maven after another in their criticism of Pelosi -- calling it a "towering defeat," "a real embarrassment," "a disaster for Pelosi all the way around," and even comparing her unfavorably to the bullying, bribing former Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, he dissects the coverage in far more detail that I will subject the reader to here. (Click the Unclaimed Territory link at the end of this post for Greenwald's entire diary.) The rancor from the Beltway insiders continues, with neoconservative Marty Peretz comparing Pelosi to, of all people, Bella Abzug, first mocking the late Abzug's weight problem and sartorial choices, and then saying that, like Abzug, Pelosi cannot "discern between a political difference and a personal war." Slate's Timothy Noah even warns Pelosi that House Democrats must now consider her "on probation. ...One more strike -- even a minor misstep -- and House Democrats will demonstrate that they, unlike Speaker-elect Pelosi and President Bush, know how to correct their mistakes." Greenwald notes, accurately, that Pelosi supported Murtha over Hoyer because she has a much better working relationship with Murtha than Hoyer. "Is that supposed to be unusual? That's how all of Washington works. It's how the world works." He notes that the infighting in the Republican Party over the succession of Mel Martinez to the chairmanship to the Republican National Committee over Michael Steele was for the plain fact that Martinez, unlike Steele, knows how to take orders, in this case from the White House.
Greenwald writes, "The Bush administration has spent six years completely obsessed with personal loyalty to the President and intolerant of the slightest independence. The entire Congress was kept strictly in line for the last five years. Every official who showed the slightest independence was replaced by obedient Bush loyalists. Yet Pelosi does nothing other than support an ally rather than an opponent for the position immediately underneath her, and that makes her some out-of-control egomaniac consumed by personal vanity and emotional impulses. And that's to say nothing of the fact that the Hoyer-Murtha race is being depicted as some sort of sign of hateful Democratic in-fighting that shows Pelosi has lost control, even though Republicans are mauling each other for every single House leadership position, all of which are hotly contested. Trent Lott beat Lamar Alexander by a vote of 25-24 in the Senate for the position of Minority Whip. There's nothing wrong with various factions competing for leadership positions. That's called an 'election,' and only those to whom Eric Alterman refers as the 'smart boys' at TNR and Slate would view a simple election for House Majority Leader as some apocalyptic sign that Democrats are lame, idiotic and hopelessly divided.
Greenwald is equally contemptuous of the media's breathless coverage of the struggle for the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. The media portrays Pelosi's opposition to Jane Harman for that position as a personal, vicious "cat fight," citing inane reasons like both wearing similar dresses to a Capital Hill event and Pelosi's supposed hatred of Harman as a result. Noah writes that the reasons for "Pelosi's animus are cloudy and in all likelihood personal." Those in the know believe that Pelosi opposes Harman's attempt to take the position because Harman, one of the more conservative Democrats on the Hill, aggressively supported both the war on Iraq and Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program. Harman is also under investigation for her work on behalf of the Israeli lobby AIPAC. Greenwald notes, "She has been far too sympathetic to the administration's excesses and far too eager to serve as a Democratic shield publicly defending the President." But the media prefers the gossipy, woman-bashing portrayal of the two women indulging in "cat fights." The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus notes that Pelosi thinks that Harman has been "insufficiently partisan on the committee." This is a solid reason for Pelosi to oppose Harman as chair of the committee, but, Greenwald notes, this rationale is being tossed aside; instead, the media "just make[s] things up in order to bolster their group-driven collective imagination, and then present their group gossip as authoritative and established insider wisdom. [Media pundits] are already out in force attacking Pelosi's character with petty and baseless chattering. This country has extremely serious issues facing it, and yet these self-styled 'serious' journalists are already trying to cripple Pelosi's ability to do anything before she has even begun, all based on giggly chit-chat and gossipy garbage that has no legitimacy other than the fact that they all repeat it in unison on television and in print. It's what these pundits and journalists do. They have pre-conceived, vapid notions about everything and everyone -- all driven by deep self-love for their own superior wisdom -- and they distort reality and crowd out sober analysis of everything that matters. Nancy Pelosi, and really everyone, would be well-advised not to listen to them and, above all, never adopt as a goal trying to please or satisfy them. They are frivolous and out of touch with everything that matters and should be treated as such."
Another progressive blogger, "Digby" of Hullabaloo, is even less forgiving. He focuses on what is apparently a b*tchfest on MSNBC, featuring Norah O'Donnell, Mary Ann Akers, Lawrence O'Donnell, all giggling and piling on about Pelosi's imminent downfall. Akers whispers, like a middle school girl passing on ugly gossip about a schoolmate, that her fellow reporters are "loving" this story. Digby channels their own spiteful immaturity, writing, "The DC press corps hates having to criticize Republicans. Republicans make them feel all icky and call them liberals (which they so, like, aren't!). I confess, however, that I'm a little bit awed by how smoothly they have transitioned back into their assigned roles. I thought there might be a moment or two of cognitive dissonance as they went from grim and serious reports about terrorism and war to shallow personality politics and tabloid character assassination. I assumed they would at least wait until the presidential campaign took off to contrast the manly Republican Alpha with the loser Omega Dem, but I guess I didn't realize how much they've missed their fast times at DC High. They were certainly enjoying themselves tonight. Rolling their eyes and laughing and even snorting a time or two at the completely absurd sight of Democrats in power. I expected to see Yoohoo spray out of Norah's nose at one point. It was just so, like, awesomely super-fun!" Digby calls it the return of the "Clinton Rules" for Democratic coverage -- citing the 1994 battle royale between Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich's handpicked choice for House Majority Leader among Republicans, a battle that went unremarked in the press, and comparing it to the immediate pile-on of the media against Bill Clinton when he took office in January 1993. Digby sums up: "There are no honeymoons for Democrats. Remember that. And 'moral authority' is about haircuts and Hollywood, not torture and illegal wars. It is not merely a fight against the Republicans or a fight over politics and policy. It is a non-stop battle with the press to cover events with seriousness and responsiblity. For some reason, when Democrats are in power the press corps immediately goes from being merely shallow to insufferable, sophomoric *ssholes." (AP/Yahoo! News, CNN, MediaMatters, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Unclaimed Territory, Hullabaloo)
November 16: Democratic incumbent John Barrow will take the House seat in Georgia's 12th District after Republican Max Burns says he will drop his request for a recount. Barrow won the seat by a slim 864 votes out of over 142,000 cast. Barrow was one of several Georgia Democrats facing tough re-election campaigns after Georgia's Republican-dominatd state legislature gerrymandered Georgia's House districts to favor GOP candidates in 2005. Before the districts were redrawn, Barrow defeated Burns handily in 2004. (Congressional Quarterly)
November 16: In the still-disputed FL-13 House race, governor Jeb Bush has appointed Alec Yasinsac, a Florida State University computer science professor, to carry out an inspection of the Sarasota County voting machines, manufactured by ES&S, that failed to register at least 18,400 votes for the race in that Democratic-leaning area. Yasinsac is a questionable choice at best to handle the investigation, according to lawyer Reggie Mitchell of the liberal civil rights organization People For the American Way, who says, "I know Alec Yasinsac well, and while he's a great guy, he's the wrong choice to lead an investigation into what went wrong in Sarasota County. We need an independent investigator, not someone whose partisan leanings have been clear since the 2000 voting fiasco. Alec is a strong advocate for electronic voting machines and a vociferous opponent of requiring a voter verifiable paper trail. In 2000, he wore a button reading 'Bush Won' while working against a recount in the presidential race. He clearly has preexisting biases. This situation requires a truly independent investigation that will get to the bottom of this problem in a nonpartisan fashion, and help to ensure that these problems never occur again. Sarasota County voters, Florida and the nation deserve no less." Yasinsac is a registered Republican who actively supported GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Gallagher this year and loudly protested Democratic tactics in the 2000 presidential recount. On December 3, 2000, while taking part in the Florida presidential recount, Yasinsac proclaimed, "'I'll never be a passive political participant again." The race, between incumbent Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings, is in recount. Buchanan at this point has a slender 373-vote lead. On November 13, Jennings's campaign filed a lawsuit aimed at making sure all of the voting systems and documents remain in their Election Day state.The congressional undervote rate in Sarasota was far higher than the rate in any other of the district's counties. It's also more than 10 times as high as the gubernatorial and Senate races that bookended it on the top of the ballot. A spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb says that her office hired Yasinsac because he was "based locally," has strong credentials, and approached the office to be a vendor. (Daily Kos, Miami Herald)
November 16: The public relations firm Lincoln Group wins another $20 million contract to "monitor" -- and to manipulate and shape -- the news media's coverage of the Iraq war. The effort to control the news about, and from, Iraq, begun long before the March 2003 invasion. "Embedded" journalists were used to tell stories of toppled statues and American heroism during the siege and investitute of Baghdad. Since then, the US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an assortment of media projects specifically designed to sell "good news" about the occupation, while administration officials played the other side of the card by consistently complaining about the lack of good news from Iraq reported in the media. Lincoln Group staffers and subcontractors have been in the thick of this propaganda effort, writing and translating stories for Iraqi publications, then paying local editors to run them. Sometimes the Lincoln staffers and subcontractors pretended to be freelance reporters or ad executives. The current deal with Lincoln was quietly done in September, but news of that contract is just now reaching the public. Lincoln is being paid to maintain a "unit of 12-18 communicators to support military PR efforts in Iraq and throughout the Middle East from media training to pitching stories and providing content for government-backed news sites." O'Dwyers PR Daily, a respected public relations industry publication, reports that "contract with the Multi-National Force-Iraq is valued at more than $6 million per year, although contracting documents indicated that additional efforts could be 'ordered' from the Pennsylvania Avenue firm for up to $20 million." The group calls itself a "strategic communications and public relations firm providing insight and influence in challenging and hostile environments."
Lincoln is a veteran of Defense Department contracts, having signed at least 20 contracts with the Pentagon over the last two years, the largest topping $100 million, as well as similar commercial and nonmilitary governmental deals. Lincoln is also working in Pakistan to promote "'investments in the country's textile, energy, technology and telecom" industries. The firm also wants to contract with the Pentagon to help the US Army Reserve create a promotional campaign for what it calls the Reserve's "vision of the future." In 2005, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the US military was "secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq." The stories were actually written, not by troops in the field, but by US military "information operations' troops" and "translated into Arabic and covertly placed in Baghdad newspapers." The Lincoln Group acted as an intermediary between the US military and the media outlets; company staff and subcontractors wrote and translated stories, then paid local editors varying amounts to run them, pretending to be freelance reporters, for example, or advertising executives. The Lincoln Group was formed in mid-2004, under the name Iraqex, specifically to provide services in Iraq, according to authors Sheldon Ramptom and John Stauber. (See earlier items in this site.) The two founders of the firm, former Marine intelligence officer Paige Craig and English businessman Christian Bailey, had no background in public relations or media when they formed their firm. According to Rampton and Stauber, "In its various [pre-war] incarnations, Iraqex/Lincoln dabbled in real estate, published a short-lived online business publication called the Iraq Business Journal, and tried its hand at exporting scrap metal, manufacturing construction materials, and providing logistics for US forces before finally striking gold with the Pentagon PR contract."
Lincoln originally worked with the well-established Rendon Group, a PR firm with close ties to the Republican Party which had played a major part in "selling" the Persian Gulf War to Americans, and worked closely with Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, the outfit that sent carefully coached Iraqi "defectors" to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House to feed false information to senior intelligence agents and Bush officials to sell the INC's hoped-for invasion of Iraq. The Lincoln Group managed to place more than 1,000 stories in the Iraqi and Arab press. In May 2006, a Defense Department investigation of Pentagon-financed propaganda efforts in Iraq warned that paying Iraqi journalists to produce positive stories could damage American credibility and called for an end to military payments to a group of Iraqi journalists in Baghdad. The report, authored by Rear Admiral Scott Van Buskirk, doesn't mention Lincoln by name, but found that the military should scrutinize contractors involved in the propaganda effort more closely to ensure proper oversight is in place. Van Buskirk also blamed the military for not investigating whether paying for placement for articles would undermine the concept of a free press in Iraq. The report, which was carefully scrubbed before its release, apparently found that, while disturbing, the military's propaganda efforts did not violate military regulations, but did raise questions about the military's truth and credibility that will prove to be difficult to deflect. "The war in Iraq has spawned a new industry in Washington that could be called Psy-ops Journalism," says Alvin Snyder, a former executive of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and a senior fellow at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy. "The new breed of journalists are following the money trail to the Pentagon." While such psy-ops campaigns are an accepted part of military operations in foreign countries, they are specifically prohibited from being carried out in a manner that might influence US news coverage.
That caveat, of course, is being honored in the breach. A Defense Department document titled "Information Operations Roundup," approved in 2003, acknowledged that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa. PSYOP messages disseminated to any audience...will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public." Snyder says, "Some $400 million in media consulting contracts has been awarded during the past few years by the Pentagon, for the purpose of helping 'to effectively communicate Iraqi government and Coalition goals with strategic audiences.' Thus far both the Pentagon and its contract psy-op journalists have experienced a painful learning curve, but the most recent contract award will show how much each has learned. The outlook is not promising. ...A practical question is whether psy-ops journalism can work at all. It is a cross between what is accepted as the mainstream journalism of print and TV (and many journalists now blog) and what is known as psy-ops, or psychological operations, those engaged in mind control warfare, to gain military advantage by fooling the enemy." Rampton and Stauber point out in their new book, The Best War Ever, that much of the endless stream of public relations propaganda flowing from the military into the US news media "is aimed not at tactical deception of enemy combatants but at influencing morale and support for the war in the United States." It has not always worked well.
But Lincoln is prospering. Its DC offices, once located on K Street, recently moved to larger quarters in the Pennsylvania Avenue building that once housed Jack Abramoff's famous restaurant, Signatures. (Media Transparency)
November 16: In an egregrious example of sugarcoating reality with marketing phrases, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) issues a report that does not mention "hungry" people in America. Instead, those people who consistently lack enough food for their needs are now labeled as experiencing "very low food security." USDA sociologist Mark Nord, who authored the report, says that the term "hunger" is an inaccurate and unscientific term. The number of chronically hungry Americans has topped out at 35 million, or 12% of the population, with 11 million more reporting that they lack enough food to eat on a periodic basis. The number of chronically hungry Americans has consistently risen for the last five years. Anti-hunger advocates say the new words sugarcoat a national shame. "The proposal to remove the word 'hunger' from our official reports is a huge disservice to the millions of Americans who struggle daily to feed themselves and their families," says David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, an anti-hunger advocacy group. "We...cannot hide the reality of hunger among our citizens." In assembling its report, the USDA divides Americans into groups with "food security" and those with "food insecurity," who cannot always afford to keep food on the table. Under the old lexicon, that group -- 11% of American households last year -- was categorized into "food insecurity without hunger," meaning people who ate, though sometimes not well, and "food insecurity with hunger," for those who sometimes had no food. That last group now forms the category "very low food security," described as experiencing "multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake." Slightly better-off people who aren't always sure where their next meal is coming from are labeled "low food security."
Many politicians have long ducked the issue of hunger in America. In 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush, then running for president, said he thought the annual USDA report -- which consistently finds his home state one of the hungriest in the nation -- was fabricated. "I'm sure there are some people in my state who are hungry," Bush said. "I don't believe 5% are hungry." Bush said then that he believed that the statistics were aimed at his candidacy. "Yeah, I'm surprised a report floats out of Washington when I'm running a presidential campaign," he snapped. The agency usually releases the report in the fall, for reasons that "have nothing to do with politics," Nord said, but this year, the report was delayed from its usual October release until after the midterm elections. Democrats accused the Bush administration of delaying its release until after the elections. Nord denies the contention, saying, "This is a schedule that was set several months ago." (Washington Post)
November 16: Alleged Hamas operative Mohammed Salah, on trial in Chicago after being caught by Israeli authorities and accused of running money to high-level Palestinian militants, says the cash that he was caught with was intended for the legitimate, charitable arm of Hamas. He also says that much of the money actually came from "cronies of George Bush" in the Saudi royal family. Salah, who spent five years in an Israeli prison, is on trial in Chicago, facing terrorism charges related to his relationship with Hamas. In 1993, Salah and his wife deposited nearly a million dollars into a pair of Chicago bank accounts; much of the money was sent to Salah through accounts controlled by Mousa Abu Marzook, a longtime Hamas leader now living in Syria. A large amount of the money had earlier been wired to Marzook by a Geneva, Switzerland firm, Faisal Financial Services, according to bank records. "Are you aware that's an arm of the Saudi government, cronies of George Bush?" defense attorney Erica Thompson asks Justice Department investigator Thomas Moriarty during cross-examination. Moriarty testifies he didn't know who was behind the Swiss bank account, an unlikely story considering the fund was linked to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 2003 US congressional testimony. During his trip, Salah was able to access about $200,000 of the $985,000 placed in his accounts before he was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint. Shortly after the capture, his wife moved the leftover money into a new account and used some of it to pay off the mortgage on the couple's home. Thompson suggested that Azita Salah was simply trying to protect the money from Israeli seizure and safeguard her family's future. And she said the $985,000 was only a fraction of what was needed for humanitarian missions in the impoverished Occupied Territories. "Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a hospital?" Thompson asks Moriarty. "Do you have any idea how much it costs to run an orphanage?" (Daily Southtown)
November 16: Disgraced former Republican representative Mark Foley is now being investigated for possible criminal activities related to his Internet stalking of underage House pages by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The FDLE is assisting the FBI in its own probe of Foley, who continues to deny that he had any improper sexual relations with anyone under the age of consent. (CNN)
November 16: Columnist Sidney Blumenthal writes that, while many neoconservatives are ducking out of admitting any responsibility for the war in Iraq -- a war they planned for and advocated -- now that Bush "fixer" James Baker is heading the Iraq Study Group and preparing what Blumenthal calls "a whole new US foreign policy [and] trying to salvage whatever can be retrieved from the wreckage of Bush's presidency for its last two years [in an attempt to] prevent the Republican party, having lost the crown jewel of the Congress, from being permanently tainted," the selfsame neocons are planning to "confound Baker." ISG member Edwin Meese, according to ISG advisor Clifford May and the closest thing to a neocon on the committee, intends to oppose the group's recommendations. Blumenthal writes, "The neocon logic in favor of the Iraq war was that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad: an invasion would install an Iraqi democracy that would force the Palestinians to submit to the Israelis. Now near-unanimity exists on Baker's commission to reverse that formula. The central part of a new policy must be, they believe, that the road to Baghdad leads through Jerusalem." Former Bush I national security advisor and Baker confidante Brent Scowcroft has long advocated the position that security and stability in the region, including Iraq, can only be achieved by re-establishing the Middle East peace process. Scowcroft is echoing Baker's own views. Blumenthal writes, "On September 15, Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice's legal adviser and a former Scowcroft protege, echoed Scowcroft's ideas in a speech at Washington's Middle East Institute. Afterwards, Cheney pressured Rice and she rebuked her closest deputy, underlining her own weakness. Then the electoral catastrophe intervened, giving Baker leeway (and sidelining Rice). Baker even summoned Tony Blair to testify on Tuesday in order to support a restart of the Middle East peace process. If Baker were to propose that, he knows -- although he will not explicitly say so -- that its enactment would require the firing of neocons on the national security council and Cheney's staff, in particular Elliott Abrams, the NSC's near-east affairs director. If Baker actually advocates what he thinks, Bush will have to either admit the errors of his ways and the wisdom of his father and his father's men -- or cast them and caution aside once again." Recent history tells us which way Bush is likely to jump, and admitting error and submitting to his father's wisdom is not the direction he is likely to take. (Guardian)
November 16: CBS News producer Dick Meyers says that America should be relieved to lose so many of the 1994 "Contract with America" Republicans that came in to power in the House of Representatives under the tutelage of Newt Gingrich. Meyers writes, only somewhat facetiously, "The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do. I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99% of the population -- if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies -- would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections. I'm confident that if historians ever spend the time on it, they'll confirm my thesis. Same with forensic psychiatrists. I have discussed this with scores of politicians, staffers, consultants and reporters since 1994 and have found few dissenters."
Meyers says that, in general, American politicians are "like any high-achieving group in America, with roughly the same distribution of pathologies and virtues." But not the 1994 crowd. They "didn't fit the personality profile of American politicians, and they didn't deviate in a good way. It was the Chess Club on steroids. The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government. Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace. Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of '94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime."
Meyers singles out Gingrich for special treatment, writing that Gingrich "lived out a very special hypocrisy. In addition to the above biographical dissonance, Gingrich was one of the most sharp-tongued, articulate and persuasive attack dogs in modern politics. His favorite target was the supposed immorality and corruption of the Democratic Party. With soaring rhetoric, he condemned his opponents as anti-American and dangerous to our country's family values -- 'grotesque' was a favorite word. Yet this was a man who was divorced twice -- the first time when his wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment, the second time after an affair was revealed. Gingrich made his bones in the party by relentlessly attacking Democratic corruption, yet he was hounded from office because of a series of serious ethics questions. He posed as a reformer of the House, yet championed a series of deforms that made the legislative process more closed, more conducive to hiding special interest favors and less a forum for genuine debate. And he did it all with epic sanctimony."
Other Republicans not in the 1994 class were quick to embrace their warped ideology and hypocrisy. "Bill Clinton of Monica Lewinsky fame had no more zealous and moralistic critic than Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who ran a then-powerful committee," Meyers writes. "In the course of his crusade, Burton was forced to admit he had actually fathered a child in an extramarital affair. The man who led the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings with equal, if saner, bloodlust was Rep. Henry Hyde. In the midst of this, Hyde was forced to admit to a five-year affair. When Gingrich stepped down, Republicans turned to a master Louisiana pork-barreller, Robert Livingston. That lasted a day or so, until Livingston (you guessed it) admitted to having extramarital affairs. Livingston was succeeded by Dennis Hastert, perhaps the most, well, conventional of the GOP leaders of his era. Still, Hastert was a hawk with no military service and a defender of the rich with no money or experience in business."
Meyers is equally scathing in his treatment of the losers in the November midterms. "In this year's election cycle, House Republicans were justly vilified for their subservience to the corruptions of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay's entire K Street project. While extreme, there have been many other periods of extreme corruption in Congress. What marked this Republican cadre was not their corruption, but the chips on their shoulders. It was a localized condition. It didn't spread to the Senate. The Republican leaders there -- again, suspend your ideology and just look at biography -- were pretty typical American politicians. Bob Dole, Trent Lott and Bill Frist were not acting out in office. They were not ideologues and did not use the rhetoric of the righteous. The colleagues that wielded the most power -- like McCain, Simpson, Lugar, Specter, Stevens, Warner -- have had long runs of service in several arenas relatively free of public and private embarrassment and hypocrisy -- and even some substantial accomplishments pre-Senate. History reveals that great leaders and intellectuals often appear in clusters, inspiring and motivating each other to extraordinary achievement. American historians have focused on this in recent books looking at the 'founding brothers,' Lincoln's 'team of rivals,' the 19th-century pragmatist philosophers called 'the metaphysical club,' Roosevelt's New Dealers and Kennedy's 'best and the brightest.' The opposite is also true. What's next for the House is of course uncertain, but an undistinguished chapter has come to a close. Good riddance." (CBS News)
November 16: In yet another example of the mainstream media's "fair and balanced" coverage of the news, Fox News's Special Report features the executive editor of Roll Call, Morton Kondracke, calling incoming Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi "the Wicked Witch of the West." The next morning, New York Post Washington bureau chief Deborah Orin-Eilbeck twice calls Pelosi a "shrew." No similar insults can be located from mainstream sources about outgoing Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert, particularly any overtly sexist comments. In a discussion about Pelosi's handling of the Democratic leadership contest between representatives Steny Hoyer and John Murtha for House majority leader, in which Pelosi backed Murtha but Hoyer emerged victorious, Kondrake states: "[W]e had the 'Hammer' -- [former House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay -- and now, we have the 'Wicked Witch of the West'...Nancy Pelosi, who's twisting arms and...having her aides making threats." Not only is Kondracke overstating the case, the mainstream media has routintely played up disagreements among Congressional Democrats while refusing to report on similar divisions between Republicans. On November 17, the Post's Orin-Eilbeck publishes a column entitled "Call Her 'Nancy Shrew'?," also addressing Pelosi's handling of the Hoyer/Murtha contest. She writes, "Forget [the recently released film] The Devil Wears Prada, the hot show in Washington is 'The Shrew Adores Armani.' In just a few short days, House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi has turned into a caricature of the shrill, petty woman boss. ...The stereotype of the woman boss as a self-centered witch on wheels who'll run over anyone in her path has plenty of roots in American culture -- The Devil Wears Prada, zinging a fashion editor modeled on Vogue's [editor in chief] Anna Wintour, is just the latest incarnation. So if 'Nancy Shrew' becomes the image of the highest-ranking woman ever in American politics -- Pelosi will be second in line of succession to the presidency -- it'll be a problem for all women politicos, including 2008 prospect Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton."
Other media commentators have resorted to sexist commentary to characterize Pelosi, with MSNBC's Chris Matthews on November 13 asking a guest if Pelosi was "going to castrate Steny Hoyer" if Hoyer was elected House majority leader. A number of media mavens have attacked Pelosi over her appearance, accusing her of overdosong on Botox and facelift surgeries. And on October 26, Fox News contributor Dennis Miller called Pelosi a "nimrod" who "intellectually [is] not up to the task" Pelosi is, according to Miller, "a C-minus, D-plus applicant...who no doubt would have been drummed out of the Mary Kay corps after an initial four-week evaluation period." See earlier items for more information about the media onslaught against Pelosi. (MediaMatters)
November 16: What Fox News is to television news programming, NewsMax tries to be on the Internet -- a source of relentless right-wing propaganda and manipulation of the news to serve its conservative ideological interests. Indeed, NewsMax is funded by radical right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, best known for his covert funding of the "Arkansas Project" and other attempts to force Bill Clinton out of office. Recently NewsMax signed respected journalist Ronald Kessler to be its chief Washington correspondant. In return, Kessler has become, in columnist Terry Krepel's words, "a Bush hagiographer, penning two books singing the praises of the president and his wife...." Krepel writes that Kessler's main function at NewsMax is to "fluff the president and his advisers and to attack the administration's opponents, like John McCain and Democrats." None of this is particularly noteworthy in and of itself; the so-called "Mighty Wurlitzer" of the right-wing noise machine is well-documented, and there are far more influential news outlets out there than NewsMax. Still, Kessler's efforts during the election season are worth reporting, if for no other reason than to demonstrate just how far the right-wing media will go to achieve its aims. Truth, honesty, and journalistic integrity have been, of course, completely abandoned.
In July and August, Kessler provided a three-part series featuring former White House chief of staff Andrew Card. In the series, Kessler did his sycophantic best to fluff the Bush administration, by allowing Card to extoll the virtues of failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers; used Card to attack the supposed "liberal media" by suggesting to Card that the New York Times "jeopardized Americans' safety" by "publishing stories on how the government tracks terrorists;" and attacking one of his favorite Republican targets, John McCain, by quoting Card on McCain's "incidents of irrational behavior." Kessler's sycophancy reached new levels with an August feature on Bush staffer Clay Johnson, in which he quotes Johnson as saying Bush's "trademark smirk or half smile" is "a manifestation of Bush's inability to act or pretend." On August 17, Kessler profiles the new White House communications director, Kevin Sullivan, and quotes Sullivan as saying, "The president has such great humanity, and he's so good with people, and the public doesn't see that enough." On September 11, Frances Townsend, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, is quoted as saying, "The president, not just by his words but by his actions and his decisions, has made perfectly clear that first and foremost in his mind is personal commitment to protecting the American people -- even if it results in criticism of him personally." Kessler, abandoning any pretense of non-partisan journalistic restraint, adds, "In effect, Bush operates as the CEO of the war on terror, pushing countries to cooperate, keeping track of terrorists, asking tough questions, and guiding the agencies responsible for combating terrorism." Other articles, including a glowing report on Bush's faith-based funding initiatives, followed.
Kessler began working in high gear after the one-two punch of the Mark Foley scandal and the release of Bob Woodward's State of Denial. Handling Woodward was, for Kessler, relatively straightforward, countering Woodward's claims that Card and Laura Bush tried to get the president to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by repeating Card's evasive denials on the subject. Handling Foley was a different matter. Foley was the recipient of both cash donations and favorable press coverage from NewsMax CEO Christopher Ruddy, so the publication had its own personal axe to grind, and its own dirty laundry to conceal. Instead, Kessler lied in his reports about the scandal. On October 6, Kessler ran an interview with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, but Hastert's claims were not countered -- even though they were incomplete or contradicted elsewhere. For instance, Kessler repeated Hastert's claim that he couldn't succeed in his intention to name former FBI director Louis Freeh to investigate the Foley scandal because of resistance from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. But the same day, NewsMax itself reported that Freeh was widely viewed as a Republican ally by Pelosi and other Democrats, and that -- not just an obstinate refusal to cooperate with Hastert -- was the basis for Pelosi's resistance. Kessler took it much further in an October 11 article, blaming the pages themselves for being targeted by Foley. He reprinted a host of unconfirmed rumors about scandalous behavior among the pages from the 1970s -- 30 years before -- involving sex, drugs, skinny-dipping, females undressing in front of open windows for the benefit of ogling Capitol Police officers, and more. Kessler wrote that, in essence, it wasn't Foley's fault that he was enticed into bad behavior by the licentious pages because "there is no way ultimately to ensure that members of Congress will behave themselves with minors they encounter anywhere." (Imagine that claim being made on, for instance, schoolteachers or Democrats.)
As the midterm elections approached, and the prospects for Republicans to retain control of Congress looked increasingly unlikely, Kessler mounted more attacks. He reprinted RNC chairman Ken Mehlman's assertions that the GOP would retain control of both the House and Senate as undeniable fact. He also used an October 31 article to launch a barrage of lies intended to damage Democrats. He wrote that "This year alone, the Democrats overwhelmingly voted five times to kill the Patriot Act," when in reality, in the final vote on the reauthorization of the act in March, only nine Senate Democrats voted against it. He repeatedly portrayed Democrats as opposing the entire Patriot Act when, in fact, the vast majority opposed only specific provisions. As Democratic House member Jane Harman, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: "We must extend it, mend it, but not end it." Kessler suggested that one Patriot Act provision that Democrats opposed was removal of the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but he offers no examples of Democrats who specifically opposed that provision -- perhaps because there are none. In fact, senator Russ Feingold, the only senator who voted against the original Patriot Act law in 2001, has said, "Nobody wants to put the wall back up." Kessler added, "Under the Patriot Act, each roving wiretap, as they are called, has to be approved by a judge, so there is no question about infringing on civil liberties any more than when a judge approves a search of the house of a suspected child molester. Yet Democrats have portrayed the act as a monstrous invasion of rights." This, again, conflates questions about a specific provision to opposition to the entire Patriot Act. What Democrats actually opposed was a Bush administration proposal to make roving wiretaps permanent; the renewal put a four-year sunset provision on them.
In a November 2 article, he wrote unequivocally, "Democrats have sought to kill the USA Patriot Act, which FBI agents and CIA officers consider their single most important tool for hunting down terrorists and preventing another 9/11 attack." This is not true either of the Congressional Democrats or of the FBI and CIA. And in a November 6 article, his final screed before the elections, Kessler sank to a Rush Limbaugh-ish level of what Krepel calls "pure, fact-free scare tactics." Krepel condenses Kessler's rhetoric into the following: "If the Democrats win control of Congress and their rhetoric and votes are to be believed, they would adopt the Clinton administration's spineless approach to fighting terrorism. They would gut the USA Patriot Act. They would stop interception of calls from al-Qaeda to and from the US. They would end tracking of terrorists' financial transfers. They would bestow legal rights on al-Qaeda terrorists who are being interrogated about planned plots rights similar to those enjoyed by American citizens. Finally, they would cut off funds to support the war effort in Iraq, handing al-Qaeda a win in what the terrorists themselves have described as a crucial battleground in their effort to defeat America and impose their vision of radical Islam on the world."
The day after the elections, Kessler entered a new realm of sycophancy and damage control. His article for that day compared Bush to three iconic Americans, and took a pointless swipe at Democrats in the process. Read for yourself: "Like Warren Buffett, Bush keeps his eyes on the horizon. Buffett invests in companies he believes have long-term growth potential and holds on to those stocks regardless of short-term price fluctuations, negative media coverage, and downgrades by stock analysts. Today, Buffett is the second richest American with $40 billion in assets. Bush isn't particularly interested in his place in history, either. Like any good CEO, he simply wants results and views challenges as opportunities. But he is also aware of how transitory opinion polls can be. When Truman left office, his approval rating stood at 25 percent. Yet today, because of his firm approach to national security, Truman -- whom the press portrayed as a simpleton -- is viewed as one of the great presidents. Similarly, the media have portrayed Bush as a buffoon, a religious fanatic, or a monster with the temerity to topple a man who had killed 300,000 people, not to mention liberating 50 million people. In the same way, Democratic papers and critics disparaged Abraham Lincoln as a 'dictator, ridiculed him as a baboon, damned him as stupid and incompetent....' according to Stephen B. Oates' book, With Malice Toward None." Krepel concludes, "Note that Democrats get the blame for attacking Lincoln. But that's Ron Kessler for you -- defending Bush at all costs, attacking any perceived threat to Bush at all costs. Truth and honesty, however, make up a good chunk of that cost." (ConWebWatch)
November 16: Fox News political pundit Bill O'Reilly does his own whitewashing, this time on behalf of Fox News. Fox Broadcasting recently signed to air a primetime special about O.J. Simpson's new book, If I Did It, an extraordinarily heinous publication telling how -- hypothetically -- he killed his wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. Like many others, O'Reilly is disgusted by the entire idea of Simpson's book and with the media outlets promoting it, but O'Reilly attempts to distance Fox News from Fox Broadcasting. He says, "Here's a man many believe did kill those two Americans, Nicole Brown Simpson being mother of his two children. Yet Simpson is participating in a project that is exploiting the murders. Shamefully, the Fox Broadcasting Unit is set to carry the program, which is simply indefensible, and a low point in American culture. For the record, Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel." Unfortunately, O'Reilly is dead wrong. Fox News chief Roger Ailes also chairs Fox Television Stations, the group behind the Simpson special. Both Fox News and Fox Broadcasting are owned by conservative Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. And Fox Broadcasting, which programs prime time for the Fox network, regularly airs Fox News-produced programming, including content from O'Reilly. The Internet entertainment publication Radar Online contacts both Fox News and Fox Broadcasting for comment; interestingly enough, both e-mails are answered by the same spokesman, Brian Lewis, who responds, "Roger [Ailes] has absolutely nothing to do with the programs Fox Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts" -- even though Ailes is responsible for programming on the Fox television stations. Additionally, HarperCollins, the publishing house that is paying Simpson a reported $3.5 million for the book, is also owned by Murdoch's News Corp. While O'Reilly excoriates Simpson's publisher on his show, he never mentions it by name, or points out that it's also owned by the people who cut his paychecks. The editor at HarperCollins who bought Simpson's book, and who will be conducting the interview with Simpson for the Fox program, also publishes books by Fox talk show host Sean Hannity. Regan also used to host a Fox News show, Judith Regan Tonight, under contract from Ailes. In other words, O'Reilly is a tremendous liar and hypocrite. Not that that's news. (Radar Online)
November 16: Columnist Mick Farren writes a punchy editorial titled "The Wailing of Whipped Weasels." After have some fun at the expense of media pundits like Rush Limbaugh, howling that he was through "carrying water for the Republicans," and sycophants like Tucker Carlson who denied that they had ever been Bush supporters and excuse-mongerers -- who, in Farren's words, "had been wired to the RNC and Karl Rove [and are now] no longer even Republicans, embracing some weird, amorphous 'libertarianism'" -- he notes a new and "pathetic spin, based in the fiction that the people still respond to Bush's supposed charisma: that to lay a Democrat glove-of-impeachment on the president would alienate the electorate big-time. We were being urged to forgive, forget, and all get along. As in forget the lies and the spies, the Constitution and Geneva Conventions, the war profiteering and the body count. Forget that New Orleans's 9th Ward is still in ruins, forget the inflated homophobia, the decimated middle class, for-profit health care, reproductive rights and embryonic stem cells, and all the small-time insanity, like the Terri Schiavo debacle. Forget 'My Pet Goat' and the War on Christmas? And the accusations of everything from treason to dementia leveled at most of my friends?" Farren has no intention of going along with the spin: "Believe me, I have no inclination to forget any single damned thing, or to make any attempt to get along. I want to see every dirty secret dragged out and exposed, until George W. Bush is doing the Nixon perp-walk to the helicopter." (LA City Beat)

Ex-spy claims US duped into war with Iraq by tortured al-Qaeda prisoner

November 17: A former double agent who passed intelligence to the US while working undercover in al-Qaeda says an al-Qaeda captive deliberately misled the US into attacking Iraq. The ex-spy, using the assumed name Omar Nasiri, tells the BBC, and writes in a new book, about his infiltration of terrorist organizations over a decade and what he learned about their strategies. The al-Qaeda captive, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, provided erroneous information after he was captured by American forces in late 2001 and sent to Egypt for interrogation and torture. Nasiri adds to the story with his contention that Libi intentionally lied to provoke the US to invade Iraq in hopes of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and establishing Iraq as the center of a massive jihad. The intelligence agencies that Nasiri claims to have worked for have so far refused to discuss his claims. But his credibility has been addressed positively by multiple media outlets covering his book and the interview, such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS, Guardian, and the BBC. "I've never seen anything from that period that was so complete and rang so true," says Michael Scheuer, who used to run the CIA unit that focused on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. "It really tied together and resonated with the information we had in classified form." "[Libi] knew what his interrogators wanted, and he was happy to give it to them," Nasiri writes. "He wanted to see Saddam toppled even more than the Americans did." According to Nasiri, one of the most important parts of the training al-Qaeda recruits receive in training camps is how to supply false information during interrogation. So far the American media is refusing to cover Nasiri's claims. (BBC/Buzzflash)
November 17: In an interview with the Arab news channel al-Jazeera, British prime minister Tony Blair admits that the situation in Iraq is a "disaster." He does not blame US or British troops, or policies, but instead blames Iraqi insurgents. Challenged by veteran interviewer Sir David Frost that the Western invasion of Iraq has "so far been pretty much of a disaster," Blair says, "It has." Blair continues, "You see what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq? It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy -- al Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shi'a militias on the other -- to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war." However, Blair insists that British troops are not leaving. "We are not walking away from Iraq," he says. "We will stay for as long as the government needs us to stay. And the reason for that is that what is happening in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, as elsewhere in parts of the Middle East, is a struggle between the decent majority of people, who want to live in peace together, and those who have an extreme and perverted and warped view of Islam, who want to create war. In those circumstances, our task has got to be to stand up for the moderates and the democrats against the extremists and the sectarians. They are testing our will at the moment, and our will has not to be found wanting." He warns that Britain will be involved in the Middle East on a "generational" basis, though he stresses he does not expect British troops to remain in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan for a generation. He says long-term diplomatic, economic and political efforts would be required to support and empower the forces of moderate Islam in the region against extremists with a "warped and perverted" version of the religion. Of the possibility of negoatiations and improved relations with Iran, Blair says, speaking directly to the Iranian government, "If you reject the way forward that we are setting out, if instead of helping the region you support terrorism, you act in breach of your international obligations, then it is our part to stand up to you. On the other hand, if it is the case that you want to be part of a constructive solution in the Middle East, the door is open to you."
Downing Street tries to play down what they are calling a "slip," saying, "I think that's just the way in which he answers questions. His views on Iraq are documented in hundreds of places, and that [the belief that it is a disaster] is not one of them." However, Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Liberal Democrats, responds, "At long last, the enormity of the decision to take military action against Iraq is being accepted by the prime minister. Surely Parliament and the British people who were given a flawed prospectus are entitled to an apology?" (London Daily Mail, Guardian)
November 17: The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress for its largest expenditure yet for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- anywhere from $127 billion to $160 billion for the 2007 fiscal year. If approved, the budget request would make the conflict the most expensive since World War II. The request is an addition to the $70 billion already approved for 2007. Since 2001, Congress has approved $502 billion for the war on terror, roughly two-thirds for Iraq. The latest request, due to reach the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress next spring, would make the war on terror more expensive than the Vietnam War. Senator Kent Conrad, the Democrat who will chair the Senate Budget Committee next year, says the amount under consideration is "$127 billion and rising." He says the cost "is going to increasingly become an issue" because it could prevent Congress from addressing domestic priorities, such as expanding Medicare prescription drug coverage. Democratic House member Jim Cooper, who believes the request will top $160 billion, says even this huge increase "won't solve the problem" in Iraq. Before the Iraq war began in 2003, the Bush administration estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion, though White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey had suggested in 2002 that it could cost as much as $200 billion. Lindsey was fired shortly after making that prediction. Representative John Murtha, an early critic of the war, vows to use his clout as chairman of the House panel that reviews the Pentagon budget "to get these troops out of Iraq and get back on track and quit spending $8 billion a month." Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff and a member of a bipartisan panel studying recommendations on Iraq for Bush, says the Pentagon needs $50 billion to $60 billion to "restore the units that are being brought back here, to re-equip them and get them back to a combat-readiness status." (USA Today)
November 17: Democratic senator Max Baucus says that Republicans can forget about any continuing plans to privatize Social Security. Baucus, the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, says that while he wants to hold hearings on looming insolvencies in the Medicare and Social Security programs, Bush's plan to privatize Social Security is dead. "Don't waste our time," he says. "It's off the table." Baucus wants to simplify Medicare prescription drug procedures, which right now are a morass of confusing, ever-changing options that frustrate Medicare recipients and steer tremendous profits -- in tax dollars -- to drug companies. Baucus, a conservative Democrat, says he has a close working relationship with the senior Republican on the committee, Charles Grassley, and will work in a bipartisan fashion to shore up the programs. So far, Baucus's proposals for his committee to address when the Democratically-led Congress begins meeting in January span the gamut of left and right. Democrats can be expected to support his plans to increase tax breaks for married couples and increase child tax credits, raise funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, provide free college for math and science majors if they work and teach in their field for at least four years, and to permanently scale back the alternative minimum tax, a complicated portion of the tax code aimed to catch wealthy tax dodgers that affects middle class taxpayers. Republicans may well back Baucus's plans to raise the estate tax exemption to $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples, and to extend renewable electricity production credits and create $1 billion in tax credits for investments in clean coal facilities. (AP/Great Falls Tribune)
November 17: US ambassador to the UN John Bolton castigates the UN for the General Assembly's adoption of a resolution expressing the UN's regret over the deaths of 19 Palestinian civilians in an attack by the Israeli military in the town of Beit Hanoun last week. Even though the resolution was significantly watered down at the behest of the United States, and was passed 156-7, Bolton launches a blistering attack on the UN, and many of its members. "Many of the sponsors of that resolution are notorious abusers of human rights themselves, and were seeking to deflect criticism of their own policies," he thunders. "This type of resolution serves only to exacerbate tensions by serving the interests of elements hostile to Israel's inalienable and recognized right to exist. This deepens suspicions about the United Nations that will lead many to conclude that the organization is incapable of playing a helpful role in the region. ...In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is a little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States. ...The Human Rights Council has quickly fallen into the same trap and de-legitimized itself by focusing attention exclusively on Israel. Meanwhile, it has failed to address real human rights abuses in Burma, Darfur, the DPRK, and other countries. The problem of anti-Israel bias is not unique to the Human Rights Council. It is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies."
The seven nations voting against the resolution are Israel, the US, Australia, and four small Pacific island countries. All other countries, including Britain, voted for the resolution. The original version condemned Israel over the Beit Hanoun attack and its operations in Gaza, but the adopted resolution merely has the General Assembly expressing "regret." The resolution also carries a demand that the Palestinian Authority take action to stop rocket attacks on Israel. The resolution was taken to the General Assembly after the United States used its veto to squash a similar motion in the Security Council. It was the 31st time the US had used its veto at the UN to stop resolutions concerning Israel and the Palestinians. (AP/Calcutta News)
November 17: The human rights organization Amnesty International calls the Pentagon's plans to build a huge, sprawling legal compound at the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities a "white elephant." US executive director Larry Cox says, "Once again, the Defense Department seems to be operating in -- even constructing -- its own universe. The new rules for the proposed military commissions...have not been made public, and not a single charge has been filed under the new system. And yet the Pentagon wants to build a permanent homage to its failed experiment in second-class justice." The Defense Department is ready to seek bids for design and construction for a military commissions compound at the US Navy base in southeast Cuba, featuring two courtrooms, housing for up to 1200 US soldiers, lawyers, and members of the press and other visitors. It will have a 100-car motor pool, an 800-person dining facility, conference and closed-circuit television facilities, and a secure work space for classified material. The total cost will be between $75 and $125 million, and have a completion date of July 2007. The project is not yet funded; the Pentagon next plans to present the proposal to Congress, which must both authorize and fund it. Pentagon officials want to "fast-track" the proposal in the Republican-led "lame-duck" Congress, rather than wait and have the Democratically-led Congress consider the proposal in January. "Rather than wasting tons of money creating edifices that may prove to be a white elephant," Cox says, "the US government should use the sophisticated and fully adequate facilities already available to it to try terrorism suspects -- federal courts." The US Supreme Court in June halted an earlier version of the commissions, declaring the formula unconstitutional. The project represents the largest single expenditure at the Navy base since it began taking in suspected enemy combatants from Afghanistan in January 2002. (Miami Herald)
November 17: The national voting rights organization Election Defense Alliance (EDA) claims that it has clear evidence that a major effort to "undercount" Democratic votes and "overcount" Republican votes in key US House and Senate races across the country took place on November 7, judging from exit poll data. The efforts were largely unsuccessful because, if true, Republicans didn't take into account the hugeshift towards Democratic candidates in their calculations that took place in the last weeks before the elections. "We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape," says attorney Jonathan Simon, co-founder of EDA, "so 'the fix' turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances. When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure -- of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7." Sally Castleman, the national chair of EDA, adds, "The findings raise urgent questions about the electoral machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States. This is a nothing less than a national indictment of the vote counting process in the United States." She continues, "The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on, just not enough to overcome the size of the actual turnout. The tide turned so much in the last few weeks before the eleciton. It looks for all the world that they'd already figured out the percentage they needed to rig, when the programming of the vote rigging software was distributed weeks before the election, and it wasn't enough." When done properly, exit polls are one of the most reliable predictors of an election.
EDA data analysis team leader Bruce O'Dell, whose expertise is in the design of large-scale secure computer and auditing systems for major financial institutions, says, "The logistics of mass software distribution to tens or even hundreds of thousands of voting machines in the field would demand advance planningï -- at least several weeks -- for anyone attempting very large-scale, systematic e-voting fraud, particularly in those counties that allow election equipment to be taken home by poll workers prior to the election. The voting equpment seems to be designed to support two types of vote count manipulation -- techniques accessible to those with hands-on access to the machines in a county or jurisdiction, and wholesale vulnerabilities in the underlying behavior of the systems which are most readily available to the vendors themseleves. Malicious insiders at any of the vendors would be in a position to alter the behavior of literally thousands of machines by infecting or corrupting the master copy of the software that's cloned out to the machines in the field. And the groundwork could be laid well in advance. For this election, it appears that such changes would have to have been done by early October at the latest."
For part of EDA's data analysis, Simon used the unadjusted National Election Pool (NEP) data as posted on CNN's web site before it was later "adjusted" to match the actual vote counts. The exit poll data that is seen now on the CNN site has been adjusted already. But Simon, who is surprised that CNN ever posted the unadjusted results, points out that both adjusted and unadjusted data were instrumental to exposing the gross miscount. As the information was posted, Simon copied them before they could be adjusted, which took place throughout the evening of November 7 and into the next morning, as is standard procedure with NEP. Adjusting the exit poll data is, by itself, not a troublesome act. Simon explains. "Their advertised reason to do the exit polls is to enable analysis of the results by academic researchers -- they study the election dynamics and demographics so they can understand which demographic groups voted what ways," he says. "As an analytic tool, the exit poll is considered more serviceable if it matches the vote count. Since the vote count is assumed to be gospel, congruence with that count is therefore assumed to give the most accurate picture of the behavior of the electorate and its subgroups. In 2004 they had to weight it very heavily, to the point that the party turnout was 37% Democrat and 37% Republican, which has never been the case -- leading to the claim that [Karl] Rove turned out the Republican vote. This was nowhere witnessed, no lines in Republican voting places were reported. As ridiculous as that was, the distortion of actual turnout was even greater in 2006. The adjusted poll's sample, to match the vote count, had to consist of 49% 2004 Bush voters and only 43% 2004 Kerry voters, more than twice the actual margin of 2.8%. This may not seem like that much, but it translates into more than a 3,000,000 vote shift nationwide, which, depending on targeting, was enough to have altered the outcome of dozens of federal races. It should be very clear that weighting by a variety of carefully selected demographic categories, which yields the pre-adjustment exit polls, presents a truly representative electorate by every available standard except the vote count in the present election. So you have a choice: you can believe in an electorate composed of the correct proportions of men and women, young and old, rural and urban, ethnic and income groups, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- or you can believe the machines. ...These machines are completely and utterly black box. The idea that we have this enormous burden of proof that they are miscounting, and there's no burden of proof that they are counting accurately -- that, first and foremost, has to change."
According to the original, unadjusted Edison-Mitofsky exit polls, commissioned by a number of media organizations and released at 7:07 PM the evening of November 7, Democratic House candidates were favored by a 55-43.5 margin -- an 11.5% margin of victory. The election results themselves showed a much smaller margin of victory, 52.7% to 45.1% -- a 7.6% margin. The polls claim a 1% margin of error, so such a discrepancy has less than a 1-in-10,000 chance of occurring. The exit poll data was adjusted to match the official totals by the afternoon of November 8. EDA says the discrepancy is all too similar to the same discrepancies observed in the 2004 presidential elections, which then showed a 6% gap in what was originally reported and then what was officially recorded, a discrepancy that EDA calls "a clear distortion of the 2006 electorate." Simon says, "It required some incredible distortions of the demographic data within the poll to bring about the match with reported vote totals. It not only makes the adjusted Exit Poll inaccurate, it also reveals the corresponding inaccuracy of the reported election returns which it was forced to equal. The Democratic margin of victory in US House races was substantially larger than indicated by the election returns." O'Dell calls the adjusted figures "a statistical illusion." (Election Defense Alliance/OpEd News)
November 17: Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, may have disclosed conclusions from a highly classified government report on Iraq to journalists before the report was declassified by Bush, federal prosecutors say in a new court filing. Libby resigned as chief of staff to Cheney when he was indicted last year on obstruction of justice and perjury charges in connection with an investigation into the leak of the identity of a CIA official, Valerie Plame Wilson. The special prosecutor who oversaw the probe, Patrick Fitzgerald, has not yet charged Libby or anyone else for participating in the leak. It emerged recently that the first public account of Plame's employment, in a 2003 op-ed by conservative columnist Robert Novak, may have been triggered by comments from a State Department official, Richard Armitage. Attorneys for Libby have asked that the prosecution be precluded from arguing at trial that Libby acted improperly or illegally when he discussed a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq with the press. The issue ties into the criminal case because in some of the conversations about the estimate, Libby is alleged to have mentioned Plame or answered a question about her. Libby said in April that he disclosed the intelligence report on Iraq at the direction of Cheney, who said he had obtained the permission of Bush to release the findings of the closely held document. Fitzgerald says he will use the leak to attack Libby's credibility if Libby or his lawyers argue that all his disclosures from the Iraq report were clearly authorized by his superiors. According to Fitzgerald, Libby testified initially that he was told of the declassification just prior to a July 8, 2003, meeting he had with Judith Miller of the New York Times. However, Fitzgerald says Libby "was unsure" whether the declassification took place prior to meetings he had with a Washington Post reporter, Bob Woodward, on June 27 of that year, and with another Times journalist, David Sanger, on July 2. "Defendant testified that he recalled a 'go-stop-go' sequence in discussions concerning authorization to disclose the NIE, that is, he was authorized to disclose, then he was instructed to hold off, and then later told again to disclose," Fitzgerald writes. He also says Libby testified that he may have "slipped" in discussing with Sanger the report's conclusion that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium. "The government simply wishes to make clear that it cannot affirmatively agree that each time defendant disclosed the NIE, he was authorized to do so," Fitzgerald says. Libby's lawyers will argue that Libby has "misremembered" certain conversations amid the crush of national security concerns and terrorist threats he handled daily, and that much of the evidence Fitzgerald seeks to introduce must be suppressed out of concern for national security. Libby's trial begins in January.
Woodward himself admits to having learned of Plame's identity a month before the July 14 article by Novak, but says that his original source was not Libby. (He later admits that his source was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.) Woodward has recently provided a sworn deposition to Fitzgerald about the leak to him. The leak from Armitage came when Woodward was doing research for his book Plan of Attack. Woodward never wrote about Plame's identity as a CIA agent before Novak revealed her identity in his column. Woodward came perilously close to destroying his own integrity as a journalist when, in October 2005, he appeared on CNN's Larry King Live and, without revealing his own contacts with Libby or Armitage, savaged Fitzgerald for indicting Libby, saying the disclosure of Plame's identity had caused "quite minimal damage" at the CIA and calling Fitzgerald "a junkyard dog prosecutor." (New York Sun, CNN, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
November 17: Specialist James Barker is sentenced to 90 years in jail for conspiring to rape and kill a 14-year old Iraqi girl in the village of Mahmoudiya. Barker, one of four US soldiers and one former soldier accused in the March 12 rape and murders, says during his sentencing, "I do not ask anyone to forgive me today. I don't know how that would be possible after what I have done. I do ask the Iraqi people not to blame my brothers still fighting in Iraq." Barker has agreed to testify against the others in return for not being sentenced to death. Barker will be eligible for parole in 20 years. In his closing statement, Barker says stressful conditions in Iraq made him angry and violent: "To live there, to survive there, I became angry and mean. The mean part of me made me strong on patrols. It made me brave in fire fights. I loved my friends, my fellow soldiers and my leaders, but I began to hate everyone else in Iraq." Some of Barker's fellow soldiers testified on his behalf, describing weeks with little support and sleep while manning distant checkpoints. "The bottom line is they were not giving the soldiers the tools, were not giving the soldiers the combat stress treatment, were not giving them enough troops on the ground to fulfill their mission," defense attorney David Sheldon says after the sentencing. Lead prosecutor Captain William Fischbach told the court that such conditions were no excuse for Barker, who led the group to the family's house, and that no one deserved such unspeakable horrors. "This burned-out corpse that used to be a 14-year-old girl never fired bullets or lobbed mortars," Fischbach said as he held pictures of the crime scene. Barker and his cohorts are accused of raping and murdering the young girl, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, and then murdering her, her younger sister, and her parents. They then burned the bodies to conceal their crime. The other three soldiers, all still facing trial, are Sergeant Paul Cortez and Private First Class Bryan Howard, who have both deferred entering a plea; PFC Jesse Spielman, and former private Steven Green, who has pled not guilty to civilian charges including murder and assault. Cortez and Spielman could face the death penalty for their crimes. In his testimony, Barker named Cortez and Green, but not Spielman or Howard, as participants in the rape and murders, but says Spielman went along to the house knowing what the others intended. Prosecutors say Howard had been left behind at a checkpoint. (AP/New York Daily News)
November 17: Bush appoints Dr. Eric Keroack, medical director for the anti-abortion group A Woman's Concern, as head of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Keroack's organization has stated many times that the distribution of contraceptives is "demeaning to women." Keroack will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. He will not only advise DHHS secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy, but will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are "designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons." The appointment does not require Senate confirmation, but is drawing heavy fire from Democrats, who view the appointment of Keroack as provocative and emblematic of Bush's refusal to pay anything more than lip service to the idea of cooperating with Democrats. Keroack's organization supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and refuses to distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts. "A Woman's Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness," the group's Web site says. A Woman's Concern, the umbrella organization that supports the crisis-pregnancy clinics supervised by Keroack, is also the parent organization for Healthy Futures, the contractor that Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has selected to teach abstinence in the state's public schools. Keroack is also a favorite speaker for the National Right to Life Committee, a medical advisor to the extremist National Abstinence Clearinghouse (the purveyor of "purity balls" for young women), and strongly supported by James Dobson's Focus on the Family.
Marilyn Keefe, interim president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents 4,000 family-planning clinics, says Keroack's work "seems to really be geared toward furthering anti-choice, anti-contraception policies." She adds that despite the congressional election results, the appointment "goes to show you the importance of controlling the White House and how important federal agencies are in the delivery of health services." The federal family-planning program, created in 1970, supports a network of 4,600 family-planning clinics that provide information and counseling to 5 million people each year. Services include patient education and counseling, breast and pelvic exams, pregnancy diagnosis and counseling, and screenings for cervical cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, calls Keroack's appointment "striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation's priorities." And Dianne Luby, president of Massachusetts's Planned Parenthood League, says bluntly, "Putting Dr. Keroack in charge of our nation's largest family planning program is dangerous to women's health."
His backers say that he has been successful in using medical arguments to persuade pregnant women -- whom he calls "abortion-vulnerable" -- to carry their children to term, using ultrasound and other technologies to further his arguments and saying in 2001 that "Even Midas lets you look at your old muffler before they advise you to change it." Keroack has used what can only be called questionable science to further his views. In 2003, in a presentation to the International Abstinence Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Keroack wrote in a PowerPoint item that "PRE-MARITAL SEX is really MODERN GERM WARFARE." Keroack defended abstinence by claiming that sex causes people to go through oxytocin withdrawal which in turn prevents people from bonding in relationships. The presentation outlined a purported scientific basis for how premarital sex ruins later relationships that has virtually no basis in fact. Keroack said teenage sexual activity blunts the brain's ability to develop emotional relationships. Comparing sex to drug use, he said the hormone produced by the brain after orgasm, oxytocin , will eventually diminish a person's ability to form emotional attachments. Keroack said premarital sex can lead to overproduction of oxytocin. In a 2001 paper he coauthored for the Abstinence Medical Council, he and his coauthor, Dr. John Diggs, wrote, "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.... Just as in heroin addiction...the person involved will experience 'sex withdrawal' and will need to move on to a...new sex playmate." Keroack's statements are not supported by any serious scientific research; the sweeping statements he makes are based on a single study of oxytocin in prairie voles, a type of rodent. Sue Carter, a biologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, says that "extrapolating from an animal model to humans is a leap of faith."
Keroack is continuing his march away from solid science. In June 2006, he gave a similar presentation, using a similar Power Point presentation (see slide below) that helped him explain that love and sexual relationships are hormonally based, with oxytocin as the key factor. Oxytocin is a hormone whose actions are associated with pregnancy, breastfeeding, and maternal-infant bonding -- and, according to Keroack, it's the tie that binds in marriage, as well. People don't fall in love, Keroack avers, but into hormonal bondage. Therefore, the most important rationale for sexual abstinence isn't faith-based at all, but purely physiological. Unfaithful men and promiscuous women are created by misuse of what he calls the "emotional glue" of attraction, an abuse leading to a "perpetual cycle of misery." Keroack explained that oxytocin is released during positive social interaction, massage, hugs, "trust" encounters, and sexual intercourse. "It promotes bonding by reducing fear and anxiety in social settings, increasing trust and trustworthiness, reducing stress and pain, and decreasing social aggression." he said. In an unpublished article that has become an established text of the abstinence movement, he wrote, "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual," and calls oxytocin "God's superglue." In 2002, he compared sexual relationships to open warfare. "Sexual activity is a war zone," he said. "What we have is this ongoing war. So we're constantly coming up with better equipment," he said, referring to contraceptive strategies and abortions. "And the truth is that somewhere along the way people die in war." He acknowledged that deaths from abortion-related complications are rare, but that "they die emotionally." Keroack uses his bully pulpit to push for federal funding for ultrasound machines to be provided to anti-abortion "counseling" centers around the nation.
Pregnant women who come to Keroack's organization for counseling are given a flurry of ultrasounds -- regardless of the established medical risk to the gestating fetus of repeated and unnecessary ultrasounds, and the ethical problems surrounding giving such tests for non-medical reasons. The women are then told that since early pregnancies are "often" terminated by early miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, they should wait a few weeks before making any decision to have an abortion. That time is used to browbeat and inundate the pregnant women with "counseling" that advises them against abortions.
PZ Myers of the highly respected scientific blog Pharyngula calls Keroack a "kook," and says that after extensive research he can find no evidence to support any of Keroack's claims about oxytocin. He also takes time to delineate the contradictions and assumptions riddling Keroack's claims. "So there isn't any evidence for his claims," Myers writes. "Is it logical? Oxytocin has complicated and sometimes conflicting effects, so it would be awfully hard to pin down any clear consequences of multiple partners on pair bonding without lots of data, but on the face of it, no, none of what he says makes much sense. ...This guy is simply not credible. It looks to me like the Bush administration is trying to throw a sop to the religious right after the defeat of the South Dakota abortion ban by appointing a reliable ideologue with connections to the insane Unruh anti-abortion/abstinence machine to a position where he can interfere with women's reproductive health. Let's hope the Democrats will show some spine and squelch this continued nonsense of using fake science to support bad policy." (Washington Post, Boston Globe, AlterNet [includes graphics from Keroack's slide show], Pharyngula, Feministing)

Slide from Keroack's 2003 presentation about oxytocin

November 17: Tony Blair's outgoing chief strategy advisor, Matthew Taylor, blames the Internet for exacerbating what he calls a "crisis" in the relationship between politicians and voters. Taylor, stressing he is speaking as a citizen and not as a government spokesman, says the Internet could be "fantastic" for democracy, but is too often used to encourage the "shrill discourse of demands" that dominates modern politics. Speaking at an E-Democracy conference in central London, Taylor says that modern politics is all about "quality of life" and that voters have a "very complex set of needs. ...The Internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands."
Taylor expands his discussion to say, in essence, that the rapid pace of social change and growing diversity are all good things, but they also meant governments find it increasingly difficult to govern. Worse, he says, the citizenry isn't mature enough to take full part in their own governance. "We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government," he says. Like "teenagers," people are demanding, but "conflicted" about what they actually want. For example, they want "sustainability," but not higher fuel prices; affordable homes for their children but not new housing developments in their town or village; and so forth.
The media encourages the citizenry, not to work out these dilemmas in partnership with their elected leaders, but to view all politicians as corrupt or "mendacious" by the media, which he describes as "a conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage." He says that the media's message, from the entire range of the political spectrum, is that "leaders are out there to shaft you." He continues, "At a time at which we need a richer relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had, to confront the shared challenges we face, arguably we have a more impoverished relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had. It seems to me this is something which is worth calling a crisis." The Internet makes the problem far worse, he avers. "The Internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands. If you look at the way in which citizens are using technology and the way that is growing up, there are worrying signs that that is the case. What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It's basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are. The Internet is being used as a tool of mobilization, which is fantastic, but it only adds to the growing, incommensurate nature of the demands being made on government." He says that the online community should provide more opportunities for "people to try to understand the real trade-offs that politicians face and the real dilemmas that citizens face." He tells delegates, "I want people to have more power, but I want them to have more power in the context of a more mature discourse about the responsibilities of government and the responsibilities of citizens." Right now, he says, the online culture is rooted in libertarianism and "anti-establishment" attitudes. "You have to be part of changing that culture," he tells delegates. "It's important for people who understand technology, to move from that frame of mind, which is about attacking the establishment into one which is about problem-solving and social enterprise." (BBC)
November 17: Patrick Leahy, the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calls on the Justice Department to investigate conservative radio host Laura Ingraham's call for her listeners to jam the Democratic voter assistance hotline. On November 7 (see item above), Ingraham called on her listeners to jam the toll-free voter assistance hotline sponsored by the Democratic Party by calling repeatedly to tie up the lines and prevent voters from getting assistance with possible election fraud and voting problems. "I want you to call it and I want you tell us what you get when you call 1-888-DEM-VOTE" Ingraham said on the air. "They're on top of all of the shenanigans at the polling stations. One problem: you can't get through." Minutes later, while talking with a listener who called the hotline, Ingraham said: "Let's keep 'dem' lines ringing." Such an effort is a violation of federal law, and likely a violation of several state laws. (Crooks and Liars/Daily Kos [link to audio])
November 17: A tidbit tucked inside a New York Daily News article about the race between Steny Hoyer and John Murtha for the position of House Majority Leader may indicate the tip of a particularly ugly iceberg for the Republican party. According to reporters Tom DeFrank and Ken Banizet, "For all the focus on the Democrats, a former Bush official who predicts a coming bloodbath between the White House and disgruntled conservative Republicans brushed off the Pelosi-Hoyer tussle as much ado about process. 'The Democrats are the sideshow,' he said. 'Bush self-destructing is the big story in town.'" Veteran liberal blogger and Washington insider John Aravosis writes that the two reporters "always have very, very good inside GOP sources." (New York Daily News/AmericaBlog)

November 18: Tom Koenigs, the diplomat heading the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, says that NATO "cannot win" the fight against the Taliban alone and will have to train Afghan forces to do the job. "At the moment NATO has a very optimistic assessment," says Koenigs. "They think they can win the war. But there is no quick fix." Koenigs said that training the fledgling Afghan national army to defeat the Taliban is crucial. The Afghan national army "can win," he says. "But against an insurgency like that, international troops cannot win." British commanders have argued that their troops should be withdrawn from Iraq to allow the military to focus on Afghanistan, and NATO commanders on the ground have pleaded for 2,000 more troops, helicopters and armored vehicles, to little effect. NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says countries should lift restrictions on what their troops could do. "My plea to governments would be: 'Please help us in lifting those caveats as much as possible...because in Afghanistan it is a problem." British defense secretary Des Browne says that the future of the alliance is now bound up with the future of Afghanistan. "The Afghan people, our own people and the Taliban are watching us. If we are indecisive or divided, the Taliban will be strengthened, just as all of the others despair," he says. Attacks have increased fourfold this year and 3,700 people have died, mostly in the south. The US has made 2,000 air strikes since June, against 88 in Iraq. Last week Acbar, an umbrella group of Afghan and international aid agencies, said the crisis highlighted the "urgent need" for a rethink of military, poverty-reduction and state-building policies. Koenigs says NATO commanders boasting of defeating the Taliban and gaining "psychological ascendancy" are premature at best. "You can't resolve it by killing the Taliban," he says. You have to win people over. That is done with good governance, decent police, diplomacy with Pakistan, and development." Otherwise, he says, the Taliban would regroup in Pakistani refugee camps and madrassahs and return in greater numbers next spring. (Guardian)
November 18: The press learns that former secretary of state James Baker, co-chairman of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group which is examining strategic options in Iraq, has met Syrian officials several times to discuss cooperation with the US. The Bush administration withdrew its ambassador to Damascus and has stated it will not authorize higher level contacts because of Syria's suspected role in supporting terror groups, Iraqi insurgents and opponents of Lebanon's government. Instead, Baker is employing what is sometimes known as "backchannel" contacts to meet with high-level Syrian officials. In September, Baker asked Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem "What would it take Syria to help on Iraq?" And just this past week, Baker dined with Iran's UN ambassador Javad Zarif. Although Baker apparently made clear that he was not negotiating for the United States, he is understood to have told the ambassador that his group wanted Iran's "input and suggestions." Interestingly, after the meetings, Tehran's English-language news channel featured commentary from political scientist Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh calling for the United States to remain in Iraq until it has established a strong, stable central government capable of providing adequate security. "The Americans can't simply withdraw from Iraq, leaving the mess as it is," he said afterwards. "Who's going to look for the safety of the Iraqis there? The Iranians can't do it. The Turks can't do it.... This is not a question of political rivalry between Iran and the West. It has to do with the fact that the society has to have a government structure in place." Baker's ISG is expected to recommend greater US co-operation with Syria and Iran as the administration considers a change in course on the war after the midterm elections. (Guardian)
November 18: Iraqis "don't have a future" if they give in to the sectarian tensions that are tearing apart their society, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says during a visit to Vietnam in one of the starkest warnings on the present violent trajectory of the country. Rice's warnings come on top of a plethora of bleak prognoses for the region, including one by General John Abizaid, the highest-ranking US military officer in the Middle East, who recently told a Congressional hearing that if the world does not find a way to stem the rise of violent Islamic militancy, it will face a third world war. "[Iraqis] have one future and that is a future together. They don't have a future if they try to stay apart," Rice says. "I don't mean to diminish the difficulties we have in Iraq and that the Iraqi people have in Iraq. This is difficult going." (Guardian)
November 18: The incoming Senate Minority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, warns the incoming Democratic Senate leadership not to block confirmation votes on Bush's array of nominees to the federal judiciary unless they want him and other Republicans to block other legislation. Five of the six nominees were previously rejected by both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, and all are considered extreme right-wing judges and lawyers. McConnell says that Republican senators will not hesitate to use their filibuster power to clog the chamber. The new Senate has a slim 51-49 majority of Democrats; it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster. If "Democrats want our cooperation, they'll give the president's judicial nominees an up-or-down vote," says McConnell. Vice President Dick Cheney has already said that Bush will continue to nominate what Cheney calls "strict constructionist" judges for the federal bench, nominees in the same judicial mode as Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas. Democrats allowed Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts to come to a vote after filibustering both nominations. "The president should stop picking fights and start working with Democrats to pick nominees who can be confirmed," says Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. "When we work together on consensus judicial nominees we can make progress," adds Senator Patrick Leahy, the incoming Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Bush did the opposite this week, renominating six judges, four of them vehemently opposed by Democrats. Leahy says the renominations amount to the White House "taking the bait of right-wing partisan groups. ...Advice and consent does not mean giving the president a free pass to pack the courts with ideologues from the right or left. The American people want the Senate to be more than a rubber stamp." (AP/CBS News)
November 18: Sarasota County elections supervisor Kathy Dent says she will report that no malfunctions of voting equipment occurred in her county on November 7. The elections in this Florida county are mired in controversy centering around the House race between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings. Buchanan holds a slender 368-vote lead over Jennings, but over 18,000 voters in Sarasota County did not register a preference in the race, a 13% undervote that cannot be explained. Dent says she will certify the election as going to Buchanan on November 20; Jennings will then have ten days to contest the results. Attorneys for Jennings say the undervotes are statistical evidence of lost votes, and they have hundreds of eyewitness acounts of malfunctioning machines that would not allow them to vote for Jennings. A state audit of Sarasota County's touchscreen machines has been held up in court and will likely be delayed past Thanksgiving week. Dent has an ingenuous rationale for certifying the vote even with the huge undervote: "Machines don't make mistakes." She says that a manual recount won't make much difference in the race between Jennings and Buchanan, but critics say a recount is meaningless since the votes weren't recorded in the first place. Reginald Mitchell, Florida legal counsel for the People for the American Way Foundation, says, "Something clearly went very wrong in Sarasota County." In Sarasota County, the district's most populous region, Jennings won 53% of the recorded vote. If that percentage held through the undervotes, she would pick up about 900 votes, more than twice what she would need to overtake Buchanan. Florida State University professor Alec Yasinsac, who wore a "Bush Won" button as he fought fiercely against Democratic demands for a recount in 2000, has been assigned by the state's Republican administration to carry out inspection of the Sarasota voting machines. (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Los Angeles Times)
November 18: Columnist Rich Brooks of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune writes that his wife was one of the 18,000 voters disenfranchised in the "undervote debacle" of November 7 that has left the House race between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings in doubt. Mrs. Brooks told her husband on Election Day that she was disappointed she couldn't vote in the race -- the contest was not on her ballot. Brooks is mystified, as the race appeared on his ballot. (They voted in the same polling place.) At first, both believe that Mrs. Brooks merely goofed, but as stories of the rampant undervoting caused by the ES&S voting machines began pouring in, both husband and wife realized that she was disenfranchised. Brooks writes, "It may not happen, but it's clear that a special election is needed to ensure a fair process. That's preferable to sending the wrong representative to Washington." (Sarasota Herald-Tribune)

Kissinger says military victory in Iraq not possible

November 19: In a stunning about-face, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, an informal but highly influential foreign policy advisor to Bush, says that a military victory is no longer possible in Iraq. He says that Iraq is in crisis, and if progress is to be made, the Bush administration must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors, including Iran. "If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he says to a reporter from the BBC. However, Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam War, warns against withdrawing any coalition troops because such a withdrawal would destabilize Iraq's neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict. "A dramatic collapse of Iraq -- whatever we think about how the situation was created -- would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region," he says. Kissinger has recently been contributing information and opinion to the Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker. Kissinger advocates an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq's neighbors, and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region. "I think we have to redefine the course, but I don't think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal," he says. (Washington Post)
November 19: A classifed draft CIA assessment finds no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House. Eminent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has written an article for The New Yorker (see November 20 item) that exposes the Bush administration's inclination to attack Iran regardless of the evidence, regardless of the will of Congress or the will of the American people. The CIA's draft assessment "challeng[es] the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," according to Hersh. "The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh writes. The White House is described as "hostile" to the report. He quotes one senior intelligence official as saying, "They're not looking for a smoking gun. They're looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission." On November 15, Israel's outgoing US ambassador Danny Ayalon said in an interview that Bush would not hesitate to use force against Iran to halt its nuclear program if other options failed. "US President George W. Bush will not hesitate to use force against Iran in order to halt its nuclear program," said Ayalon. (Agence France Press)
November 19: Saudi Arabia is threatening to suspend diplomatic ties with Britain unless Downing Street intervenes to block an investigation into a £60 million "slush fund" allegedly set up for some members of its royal family. A senior Saudi diplomat in London has delivered an ultimatum to Prime Minister Tony Blair that unless the inquiry into a corrupt defense deal is dropped, diplomatic links between Britain and Saudi Arabia will be severed. The Saudis have also threatened to cut intelligence co-operation with Britain over al-Qaeda, and have threatened to terminate payments on a defense contract that could be worth £40 billion and safeguard over 10,000 British jobs. The Saudis are furious about the criminal investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into allegations that BAE Systems, Britain's biggest defense company, set up the slush fund to support the extravagant lifestyle of members of the Saudi royal family. The payments, in the form of lavish holidays, a fleet of luxury cars including a gold Rolls-Royce, rented apartments and other perks, are alleged to have been paid to ensure the Saudis continued to buy from BAE under the so-called Al-Yamamah deal, rather than going to another country. Al-Yamamah is the biggest defense contract in British history and has kept BAE in business for 20 years. The Saudi threat was actually made in September, but word of the Saudi challenges is just now hitting the press.
Five people have already been arrested as a result of the investigation, including BAE managing director Peter Wilson, and former company official Tony Winship, who oversaw two travel and service firms that are alleged to have been conduits for the payments. Both deny any wrongdoing.
The Saudi royal family became alarmed at the latest turn in the fraud inquiry; sources close to the investigation say the Saudis "hit the roof" after discovering that SFO lawyers had persuaded a magistrate in Switzerland to force disclosure about a series of confidential Swiss bank accounts. The accounts relate to substantial payments between third-party offshore companies that may have received large sums in previously undisclosed, and probably illegal, commissions. Fraud office sources say they are now trying to get more documents that will tell them who benefited from the accounts. The Saudis learned of this development only when they were contacted by the Swiss banks in the late summer. "They hit the roof," says a source close to the investigation. (Sunday Times)
November 19: House Democrat Barney Frank, the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says he wants to implement a "grand bargain" with corporate America: Democrats would agree to reduce regulations and support free-trade deals in exchange for businesses agreeing to greater wage increases and job benefits for workers. Frank's proposal is part of the incoming Democratic leadership's attempts to end the political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats on broad economic issues. "What I want to do is break that deadlock," he says. "A lot of policies that the business community wants us to adopt for growth are now blocked. On the other hand, the business community is successfully blocking the minimum wage [increase] and created a very anti-union attitude in the Congress." Frank proposes that if businesses support a minimum wage increase and provide protection for workers adversely affected by trade treaties, Democrats would be more willing to ease regulations and approve free-trade deals. Frank also would support changes to immigration rules favored by businesses, and noted that allowing more immigrants would put needed funds into the Social Security system. Frank casts his proposal as a way for capitalists to quell some of the populist fervor that was expressed in last week's election, when many Democrats vowed to crack down on companies moving jobs overseas. "I'm a capitalist, and that means I'm for inequality," Frank recently told Boston business leaders. But you reach a point where you get more inequality than is healthy, and I believe we're at that point. What we want to do is to look at public policies that'll get some bigger share of the increased wealth into wages, and in return you'll see Democrats as internationalists. ...I really urge the business community to join us."
At least one Republican business leader has no desire to cooperate with Frank. Bruce Josten, chief lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce, worries that Frank's grand bargain would mandate costly benefits to employees, including health care, in exchange for support of free trade. "His grand bargain...certainly is not going to sail with the American business community," Josten says, noting that Frank has long been at odds with the US Chamber of Commerce in part because of Frank's opposition to sweetheart trade deals that Frank feels were good for corporations, but bad for Americans. Asked about the chamber's low ranking of him, he responds, "That's more than I give them." Frank says he will work out details of his grand bargain after conducting a series of hearings starting early next year. "I am not claiming I have majority support," he says. "I expect to spend much of the next year in the committee documenting this." But he says he has general backing from incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats.
A starting point could be health care. Many businesses are trying to shed high health care premiums and cut back, or eliminate, health care coverage for their employees. Frank hopes that workers and businesses can agree on a government-administered plan paid for by workers that would reduce burdens on businesses, which would pass on savings to employees through higher wages. "I think employer-paid health care is a mistake," he says. "I think it depresses wages." Stephen Collins, president of the Automotive Trade Policy Council, which represents Detroit's Big Three automakers, says business leaders would welcome such a discussion with Frank. "Our companies are very open about the fact that they are facing massive competitive challenges of a global nature that need big answers," Collins says. "There has to be a partnership between government and industry to solve some of these problems, and health is one of them."
Before the election, Frank spent much of his time urging fellow Democrats to campaign on "how poorly most workers have fared under the Bush economy." In one memo, Frank went through a point-by-point rebuttal of a White House report on how workers fared under the Bush administration, arguing that only the wealthiest Americans have seen a significant income gain. Although Frank is one of the most outspokenly liberal members of Congress, he has a long track record of working closely with businesses and corporations, primarily in his home state of Massachusetts. "I believe he's one of the voices in the Democratic party that is trying to reposition the party as a pro-growth, pro-jobs party as opposed to simply being against things," says Paul Guzzi, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. Former representative Steven Bartlett, a Texas Republican who served with Frank in Congress and who now represents businesses as the president of the Financial Services Roundtable, says Frank's ability to work with business leaders and Republicans should not be underestimated. "I'm a very conservative Republican and Barney is a very liberal Democrat, but we worked a lot of legislation together," says Bartlett. (Boston Globe)
November 19: The incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, Democrat Charles Rangel, says he will push for a mandatory military draft once he takes his seat in January. Rangel, who knows he does not have the support of the Democratic leadership, the rank and file Democrats, or of Republicans, says he wants to make the point that his idea is a way to deter politicians from launching wars. "There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," Rangel says. Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War, says the all-volunteer military disproportionately puts the burden of war on minorities and lower-income families. In 2003, Rangel proposed a measure covering people age 18 to 26. It was defeated 402-2 the following year. This year, he offered a plan to mandate military service for men and women between age 18 and 42; it went nowhere in the Republican-led Congress. "I don't see how anyone can support the war and not support the draft," he says. I think to do so is hypocritical." Rangel does not support the war. "If we're going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can't do that without a draft," he says. Repeated polls have shown that about seven in 10 Americans oppose reinstatement of the draft and officials say they do not expect to restart conscription.
Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi quickly comes out against Rangel's idea of a draft, and says it will not come up for a vote on the floor of the House. She notes that a return to the draft is something Rangel has long championed to promote shared sacrifice. "It's not about a draft; it's about shared sacrifice in our country," she tells reporters. "Mr. Rangel will be very busy with his work on the Ways and Means Committee, which jurisdiction is quite different, but he is a strong voice for social justice in our country. And [pushing for a draft is] a way to make a point that this war has not involved or made any shared sacrifice." When asked directly if she supported the measure, Pelosi says, "No. No." (AP/Yahoo! News, CNN)
November 19: New York Times columnist Frank Rich slams the media's "fictional story line" surrounding the Democrats' victories in the November 7 elections. (Unfortunately, the column is behind the Times's paid firewall, TimesSelect.) "Elections may come and go," he writes, "but Washington remains incorrigible. Not even voters delivering a clear message can topple the town's conventional wisdom once it has been set in the stone of punditry." Rich writes that the media has been playing up a false storyline involving the myth of the Democratic Party in "shambles" over the race between John Murtha and Steny Hoyer for House Majority Leader, and in the process downplaying the re-emergence of the patently bigoted Trent Lott as a GOP leader in the Senate. However, Rich takes the most umbrage at the lie being spun by the media that the Democrats' sweep was "more or less an accident. The victory had little to do with the Democrats' actual beliefs and was instead solely the result of President Bush's unpopularity and a cunning backroom stunt by the campaign Machiavellis, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, to enlist a smattering of 'conservative' candidates to run in red states.... And now the party is deeply divided as its old liberals and new conservatives converge on Capitol Hill to slug it out."
As attractive as this story may be to the media mavens who have made careers out of fawning over Republicans, "[t]he only problem with this version of events is that it's not true," Rich writes. "The overwhelming majority of the Democratic winners, including Jon Tester of Montana, are to the left of most Republicans, whether on economic policy or abortion. For all of the hyperventilation devoted to the Steny Hoyer-John Murtha bout for the House leadership, the final count was lopsided next to the one-vote margin in the GOP Senate intramural that yielded that paragon of 'unity,' Trent Lott. But the most telling barometer is the election's defining issue: there is far more unanimity among Democrats about Iraq than there is among Republicans. Disengaging America from that war is what the country voted for overwhelmingly on Nov. 7, and that's what the Democrats almost uniformly promised to speed up, whatever their vague, often inchoate notions about how to do it."
Rich notes that the biggest story to come out of the weeks after the election is that "Bush has no intention of changing his policy on Iraq or anything else one iota.... The Washington story that will matter most going forward is the fate of the divided Republicans. Only if they heroically come together can the country be saved from a president who, for all his professed pipe dreams about democracy in the Middle East, refuses to surrender to democracy's verdict at home."
In conjunction with Rich's column, Democratic blogger "Digby" notes that the latest attack on Nancy Pelosi centers on making Botox jokes about her appearance. The line originated with Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who is quoted as saying, "I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, 'You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn't work the first time, let it go.'" Syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd, whom Digby calls the "Queen Bee" of the insufferably catty (and bi-gendered) Washington insiders journalism club he contemptuously terms the "Mean Girlz," couldn't wait to trot out the line in a recent column. And Ted Olson, the former solicitor general and Republican lawyer who argued the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, recently warmed up a rabidly conservative Federalist Society crowd for John McCain with a few sexist cracks about Botox. The new Congress could amuse itself, Olson said, by "searching for any sign of movement in Speaker Pelosi's forehead." The Senate, he added, would be entertained by "the expressionless, Pelosi-like forehead of Senator Clinton." Digby observes, "Luntz gave the game away. This kind of derisive babble is not simply a bunch of overgrown frat boys 'n sorority girls disrespectfully talking about these women's looks. It's designed very specifically to trivialize them." And so far, the media seems to be playing right along. (New York Times/Editor and Publisher, MSNBC/Hullabaloo)

Bush gives tacit approval for Israel to attack Iran

November 20: In a stunning incitement to catastrophic violence in the Middle East that goes almost unreported in the US, Bush says he would understand -- and by implication support -- a military strike by Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities. Bush made the statement several weeks ago to French president Jacques Chirac, but the news is just now hitting the Israeli press. The story of Bush giving what amounts to a green light to Israel to attack Iran comes out during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to a number of European diplomats and lawmakers to explain why the US will not attack Iran at this time. She gives three main reasons why the US is currently unable to carry out a military operation against Iran: the wish to solve the crisis through peaceful means; concern that a military strike will be ineffective -- that it would fail to completely destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities; and the lack of precise intelligence on the targets' locations. Rice is not giving the Europeans the same expression of willingness or understanding for an Israeli attack as Bush, but she says that such an option must remain under consideration. Israeli officials believe that Iran will reach the "point of no return" in its nuclear program by spring 2007, in approximately five months. At that point, Iran will be in a position to simultaneously operate approximately 3,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium. This would represented a five- to tenfold increase in their centrifuges. French government officials have told the Israelis that any such attack on Iran would be "a total disaster" in terms of its implications for the entire world. According to the French, while such a strike would, at best, delay the completion of Iran's nuclear program by two years, it would also result in Iran cancelling its membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, cause a great deal of agitation in the Arab world, lead to a rise in oil prices, and could result in a major Iranian military response that would not target Israel alone. (Ha'aretz)

Administration still intent on cobbling up evidence to justify invading Iran

November 20: Vice President Dick Cheney has specific plans on ensuring that the newly elected Democratic majority in Congress will achieve none of its goals, and in particular, ensure that Congressional Democrats will not block the administration's intent to launch military strikes on Iran, according to an in-depth article by eminent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. A month before the elections, in a national-security discussion at the Executive Office Building, the question came up: how would a Democratic Congressional victory affect policy toward Iran, believed by the US to be on the verge of becoming a nuclear power? Cheney and the White House was not so concerned about Democrats cutting off funding for the war in Iraq, but that future legislation would prohibit it from financing operations targeted at overthrowing or destabilizing the Iranian government. "They're afraid that Congress is going to vote a binding resolution to stop a hit on Iran, a la Nicaragua in the Contra war," says a former senior intelligence official. (Republicans in the Reagan White House and in Congress repeatedly broke the so-called "Boland amendments," introduced by Democratic House member Edward Boland, which limited their ability to support the rightist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. In doing so, White House officials orchestrated illegal fund-raising activities for the Contras, including the sale of American weapons, via Israel, to Iran. The result was the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-eighties. Cheney does not intend to allow such legislation to impede his administration's plans for Iran.)
The question is, say current and former administration officials, is whether Cheney would be as influential in the last two years of Bush's presidency as he was in its first six. About iraq, Cheney is adamant: "I know what the President thinks" about Iraq, he said in October 2006. "I know what I think. And we're not looking for an exit strategy. We're looking for victory." He is equally clear that the administration would, if necessary, use force against Iran. "The United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime," he told Israeli lobbying group AIPAC early this year. "And we join other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."
A former senior CIA official says that the post-election firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was more than a smokescreen, as some on the left believe, but neither is it a sign of any real change in the administration's policies. What it is, says the official, is a sign of the White House's "desperation." Cheney's relationship with Rumsfeld was among the closest inside the Administration, and Gates's nomination was seen by some Republicans as a clear signal that Cheney's influence in the White House could be challenged. The only reason Gates would take the job, after turning down an earlier offer to serve as the new Director of National Intelligence, says the former official, is that "the President's father, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker" -- all former aides of the first President Bush -- "piled on, and the president finally had to accept adult supervision." Critical decisions will be made in the next few months, the former CIA official says. "Bush has followed Cheney's advice for six years, and the story line will be: 'Will he continue to choose Cheney over his father?' We'll know soon." But as with all things Bush, the Rumsfeld firing is mostly about politics. According to a retired four-star general who worked closely with the first Bush administration, the Gates nomination means that Scowcroft, Baker, the elder Bush, and his son "are saying that winning the election in 2008 is more important than the individual. The issue for them is how to preserve the Republican agenda. The Old Guard wants to isolate Cheney and give their girl, [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice, a chance to perform." The combination of Scowcroft, Baker, and the senior Bush working together is, the general added, "tough enough to take on Cheney. One guy can't do it." Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage believes the Democratic election victory, followed by Rumsfeld's dismissal, means that the administration "has backed off," in terms of the pace of its planning for a military campaign against Iran. Gates and other decision-makers would now have more time to push for a diplomatic solution in Iran and deal with other, arguably more immediate issues. "Iraq is as bad as it looks, and Afghanistan is worse than it looks," Armitage says. "A year ago, the Taliban were fighting us in units of eight to twelve, and now they're sometimes in company-size, and even larger." Bombing Iran and expecting the Iranian public "to rise up" and overthrow the government, as some in the White House believe, Armitage adds, "is a fool's errand."
"Iraq is the disaster we have to get rid of, and Iran is the disaster we have to avoid," says Joseph Cirincione, the vice-president for national security at the liberal Center for American Progress. "Gates will be in favor of talking to Iran and listening to the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the neoconservatives are still there [in the White House] and still believe that chaos would be a small price for getting rid of the threat. The danger is that Gates could be the new Colin Powell -- the one who opposes the policy but ends up briefing the Congress and publicly supporting it." Other sources close to the Bush family say that the machinations behind Rumsfeld's resignation and the Gates nomination are complex, and the seeming triumph of the Old Guard may be illusory. The former senior intelligence official, who once worked closely with Gates and with the President's father, says that Bush and his immediate advisers in the White House understood by mid-October that Rumsfeld would have to resign if the result of the midterm election was a resounding defeat. Rumsfeld was involved in conversations about the timing of his departure with Cheney, Gates, and the President before the election, the former senior intelligence official said. Critics who ask why Rumsfeld wasn't fired earlier, a move that might have given the Republicans a boost, are missing the point. "A week before the election, the Republicans were saying that a Democratic victory was the seed of American retreat, and now Bush and Cheney are going to change their national-security policies?" he says. "Cheney knew this was coming. Dropping Rummy after the election looked like a conciliatory move -- 'You're right, Democrats. We got a new guy and we're looking at all the options. Nothing is ruled out.'" But the conciliatory gesture would not be accompanied by a significant change in policy; instead, the White House sees Gates as someone who has the credibility to help it stay the course on Iran and Iraq. Gates would also be an asset before Congress. If the administration needs to make the case that Iran's weapons program indeed pose an imminent threat, Gates will be a better advocate than someone who had been associated with the flawed intelligence about Iraq. "He's not the guy who told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and he'll be taken seriously by Congress," says the former intelligence official. As for whether Gates will have the gumption to stand up to Cheney, that remains to be seen.
Aside from the thorny issues of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and others, Gates also has to contend with the Pentagon's expanding effort to conduct clandestine and covert intelligence missions overseas. Such activity has traditionally been the CIA's responsibility, but, as the result of a systematic push by Rumsfeld, military covert actions have been substantially increased. In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan. The group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran, says a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as "part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran." The Pentagon has also established covert relationships with Kurdish, Azeri, and Baluchi tribesmen, and has encouraged their efforts to undermine the regime's authority in northern and southeastern Iran. The government consultant says that Israel is giving the Kurdish group "equipment and training." The group has also been given "a list of targets inside Iran of interest to the US." Unlike similar intelligence operations, the law does not require Congress to be briefed on military activities such as these, and therefore most of these covert forays will never be shared with the Democratic leadership. This fall, Representative David Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that finances classified military activity, pointedly asked, during a closed meeting of House and Senate members, whether "anyone has been briefing on the administration's plan for military activity in Iran." The answer was no.
Calls for the administration to open dialogue with Iran to help settle the Iraqi conflict are rife after the election, even in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair broke ranks with Bush after the election and declared that Iran should be offered "a clear strategic choice" that could include a "new partnership" with the West. But many in the White House and the Pentagon insist that getting tough with Iran is the only way to salvage Iraq. "It's a classic case of 'failure forward,'" a Pentagon consultant says. "They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq -- like doubling your bet. It would be an attempt to revive the concept of spreading democracy in the Middle East by creating one new model state." One strong proponent of this hellishly risky idea is Rice, who said last month that Iran "does need to understand that it is not going to improve its own situation by stirring instability in Iraq," and by Bush, who said in August that "Iran is backing armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold" in Iraq. The government consultant says, "More and more people [in the administration] see the weakening of Iran as the only way to save Iraq." The consultant adds that, for some advocates of military action, "the goal in Iran is not regime change but a strike that will send a signal that America still can accomplish its goals. Even if it does not destroy Iran's nuclear network, there are many who think that thirty-six hours of bombing is the only way to remind the Iranians of the very high cost of going forward with the bomb—and of supporting Moqtada al-Sadr and his pro-Iran element in Iraq." Sadr, who commands a Shiite militia, has religious ties to Iran. "Make no mistake: President Bush will need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office," writes prominent neoconservative Joshua Muravchik. Bush would be bitterly criticized for a preemptive attack on Iran, Muravchik writes, and so neoconservatives "need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes."
The main Middle East expert on Cheney's staff is David Wurmser, a neoconservative who was a strident advocate for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Like many in Washington, Wurmser "believes that, so far, there's been no price tag on Iran for its nuclear efforts and for its continuing agitation and intervention inside Iraq," according to the consultant. But, unlike those in the administration who are calling for limited strikes, Wurmser and others in Cheney's office "want to end the regime. They argue that there can be no settlement of the Iraq war without regime change in Iran." Unfortunately for the Iran belligerents, a highly classified CIA draft assessment issued this fall finds no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. Predictably, the White House has angrily dismissed the assessment as counterproductive to their need to whip up a fear of a nuclear-empowered Iran. Cheney and his aides discounted the assessment, the former senior intelligence official says. "They're not looking for a smoking gun," the official adds, referring to specific intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning. "They're looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission." The DIA has also challenged the CIA's analysis. "The DIA is fighting the agency's conclusions, and disputing its approach," the former senior intelligence official says. Bush and Cheney, he adds, can try to prevent the CIA assessment from being incorporated into a forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear capabilities, "but they can't stop the agency from putting it out for comment inside the intelligence community." The CIA assessment warned the White House that it would be a mistake to conclude that the failure to find a secret nuclear-weapons program in Iran merely meant that the Iranians had done a good job of hiding it. The former senior intelligence official noted that at the height of the Cold War the Soviets were equally skilled at deception and misdirection, yet the American intelligence community was readily able to unravel the details of their long-range-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. But some in the White House, including in Cheney's office, had made just such an assumption -- that "the lack of evidence means they must have it," the former official says.
Adding to the problem is Iran's own obstinance in cooperating with the IAEA. Though Iran, as a signee of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, has the right to conduct nuclear research for peaceful purposes, it defied a demand by the IAEA and the Security Council earlier this year to stop enriching uranium, a process that can produce material for nuclear power plants as well as for weapons, and it has been unable, or unwilling, to account for traces of plutonium and highly enriched uranium that have been detected during IAEA inspections. The IAEA has complained about a lack of "transparency," although, like the CIA, it has not found unambiguous evidence of a secret weapons program. Last week, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced that Iran had made further progress in its enrichment research program, and said, "We know that some countries may not be pleased." He insisted that Iran was abiding by international agreements, but said, "Time is now completely on the side of the Iranian people." A diplomat in Vienna, where the IAEA has its headquarters, says that the agency is skeptical of the claim, for technical reasons. But Ahmadinejad's defiant tone has done nothing to diminish suspicions about Iran's nuclear ambitions. "There is no evidence of a large-scale covert enrichment program inside Iran," one involved European diplomat says. "But the Iranians would not have launched themselves into a very dangerous confrontation with the West on the basis of a weapons program that they no longer pursue. Their enrichment program makes sense only in terms of wanting nuclear weapons. It would be inconceivable if they weren't cheating to some degree. You don't need a covert program to be concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions. We have enough information to be concerned without one. It's not a slam dunk, but it's close to it."
There are, however, other possible reasons for Iran's obstinacy. The nuclear program -- peaceful or not -- is a source of great national pride, and Ahmadinejad's support for it has helped to propel him to enormous popularity. According to the former senior intelligence official, the CIA's assessment suggests that Iran might even see some benefits in a limited military strike -- especially one that did not succeed in fully destroying its nuclear program -- in that an attack might enhance its position in the Islamic world. "They learned that in the Iraqi experience, and relearned it in southern Lebanon," the former senior official says. In both cases, a more powerful military force had trouble achieving its military or political goals; in Lebanon, Israel's war against Hezbollah did not destroy the group's entire arsenal of rockets, and increased the popularity of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The former senior intelligence official adds that the CIA assessment raised the possibility that an American attack on Iran could end up serving as a rallying point to unite Sunni and Shi'ite populations. "An American attack will paper over any differences in the Arab world, and we'll have Syrians, Iranians, Hamas, and Hezbollah fighting against us -- and the Saudis and the Egyptians questioning their ties to the West. It's an analyst's worst nightmare -- for the first time since the caliphate [that ended in the 13th century] there will be common cause in the Middle East." According to the Pentagon consultant, "The CIA's view is that, without more intelligence, a large-scale bombing attack would not stop Iran's nuclear program. And a low-end campaign of subversion and sabotage would play into Iran's hands -- bolstering support for the religious leadership and deepening anti-American Muslim rage." The Pentagon consultant says that he and many of his colleagues in the military believe that Iran is intent on developing nuclear-weapons capability. But he adds that the Bush Administration's options for dealing with that threat are diminished, because of a lack of good intelligence and also because "we've cried wolf" before.
As the CIA's assessment was causing a stir inside the White House and the intelligence community, this summer a new element emerged: intelligence from Israeli spies operating inside Iran claimed that Iran has developed and tested a trigger device for a nuclear bomb. The intelligence is suspect and controversial. "The problem is that no one can verify it," the former senior intelligence official says. "We don't know who the Israeli source is. The briefing says the Iranians are testing trigger mechanisms" -- simulating a zero-yield nuclear explosion without any weapons-grade materials -- "but there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site? How often have they done it? How big is the warhead -- a breadbox or a refrigerator? They don't have that." However, the report, as suspect as it is, is being used by White House hawks within the administration to "prove the White House's theory that the Iranians are on track. And tests leave no radioactive track, which is why we can't find it." Still, he says, "The agency is standing its ground." The Pentagon consultant says that within the intelligence community "we're going to be fighting over the quality of the information for the next year." One reason for the dispute, he said, was that the White House had asked to see the "raw" -- the original, unanalyzed and unvetted—Israeli intelligence. Such "stovepiping" of intelligence had led to faulty conclusions about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq war. "Many Presidents in the past have done the same thing," the consultant says, "but intelligence professionals are always aghast when Presidents ask for stuff in the raw. They see it as asking a second grader to read 'Ulysses.'"
In early 2004, John Bolton, then the undersecretary of state for arms control, privately conveyed to the IAEA suspicions that Iran was conducting research into the intricately timed detonation of conventional explosives needed to trigger a nuclear warhead at Parchin, a sensitive facility twenty miles southeast of Tehran that serves as the center of Iran's Defense Industries Organization. A wide array of chemical munitions and fuels, as well as advanced antitank and ground-to-air missiles, are manufactured there, and satellite imagery appeared to show a bunker suitable for testing very large explosions. In response to the allegations, IAEA inspectors went to Parchin in November of 2005, after months of negotiation. An inspection team was allowed to single out a specific site at the base, and then was granted access to a few buildings there. "We found no evidence of nuclear materials," the diplomat says. The inspectors looked hard at an underground explosive-testing pit that, he says, "resembled what South Africa had when it developed its nuclear weapons" three decades ago. The pit could have been used for the kind of kinetic research needed to test a nuclear trigger. But, like so many military facilities with dual-use potential, "it also could be used for other things," such as testing fuel for rockets, which routinely takes place at Parchin. "The Iranians have demonstrated that they can enrich uranium," the diplomat adds, "and trigger tests without nuclear yield can be done. But it's a very sophisticated process...and only countries with suitably advanced nuclear testing facilities as well as the necessary scientific expertise can do it. I'd be very skeptical that Iran could do it."
The Pentagon consultant says that, while there is pressure from the Israelis, "they won't do anything on their own without our green light." That assurance "comes from the Cheney shop. It's Cheney himself who is saying, 'We're not going to leave you high and dry, but don't go without us.'" A senior European diplomat agrees: "For Israel, it is a question of life or death. The United States does not want to go into Iran, but, if Israel feels more and more cornered, there may be no other choice." A nuclear-armed Iran would not only threaten Israel. It could trigger a strategic-arms race throughout the Middle East, as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt -- all led by Sunni governments -- would be compelled to take steps to defend themselves against the Shi'a-dominated Iranian government. Despite the rhetoric, and support from some influential Democrats, Leslie Gelb, a former State Department official and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, says he believes that, "when push comes to shove, the Israelis will have a hard time selling the idea that an Iranian nuclear capability is imminent. The military and the State Department will be flat against a preëmptive bombing campaign." Gelb says he hopes that Gates's appointment would add weight to America's most pressing issue -- "to get some level of Iranian restraint inside Iraq. In the next year or two, we're much more likely to be negotiating with Iran than bombing it." Right now the Bush administration remains publicly committed to a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear impasse, and has been working with China, Russia, France, Germany, and Britain to get negotiations under way. So far, that effort has foundered; the most recent round of talks broke up early in November, amid growing disagreements with Russia and China about the necessity of imposing harsh United Nations sanctions on the Iranian regime. Bush is adamant that Iran must stop all of its enrichment programs before any direct talks involving the United States can begin.
The Baker-Hamilton study group is expected to rule out calling for a complete US withdrawal from Iraq, but instead will recommend focusing on the improved training of Iraqi forces and on redeploying American troops. In the most significant recommendation, Baker and Hamilton are expected to urge Bush to do what he has thus far refused to do -- bring Syria and Iran into a regional conference to help stabilize Iraq. It is doubtful that Bush and Cheney will be receptive. In August, Rumsfeld asked the Joint Chiefs to quietly devise alternative plans for Iraq, to preempt new proposals, whether they come from the new Democratic majority or from the Iraq Study Group. "The option of last resort is to move American forces out of the cities and relocate them along the Syrian and Iranian border," the former senior administration official says. "Civilians would be hired to train the Iraqi police, with the eventual goal of separating the local police from the Iraqi military. The White House believes that if American troops stay in Iraq long enough -- with enough troops -- the bad guys will end up killing each other, and Iraqi citizens, fed up with internal strife, will come up with a solution. It'll take a long time to move the troops and train the police. It's a time line to infinity." He adds that he has also been told that the Pentagon has been at work on a plan in Iraq that called for a military withdrawal from the major urban areas to a series of fortified bases near the borders. The working assumption is that, with the American troops gone from the most heavily populated places, the sectarian violence will "burn out." "The White House is saying it's going to stabilize," the official says, "but it may stabilize the wrong way."
And it is not clear that Iran even wants to help the administration reach a settlement of the Iraqi conflict. "Iran is emerging as a dominant power in the Middle East," says a Middle East expert and former senior administration official. "With a nuclear program, and an ability to interfere throughout the region, it's basically calling the shots. Why should they coöperate with us over Iraq?" He recalls a recent meeting with Ahmadinejad, who challenged Bush's right to tell Iran that it could not enrich uranium. "Why doesn't America stop enriching uranium?" the Iranian president asked. He laughed, and added, "We'll enrich it for you and sell it to you at a fifty-per-cent discount." (New Yorker)
November 20: The trial of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, in which he was sentenced this month to death by hanging, was marred by flaws so serious that they undermined the trial's fairness and called into question the verdict, an international human rights watchdog group says in an upcoming report. According to Human Rights Watch's 97-page report, the Iraqi High Tribunal's independence and perceived impartiality was weakened by actions of the Iraqi government from the outset of the trial. Hussein and seven co-defendants were convicted of war crimes surrounding the torture and execution of 148 people in the hamlet of Dujail more than two decades ago. The report does not challenge the evidence against Hussein, nor does it imply that Hussein is innocent, but focuses on the court trial itself. Based on courtroom observations and dozens of interviews with judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers, the report is the first significant challenge to what the Iraqi government and its US patrons assert was a fair, if messy, trial. The report asserts that there was failure to disclose key evidence to Hussein's attorneys and that there were violations of basic rights of the defendants to confront witnesses. The chief judge's outbursts in court undermined his impartiality, it said. There were also gaps in the evidence that weakened the prosecution's case and "put in doubt whether all the elements of the crimes charged were established," according to the report. The report's chief author, Nehal Bhuta, says, "The tribunal squandered an important opportunity to deliver credible justice to the people of Iraq. And its imposition of the death penalty after an unfair trial is indefensible." The US has denounced the report and says the trial was fair and acceptably impartial. The Dujail trial was the first of its kind to be conducted against a former leader in his own country by his own people, and the first since the World War II Allies prosecuted the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg to try nearly an entire senior leadership for crimes against humanity.
The trial's shortcomings, the report asserts, "call into question subsequent proceedings at the tribunal." Not only did chief judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman lose his temper and descend into exchanging insults with the defendants, he also, according to the report, made "erratic and often unexplained decisions limiting the rights of defense counsel to question witnesses." US advisors say Abdel-Rahman was simply trying to take control of a court that Hussein and his defense team mocked. Hussein boycotted proceedings or often wagged his finger and shouted. His co-defendants sometimes appeared in their underwear. But the prosecution, asserts the report, engaged in "trial by ambush," in which important documents were not handed to the defense in advance. As an example, the report cites an instance when 23 prosecution witness statements were read into the court record without any of the witnesses being made available for questioning by defense counsel.
The former chief judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, resigned after members of Iraq's parliament denounced him as "weak" and too lenient toward the defendants, the report says, noting that there was heavy governmental pressure on the court to side against Hussein. "The attitude of the cabinet towards the court and the trial is one of a consumer who pays money for a product," one judge says in the report. "They give money, and they demand results. The government treats the court like a factory." The report adds that the judges lacked the experience to conduct such a complex trial and urged Iraq's government to allow international judicial experts to take part in future proceedings. "For justice to be done, the trial has to be fair. There were large, large shortfalls in the fairness," says Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. The trial, he says, "certainly fails as a reference point historically for what happened and who was responsible in the way the Nuremberg trials did." (Washington Post)
November 20: A critical Army manual is being rewritten in a manner that rejects the "Rumsfeld doctrine" -- in short, a doctrine that emphasizes speed over troop numbers -- and cautions against its use in future actions. The doctrine, named for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was primarily used in the Iraq invasion and occupation, and has consistently been held up by the Bush administration as a resounding success. The draft version of the Army's Full Spectrum Operations field manual argues that in addition to defeating the enemy, military units must focus on providing security for the population, even during the heat of a major combat operation. "The big idea here is that stability tasks have to be a consideration at every level and every operation," says Clinton Ancker, head of the Army's Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate and an author of the guide. The field manual is the authoritative guidebook on how to conduct ground operations, which officers use to develop tactics for military endeavors, including war, counterinsurgency and peacekeeping. When completed, the manual will be taught to officers at all levels. Before the war, Rumsfeld forced General Tommy Franks and others to design an invasion plan to fit his beliefs about how modern militaries should fight. When Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed and Baghdad seemed to fall in just 21 days, Rumsfeld and his emphasis on speed over mass got the credit. But after the initial military success, the Pentagon was criticized for not doing enough to plan for postwar stability. And Rumsfeld drew objections for his dismissive attitude toward the disorder and looting in Iraq, particularly when he said, just days after Baghdad's fall, that "stuff happens" in democracies. The old manual emphasized that stability operations usually follow combat. The draft version of the 2007 ground operations manual instructs commanders that they cannot wait for offensive operations to end before providing security and services for the population. "Army forces must defeat enemies and simultaneously shape the civil situation through stability or civil support operations," says the manual. "We cannot move away from fighting and winning wars," says Ancker, "but the combat side is not adequate to ensure the peace." (Chicago Tribune)
November 20: An antiterrorist database used by the Defense Department in an effort to prevent attacks against military installations includes intelligence tips about antiwar planning meetings held at churches, libraries, college campuses and other locations, according to newly disclosed documents. One example includes a tip in the database from February 2005 that notes "a church service for peace" would be held in the New York City area the next month. Another entry notes that antiwar protesters would be holding "nonviolence training" sessions at unidentified churches in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Of course, such "tips" about legitimate citizen activities are not appropriate for inclusion in the database, called Talon. Earlier this year, the Defense Department tightened its procedures to ensure that only material related to actual terrorist threats, and not peaceable First Amendment activity, are included in the database. Daniel Baur, who runs the unit that oversees Talon, is blunt in his regard for the information: "I don't want it, we shouldn't have had it, not interested in it. I don't want to deal with it." Baur says that those operating the database had misinterpreted their mandate and that what was intended as an antiterrorist database became, in some respects, a catch-all for leads on possible disruptions and threats against military installations in the United States, including protests against the military presence in Iraq. "I don't think the policy was as clear as it could have been," he says. More than 180 entries in the database related to war protests were deleted from the system last year; out of 13,000 entries in the database, many of them uncorroborated leads on possible terrorist threats, several thousand others were also purged because, as Baur says, they had "no continuing relevance." Leads from so-called neighborhood watch programs and other tips about possible threats are down significantly this year. Baur says he worries that public scrutiny has created "a huge chilling effect" that could lead the military to miss legitimate terrorist threats.
The revelations about the database inclusions come from military documents released to the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act request. ACLU officials want the newly Democratic Congress to hold hearings about the Talon database. Lawyer Ben Wizner says the new documents suggest that the military's efforts to glean intelligence on protesters went beyond what was previously known. If intelligence officials "are going to be doing investigations or monitoring in a place where people gather to worship or to study, they should have a pretty clear indication that a crime has occurred," he says. Veterans for Peace director Michael McPherson, a former Army captain, says that he is skeptical of the military's claim that it has ended its collection of material on war protests. "I don't believe it," he says. The latest Talon documents show that the military used a variety of sources to collect intelligence leads on antiwar protests, including an agent in the Department of Homeland Security, Google searches on the Internet, and e-mail messages forwarded by apparent informants with ties to protest groups. In most cases, entries in the Talon database acknowledge that there was no specific evidence indicating the possibility of terrorism or disruptions at the antiwar events, but they warn of the potential for violence, even when no evidence of any possibility of violence exists. Of McPhearson's group, the database notes, "Veterans for Peace is a peaceful organization," but "there is the potential that future protests "could become violent." (New York Times)
November 20: Half a trillion dollars in spending bills are being left behind by the Republican leadership in Congress, who have decided to let these bills wait for the Democrats to work on passing them. Instead, Republicans are attempting to force the Democrats to spend valuable time and energy on the bills that they would otherwise use moving their own agenda forward. Resolving the thorny fiscal issues represented in the bills was problematic at best, and passage of all the bills would have been difficult in light of the deep divisions within the Republicans themselves. Instead, the Republican leaders have decided to duck the issues entirely, and intend to cut short the lame-duck session, ending the last session under Republican leadership on December 16 at the latest, and probably closer to December 8. The AP reports, "Driving the decision to quit and go home rather than finish the remaining budget work is a determined effort by a group of conservative Republicans to prevent putting a GOP stamp on spending bills covering 13 Cabinet Departments -- and loaded with thousands of homestate projects derided as "pork" by critics." Republicans like Senator Jim DeMint do not want the GOP stamp on the pork-laden spending bills currently awaiting passage. "The last thing Republicans need is an end-of-Congress spending spree as our last parting shot as we walk out the door," said DeMint spokesman Wesley Denton, not acknowledging that Republicans drafted the legislation for that spending spree. Instead, Republicans intend to work against the Democrats, who intend to come in working towards a raise in the minimum wage, negotiating lower drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries, cutting interest rates on college loans, and closing tax breaks for oil companies. "Other stuff may get pushed off the table," says GOP lobbyist Hazen Marshall, a former longtime Capitol Hill aide. "It kills [Democrats'] message." For their part, Democrats pledge not to overreach in their dealings with the president. "We're not going to send him veto bait," says House member David Obey, the incoming chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. "We're not that stupid." (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 20: Florida's Elections Canvassing Commission certifies Republican Vern Buchanan as the winner in the 13th House District; moments later, Democratic challenger Christine Jennings files a lawsuit asking a judge to either void Buchanan's victory or to rule for a new election to be held. The case hinges on more than 18,380 nonvotes, or so-called "undervotes," in Sarasota County, where numerous voters and poll workers complained the ATM-style touch-screen voting machines failed to register votes in the Jennings-Buchanan race. Others say the ballot in Sarasota County was so crowded and badly designed that they couldn't find the race to cast their votes. Jennings's lawsuit covers the commission, the Secretary of State's office, and Sarasota County. It demands a complete inspection of the Election Systems & Software iVotronic machines, the same type used in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ES&S and state and county officials say the machines work fine, but the Jennings team says otherwise. "There is a crisis of confidence in these machines," says Jennings' lawyer, Kendall Coffey, who represented Al Gore in the disputed 2000 elections. "It is absolutely certain something went terribly, terribly wrong." Coffey points out that the undervote rate in Sarasota of nearly 14% dwarfs the undervote rate in the other four counties comprising Congressional District 13, where the undervote rate ranged from 2.2%to 5.3%. Sarasota was the only county Jennings won. The congressional seat is now held by Republican Katherine Harris, who presided over the 2000 elections as secretary of state. And in echoes of that recount, Democrats are charging there was "disenfranchisement," while Republicans say Democrats are just being sore losers. Florida GOP spokesman Jeff Sadosky accuses Jennings of being too good to accept the verdict of the voters. House Democrat Allen Boyd of Florida says that the Democratic House leadership may end up getting involved. "Ultimately," he says, "the US House has the authority over who it seats."
Buchanan calls on Jennings to concede, and does so with the maximum amount of personal insult and innuendo he can muster. He accuses Jennings of bringing in "out-of-town" lawyers to help her contest the election, not noting that he himself has brought in a staff of high-priced Washington attorneys for his side. He says, "It's time for Christine Jennings to put the interest of the public before her own self-interest and concede this election;" the implication about Jennings is clear. He piles on to his earlier character assassination, saying, "I'm calling on Christine Jennings to stop listening to high priced lawyers and out of town special interest groups who have hijacked the process to advance their own agenda and to listen to the people of the 13th district." He is dismissive of the 18,000 undervotes, saying, "Much has been made of the 18,000 undervotes. The machines were tested, re-tested and certified by the state. There's no evidence for malfunction," and then hurling a veiled accusation that the entire voting debacle in Sarasota County is an attempt to target him: "Before the polls closed on election day, the lawyers and special interest groups had mounted a deliberate and shameful attempt to erode voter confidence in the outcome of this election.... Which shows the blatant disrespect for the voters and a disregard for the electorial process." Experience with this kind of voter fraud in Florida leads one to believe that the more the Republicans hurl this kind of accusation, the more guilty they are of some sort of complicity in real election fraud. (Miami Herald, BradBlog)
November 20: Former Attorney General Janet Reno and seven other former Justice Department officials file court papers arguing that the Bush administration is setting a dangerous precedent by trying a suspected terrorist outside the court system. Until now, Reno has refrained from speaking out either for or against the Bush administration's policies on terrorism detainees; her decision to lead the group of former DoJ officials in filing court papers against the policies underscores just how strongly she and her fellows believe the policies need to be opposed. It is almost unprecedented for a former attorney general to file court papers challenging administration policy. Currently, suspected al-Qaeda sleeper agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is the only detainee being held in the United States, at least officially. The former prosecutors are challenging the Justice Department's right to bring al-Marri before a military commission. Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was arrested in 2001 while studying in the United States. He had faced criminal charges until authorities designated him an enemy combatant and ordered him held at a naval base in South Carolina. He has never been charged with a crime, and has had extremely limited contact with family members or lawyers. The Justice Department said in court papers last week that a new anti-terrorism law strips detainees such as al-Marri of the right to challenge their imprisonment in court. "The government is essentially asserting the right to hold putative enemy combatants arrested in the United States indefinitely whenever it decides not to prosecute those people criminally -- perhaps because it would be too difficult to obtain a conviction, perhaps because a motion to suppress evidence would raise embarrassing facts about the government's conduct, or perhaps for other reasons," says the papers filed by Reno and the other DoJ officials. Some of the eight attorneys named in the document are now in private practice and represent detainees at the military base in Guantanamo Bay. Most served under Clinton, though the list includes former US Attorneys Thomas Dillard and Anton Valukas, who served under Reagan. "The existing criminal justice system is more than up to the task of prosecuting and bringing to justice those who plan or attempt terrorist acts within the United States -- without sacrificing any of the rights and protections that have been the hallmarks of the American legal system for more than 200 years," reads the court filing.
The al-Marri case is before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, and is one of three appeals court cases that will help determine the scope of the new Military Commissions Act. The MCA allows the CIA to use tough, but undefined, interrogation techniques and says detainees may not use civilian courts to challenge their imprisonment. Human rights groups have challenged the law. The former prosecutors write that they worry the government will increasingly use the law to avoid criminal trials "and the rights associated with them, such as the defendant's right to counsel and the government's obligation to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." In contrast, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently said that detainees are afforded more rights than the law requires. "What is extraordinary, in other words, is how much -- not how little -- our law protects enemy combatants," he said last week. (AP/San Antonio Express-News)
November 20: Democratic senator Barack Obama, who is contemplating a run for the presidency, calls for a "gradual and substantial" reduction of US forces from Iraq that would begin in four to six months. Obama envisions a flexible timetable for withdrawal linked to conditions on the ground in Iraq and based on the advice of US commanders. He also calls for intensified efforts to train Iraqi security forces, US aid packages tied to Iraqi progress in reducing sectarian violence and new diplomacy with Syria and Iran. "I believe that it remains possible to salvage an acceptable outcome to this long and misguided war," he says, "but I have to be honest today, it will not be easy. For the fact is that there are no good options left in this war." Obama's ideas for a phased withdrawal and redeployment are not new, and in fact have already been stated by many other Democrats. But Obama, unlike many Senate and House Democrats, did not vote to give Bush the authority to use military force against Saddam Hussein in 2002 -- he was not in the Senate at the time. Adding to his credibility on the war, Obama made it very clear in 2002 that he was staunchly against the war effort. Many potential Democratic presidential candidates, including presumptive frontrunners Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, have mixed stances on the war, and are vulnerable to accusations of "flip-flopping," the charge that was so successfully used against Kerry in 2004. The results of this month's elections, says Obama, represents a repudiation of Bush's policies. However, he worries that the war is sparking an increasing sense of isolationism among Americans that is risky in a post-9/11 world. "We can't afford to be a country of isolationists in the 21st century," he says, arguing that it is "absolutely vital that we maintain a strong and active foreign policy, relentless in pursuing our enemies and hopeful in promoting our values around the world." He proposes redeploying troops to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and to other countries in the region, and says the US should bolster troop strength in Afghanistan, "where our lack of focus and commitment of resources has led to an increasing deterioration of the security situation there." Of Iraq, he says that the US must "send a clear message to the Iraqi factions that the United States is not going to hold together this country indefinitely -- that it will be up to them to form a viable government that can effectively run and secure Iraq." Obama says that the war has underscored one lesson: "We should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force." (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 20: Without any fanfare, Larry Hanauer, the Democratic aide on the House Intelligence Committee whose clearance was yanked because he was suspected of leaking the Iraq NIE, has his clearance restored by House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, a Republican. According to the Washington insider publication Roll Call, the reinstatement "essentially clear[s] the aide of accusations that he leaked a sensitive report on the Iraq War to the New York Times." Hoekstra had stripped Hanauer of his access based on remarkably thin evidence -- that Hanauer requested a copy of the Iraq National Intelligence Estimate shortly before the Times reported on the NIE's findings. The article itself cleared Hanauer, stating that details of the report came from a number of intelligence professionals with whom the reporters had been speaking for weeks. Republican representative Ray LaHood admitted after Hanauer's clearance was yanked that Hanauer was demoted as payback for the Democrats having released, over Hoekstra's objections, a report on convicted Republican House member Randall Cunningham's criminal misdeeds. Hanauer's lawyer, Jonathan Turley, says, "It is regrettable that it took this long given the total absence of any evidence linking Larry to the New York Times articles. As we stated at the outset of this controversy, Larry was not and could not have been the source for the New York Times story. As a result of his name and private telephone number being leaked to the media, Larry has now been the subject of horrible and reprehensible threats. I hope that the total vindication of Larry will now restore his good name and standing as a professional staff member." (Roll Call/TPM Muckraker)

November 21: Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke writes an op-ed for the publication New Republic entitled "Admit It's Over." In essence, Clarke is asking the Bush administration to accept that Iraq is a no-win situation, and the best path forward is to withdraw with as much grace as the US can muster. Clarke notes that the longer the US stays, the more destabilized the country becomes. "Our efforts, then, are merely postponing the day when Iraqis find their way to something approaching normalcy," Clarke writes. "Only withdrawal offers a realistic path forward." Clarke says that "the most troublesome...argument [for remaining in Iraq is] that we must honor the American dead by staying until we can build something worthy of their sacrifice. Stripped of its emotional tones, this argument is, in economic analysis, an appeal to sunk cost. An MIT professor once promised to fail me if I ever justified actions based on sunk cost -- so I learned that what is gone is gone, and what is left we should conserve, cherish, and employ wisely." Honoring the dead by swelling their ranks in a futile cause is no honor, and gains the US nothing. Clarke also answers the assertion that if the US leaves, chaos will break loose in Iraq. "The flaw lies not in the concept that chaos will happen, but rather in thinking that chaos will only happen if we withdraw in the near-term. Chaos will almost certainly follow any US withdrawal, whether in 2008 or 2012." Clarke addresses the argument that to stay longer would mitigate the extent of the chaos: "[H]ow can we have strong confidence in such a prediction -- which assumes that more time means progress -- when the United States and Iraq have produced so little in the way of progress thus far? Even granting that chaos after a 2008 pullout may be worse than what would follow a 2012 withdrawal, is the difference between those two levels of disaster worth the cost? This cost comes in American dead and wounded, Iraqi dead and wounded, billions of dollars in military expenditures, the continued damage to US influence in the world, and the further strengthening of radical Islamist terrorists everywhere. We cannot have high confidence that the cost is worth whatever improvement there would be in the two levels of post-withdrawal chaos."
So what about emboldening al-Qaeda by our withdrawal? He addresses that simply enough: "[A]re we to conclude that, if we make a mistake, we should continue to make it lest our enemies gloat? Al-Qaeda is already sufficiently emboldened. The additional motivation it will derive from seeing US forces leave Iraq cannot be accurately measured and is likely to be inconsequential." As for the assumption that al-Qaeda will turn Iraq into a terrorist base if we leave, the harsh reality is that Iraq is already a haven for terrorists, "and we are providing the targets in the shooting gallery." Withdrawal of our occupying troops does not mean that the US cannot take action in Iraq in the future, says Clarke. The US could use intelligence capabilities, Special Forces, and air strikes, mostly based in Kuwait, to continue pursuing the terrorists in Iraq. And, notes Clarke, "the Iraqis themselves may rid the country of al-Qaeda once that becomes their responsibility. Already, Sunni groups opposed to the US presence are taking action against al-Qaeda.
Clarke says to ensure that Iraq does not indeed become a haven for terrorists, and does not destabilize the region, the Bush administration needs to announce a reduction in US forces in Iraq beginning in December and concluding with full withdrawal in the summer of 2008. It needs to declare that it has no interest in building permanent military bases in Iraq. It needs to gain permission from Kuwait to station additional combat units in that country to create what Clarke calls an "over the horizon" capability to deal with terrorists in Iraq. Training for Iraqi army and security forces needs to accelerate. The US needs to work with its regional allies to create an enhanced covert action capacity to combat Iraq-based terrorism. Reconstruction efforts need to speed up, or at least begin in earnest. Lastly, a regional process to guarantee the stability of Iraq, inviting Iran, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and the Gulf countries to join, must be convened.
Clarke writes, "Are there problems with this plan? Of course. But our current approach -- maintaining that we can fix Iraq if we just try a bit harder -- is likely more seriously flawed and more costly than the alternative. Still, President Bush insists on staying in Iraq, and it is easy to understand why. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman documented repeated instances when leaders persisted in disastrous policies well after they knew that success was no longer an available outcome. They did so because the personal consequences of admitting failure would be very high. So they postponed the disastrous end to their policy adventures, hoping for a deus ex machina or to eventually shift the blame. There is no need to do that now. Everyone already knows who is to blame. It is time to stop the adventure, lower our sights, and focus on America's core interests. And that means withdrawal of major combat units." (The New Republic)
November 21: Several still-undecided House races are clearing up. In New Mexico, Republican Heather Wilson wins the 1st District seat from challenger Patricia Madrid after Madrid decides against asking for a recount. Wilson's final tally shows her with a scant 875-vote margin of over 210,000 votes cast. Another Republican, Jean Schmidt, clinches her seat after additional ballot counts give her a slender but insurmountable lead over challenger Victoria Wulsin. State Democratic Party Chairman John Wertheim has accused Republicans of "systematic vote suppression" in New Mexico, a reference to accusations that Republicans called Democratic voters and gave them erroneous polling information. (New Mexico was also victimized by systematic, GOP-led voter suppression in 2004; see the 2004 election and the November 2004 pages of this site.) Several other House races remain unresolved, with NC-08 going into recount and FL-13 going to court. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 21: The New Hampshire Democratic Party says the state and national Republican committees should pay it $4.1 million in damages for an illegal get-out-the-vote phone-jamming operation on Election Day 2002. The Republicans call the figure untenable and say their admitted two-hour disruption of 13 Democratic telephone lines should cost them no more than $4,974, the costs of rental and service for the affected telephones. But the Democrats want the Republicans to pay nearly half of the "value" of their entire get-out-the-vote effort from April 1 to Election Day. They say the phone-jam disrupted the operation at the crucial time that the product of seven months of incurred costs was being mobilized. Superior Court Judge Philip Mangones will decide which side prevails as the two-year-old civil case moves toward a scheduled December 4 trial date with competing expert testimony and much legal maneuvering.
The case has already seen a number of convictions, including the former chairman of the Republican State Committee, Charles McGee, a national GOP operative, and the former owner of the telemarketing firm hired by the New Hampshire GOP to disrupt the Democrats' efforts. The phone jam may have cost Democrat Jeanne Shaheen her chance to defeat Republican John Sununu in the hotly contested 2002 Senate election. The Democrats filed a civil suit against the state GOP in 2004 and later added defendants, including the Republican National Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee. In June, the judge dismissed five of the eight Democratic allegations, including a charge that the phone-jam denied New Hampshire residents their constitutional right to vote. The judge preserved a Democratic "trespass to chattels (items of property)"Republicans intentionally and repeatedly interfered with the Democrats' lawful use of their telephone systems. The Republicans are asking the judge to exclude from the trial any evidence of damages beyond the telephone system. The Democrats counter that if the judge limits damage to the loss of telephone use, they would be prevented from presenting testimony showing the phone-jam to be a "catastrophic sabotage" with a broad impact.
"The appropriate measure of damages in this case is for the court to look at the scope of the harm suffered as a result of the trespass and then compute what it would have cost the plaintiff (Democratic Party) to repair the damage," a Democratic attorney wrote. "The best way to calculate the loss is to look at what the (Democratic Party) spent to set up its get-out-the-vote operations on election day and then determine the loss." According to expert testimony from Temple University professor Kevin Arceneaux, the Democrats spent $9.3 million on "field-related activities" from April 1, 2002 to election day. He reported that the phone-jam "derailed their plan and vitiated the NHDP's ability to carry out a full and complete Election Day get-out-the-vote." Arceneaux reasoned that the Democrats lost "four hours (or 44.4 percent) of get-out-the-vote work during the crucial nine-hour window" of 7 AM to 4 PM. He then assessed the damages at 44.4 percent of the entire $9.3 million get-out-the-vote cost and arrived at $4,143,077. Republicans have challenged Arceneaux's testimony. (New Hampshire Union Leader)
November 21: Like many newly elected Congressional Democrats, Senator-elect Jim Webb of Virginia is quick to correct the media's wishfully incorrect labeling of him as a "conservative Democrat." Webb, like most of the newly elected Democratic senators and representatives, is an economic populist. Some of the new Democratic officeholders are conservative on some social issues, including Webb and his new Senate colleague, Bob Casey, who is against abortion rights, but Webb, Casey, Jon Tester, and many other newly elected Democrats have similar beliefs about economic inequality in America. In a November 8 interview with NPR, he resisted the attempts of the interviewer to paint him as a conservative who got elected by running against the war in Iraq. "I decided to run because of my concern...with the economic breakdown that's happened in this country along class lines," he said. "There are huge income inequalities...that we haven't seen since the 1880s. And wages and salaries...are at an all-time low as a percentage of wealth." According to Nation writer Christopher Hayes, "...Webb is not an anomaly. He's part of a broader trend that has been obscured by the fast-congealing conventional wisdom that the election results were driven chiefly by the ongoing disaster in Iraq. If you drill down a little into those results, it's clear that Iraq and Republican scandal can't account for all the Democratic victory. Consider the Democrats' success at the state level. The party picked up six governors, nine legislative chambers and more than 300 state legislative seats, none of which can plausibly be ascribed to discontent over Iraq. As Webb suggests, the hidden story of the election was the appeal of economic populism in a country whose middle class is increasingly feeling the squeeze. Coast to coast, Democrats running for local and national office campaigned on raising the minimum wage, repealing welfare for Big Oil and opposing trade deals lacking protection for workers and the environment, and their message resonated with an electorate anxious about the economy. Half of all voters rated the economy not good or poor, and a full 69% said their family's economic situation had either gotten worse or stayed the same since the last election. Democrats won both these groups by wide margins."
The Republicans' last-ditch efforts to repaint themselves as economic populists failed, and may have backfired, reminding voters that Republicans are largely responsible for an economy where indicators like the GDP and unemployment figures seem rosy, but the reality for most middle- and lower-class working Americans is grim and getting grimmer. Exit polls showed that 39% of voters rated the economy as "extremely important," roughly the same percentage as those who said the same about Iraq and corruption, but Democrats won those voters by twenty points. Hayes writes, "This shouldn't be surprising. Despite relatively strong growth, manageable inflation, high corporate profits and a bullish stock market, real wages continue to stagnate, productivity gains continue to be captured by the wealthiest 1%, income inequality has continued to get worse and, as Jacob Hacker argues persuasively in The Great Risk Shift, America's middle class finds itself living with far more risk and income volatility than it did a generation ago.
Democrats finally began to plug into the overwhelming call for help -- the economic populism that shows actual caring and actual results for the all-but-forgotten middle and lower classes. "Fair trade" over unregulated, corporate-friendly "free trade" was a winner at the polls, as was opposition to corporate giveaways and corporate-driven corruption in Congress and in state houses across the nation. Hayes writes, "Even the Democratic Leadership Council, the most outspoken opponent of economic populism, has begun to come around. In 1995 Roll Call reported that 'DLC officials think that, if Clinton calls for a minimum-wage increase in the State of the Union...it could wreak the same political damage as his 1993 vow to veto any healthcare bill that did not provide universal coverage.' By this election, the DLC was firmly behind an increase in the minimum wage."
Hayes believes that broad Democratic support for a raise in the minimum wage "just might have been Tuesday night's most underreported story." The six states with ballot initiatives for a raise in the state minimum wages saw all six pass, many with overwhelming margins (Montana, 73%, Missouri 76%, for example). "Consider that the much-publicized stem-cell-research initiative passed in Missouri by only a few percentage points. That means hundreds of thousands pulled the lever for an increased minimum wage and against funding for stem-cell research," Hayes writes, and notes that conservative-backed economic initiatives on three states, ballot referendums in Maine, Nebraska, and Oregon modeled on the Grover Norquist-based Taxpayer Bill of Rights that would severely limit the growth in state government taxing, all failed. The Reverend Paul Sherry of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign says that the issue of the minimum wage brings together people across many political lines. "I do a lot of speaking around the country, and when I say that a person working at $5.15 an hour full time makes $10,710 a year, you can see people's eyes light up as they begin to think of their own circumstances."
Of course the media is doing its level best to paint the crop of new Democrats as conservatives, giving anecdotal evidence -- senator-elect Jon Tester's A rating from the NRA, Bob Casey's opposition to abortion choice and, most loudly, Heath Shuler, who defeated incumbent Charles Taylor in North Carolina's 11th District while opposing abortion, gay rights and a guest-worker program for immigrants. What the pundits glossed over was the role in Shuler's victory of the district's opposition to "free trade" deals. The area's textile industry has been gutted by NAFTA, so when it came time to vote on CAFTA, Taylor was caught between his district, which wanted him to vote no, and the GOP House leadership, which wanted him to vote yes. So he skipped the vote altogether and CAFTA passed by one vote. Taylor paid for his weaselry, with Shuler hammering him for "selling out American families." A postelection analysis by Public Citizen found that campaigns cut 25 ads attacking free-trade deals, and that trade played a significant role in more than a dozen House races won by Democrats, including Shuler. In the entire election, the organization noted, "no incumbent fair trader was beaten by a 'free trader.'" Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division, says, "Democrats have coalesced in favor of trade policy reform over the past decade as President Bill Clinton's NAFTA, WTO and China trade deals not only failed to deliver the promised benefits but caused real damage.
Senator-elect Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a House Democrat who thrashed incumbent Mike DeWine to move up to the more exclusive chamber of Congress, ran in what conservative commentator David Brooks called "the most important political race in the country," because as a "full-bore economic populist" Brown represented the most "vibrant strain" of the Democratic Party. Brown is a down-the-line progressive: a supporter of gay rights, abortion rights and civil rights who voted against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act (though, disappointingly, for the Military Commissions Act during the campaign). Brown managed to shrug off the efforts by DeWine and the national GOP organizations to tar him as just another "tax-and-spend liberal" by focusing on a simple economic populist message: "fighting for the middle class," as his campaign manager John Ryan put it. Ryan says that even when DeWine attempted to change the topic or attack Brown, the campaign spent 50% of its airtime in TV ads responding to the charge "and 50% of Sherrod looking onscreen with a working-class message and a middle-class message." Hayes writes, "The race came down to the have-nots outnumbering the haves: 37% of voters rated the economy excellent or good, and DeWine won their vote by 44 points. But 62% rated the economy not good or poor, and Brown won those voters by almost 50 points.
Hayes writes, "Brown's successful populism and that of other Democrats hasn't gone unnoticed. Commentators have raised the specter of the rise of a 'Lou Dobbs'-like wing of the party whose economic arguments are inextricably linked to a racialized nationalism, the kind of populism that's equally comfortable bashing corporations that outsource jobs and 'illegal aliens' who take away Americans' jobs here at home, and whose opposition to the Iraq War, like Pat Buchanan's, is rooted in an America-first isolationism. To be sure, economic populism has a dark side. It's a fine line between railing against corporate-written trade deals because they hurt workers the world over, and scapegoating the brown-skinned Other who is stealing our jobs. Democrats haven't always walked this line carefully: There was more than a whiff of demagoguery in John Kerry's nomination acceptance speech about 'closing firehouses in America' while opening them in Baghdad (why shouldn't Iraqis have firehouses?). That subtext ran through many Democrats' ads in this past cycle, as they rushed to declare their opposition to 'amnesty,' a word as racially loaded today as 'quotas' was in the 1980s. Heath Shuler's ads attacking his opponent for 'selling out our families' also ridiculed him for voting to set up a scholarship for Russian students (the horror!), while pledging that he would 'put American families first.' Even Sherrod Brown talked in television ads about the need for 'tighter borders.'"
Hayes calls populism "the left's perennial dilemma: Populism is a fundamentally majoritarian mode of politics -- the have-nots versus the haves, the many versus the few -- but a central part of the left's most noble tradition is protecting the rights and interests of minorities. Yet if there's going to be a center-left majority in this country, its electoral strength is going to rest on a coalition bound by a shared interest in economic justice." It won't be easy to build that coalition, nor to make it last. Voters want the corporations to be brought to heel, but the new infusions of corporate cash into the Democratic Party will provide a strong temptation to let their new corporate friends continue to slide. And continued growth for the Democrats rest largely with an increasing Latino population and a more socially liberal youth movement, two groups almost guaranteed to come into conflict over issues. Hayes writes that Democratic leaders can have some success by, among other things, making sure that socially conservative members never get a chance to alienate their more populist base by casting votes against abortion or on marriage amendments -- never let the issues come to a vote and no one can cast a potentially crippling vote for or against it. It will take real party discipline, not the least of which involves preventing socially conservative Dems from defecting on key issues like stem-cell funding, choice, abstinence education and immigration.
Incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi's "first 100 hours" agenda focuses on broadly popular, mainstream, progressive bills that will economically benefit many Democratic constituencies: a raise in the minimum wage, which would greatly benefit blacks, Latinos and single women; a cut in interest rates for student loans, which would benefit young voters; and bulk negotiation of Medicare prescription drugs, which would benefit the elderly. "The Republicans are here to concentrate the wealth of our country in the top 1%, and all the power that comes with that is at the expense of the middle class and those striving to be in the middle class -- and that's just plain wrong," she recently said. "That's why we need to get a progressive economic agenda out there. As long as I get my caucus organized around that, that's more important to me than having a checklist." (Nation)
November 21: 14 senators send a letter to Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt, urging the administration to withdraw its appointment of Dr. Eric Keroack as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Population Affairs. Keroack, whose "junk science" approach to his promotion of abstinence-only sexual education and counseling is detailed above, will control Title X funding that takes care of family planning and health screening services for millions of low-income Americans. The letter to Secretary Leavitt is signed by Senators Patty Murray, Edward Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Tom Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Harry Reid, Patrick Leahy, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Frank Lautenberg, Barack Obama, and Robert Menendez. The letter reads in part, "Given Dr. Keroack's ideological record on Title X services, we urge you to withdraw this appointment and select a Deputy Assistant Secretary who will vigorously administer Title X as intended by Congress under current law." Keroack, a member of the Medical Advisory Council of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, also serves as the medical director for five crisis pregnancy centers which are officially opposed to any form of contraception and has been involved in organizations whose materials the nonpartisan General Accounting Office (GAO) has found to be medically inaccurate and lacking scientific credibility. "Unfortunately, this appointment is another example of the administration allowing ideology to trump science, and it could jeopardize vital services on which large numbers of women and families depend," the letter says. (Edward Kennedy)
November 21: Former president George H.W. Bush angrily defends his son's unpopular policies and character during a testy exchange at a leadership conference in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi. "My son is an honest man," he snaps as members of the audience vent their harsh criticism of the younger Bush's foreign policy. "We do not respect your son. We do not respect what he's doing all over the world," says a woman in the audience. Bush seems stunned, as audience members whoop and whistle in approval. A college student tells Bush his belief that US wars are aimed at opening markets for American companies and says globalization is contrived for America's benefit at the expense of the rest of the world. In return, Bush insults the student: "I think that's weird and it's nuts. To suggest that everything we do is because we're hungry for money, I think that's crazy. I think you need to go back to school." The hostility from the audience is triggered by Bush's emotional defense of his son, and his discussion of how criticism of his son hurts him. "This son is not going to back away," Bush says during his address, his voice quivering. "He's not going to change his view because some poll says this or some poll says that, or some heartfelt comments from the lady who feels deeply in her heart about something. You can't be president of the United States and conduct yourself if you're going to cut and run. This is going to work out in Iraq. I understand the anxiety. It's not easy. ...When your son's under attack, it hurts. You're determined to be at his side and help him any way you possibly can." He refuses to discuss what advice, if any, he gives the younger Bush on Iraq or anything else. Overall, Bush says he is surprised that anyone in the audience would be critical of his son. "He is working hard for peace," he avers. "It takes a lot of guts to get up and tell a father about his son in those terms when I just told you the thing that matters in my heart is my family. ...How come everybody wants to come to the United States if the United States is so bad?" Obviously the audience members have a different view of both US policy in Iraq, and of the younger Bush. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 21: Republican House member Tom Tancredo leads some to question his sanity after he warns Americans that the Bush administration intends to integrate the US with Canada and Mexico into one huge nation under US control. Tancredo, a rabid anti-immigration conservative, says that Bush is a dangerous internationalist who "is going to do what he can to create a place where the idea of America is just that, it's an idea. It's not an actual place defined by borders. I mean this is where the guy is really going." Tancredo makes his remarks to the equally extremist news Web site WorldNetDaily. "I know this is dramatic, or maybe somebody would say overly dramatic. But I'm telling you that everything I see leads me to believe that this whole idea of the North American union, it's not something that's just written about by right-wing fringe kooks. It is something in the head of the president of the United States, the president of Mexico, I think the prime minister of Canada buys into it...." Tancredo then tells a Fox News interviewer that the borders between the three countries will lose all their significance, serving merely as "speed bumps" in the flow of goods, services and people. In October, Tancredo demanded the United States suspend work on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) signed last year by Canada, Mexico and the United States until Congress examines its goals and agreements, which include standardizing regulations and dismantling other barriers to trade. The deal to collaborate on a wide range of trade and security issues is part of a larger plot to merge the countries in a European Union-like arrangement using a common currency, he says, with no oversight from legislators. Tancredo wants to deport every undocumented worker in the United States, a proposal that would cost at least $200 billion, and has called for halting all immigration, legal or otherwise. (Canadian Press)

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

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 Three

Iraq already engulfed in civil war; problem now is to keep war from involving other countries

Bush plans to increase US military presence in Iraq

Ex-spy claims US duped into war with Iraq by tortured al-Qaeda prisoner

Slide from Keroack's 2003 presentation about oxytocin

Kissinger says military victory in Iraq not possible

Bush gives tacit approval for Israel to attack Iran

Administration still intent on cobbling up evidence to justify invading Iran

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