November 2006: Week Four: This Far and No Further

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November 22: Iraq's best doctors are fleeing the country in fear for their lives, leaving hospitals in the hands of medical students or junior physicians, says Iraqi lawmaker Dr. Rajaa al-Khuzai, an obstetrician and member of the Iraqi National Council. Doctors "have been targeted since the fall of the regime," she says. "Some of them have been kidnapped and found dead in the streets, some have been released after paying a ransom." Those who can afford it make their way to the United Arab Emirates or to Jordan, and those who aren't as well off head to Kurdistan, she says. Compounding the problem for Iraqi patients is a long-term, critical shortage of medicines and equipment. "We were promised, or we believed, that we would have many new hospitals being built, and many health centers...but none of this has been done," she says. "No hospitals have been built so far; only some of the hospitals have been serviced. So if you want to see a good ophthalmologist in Baghdad, you'll never find one. If you want a good gynecologist...you'll never find one. The health services are very bad." She estimates that cancer cases have increased fivefold since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, and says there is a shortage of medicines to treat patients. "We believe that allied forces at that time used depleted uranium because most of these cancer cases [are] found in the southern part of Iraq, which was close to Kuwait," she says. Breast cancer and leukemia cases have increased most dramatically. Al-Khuzai is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and the founder of a World Bank-sponsored project to help Iraqi widows. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 22: An analysis of the 18,000 undervotes cast in the FL-13 House race between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican incumbent Vern Buchanan shows that the voters whose votes were not registered in the House race overwhelmingly voted Democratic in other key state races. If that trend applied to the House race, Jennings would have earned far more than enough votes to defeat Buchanan. On November 20, Buchanan was certified the victor in that race, winning by a tiny margin of 369 votes; Jennings is challenging the results in court and demanding that the voting machines that caused the undervote be examined by independent experts. Of the undervote analysis, performed by the Orlando Sentinel, University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato says, "Wow. That's very suggestive -- I'd even say strongly suggestive -- that if there had been votes recorded, she [Jennings] would have won that House seat." David Dill, an electronic-voting expert at Stanford University, says, "It seems to establish with certainty that more Democrats are represented in those undervoted ballots." The Sentinel reviewed records of 17,846 touch-screen ballots that included no vote in the tightly contested 13th District congressional race to determine whom voters selected in other major races. The analysis of the so-called "undervotes" examined the races for U.S. Senate, governor, attorney general, chief financial officer and agriculture commissioner. The results show that the undervoted ballots skewed Democratic in all of those races, even in the three races in which the county as a whole went Republican. In the governor's race, for example, Republican Charlie Crist won handily in Sarasota, easily beating Democrat Jim Davis. But on the undervoted ballots, Davis finished ahead by almost 7 percentage points. The analysis cannot reveal why no congressional choice was recorded on the ballots. It also cannot determine which candidate any single voter might have selected had he or she made a choice. But the strong performance of other Democrats indicates Jennings would have found a sizable number of supporters within the group. "If votes were actually lost," Dill says, "it appears those votes would have favored the Democrat." Jennings spokesman David Kochman says the results of the analysis are consistent with what the Democrats have been saying all along. "That reflects what we've seen anecdotally," he says. "The overwhelming majority of reports of voters having problems say they were trying to vote for Christine Jennings. It's nearly unanimous."
Jennings's attorney, Kendall Coffey, is trying to get the case heard and possibly decided before January 3, when the newly elected House members take their seats. He views the case as a possible "test case" of electronic voting machines, saying, "These questions about the reliability of these computerized voting systems are asked not just here but throughout the country. This is indeed potentially a test case for the nation." Meanwhile, Buchanan is accusing Jennings of allowing herself to be manipulated by what his spokespeople call "liberal third-party groups" in mounting the challenge. (Orlando Sentinel)
November 22: Hearst columnist Marianne Means writes that, for Bush, even paying lip service to the ideas of civility and bipartisanship have proven too much. She writes, "President Bush's political fortunes have changed for the worst, but he himself is announcing that he hasn't changed a bit. He still hates not getting his own way on everything." After announcing his heartfelt desire to work with Democrats, he comes out with a spate of actions guaranteed to make his religious right base tingly with anticipation, but equally guaranteed to further anger and alienate the Democrats he professes to want to cooperate with. "This is the new civility in the nation's capital?" Means asks. "Bush has had it pretty much the way he wanted things for six years; you'd think he would be wondering what hit him. The word hasn't gotten through his isolation bubble, apparently. Or Karl Rove has not told him yet. Reports are that Rove is still defending his strategy of sticking to the so-called base of mostly Southern far-right extremists, who didn't deliver very well this November. Maybe it's time for the president to look beyond the bubble." Means wants to know why his first move was to thumb the Democrats in the eye by re-nominating a group of judicial nominees already rejected as too conservative and unqualified by the current Senate. "This was no accident," she notes. "Why did he do it?" Senate Judiciary Committee member Charles Schumer has announced that the judges' nominations, all of them, are DOA -- "The days of hard-right judges" are over, he says. Schumer said. Schumer's fellow Democrat, Patrick Leahy, who will head the committee, adds, "Barely a week after the president promised to change course by working in a bipartisan and cooperative way with Congress, it is disappointing that he has decided to 'stay the course' on judicial nominees by renominating a slate of his most controversial past choices." If Bush wants to build resistance and gridlock in Congress, he's doing a bang-up job. Means lists some of the nominees, and shows quickly why each is guaranteed to garner opposition among Democrats.
- William Haynes II, a one-time lawyer for the Pentagon who helped formulate the administration's torture and enemy combatant policies that have redefined normal understanding of civil liberties.
- Terrence Boyle, a former aide to Republican senator Jesse Helms, has a record of racial insensitivity.
- Michael Wallace, a former adviser to Republican senator Trent Lott, built a GOP-promoted legal case for letting Bob Jones University keep its tax-exempt status despite its open discrimination on the basis of race. He also got a "not qualified" rating from the American Bar Association.
- Peter Keisler is a nominee for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. "When President Bill Clinton tried to fill that empty slot, Republican senators blocked him on the grounds that the court didn't need another judge," she writes. "This is a pretty bad double standard statement for Bush to make."
But Bush hasn't stopped with judiciary nominees. He has nominated Andrew Biggs, an advocate of privatizing Social Security, to a six-year term as the next deputy commissioner of Social Security, despite the fact that Bush assigned Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to work with the next Congress to build a consensus on what to do with Social Security. Democrats have absolutely no intention to support privatization. Public opinion polls show that Americans hate the idea of putting the elderly at such risk for problematic gains in the unforeseeable future. "How can Paulson negotiate in good faith with a deputy committed to a policy that cannot pass?" she asks. Answer: he will not even try. And then there's the new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who is opposed to contraceptives for women. Eric Keroack (see item above) works at a Christian pregnancy counseling organization that calls the distribution of birth control pills "demeaning to women." He gets to advise the department on reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy, with $283 million in grants to provide "access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them." The appointment does not require Senate confirmation, so instead of taking the opportunity of appointing, not necessarily a pro-abortion deputy commissioner, but at least someone who can reach out to pro-choice Democrats, he appoints an extremist. And Bush is attempting, without success, to hang UN ambassador John Bolton around the nation's necks for another term, even though Bolton couldn't win approval in the Senate under Republican leaders and had to be given a recess appointment. Means asks, "Am I missing something here? Where's the good will and cooperation that Bush promised? It's the same old provocative, bossy attitude of the past six years. But it's not the same old rubber-stamp Republican terrain. If he wants partisan warfare, he'll get it. He's started it and now he's going to be stuck with it." (Florence Times-Daily)

November 23: The prospects of the US effectively negotiating with either Iran or Syria are complicated by a number of factors, including internal strife within James Baker's Iraq Study Group, obdurate opposition from Bush, and the recent assassination of a key Lebanese cabinet member. One of the leaders of the ISG says that the group is riven with internal strife, dissension, and partisanship, and worries that the group will not reach a consensus on the key issues faced by the group. Former Secretary of State James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen of the ISG, have said they want their recommendations, due next month, to come from a consensus of the prominent Republicans and Democrats in the group. Baker and Hamilton have both made it clear they favor a US dialogue with Iraq's neighbors, particularly Iran and Syria, as one way out of the Iraq crisis. This thinking reflects hopes that Iran could use its strong influence on Iraqi Shi'a and Syria its control over Iraq's most porous border to alleviate insurrection against the US occupation and the fighting between Shi'a and Sunnis. Some Bush advisors, including incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, are said to be supportive of the idea of negotiations with the two countries. Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to oppose any such move. Bush, as so often in the past, is siding with his hardline vice president over more pragmatic, practical voices. He recently said of Iran, "Our focus of this administration is to convince the Iranians to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.... And so we have made it very clear, our position regards Iran, and it hasn't changed." Accusations that Syria was behind Tuesday's assassination of Lebanese Christian cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel are expected to make an opening to Syria more difficult.
Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert who advised the Baker group, said that while she favors approaching Iran and Syria for help, the United States would have to make concessions to each country. "There is a price for that, and it is not clear to me the Bush administration is willing to pay it," she says. "The latest events in...[Lebanon] make this even more difficult." Another Iraq expert who advised the Baker group said there "has been a lot of fighting" among the expert advisers to the group, mainly between hardline, extremist neoconservatives and more conventional "cold warriors" who want to take a more pragmatic approach to the Middle East. The ISG has no real representation from any anti-war representatives. (Newsday)
November 23: The bank data transfer agency SWIFT broke European privacy laws by handing over personal data to US authorities for use in anti-terror investigations, says a report by a European Union review board. SWIFT, the Belgian-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, "committed violations of data protection laws" by secretly transferring data to the United States without properly informing Belgian authorities, says the EU's data protection panel. The report calls on SWIFT, financial institutions, and EU authorities to "take the necessary measures" to end the transfer, which contradicts Belgian and EU data protection rules. SWIFT is still transferring data under US subpoenas. EU spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen says, "SWIFT is expected as well as financial institutions to take the necessary steps immediately to remedy the present illegal infringement," and adds that the group will monitor the implementation of the recommendation by SWIFT, the European Common Bank, and other national banks which sit on SWIFT's oversight board. The data protection officers have been drafting their report since September and their conclusions come as no surprise following a similar finding by a Belgian commission, which was tasked by the Belgian government and the EU panel to investigate SWIFT's secret deal with the US Treasury. The European Commission, which could eventually launch a legal case against Belgium for failing to uphold EU data protection rules, has said it would await the final report of the EU data protection officers before deciding what action to take. The company routes about 11 million financial transactions daily between 7,800 banks and other financial institutions in 200 countries, recording customer names, account numbers and other identifying information. The transfer deal between the US Treasury and SWIFT was launched by Washington after the Sept. 9/11 attacks. The SWIFT case compounds legal and political clashes between Europe and the United States over anti-terror measures and highlights divisions over what lengths governments should go to in order to prevent attacks. SWIFT officials have argued that it had no choice but to abide by US subpoenas for bank data, saying that if it refused to hand over the information, it would have faced fines and possible criminal penalties like jail time. "It is disturbing that none of the involved parties is willing to take responsibility for the failure to protect the rights of EU citizens," says Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch Green member of the European Parliament. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 23: The huge Australian wheat exporting corporation AWB was apparently tipped off a year before the Iraqi invasion that Australia would join the US coalition, according to newly released documents. The documents show that Australian prime minister John Howard lied when he repeatedly stated that his administration had not decided to join the coalition, and assist in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, until after the invasion was debated in the UN in late 2002 and early 2003. Australians are demanding a reopening of the Cole inquiry into AWB's Iraq financial kickbacks, even though the final report is almost ready to be given to the government. The documents are released by the Cole inquiry, and show that Australia's then-ambassador to the UN, John Dauth, revealed the Howard government's position to former AWB chairman Trevor Flugge. Dauth briefed Flugge in New York in February 2002, 13 months before the invasion, and the details appear in minutes of AWB's February 27 board meeting tendered to the inquiry. "The ambassador stated that he believed that US military action to depose Saddam Hussein was inevitable and that at this time the Australian government would support and participate in such action," the minutes read. "The ambassador believed that the Iraqis grossly underestimated the US reaction to September 11 (with the consequent military response in Afghanistan) and that Iraq's request to renegotiate UN weapons inspectors was a direct result of their nervousness about US action. The ambassador believed that the latest olive branch from the Iraqis was likely to stave off US action (for) 12 to 18 months but that some military action was inevitable." According to the minutes, Dauth "undertook to ensure that AWB was given as much warning as would be possible under such circumstances but noted that in these instances often the Australian government had little notification." As opposition leader Kim Beazley says, the documents prove that the Howard government was prepared to take AWB into its confidence a year before going to war, but not the Australian people. The Cole inquiry, which is likely to recommend criminal charges against current and former AWB executives over the $290 million in illicit payments the company made to Iraq, should be allowed to continue with expanded terms of reference, says Beazley. (After Downing Street)
November 23: The House race between Republican incumbent Robin Hayes and Democratic challenger Larry Kissell in North Carolina's 8th District is getting ready to go into a manual recount. Hayes holds a slender 329-vote lead over Kissell. A count of provisional ballots and a machine recount narrowed Hayes's lead by around 150 votes. Kissell spokesman Steve Hudson said the recount uncovered ballots with arrows and punched holes that clearly indicated a candidate but had not previously been counted. "It kind of confirms what we've been observing, that there are still votes to be counted," he says. Kissell is a social-studies teacher who was given little chance to defeat the entrenched Hayes, but a strong grassroots and "netroots" candicacy, run on less than a quarter of the money raised by Hayes has brought Kissell within a hair's breadth of pulling perhaps the most stunning upset of all in this upset-ridden electoral season. (Congressional Quarterly/Yahoo! News)
November 23: The Vermont Supreme Court reverses the conviction of a 69-year old grandmother accused of disorderly conduct. The woman, Rosemarie Jackowski, had engaged in a silent protest of the Iraqi war in Bennington in 2003. In a 3-2 decision, the court agreed with Jackowski that, while she had intended to protest the war, she had not intended to disrupt traffic. In her criminal trial, Bennington County District Court Judge David Suntag had told jurors that they could find Jackowski guilty if they found she had known she would cause a traffic disruption. The Supreme Court rules that Suntag's instructions were erroneous. The Supreme Court opinion said the Vermont Legislature had acted in 1972 to distinguish among crimes committed purposely, when "it is [the] conscious object to engage in conduct of that nature or to cause such a result" and knowingly, when the defendant "is aware that it is practically certain that [the] conduct will cause such a result. It was therefore error for the trial court to charge the jury to consider whether defendant was 'practically certain' that her actions would cause public annoyance or inconvenience." The Supreme Court also agreed with Jackowski's legal claim that Suntag's instructions created a "directed verdict:" by following Suntag's instructions, the jury would be virtually required to return a guilty verdict, according to the opinion. It is possible that Jackowski could be retried on the same charges. In 2003, Jackowski was one of 12 people arrested for disorderly conduct for blocking traffic at an intersection. She was carrying a protest sign that showed an Iraqi child wounded in bombing raids conducted by United States forces. When a police officer told Jackowski she had to get out of the street or she would be arrested, she turned her sign toward him and said, "I am sorry but I can't and here's why." All of the people arrested at the protest were offered an opportunity to go through a diversion program which would keep them from having a criminal record but Jackowski, who spent two years in the US Air Force, refused to plead guilty. "I didn't think any of the 12 of us were guilty," she says. "I think everyone should stand up for what they believe." She adds, "My protest was really and truly one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I didn't do much, just stood in silence, but it was excruciatingly difficult to stand up to authority like that. Next time will be easier. ...I think everyone should be protesting until we get all of the soldiers home, all of them." (Rutland Herald/Vermont Times-Argus)
November 23: Democratic strategist and columnist David Sirota warns the new Democratic Congress of the pitfalls of what he calls "too much bipartisanship." He writes, "[W]ouldn't we all like to go back to that era that actually never occurred to frolick happily through the fields of bipartisanship that never existed[?]" But the siren song of bipartisanship is a treacherous one, he warns: "only a fool whose brain has rotted from Potomac Fever would actually believe that a country under severe economic distress in a neverending quagmire in Iraq walked into the ballot box and voted primarily on a desire to see Mitch McConnell hug Harry Reid." The real dichotomy in Washington is not Democrat vs. Republican, but "the Money Party" vs. "the People Party," and the people are at a steep disadvantage. "Look no further than votes on the bankruptcy bill, the energy bill, the class action bill, China PNTR and NAFTA to figure out which politicans who call themselves Republicans and Democrats actually belong to the Money Party and which politicians actually belong to the People Party," Sirota writes. "The Establishment pretends this paradigm doesn't exist -- they need the drama of Democrats vs. Republicans to sell newspapers, and more importantly, hiding the existence of the real power equation is in the interest of all the major for-profit corporations that own the media." Even the more progressive institutions and netroots organizations and blogs are sometimes guilty of perpetuating the illusion. "Sometimes its just easier to pretend that life is a cartoonish struggle between Blue and Red, with Blue always being Moral and Just, and Red always being Evil," he writes. "Other times, it is a matter of financial pressures -- some of the self-anointed progressive leaders and institutions in Washington are actually very much a part of the Money Party, both in terms of their funding and their ideology."
Sirota believes that the November elections were "a surge for the People Party, because so many candidates were elected on anti-Money Party themes (opposition to pay-to-play corruption, opposition to lobbyist-written trade pacts, etc.). This explains why in the election's aftermath we hear such repetitive calls for 'bipartisanship': they are really repetitive and not-so-hidden attempts to make sure the Money Party that includes both Republicans and Democrats remains dominant and that the election's mandate is ignored. The thing they really do not want is for the People Party to assert itself against the Money Party." Sirota adjures incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who talk about bipartisanship to remember the real partisan divide in Washington, and to use their power and position "to build coalitions of Republicans and Democrats to push the People Party's agenda. Because doing the opposite -- solidifying coalitions of Republicans and Democrats to continue pushing the Money Party's agenda -- is not the 'bipartisanship' this country wants or deserves. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, I would remind progressives that partisanship in the defense of regular people is no vice, and Washington's faux bipartisanship in the pursuit of selling out is no virtue." (Sirotablog)

November 24: Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are resubmitting dozens of demands for classified documents about the detention of terrorism suspects, the abuse of detainees, and secrets kept under wraps by the White House, demands that until now have either been rebuffed or ignored by the Justice Department and other executive branch agencies. "I expect real answers, or we'll have testimony under oath until we get them," says incoming committee chairman Patrick Leahy. "We're entitled to know these answers, and in many instances we don't get them because people are hiding their mistakes. And that's no excuse." Leahy says the Bush administration has been "obsessively secretive," but hopes the administration will be more cooperative in the future. Leahy's aides have identified more than 65 requests he has made to the Justice Department or other agencies in recent years that have been rejected or permitted to languish without reply. Other committee members are renewing demands for information about voter fraud, immigration issues, and background inquiries on Supreme Court nominees. Leahy has written a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding the release of two documents whose existence the Central Intelligence Agency, in response to a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union, recently acknowledged for the first time. Although their details are not known, the documents appear to have provided a legal basis for the CIA's detention and harsh interrogation of high-level terrorism suspects. One document is a directive, signed by Bush shortly after the 9/11 attacks, that granted the CIA authority to set up detention centers outside the United States and outlined allowable interrogation procedures. The second is a memorandum, written by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department in 2002, that is thought to have given the CIA specific legal advice about interrogation methods that would not violate a federal statute on torture.
With complicit, complacent Republicans in charge of Congress, the Bush administration and its various agencies could merely ignore requests from Congressional Democrats, which they did as a matter of course. Now, the two branches have the power of the subpoena to force compliance. Yet so far, little evidence has materialized that the Bush administration intends to be any more cooperative than it has been in the past. So far, Leahy has gotten no response from the Justice Department on his demand for the two documents in question, except for a statement from DoJ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse that stressed the need to protect "national security" and "the confidentiality of internal executive branch deliberations," the same reasons usually cited for refusal to comply with Congressional requests for information. The two documents requested by Leahy in his letter are among what Congressional aides maintain are perhaps hundreds, crucial to shaping the government's counterterrorism policies, that have never been released or publicly acknowledged. Justice Department officials have long said they will resist efforts to require disclosure of classified documents that provide legal advice to other agencies. But Leahy says he will not tolerate such stonewalling. He has requested of Gonzales "all directives, memoranda, and/or orders including any and all attachments to such documents, regarding CIA interrogation methods or policies for the treatment of detainees." He has also requested an index of all documents related to Justice Department inquiries into detainee abuse by "US military or civilian personnel in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib prison or elsewhere." It is doubtful that Gonzales will willingly release much of this information. "The American people," writes Leahy, "deserve to have detailed and accurate information about the role of the Bush administration in developing the interrogation policies and practices that have engendered such deep criticism around the world." (New York Times)
November 24: The administration's plans to construct a huge nuclear waste disposal facility at Nevada's Yucca Mountain seems dead, with Nevada senator Harry Reid becoming the new Democratic Majority Leader in the US Senate. Reid is a powerful opponent of the facility. He has already told the Nevada press that the Yucca Mountain facility is "dead right now." The dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas is, or was, planned as the first national repository for radioactive waste. It was slated to hold 77,000 tons of the material, both from commercial power plants reactors and defense sites across the nation, for thousands of years. About 50,000 tons of the waste is now stored in temporary sites at 65 power plants in 31 states. Reid would leave all of it in place. Originally targeted to open in 1998, Yucca Mountain has been repeatedly set back by lawsuits, money shortfalls and scientific controversies. The Energy Department's best-case opening date is now 2017. The effort to create a national storage site has already cost about $9 billion, $6.5 billion of which has been spent on Yucca. Four years ago, the Energy Department estimated the project would cost $58 billion to build and operate for the first 100 years. New cost projections are being worked up, and they are expected to total more than $70 billion. Reid intends to strangle any further funding for the facility. While he acknowledges that he himself cannot kill the facility -- such an action requires Congressional legislation and approval by Bush or his successor -- Reid says, "There's not much to kill." Some of the project's most persistent supporters have lost either their chairmanships, their seats, or both. Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici has been a vocal advocate for years; he'll be replaced by Jeff Bingaman, who supports Yucca Mountain but is viewed by Nevada officials as more open to their viewpoints. Senator Barbara Boxer, who will chair the Environment and Public Works Committee with authority over some aspects of the project, is a vocal Yucca Mountain opponent. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi worked unsuccessfully to corral opposition to the project in a crucial House vote four years ago, when she was minority whip. (AP/Yahoo! News)

November 25: Bush plans on meeting with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan, to discuss ways to bring other Arab nations to the negotiating table in efforts to stem the civil war in Iraq. Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney is in Saudi Arabia, discussing matters with King Abdullah behind closed doors. The US wants Saudi Arabia to use its influence with Iraq's Sunni minority to help stabilize the country. Bush and Maliki will discuss security in Iraq at their meeting, in what is shaping up to be a crisis summit. The meeting was chosen for Amman, not Baghdad, because security in Iraq is far too problematic. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other European leaders want Bush to take a more active role in reviving the Middle East peace process, in an attempt to resolve the festering problem between Israel and the displaced Palestinians, but Bush has so far avoided the hands-on approach to Middle East peacemaking of his predecessors. That may change as Bush turns increasingly for advice to figures from his father's administration like former Secretary of State James Baker who is leading a review on Iraq policy, some analysts believe. David Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says Bush's trip signals a recognition that stability in Iraq depended on a regional approach. "By going to Jordan to meet with Maliki, Bush is investing himself in a multilateral dialogue on the Middle East," Rothkopf says. The Bush administration is also seeking help from Arab allies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan in breaking a deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. "All of these issues of the Middle East are interrelated and you can't solve any of them without looking at others," says one Arab diplomat. So far Bush officials have resisted the idea of meeting with Iran and Syria over Iraq; one Western diplomat says Washington wants to counter the threat it sees from Iran and Syria by co-opting moderate Arab nations on both Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli issue. "They also want to allay regional fears that the United States is going to leave Iraq too soon. The big concern is about stability in the region," says the diplomat. Bush has given the responsbility of handling the Arab-Israeli conflict to his neoconservative Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, a longtime Israeli supporter. (Reuters)
November 25: The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified government report concludes. The report estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by "corrupt and complicit" Iraqi officials. As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments -- previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy -- paid $30 million in ransom last year. The report was recently leaked to the New York Times by US officials, who said the findings could improve understanding of the challenges the United States faces in Iraq. The report offers little hope that much can be done, at least soon, to choke off insurgent revenues. For one thing, it acknowledges how little the American authorities in Iraq know -- three and a half years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein -- about crucial aspects of insurgent operations. For another, it paints an almost despairing picture of the Iraqi government's ability, or willingness, to take steps to tamp down the insurgency's financing. "If accurate," the report says, its estimates indicate that these "sources of terrorist and insurgent finance within Iraq -- independent of foreign sources -- are currently sufficient to sustain the groups' existence and operation." It concludes, "In fact, if recent revenue and expense estimates are correct, terrorist and insurgent groups in Iraq may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside of Iraq." The report was completed in June 2006 by an interagency working group investigating the financing of militant groups inside Iraq, made up of officials from the CIA, FBI, DIA, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and US Central Command.
If the $200 million a year estimate is close to the mark, it amounts to less than what it costs the Pentagon, with an $8 billion monthly budget for Iraq, to sustain the American war effort here for a single day; however, other estimates suggest the sums involved could be far higher. The oil ministry in Baghdad, for example, estimated earlier this year that 10% to 30% of the $4 billion to $5 billion in fuel imported for public consumption in 2005 was smuggled back out of the country for resale. At that time, the finance minister estimated that close to half of all smuggling profits was going to insurgents. If true, that would be $200 million or more from fuel smuggling alone. Washington is perhaps most worried about the finding that the insurgency now survives off money generated from activities inside Iraq, and no longer depends on sums Saddam Hussein and his associates seized as his government collapsed. American officials said that as American troops entered Baghdad, Hussein's oldest son, Qusay, took more than $1 billion in cash from the Central Bank of Iraq and stashed it in steel trunks aboard a flatbed truck. Large sums of cash were found in Hussein's briefcase when he was captured in December 2003. The report says that Hussein's loyalists "are no longer a major source of funding for terrorist or insurgent groups in Iraq." Part of the reason, the report says, is that an American-led international effort has frozen $3.6 billion in "former regime assets." Another reason, it says, is that Hussein's erstwhile loyalists, realizing that "it is increasingly obvious that a Ba'athist regime will not regain power in Iraq," have turned increasingly to spending the money on their own living expenses. The trail to these assets "has grown cold," the report adds. Now, the pattern of insurgent financing has changed from the Hussein loyalists who funded it in 2003 to "foreign fighters and couriers" smuggling cash in bulk across Iraq's porous borders in 2004, to the present reliance on a complex array of indigenous sources. "Currently, we assess that these groups garner most of their funding from petroleum-related criminal activity, kidnapping and other criminal pursuits within Iraq," the report concludes.
The possibility that Iraq-based terrorist groups could finance attacks outside Iraq appears to echo Bush administration assertions that prevailing in the war here is essential to preventing Iraq from becoming a terrorist haven, as Afghanistan became under the Taliban. But that suggestion was one of several aspects of the report that is drawing criticism from Western terrorism and counterinsurgency experts working outside the government who were given the outline of the findings. While noting that the report appeared to reflect a major effort by the administration to learn more about the murky world of insurgent financing in Iraq, the experts said the seven-page document appeared to be speculative, at least in its estimates of the funds available to the insurgent and terror groups. They noted the wide spread of the estimates, particularly the $70 million to $200 million figure for overall financing, the report's failure to specify which groups the estimates covered and the absence of documentation of how authors had arrived at their estimates. While such data may have been omitted to protect the group's clandestine sources and methods -- the document is marked "secret" and warns that it should not be shared with foreign governments -- several security and intelligence consultants said in telephone interviews that the vagueness of the estimates reflected how little American intelligence agencies knew about the opaque and complex world of Iraq's militant groups. "They're just guessing," says Patrick Lang, a former chief of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency who now runs a security and intelligence consultancy. "They really have no idea." He adds, "They've been very unsuccessful in penetrating these organizations." As for the report's assertion that the insurgent and militant groups may have surpluses to finance terrorism outside Iraq, "That's another guess. ...A judgment like that, coming from an NSC-generated document," is not an analytical assessment as much as it is a political statement to support the administration's contention that Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism. "It's a statement put in there to support a policy judgment," he says.
Numerous other analysts say that, except for the possibility that al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia might be transferring money to Qaeda factions elsewhere, the assertion that insurgent money might be flowing out of the country is doubtful considering the single-minded regional focus of most of the militants operating here. Dr. Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish National Defense College, an author of extensive studies of the Iraqi insurgency, says he doubts Iraqi groups were ready to finance terrorism outside the country. "There's very little evidence that they're preparing to export terrorism from Iraq to the West," he says. "I think it's much too early for that."
The document tracing the money flows acknowledges that investigators have had limited success in penetrating or choking off terrorist financing networks. The report says American efforts to follow the financing trails have been hamstrung by several factors. They include a weak Iraqi government and its nascent intelligence agencies; a lack of communication between American agencies, and between the Americans and the Iraqis; and the nature of the insurgent economy itself, primarily sustained by couriers carrying cash rather than more easily traceable means involving banks and the hawala money transfer networks traditional in the Middle East. "Efforts to identify key financial facilitators, funding sources and transfer mechanisms are yielding some results, but we need to improve our understanding of how terrorist and insurgent cells interact, how their financial networks vary from province to province or city to city and how they use their funds," the report says. It also says the United States must help the Iraqi government "to excise corrupt officials from its law enforcement and security services and its ministries" and "to prevent smuggled Iraqi oil from being sold within their borders." Stopping other nations from paying ransoms is another challenge, the report notes.
Several American security consultants, all former members of government intelligence agencies that deal with terrorism, say that the ineffectiveness of efforts to impede the revenues to the insurgents was reflected in the continuing, if not growing, strength of Iraq's militants. "You have to look at what the insurgency is doing," Lang says. "Are they hampered by a lack of funds? I see no evidence that they are." Jeffrey White, a defense fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, also a former Middle East analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, agrees: "We've had some tactical successes where we've picked off a financier or whatever, but we haven't been able to unravel a major component of the system. I've never seen any indication that they're strapped for cash, never seen any indication that they were short on weapons." White says that the insurgency has demonstrated tremendous regenerative properties. "The networks fix themselves, they heal themselves," he says, noting the success of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia in withstanding the loss of hundreds of combatants and dozens of major leaders. "They keep coming back," he says, "and I think the same thing has happened to the financial system." (New York Times)
November 25: Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to the prison's former US commander Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. Karpinski tells a Spanish newspaper reporter that she had seen a letter signed by Rumsfeld that authorized civilian contractors to use abusive techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation. Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods. "The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: 'Make sure this is accomplished,'" she says. "Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques." The Geneva Conventions say prisoners of war should suffer "no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion" to secure information. "Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind," says the Conventions. Karpinski was withdrawn from Iraq in early 2004, shortly after photographs showing American troops abusing detainees at the prison were flashed around the world. She was subsequently removed from active duty and then demoted to the rank of colonel on unrelated charges. She has always insisted that she knew nothing about the abuse of prisoners until she saw the photos, as the interrogations were carried out in a prison wing run by US military intelligence and not her Army units. Rumsfeld also authorized the army to break the Geneva Conventions by not registering all prisoners, Karpinski says, explaining how she raised the case of one unregistered inmate with an aide to former US commander Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. "We received a message from the Pentagon, from the Defense Secretary, ordering us to hold the prisoner without registering him. I know know this happened on various occasions." Karpinski said last week she was ready to testify against Rumsfeld, if a suit filed by civil rights groups in Germany over Abu Ghraib led to a full investigation. (Reuters)
November 25: Interference by US authorities caused a team of suspected terrorists plotting to blow up transatlantic airliners to escape British authorities, says British counterterrorism officials. An investigation by MI5 and Scotland Yard into the alleged plan to smuggle explosive devices on up to 10 passenger jets was thwarted in August 2006, when the US put pressure on authorities in Pakistan to arrest a suspect allegedly linked to the airliner plot. As a direct result of the surprise detention of the suspect, British police and MI5 were forced to rush forward plans to arrest an alleged UK gang accused of plotting to destroy the airliners. But a second group of suspected terrorists allegedly linked to the first evaded capture and is still at large. The escape of the second group is said to be the reason why the UK was kept at its highest alert level for three days before it was decided that the plotters no longer posed an imminent threat. The alleged airliner plot caused chaos and fear at airports throughout Britain when details emerged in August of an alleged plan to smuggle liquid explosives on board up to 10 flights and destroy them after take-off. As a result of the alert, airports banned passengers from carrying liquids in their hand luggage and imposed tough new security checks. The operation was one of the largest undertaken by the police and MI5, yet counter-terrorism officials say that the intervention of the Americans was due to "inexperience and naivete" and that they were after a "short-term success" primarily designed to secure favorable news headlines.
Senior American intelligence officials pressured Pakistani authorities to arrest Rashid Rauf, a British citizen, on August 9, 2006. Rauf is suspected of being closely linked to a group of terror suspects in Britain who were involved in the airline plot. The sudden arrest prompted emergency meetings involving ministers, police and intelligence chiefs who were still investigating the case. After quick deliberations, Scotland Yard and MI5 decided to sanction a series of raids on that same morning. 24 men and women were arrested, and 13 later charged in connection with the terror plot. Britain is asking that Rauf be extradited by Pakistan. However, the second group involved in the plot escaped; Scotland Yard and MI5 had hoped to capture both groups. (Independent)
November 25: According to an analysis by the Associated Press, big oil companies have been crimping supplies in subtle but effective ways for years, artificially lowering supply margins and driving up prices. Naturally, the oil companies disagree, saying that they have been working tirelessly to provide the nation with cheap oil products, and blames Middle Eastern oil powers, global competition from booming economies such as China's, and events out of their control such as hurricanes, clean-air rules, and depleting wells. In other words, everything and everyone is to blame except the noble oil companies.
Evidence from the analysis shows differently. During the 1999-2006 price boom, the industry drilled an average of 7% fewer new wells monthly than in the seven preceding years of low, stable prices. The gasoline supply expanded by only 10% from 1999 to 2006, down from 15% in the earlier period. "They ain't trying: that's more money for them," says Bakersfield construction worker JaRayle Madden. Bakersfield was stricken by the recent news that Shell Oil is closing its local refinery, even though the refinery is making money and its closing would help drive up prices in the drum-tight markets along the West Coast. Shell justifies the closing by saying the refinery is old and non-compliant to environmental regulations, and that the oil fields around Bakersfield are drying up. But the local oil fields have decades' worth of oil yet to be pumped without unreasonable difficulty, acknowledges Shell engineers. Apparently Shell could make more money by focusing its attentions on other refineries, particularly refineries providing oil to China. The company isn't even trying to sell the refinery, an action that proves Shell is attempting, in the words of Oregon Democratic senator Ron Wyden, "to squeeze the market in every possible way."
The Bakersfield Shell refinery is just one example of how the oil companies have long "gamed" the energy markets to their advantage. Though they insist they have little control over the supply of oil, in reality, they have tremendous control. The oil companies decide if, where, and when to invest in new wells and refining equipment. They decide how much to tap their resources. In 1998, according to federal records, the long price runup began after the number of new wells abruptly dropped by 59%. One consumer advocate, Mark Cooper, refers to industry-induced supply bottlenecks as "strategic underinvestment." He views references to "discipline" in annual corporate reports as a code word for going easy on supplies. "Anytime someone talks about 'discipline,' this suggests to me that they have market power. They're choosing what investments to make," says Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America. Solid evidence supports Cooper. A 2001 study by the Federal Trade Commission reported that some firms were deciding to "maximize their profits" by crimping supply during a Midwestern gasoline price spike. One executive told regulators "he would rather sell less gasoline and earn a higher margin on each gallon sold." In 2006, according to the FTC, some oil companies were storing oil, instead of selling it right away, to await higher prices anticipated in the future. The industry has shelved an average of 21% more unrefined oil from the start of 2004 through June 2006, the AP analysis indicates. Last spring, stocks of shelved crude reached their highest level in eight years, despite the fabulous riches at hand in high prices then. The same strategy could well extend to drilling. "If you think prices 10 years from now are going to be $100 a barrel, you might not be that enthused about producing as much as you can now," suggests energy economist Allan Pulsipher at Louisiana State University.
Such gaming of the market may be cold, callous, and greed-driven, but, unless separate companies are colluding in their tactics, is not illegal. And because fewer companies now control the production choke point of refining, it is easier for individual companies to bottle up supplies. Thanks to mergers, the top 10 companies now control three-quarters of national refining capacity, up from half in the early 1990s. "A handful of very large companies realize it's in their mutual interest to keep prices as high as possible," says Tyson Slocum, an energy expert at the consumer group Public Citizen. "I don't think they're sitting around a table smoking cigars and price fixing, but I think there are sophisticated ways to manipulate the market." One example is the devastating hurricane season of 2005, when hurricanes crippled Gulf Coast output. The country lost a third of its oil-output capacity and a fifth of its refining, but for relatively small lengths of time. Yet prices spiked and stayed high, enabling oil companies to make record-breaking profits. (AP/Jordan Falls News)
November 25: The president-elect of the Christian Coalition of America resigns before he even assumes his post, in a dispute over the group's ideology. The Reverend Joel Hunter of Longwood, Florida quits because, he says, he realizes that he will be unable to broaden the organization's agenda beyond opposing abortion and gay marriage. Hunter wanted to have the group focus as well on issues such as easing poverty and saving the environment. "These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," he says. Hunter says that the board of directors told him, "'These issues are fine, but they're not our issues; that's not our base." A statement issued by the coalition says Hunter resigned because of "differences in philosophy and vision." The organization, headed by President Roberta Combs and founded by evangelist Pat Robertson, claims a mailing list of 2.5 million. Hunter's move signals more tumult for a group that has fallen on hard times. Members have complained the coalition's agenda has become too liberal and diffuse. State chapters in Georgia, Alabama and elsewhere left the organization this year, and its budget has shrunk from $26 million to less than $5 million. The coalition's rejection of his approach means it is unwilling to part with its partisan, Republican roots, according to Hunter, who notes, "To tell you the truth, I feel like there are literally millions of evangelical Christians that don't have a home right now." Hunter's latest book, Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won't Fly With Most Conservative Christians, says that no political party should have a lock on the evangelical vote. (Orlando Sentinel/Jackson Clarion-Ledger)

November 26: Jordan's King Abdullah, the host of this week's emergency talks on Iraq between Bush and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, says that he is afraid the Middle East will soon face three separate civil wars. "We're juggling with the strong potential of three civil wars in the region, whether it's the Palestinians, that of Lebanon, or of Iraq," he says on ABC's This Week. Abdullah says that "something dramatic" must come out of this week's meetings between Bush and al-Maliki. "I don't think we're in a position where we can come back and revisit the problem in early 2007," he says. He says he worries even more about the escalating violence in Lebanon and the battles between the Israelis and Palestinians than he does about the civil war already erupting in Iraq. "When it comes to things exploding out of control, I would put today, as we stand, Palestine and probably a close tie with Lebanon," he says. "Iraq, funny enough, although as concerned as I am with Iraq and the major problems that might bring to us, is in third position." The United States needs to look at the "total picture" and be ready to talk with all parties in the area -- including Syria and Iran -- about a wide range of issues. "We can possibly imagine going into 2007 and having three civil wars on our hands," Abdullah says. "And therefore, it is time that we really take a strong step forward as part of the international community and make sure we avert the Middle East from a tremendous crisis that I fear."
Bush's visit to Jordan joins Dick Cheney's recent, secretive visit to Saudi Arabia to meet with the royal family of that country, though it is not known specifically what was discussed. Many governments in the region fear a general Shi'ite uprising that might spread from Iraq into other nations, possibly encouraged by the Shi'ite government of Iran and the groups it sponsors, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both Republicans and Democrats are also voicing their displeasure with the Iraq government. On the same broadcast of This Week, Democratic senator Richard Durbin and his Republican colleague Sam Brownback both voice their frustration with al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders. Durbin says that the United States should tell Maliki to disband the largely Shi'ite militias and death squads, and to govern the country "in a responsible fashion" or face an eventual US withdrawal. Brownback says that he opposes setting a timetable for withdrawing troops, but that "I think what we've got to do is go around the Maliki government in certain situations." Jordan's Abdullah seems to agree with the two US lawmakers. "There needs to be some very strong action taken on the ground [in Iraq] today," he says. (Washington Post)
November 26: Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski lambasts the Jim Baker-led Iraq Study Group, saying that while the commission "will probably come out with some sound advice on dealing with the neighborhood," it essentially "will offer some procrastination ideas for dealing with the crisis." Brzezinski adds that the Iraq war "is a mistaken, absolutely historically wrong undertaking. The costs are prohibitive. If we get out sooner, there will be a messy follow-up after we leave. It will be messy, but will not be as messy as if we stay." Appearing with Brzezinski on CNN, former secretary of state and Bush advisor Henry Kissinger says that "my attitude will be to support any bipartisan conclusion that would be arrived at" by the Baker commission. Brzenzinski counters, "I've been arguing this on your program with Henry for the last three years. And I invite viewers to go on the Internet and look what we have been saying, respectively." (CNN/Think Progress [link to video])
November 26: The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage reminds readers that the Bush administration's claim of the unbridled power of the president to ignore the law -- the "unified executive" theory -- first came to national attention in July 1987, and was articulated by Dick Cheney.
"Unitary executive"
Cheney, then the ranking Republicans on the House committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, said that then-president Reagan and his top aides were free to ignore a 1982 law that formed the heart of their crimes. The Boland Amendment banned US assistance to anti-Sandinista insurgents -- the "Contras" in Nicaragua. "I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff," Cheney said then. Cheney's assertion that the president is, for all intents and purposes, above the law did not set well with the majority of his colleagues, and the committee issued a bipartisan report accusing White House officials of "disdain for the law." Cheney and his loyalists refused to sign it, instead releasing what they called a "minority report" declaring that Congress, not Reagan and his aides, were the real lawbreakers, because the Constitution "does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power."
At the time, Cheney's assertions were largely dismissed as the rantings of a backbench, extremist House member. But Cheney's insistence on the virtually unlimited power of the president is now policy in the White House. Cheney has maintained his support for the executive branch as, in essence, a dictatorship since then, although the media has largely been careful not to report his assertions. Few legal scholars outside the White House and the most radical conservative think tanks agree with Cheney. The Constitution explicitly empowers Congress to pass laws regulating the executive branch, but over the course of his career, Cheney came to believe that the modern world is too dangerous and complex for a president's hands to be tied, especially in the area of foreign policy. He has long advocated the belief that presidents have vast "inherent" powers, not spelled out in the Constitution, that allow them to defy Congress. Where exactly Cheney gets the rationales for his dreams of an "imperial presidency" is not clear. But he has long practiced as if his radical fantasies were the law of the land.
Cheney bypassed acts of Congress as defense secretary in the first Bush administration. And his office has been the driving force behind the current administration's hoarding of secrets, its efforts to impose greater political control over career officials, and its defiance of a law requiring the government to obtain warrants when wiretapping Americans. Cheney's staff has also been behind Bush's record number of signing statements asserting his right to disregard laws; those signing statements are usually written by lawyers working out of Cheney's office.
Savage gives us telling glimpses into the key moments in Cheney's long political career that show he has long been more of a royalist than a supporter of American democracy, and these glimpses indicate that House and Senate Democrats should not expect any cooperation from Cheney or the White House when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects. Law professor Peter Shane says that Cheney is all too willing to fight this issue out with Congress. "Cheney has made this a matter of principle," he says. "For that reason, you are likely to hear the words 'executive privilege' over and over again during the next two years." Cheney himself said in January 2002, "In 34 years [since Watergate and the Vietnam War] I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job. I feel an obligation...to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors."
Savage writes, "Cheney's ideal of presidential power is the level of power the office briefly achieved in the late 1960s, the era of what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the 'imperial presidency.' Early in the Cold War, presidents began invoking national security to seize greater power from Congress. This concentration of authority peaked under President Richard Nixon, who famously asserted that 'when the president does it, that means it's not illegal.' But Watergate reawakened Congress, which passed new laws to regulate presidential power." Cheney was part of the Nixon administration, working for Donald Rumsfeld at, ironically enough, an antipoverty agency called the Office of Economic Opportunity. Cheney and Rumsfeld were there to impose greater political control over the office, and to gut the ability of the program to actually help the poor. The legal aid program, headed by Terry Lenzner, was a primary target. Lenzner recalls being ordered by the White House to fire lawyers who dared to file class-action lawsuits on behalf of poor people. Lenzner could not comply, because such firings would have been illegal under the Congressional statute that created the agency. "I was being told, 'You have to put a stop to this, you have to control these lawyers,'" he recalls. "But I said that 'If I do what you want me to do, it will violate the law.'" In November 1970, Rumsfeld and Cheney fired Lenzner.
When Cheney became Ford's chief of staff in 1975, little more than a year after Nixon's resignation over the lies of Watergate and Vietnam, he was one of Ford's point men in the battle to retain the secrecy of the executive branch in the face of Congressional demands for more openness and transparency. In October 1974, Ford vetoed a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, which would allow judges to review classified documents to determine if they were being shielded for political purposes. Ford said the bill "would violate constitutional principles;" Congress overrode his veto. Three months later, Seymour Hersh and the New York Times revealed that the CIA had engaged in an illegal domestic spying program for two decades, tapping phones, opening mail, and breaking into homes of antiwar protesters. The revelation prompted a congressional uproar.
Cheney sent a memo to Ford urging him to flip the controversy around by investigating the CIA, writing that doing so was "the best prospect for heading off congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch." Ford actually created an investigating commission, but Congress refused to be buffaloed. A Senate committee chaired by Democrat Frank Church demanded access to secret documents. Cheney decided to try to convince the public that investigating intelligence operations was dangerous and unwise. In May 1975, Hersh wrote an article discussing how US submarines eavesdropped on the Soviet Union's undersea cables. Cheney wanted to use the article to indict Hersh under the 1917 Espionage Act. Though such an indictment would be ridiculously inappropriate, and an abuse of the law, Cheney wrote in a memo to Ford that an indictment would "create an environment" that might intimidate both the press and Congress. "Can we take advantage of it to bolster our position on the Church Committee investigation? To point out the need for limits on the scope of the investigations?" Cheney wrote. The idea, however, was scrapped to avoid attracting the Soviets' attention to Hersh's article. Cheney may have been thwarted in his attempt to clamp down on the media's ability to investigate the executive branch, but he was not put off.
The next spring, after revelations that the National Security Agency had monitored the phone calls of American civil rights and antiwar activists, Congress drafted legislation to require warrants for domestic surveillance. Cheney's allies, including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George H.W. Bush, opposed such a bill as a derogation of presidential power. But Ford decided not to fight it. Congress passed the warrant requirement as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 -- the same law that the Bush-Cheney administration later bypassed with its warrantless wiretapping program.
Ford lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, and in 1978 Cheney returned to Washington as a first-term Congressman with more clout and influence than the average first-term back-bencher. He specialized in intelligence matters. He led the Republican damage-control attempts during the Iran-Contra investigations, where he tried and failed to convince a majority of his colleagues that the Reagan administration was justified in ignoring the law, but he gathered some hardline supporters among the Congressional Republicans, and was able to block a number of what he considered "encroachments" by Congress on the executive branch. When the Senate passed a bill forcing presidents to notify Congress of all covert operations within 48 hours, Cheney led a successful fight to defeat the bill in the House. He argued that Congress was prone to leaks and had no authority to force the commander-in-chief to share information about covert operations. "The 48-hour bill would 'get back' at President Reagan by tying the hands of all future presidents," Cheney wrote in a May 1988 Wall Street Journal column. "That approach will achieve nothing useful."
As defense secretary for George H.W. Bush, Cheney again pushed for increasing the power of the presidency at the expense of Congress. In late 1990, Cheney urged Bush to demonstrate his contempt for Congress by launching the Gulf War without bothering to ask Congress for authorization. For all major overseas wars from 1789 to 1950, presidents obeyed the constitutional provision giving Congress alone the power to declare war. But in Korea and Vietnam, Presidents Truman, Johnson, and Nixon defied this constraint. They asserted that the commander-in-chief had "inherent" power to take the country to war on his own. (This subject is explored much further in other pages of this site, particularly the page discussing the history and concepts of the imperial presidency.. Seeking to restore its constitutional role, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973, requiring presidents to consult Congress when sending troops into battle. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush sent 500,000 US troops to Saudi Arabia. As they prepared to attack the Iraqi forces, Cheney told Bush that it was unnecessary and too risky to seek a vote in Congress. "I was not enthusiastic about going to Congress for an additional grant of authority," Cheney recalled in a 1996 PBS Frontline documentary. "I was concerned that they might well vote 'no' and that would make life more difficult for us." Bush wisely rejected Cheney's advice and asked Congress for a vote in support of the war. The resolution passed -- barely. Had Congress voted no, Cheney later said, he would have urged Bush to launch the Gulf War regardless. "From a constitutional standpoint, we had all the authority we needed," Cheney later asserted, though his interpretation of the Consitution is questionable at best. "If we'd lost the vote in Congress, I would certainly have recommended to the president that we go forward anyway."
Cheney made it a point to fight with Congress on just about every issue surrounding the war, all in the name of the unitary executive. After civilian Pentagon lawyers clashed with military attorneys over the handling of any bodies contaminated by biological weapons, Cheney asked Congress to change the law to place all military attorneys under the control of civilian political appointees. Congress refused. So, in March 1992, Cheney's deputy issued an administrative order defying the expressed will of Congress. And at the same time, Cheney refused to issue contracts for the V-22 Osprey, a next-generation fighter plane plagued with problems that Congress had funded. Savage writes, "By refusing to issue contracts, Cheney revived a Nixon-era tactic of 'impounding' funds -- refusing to spend money for programs that he didn't like. Congress had passed a law in 1974 to ban impoundment. Cheney, who later said he believes the anti-impoundment law unconstitutionally infringes on executive power, ignored it." Congress struck back. When Cheney's top assistant, David Addington, was nominated to be the Pentagon's general counsel and had to appear at Senate confirmation hearings, the Senate flayed him and, by extension, Cheney. "How many ways are there around evading the will of Congress? How many different legal theories do you have?" Democratic senator Carl Levin demanded. "I do not have any, Senator," Addington quailed. Addington was confirmed, but only after promising that the Pentagon would restore the military lawyers' independence and issue V-22 contracts as quickly as possible.
Cheney left government for the private sector in 1992, after Bill Clinton was elected to office, but returned as the vice-president, and in many ways the chief policymaker of the government, in 2001. Addington became a dominant member of the Bush administration's legal team. Together, Cheney and Addington made the assertion of sweeping executive powers a hallmark of the Bush presidency. One of Cheney's first acts as vice president was to convene an energy policy task force, inviting energy company lobbyists to suggest a package of tax breaks and other incentives for their companies. When Congress and watchdog groups requested his task force's records, Cheney successfully fought a court battle to keep them secret, arguing that presidents needed greater power to solicit candid advice. The decision gutted the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a 1972 law in which Congress tried to require such policymaking to be subject to public scrutiny.
After 9/11, military lawyers objected to Bush and Cheney's assertions that a president can have terrorism subjects detained and interrogated beyond the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions. Instead of answering the charges and following the law, Cheney led the administration's attempt to put military lawyers under the control of political appointees. And, citing a need for secrecy, the administration also threw up new roadblocks to Freedom of Information Act requests, restricted access to historic presidential records, and threatened to prosecute journalists who published classified information using the 1917 anti-spying law -- the same idea Cheney attempted to use in 1975.
The war on terrorism has proved quite useful for Cheney, Addington, and other imperialists in the White House to push the idea that the president has some unexplained but supremely powerful "inherent" ability to ignore laws enacted by Congress. Even when Congress voted, a week after the 9/11 attacks, to authorize the use of military force against al-Qaeda, the administration quickly seized the moment to assert its authority. "[Congress cannot] place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response," asserted the Justice Department in a September 2001 memo solicited by the White House. "These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the president alone to make." A year later, Bush lawyers drew up secret legal opinions informing military and CIA interrogators that the president has the power to authorize them to violate laws banning torture. "In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign against al-Qaeda and its allies, [the anti-torture law] must be construed as not applying to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority," said an August 2002 memo, which was leaked to the media only after the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib came to light.
In December 2005, the New York Times revealed, after holding on to the story for a year, that the administration was wiretapping Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without warrants, violating the 1978 surveillance law. Three days later, Cheney asserted his belief "in a strong, robust executive authority." Bypassing the warrant law, he told reporters, was "consistent with the constitutional authority of the president." And Cheney said that he and Bush will establish further precedents for the expansion of presidential authority. Many other statutory constraints on the imperial power of the president "will be tested at some point," he said. When asked whether he believed that the pendulum of executive power had swung back far enough in the direction he desired, or whether it needed to swing back further, he merely replied, "I do think that to some extent now, we've been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency." (Boston Globe)
November 26: The GOP sniping at Karl Rove, the White House political guru who has been under fire for losing the November midterms so badly, continues, with incoming Senate Minority Whit Trent Lott telling Fox News, "I've had problems with some of the conduct of Karl Rove." Lott pointedly adds that he has a good relationship with "most of the people" around Bush. Rove is primarily responsible for orchestrating Lott's ouster as Senate Majority Leader in late 2002 after Lott said, had the country elected avowed racist Strom Thurmond as president, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years." During the midst of the CIA leak scandal a few years later, Lott suggested that Rove should resign and that Bush should "reach out and bring in more advice and counsel." (Fox News/Think Progress [link to video])
November 26: Los Angeles Times editorial writer Matt Welch writes that GOP senator and putative 2008 presidential front-runner John McCain has an undeserved reputation as a Republican "maverick" who often breaks with the conventional wisdom and ideological agenda of his own party. The media story on McCain is simplistic and contradictory, often focusing on his confinement as a POW in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, his "noisy conversion to the campaign-finance-reform faith," and his penchant for committing "political suicide" with his penchant for "straight talk." After almost 30 years in Washington, and authoring four books about his life and political beliefs, McCain's own political thrust can be surmised quite well, writes Welch. "[A] distinct approach toward governance begins to emerge," he writes. "And it's one that the electorate ought to be particularly worried about right now. McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the US government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He'll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats' nanny-state regulations with the GOP's red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism. And he's trying to accomplish this, in part, for reasons of self-realization." Welch notes that McCain's books are "shot through with the language and sentiment of 12-step recovery, especially Steps 1 (admitting the problem) and 2 (investing faith in a 'Power greater than ourselves'). Like many alcoholics who haven't quite made it to Step 6 (becoming 'entirely ready' to have these defects removed), McCain is disarmingly talented at admitting his narcissistic flaws. In his 2002 book Worth the Fighting For, the senator is constantly confessing his problems of 'selfishness,' 'immaturity,' 'ambition' and especially 'temper,' though he also makes clear that his outbreaks of anger can be justifiable and even laudable when channeled into 'a cause greater than self-interest.' 'A rebel without a cause is just a punk,' he explains. 'Whatever you're called -- rebel, unorthodox, nonconformist, radical -- it's all self-indulgence without a good cause to give your life meaning.'"
McCain avows time and again his belief that Americans "were meant to transform history" and that sublimating the individual in the service of that "common national cause" is the wellspring of honor and purpose. McCain says that he is neither liberal or conservative; his political inspiration is former president Teddy Roosevelt, the "Eastern swell who became a man of the people," whose great accomplishment was "to summon the American people to greatness." Like Roosevelt, he believes that Americans have a higher calling to "take risks for the country's sake." Welch calls this "an essentially militaristic view of citizenship, one that explains many of McCain's departures from partisan orthodoxy." He continues: "Unlike traditional Republicans, [McCain]will gladly butt into the affairs of private industry if he perceives them to be undermining Americans' faith in government; unlike Democrats, he thinks the executive branch generally needs more power, not less." Welch notes acidly, "If his issues line up with yours, and if you're not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he'll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable. Nowhere is that more evident than in his ideas about the Iraq war."
McCain has been consistent in his calls for putting thousands more American troops in Iraq, leading Welch to write, after examining his work in Congress and his writings, "McCain is more inclined to start wars and increase troop levels than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. He has supported every US military intervention of the last two decades, urged both presidents to rattle their sabers louder over North Korea and Iran, lamented the Pentagon's failure to intervene in Darfur and Rwanda and supported a general policy of 'rogue state rollback.' He's a fan of Roosevelt's Monroe-Doctrine-on-steroids stick-wielding in Latin America. And -- like Bush -- he thinks too much multilateralism can screw up a perfectly good war. The price of all this war-making, in money and manpower, would be staggering; it's hard to imagine without a draft (McCain has long been a fan of mandatory national service, at the least). But the costs to his political ambitions may even be greater. The nation is in no mood for the war we've got now, let alone a doubling-down on Iraq and ramped-up unilateralist tough talk in the Middle East. The trend lines of public opinion on these counts are not pointing in McCain's direction."
Though McCain often points to former Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as a political touchstone, and McCain, a fellow Arizonan, is often looked to as Goldwater's ideological successor, the differences between McCain and Goldwater are stark. Welch writes, "Goldwater, a man who seemed to emanate from Arizona's dust, was the paragon of limited government, believing to his core that the feds shouldn't tell you how to run a business or whom you can sleep with. McCain, on the other hand, is a third-generation DC insider who carpetbagged his way into office, believing to his core that 'national pride will not survive the people's contempt for government.' On Nov. 7, those conflicting worldviews collided when Arizonans voted on whether to outlaw gay marriage. McCain campaigned in favor of the ban, in the name of 'preserving the sanctity' of heterosexual unions. His exhortations went down to surprising defeat. Not, one suspects, for the last time." (Los Angeles Times)

November 27: NBC News decides to begin calling the Iraq conflict a civil war, adopting a phrase that President Bush and many other news organizations have avoided. According to Today's Matt Lauer, "[A]fter careful consideration, NBC News has decided that a change in terminology is warranted, that the situation in Iraq with armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas can now be characterized as civil war." The network's cable news outlet, MSNBC, has begun using the phrase "Iraq: The Civil War" on the screen.
There are different criteria for defining a civil war. Webster's New World College Dictionary defines it simply as "war between geographical sections or political factions of the same nation." Some political scientists use a threshold of 1,000 dead, which the current conflict has long since passed. The Web-based organization GlobalSecurity, which provides information on defense issues, says that five criteria must be met: The contestants must control territory, have a functioning government, enjoy some foreign recognition, have identifiable regular armed forces and engage in major military operations. By this set of criteria, Iraq is not yet in a civil war. Yet, most American scholars agree that, by the commonly accepted criteria, the threshold that defines a civil war has long since been passed. The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second says that at least 1,000 people must have been killed, with at least 100 from each side. "I think that at this time, and for some time now, the level of violence in Iraq meets the definition of civil war that any reasonable person would have," says James Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford who in September testified to Congress on the Iraq war. While the term is broad enough to include many kinds of conflicts, one of the sides in a civil war is almost always the sovereign government. Therefore, some scholars say the civil war in Iraq began when the Americans transferred sovereignty to an appointed Iraqi government in June 2004. That officially transformed the anti-American war into one of insurgent groups seeking to regain power for disenfranchised Sunni Arabs against an Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and increasingly dominated by Shiites. Others say the civil war began this year, after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra set off a chain of revenge killings that left hundreds dead over five days and has yet to end. Allawi proclaimed a month after that bombing that Iraq was mired in a civil war. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is," Allawi said.
The Bush administration says that it does not believe Iraq is in a civil war, and that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki does not, either. "You have not yet had a situation also where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power, but for territory," says White House press secretary Tony Snow. "What you do have is sectarian violence that seems to be less aimed at gaining full control over an area than expressing differences, and also trying to destabilize a democracy -- which is different than a civil war, where two sides are clashing for territory and supremacy." Iraqi citizen Adel Ibrahim, a tribal sheikh, says simply, "You need to let the world know there's a civil war here in Iraq. It's a crushing civil war. Mortars kill children in our neighborhoods. We're afraid to travel anywhere because we'll be killed in buses. We don't know who is our enemy and who is our friend." "It's stunning; it should have been called a civil war a long time ago, but now I don't see how people can avoid calling it a civil war," says Nicholas Sambanis, a political scientist at Yale who co-edited Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, published by the World Bank in 2005. "The level of violence is so extreme that it far surpasses most civil wars since 1945." Among scholars, "there's a consensus," Sambanis says. "I certainly don't know anyone who argues otherwise at this point."
Matthew Felling, spokesman for the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs, says that "not since Fox News Channel decided to stop saying 'suicide bombers' and start saying 'homicide bombers' has there been a starker linguistic stance taken by a news organization." Fox began using that terminology in April 2002, just after the White House did the same thing. The Los Angeles Times has been calling the conflict a civil war since October. "It's a very simple calculation," says foreign editor Marjorie Miller. "It's a country that's tearing itself apart, one group against another group or several groups against several groups. What country even admits that it is in the midst of a civil war?" The Associated Press has decided to not yet use the term. As international editor John Daniszewski explains, "From a historical point of view, not every civil war is called by that name, and wars by their very nature are not always neatly categorized. For instance, the American Revolutionary War, the Vietnam War and the more recent wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were all civil wars according to the broader definition, yet we do not normally think or speak of them that way." As yet, no decision has been made to use the phrase on ABC or CBS news broadcasts. "We are not there yet," says Paul Slavin, ABC News senior vice president. CNN also has not yet decided to use the term, but correspondent Michael Ware says during a broadcast today, "If this isn't a civil war, I don't know what is."
On Today, Lauer says NBC News consulted with many experts and carefully deliberated before making the call. He says there are two clearly defined groups, the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, using violence to gain political supremacy, and there's a government in place that's unable to protect people. "Well, Matt, to be honest, I've been calling it a civil war, low-grade conflict, for 18 months," replies retired General Barry McCaffrey, an NBC News consultant.
The Washington Post will not yet use the term "civil war" for the simple reason that the Bush administration isn't using it. According to Post reporter Dana Priest, interviewed on CNN, "Well, I think one of the reasons the president resists that label is because it equates almost with a failure of US policy. I'll say for the Washington Post, we haven't labeled it a civil war and I've asked around here today to see why not or what's the thinking on that and really our reporters have not filed that. We try to avoid the labels, particularly when the elected government itself does not call its situation a civil war. Certainly -- and I would agree with General McCaffrey on this -- absolutely the level of violence equals a civil war...." (Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, CNN/Crooks and Liars [link to video])
November 27: The Department of Justice begins an internal investigation into its handling of information gathered in the Bush administration's domestic spying program, but Democrats charge that the investigation is deliberately so narrow that it cannot determine whether or not the program violates federal law. The inquiry by Glenn Fine, the department's inspector general, will focus on the role of Justice prosecutors and agents in carrying out the warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency. Fine's investigation is not expected to address whether the controversial program is an unconstitutional expansion of presidential power, as its critics and a federal judge in Detroit have charged. "After conducting initial inquiries into the program, we have decided to open a program review that will examine the department's controls and use of information related to the program," Fine writes in a letter to House Judiciary Committee leaders. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says the agency welcomes the review: "We expect that this review will assist Justice Department personnel in ensuring that the department's activities comply with the legal requirements that govern the operation of the program." In January, Fine's office rejected a request by more than three dozen Democrats to investigate the secret program, which monitors phone calls and e-mails between people in the US and abroad when a link to terrorism is suspected. As welcome as Democrats find the investigation, most feel that the investigation will not produce the needed results. "A full investigation into the program as a whole, not just the DOJ's involvement, will be necessary," says Democratic representative Zoe Lofgren. The review could include whether the spying program complies with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires judicial authorization for electronic surveillance and physical searches of people suspected of espionage or international terrorism on behalf of a foreign power. The Justice Department requests surveillance approval from the FISA court.
Democrats also note that Fine asked for additional security clearances necessary for the review on October 20, but that the clearances were not granted until days after the November 7 elections. Democratic representative Maurice Hinchey says that Fine's investigation "is only coming now after the election as an attempt to appease Democrats" who have been critical of the NSA program. Caroline Fredrickson of the ACLU encourages Fine and Congressional Democrats to pursue the investigation in order "to seek the hidden truth about this program. ...No one, not even the president, is above the law." (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 27: The US House race in Ohio's 15th District between Republican incumbent Deborah Pryce and Democratic challenger Mary Jo Kilroy will go into an automatic recount. Pryce wins re-election, but by a total of only 1,055 votes, comprising less than a 0.5% margin of victory. Under Ohio law, the race must be recounted if the difference between the two candidates is less than one-half of 1 percent. Pryce says she considers herself the winner, and expects the recount to do nothing more than validate her victory. Pryce, formerly considered a near-lock for re-election, found herself unexpectedly vulnerable due to her close friendship and working relationship with disgraced Republican representative Mark Foley. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 27: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a possible 2008 presidential candidate for the GOP, tells an audience at a First Amendment awards dinner that the war on terrorism requires Americans to accept that drastic curbs must be placed on their freedom of speech and freedom of expression, especially on the Internet. He also says that terrorists must be subjected to a new and draconian set of domestic and international laws. "We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," he says. (Apparently the idea of advocating Soviet-style curbs on American freedoms at a ceremony for First Amendment award recipients escapes Gingrich.) Liberal blogger John Aravosis writes disgustedly, "Go to Russia or Tehran if you hate freedom this much. I have had it with Republicans who hate America, who hate our freedoms, who hate what this country stands for, and who think that the only way to save our freedoms from the terrorists is for us to destroy those freedoms first. Honestly, how do these scaredy-cat, quaking-in-their-boots, America-haters even dare call themselves patriotic Americans?" As for the prospect of losing a city, Aravosis notes, "We already lost a city, Newt. It's called New Orleans. And it was your party, the Republicans, who lost it. You were more concerned about furthering some neo-con agenda abroad than actually protecting Americans at home."
The only freedom Gingrich believes should be expanded is the freedom of wealthy political donors to give as much money as they choose to their chosen candidates or organizations, explicitly coming out against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation. Passed in 2002, the campaign finance law known as McCain-Feingold banned unrestricted donations from labor, corporations and the wealthy to the political parties. Gingrich says the reforms have failed and only led to more negative campaign ads via e-mail, television, direct mail and phone calls. "Just as tax lawyers always succeed in out-thinking the [Internal Revenue Service] because they stay after five and the IRS goes home, the private-sector lawyers will always out-think the [Federal Election Commission] because they stay after five and the FEC goes home," Gingrich says. He also says America has "failed" in Iraq over the past three years, and urges a new approach to winning the conflict. The US needs to engage Syria and Iran and increase investment to train the Iraqi army and a national police force, he says. "How does a defeat for America make us safer?" he asks. "I would look at an entirely new strategy. We have clearly failed in the last three years to achieve the kind of outcome we want." (AP/Boston Globe, New Hampshire Union-Leader, AmericaBlog)
November 27: Investigative journalist Robert Parry continues to speak out against the nomination of Robert Gates to head the Defense Department. Parry reminds us that during the 1980s, Gates made "wildly erroneous predictions about the dangers posed by leftist-ruled Nicaragua and espoused policy prescriptions considered too extreme even by the Reagan administration, in one case advocating the US bombing of Nicaragua." Parry believes that an examination of the advice Gates gave then-CIA head William Casey proves that Gates is far more of an extremist ideologue than many in Washington perceive him to be; that, or he was pandering to Casey's own "personal zealotry." Parry writes, "Either possibility raises questions about Gates's fitness to run the Pentagon at a time when many observers believe it needs strong doses of realism and independence to stand up to both a strong-willed President and influential neoconservative theorists who promoted the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq War -- now exceeding the length of US participation in World War II -- has been marked by politicized intelligence, over-reliance on force, fear of challenging the insider tough-guy talk, and lack of respect for international law -- all tendencies that Gates has demonstrated in his career."
Under Reagan, Gates made a career out of exaggerating the threat posed by the then-extant Soviet Union, which made him popular in the Reagan White House. Gates and his Reagan-era comrades routinely rejected the overwhelming evidence of a rapid Soviet decline in order to continue justifying a massive US military build-up and aggressive interventions in Third World conflicts. After Gates became head of the CIA's analytical division, Gates abandoned the post's traditional objective viewpoint and instead began feeding Casey extremist viewpoints and assertions about Nicaragua, an impoverished Third World nation then ruled by leftist Sandinista revolutionaries who had ousted right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. In Gates's view, Nicaragua had the potential to destabilize the entire Central American region with its "Marxist-Leninist" government (the Sandinista government, headed by democratically elected president Daniel Ortega, explicitly rejected much of Marxist ideology, though it is an openly socialistic regime). Gates advocated US air strikes against Sandinista military targets in an attempt to overthrow the Ortega government. Gates asserted that Ortega was a Soviet-style dictator in the pocket of Cuba's Fidel Castro, writing to Casey, "The Nicaraguan regime is steadily moving toward consolidation of a Marxist-Leninist government and the establishment of a permanent and well armed ally of the Soviet Union and Cuba on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere." Gates was dead wrong. When Ortega lost his re-election bid in 1990, even after the US poured millions of dollars into the candidacy of his challenger, Violeta Chamarro, Ortega stepped down as the law required. The Sandinistas have instead competed legally in elections ever since, with Ortega winning the presidency again just this month.
Gates also used the argument that Nicaragua's attempts to secure weapons was proof of its aggressive intentions. Gates ignores the fact that the Reagan administration had cobbled together an insurgency to oppose the Sandinistas, funded that Contra insurgency, and provided it with arms and weapons far more modern than anything the Sandinistas had. The CIA had even mined Nicaraguan harbors. By 1984, the Contras had earned an ugly reputation, not as potential liberators, but as rapists, torturers, terrorists, and murderers. The Contras rarely chose to battle their Sandinista opponents directly, or even carry out guerrilla warfare against Sandinista/government military camps or civilian centers. Instead, the Contras behaved as bandits, terrorizing and pillaging towns along Nicaragua's northern border. Its leaders lived lavish, licentious lifestyles on American funding, often not even bothering to spend time in Nicaragua, but living opulent lives of excess in Miami and Washington, DC. Of course, none of this makes its way into Gates's memo. Instead, Gates tells Casey, an ardent supporter of the Contras, what he wants to hear: "The Soviets and Cubans are turning Nicaragua into an armed camp with military forces far beyond its defensive needs and in a position to intimidate and coerce its neighbors." Gate also paints an apocalyptic vision of what might happen if the Contras were forced to retreat to Honduras. According to Gates, the flight of the Contras would touch off a new wave of refugees and destabilize the region. "These unsettled political and military circumstances in Central America would undoubtedly result in renewed capital flight from Honduras and Guatemala and result in both new hardship and political instability throughout the region," Gates wrote. In reality, the right-wing death squads operating in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were causing far more refugees than any outpouring of refugees following the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979.
After presenting a farrago of lies about Nicaragua, Gates drew the conclusion that the only way to handle the Sandinista "problem" is to oust the Sandinistas by military force. "It seems to me that the only way that we can prevent disaster in Central America is to acknowledge openly what some have argued privately: that the existence of a Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua closely allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba is unacceptable to the United States and that the United States will do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out," he wrote to Casey. "Hopes of causing the regime to reform itself for a more pluralistic government are essentially silly and hopeless. Moreover, few believe that all those weapons and the more to come are only for defense purposes. ...Once you accept that ridding the Continent of this regime is important to our national interest and must be our primary objective, the issue then becomes a stark one. You either acknowledge that you are willing to take all necessary measures (short of military invasion) to bring down that regime or you admit that you do not have the will to do anything about the problem and you make the best deal you can. Casting aside all fictions, it is the latter course we are on. ...Any negotiated agreement simply will offer a cover for the consolidation of the regime and two or three years from now we will be in considerably worse shape than we are now."
Gates called for withdrawing diplomatic recognition of the Nicaraguan government, backing a government-in-exile, imposing an economic embargo on exports and imports "to maximize the economic dislocation of the regime," and launching "air strikes to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua's military buildup (focusing particularly on the tanks and the helicopters)." Anyone who disagreed, he wrote, were weaklings and fools. "These are hard measures," Gates acknowledged. "They probably are politically unacceptable. But it is time to stop fooling ourselves about what is going to happen in Central America. Putting our heads in the sand will not prevent the events that I outlined at the beginning of this note. ...The fact is that the Western Hemisphere is the sphere of influence of the United States. If we have decided totally to abandon the Monroe Doctrine, if in the 1980's taking strong actions to protect our interests despite the hail of criticism is too difficult, then we ought to save political capital in Washington, acknowledge our helplessness and stop wasting everybody's time."
It is unlikely that reviewing Gates's record of ignorance, willful misinformation, and ideological extremism will derail his nomination. Congressional Democrats intend to let Gates be confirmed with little complaint. But Gates's work should be a cause for concern. Parry writes, "One could readily imagine Gates playing into George W. Bush's predilections on Iraq by presenting similar dichotomies between doing the wise but 'politically unacceptable' thing by escalating the violence or 'putting our heads in the sand' to negotiate some cowardly compromise." Whether Gates is actually a hardline ideologue, or, as many at the CIA believe, a "chameleon" who adapts his own beliefs to fit whatever political environment he finds himself in, is unclear. In the end, it doesn't matter all that much. What is certain is that, in 1984 as in other times, Gates threw out the principles of objective analysis to position himself as a political/policy advocate. He did so with the 1984 memo even while serving as the official responsible for protecting the integrity of the intelligence product. And he was dead wrong in his dire predictions. The Reagan administration rejected Gates's extreme proposals, and none of the calamitous results he predicted ever came to pass. Parry writes, "Despite Gates's apocalyptic vision, Nicaragua never hardened into a 'Marxist-Leninist' dictatorship; it never used its military buildup against neighboring states; it turned out that hoping Nicaragua would become a pluralistic democracy wasn't 'silly and hopeless'; Nicaragua even joined in regional peace negotiations that halted the political violence. As it turned out Gates had favored policies to the right of Ronald Reagan -- and was proven wrong in judgment after judgment after judgment.
"Yet now two decades later, after a stint as president of Texas A&M, Gates is returning to Washington as a respected Wise Man who will be trusted to guide the United States out of the bloody debacle in Iraq. Thankful that George W. Bush's first Defense Secretary is on his way out, the US Senate seems determined to trust in Bush's wisdom in choosing a replacement. The Senate also appears ready to trust in the judgment of Robert M. Gates to make the right decisions about the Iraq War." (Consortium News)
November 27: Apparently it's just all too much for Rush Limbaugh. Responding to claims made by King Abdullah of Jordan on November 26's This Week that "we could possibly imagine going into 2007 and having three civil wars on our hands," Limbaugh tells his audience, "[W]ell, let's just have them. Let's just have the civil wars...because I'm just fed up with this." Limbaugh then asserts: "Fine, just blow the place up. Just let these natural forces take place over there instead of trying to stop them." Limbaugh, who apparently feels his own personal exasperation is worth the lives of tens of thousands of families, then claims, "[E]verbody comes to us. ...So we go and try to fix it and our own people, Democrats and the left in our country do their best to sabotage our efforts, and then we get blamed for trying to clean up the messes that these people start." It would probably be a waste of time to remind Limbaugh that the US invaded Iraq without provocation.
Apparently Limbaugh has become impatient with the issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well. He interrupts an audio clip of Abdullah saying, "[W]e do want to concentrate ourselves on the core issues which we believe are the Palestinians and the Palestinian peace process, because that is a must today --" by snapping, "Oh, give me a break." When Abdullah tells ABC's audience that it is possible the Middle East will have three civil wars going on in 2007 -- in Iraq, Lebanon, and between the Israelis and Palestinians -- Limbaugh blows his fuse. "All right, well, let's just have them," he whines. "Let's just have the civil wars and let the crumbs crumble and the cookie crumble where -- because I'm fed up with this. The Palestinian situation -- for 50 years we've had the Palestinian situation, and it's not going to be solved until the Limbaugh Doctrine is imposed or tried. And that is, this is a war, and until somebody loses it, it isn't going to stop. And now, you know, we've done everything we can to make Lebanon a democracy, and it's crumbling because Syria keeps killing the popular leaders there. Meanwhile, the Hezbos [Hezbollah] keep expanding their influence in Lebanon. But what the hell! We're going to bring Syria and Iran in to fix Iraq, why not let them just fix the whole region? If we're heading to civil war -- I mean, everybody comes to us: 'You got to fix this and you got to fix that.' So we go and try to fix it, and our own people, Democrats and the left in our country do their best to sabotage our efforts, and then we get blamed for trying to clean up the messes that these people start. And then they come on our television show: '[Gibberish] George [gibberish] civil war [gibberish] we gotta do something. Palestinians it's a must, it's a must, we must [gibberish] right now [gibberish] war. Fine, just blow the place up. Just let these natural forces take place over there instead of trying to stop them, instead of trying to use -- I just -- sometimes natural force is going to happen. You're going to have to let it take place. You can spend all the time you like with diplomacy, and you can spend all the time you want massaging these things with diplomatic -- you're just -- you're just delaying the inevitable." (MediaMatters)
November 27: Conservative pundits' inane diatribes about the supposed "war on Christmas" have become an annual fixture on Fox News and other news outlets, but this year, the rhetoric is escalating, with the target now the children's animated film Happy Feet. According to CNN Headline News's Glenn Beck and Fox News's Neil Cavuto, the movie, featuring animated penguins, is "pro-environmentalist propaganda" that is, in both pundits' opinions, "an animated version of An Inconvenient Truth" (the Al Gore-sponsored documentary about global warming). Media Matters spokesman Karl Frisch lambasts the conservative talking heads for their return to holiday-season absurdity. "The idea that anyone would make such comments against a children's movie about a tap-dancing penguin shows just how low the bar has dropped for what the media consider real news," Frisch says. "Conservatives seem to have abandoned their traditional coverage of the supposed 'War on Christmas' for a 'War on Penguins.'" While Happy Feet does contain a strong environmental message, it is doubtful that the film attempts to "indoctrinate" children, as both Beck and Cavuto claim.
Conservative talk-radio host Michael Medved takes his criticism several steps further in a November 17 blog post on Townhall.com, referring to the film as "Crappy Feet" and saying it was the "darkest, most disturbing feature length animated film ever offered by a major studio." According to Medved, the film has both anti-religious and pro-homosexual subtexts. He cites as proof of the film's "bizarre anti-religious bias" the fact that the film's penguins "worship a false God called 'the Great Wind' and decry and persecute anyone who dares to challenge their 'sacred' traditions." The fact that the protagonist actually stands up against this persecution seems not to interest Medved. As for the pro-homosexual bias, Medved writes, "As in so many other recent films, there's a subtext that appears to plead for endorsement of gay identity. Mumbles...displeases his parents and the leaders of his community because he's born different, and makes an impassioned plea that he can't possibly change -- and they should accept him as he is." For the record, Mumbles's "difference" is the fact that he cannot sing. The leftist blog Democratic Underground mockingly observes, "Apparently the children's movies in Medved's collection are all about conforming to accepted stereotypes, burying your true identity, and not rocking the boat. No doubt Happy Feet would have a much better message for kids if Mumbles just shut up and obeyed the 'aged leaders' who 'worship a false God' and 'decry and persecute anyone who dares to challenge their "sacred" traditions.'"
Medved seems to find the movie's powerful pro-environment message particularly galling. "The propagandistic theme suggests that the biggest menace for the lovable penguins is the human race --- stealing the fish on which the birds depend, or ruining planet earth through pollution and global warming." Is Medved saying that pollution and global warming are not real phenomena? Is the fact that millions of animals, birds, and fish are dying because of loss of habitat and food sources not real? Or is Medved saying that we just shouldn't tell our children about any of it? It's a telling comment on the current state of American society when even the movie reviews we read have to be handled with an eye towards their political content. (MediaMatters, Democratic Underground)
November 27: While the level of bigotry in the US towards Muslims has been amply demonstrated before now, radio talk show host Jerry Klein provides a new and chilling level of just how far many Americans want to go. Klein, of WMAL-AM in Washington, DC, makes the suggestion that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band. The phone lines instantly light up, with callers making the following comments, among others: "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country...they are here to kill us." "What good is identifying them? You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans." After airing a half hour of increasingly vitriolic and vicious comments, Klein reveals his motives for opening the discussion: "I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said. For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting. Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen.... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous." (WUSA9/Reuters/Daily Kos [links to audio])

November 28: At the opening of a NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, Bush refuses to hear suggestions that Iraq is locked in a civil war, and vows not to withdraw US troops "until the mission is complete." He also urges NATO allies to increase their forces in Afghanistan to confront a strengthening Taliban insurgency. As Bush readies for a visit to Jordan to meet with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, Bush continues to push the same rhetoric and characterizations about the Iraqi war that he has given for years. He calls the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq central fronts in a war "against the extremists who desire safe havens and are willing to kill innocents anywhere to achieve their objectives." Even as Americans have roundly repudiated his conduct of the Iraqi occupation, as his most senior generals have challenged his handling of the occupation, as the Iraq Study Group readies its recommendations for major changes in his administration's policies, and the level of cooperation from the al-Maliki government is plummeting, Bush remains obstinate in his refusal to change either his rhetoric or his approach to handling the civil war in Iraq. While he has declared himself flexible and interested in hearing other ideas about handling Iraq, neither his words nor his actions have lived up to that presentation. He insists that there is no civil war in Iraq, merely sectarian violence in some areas of the country. He says he understands that "no question it's dangerous there, and violent." He says "the Maliki government is going to have to deal with that violence, and we want to help them do so."
In another example of his further disconnect with the realities in Iraq, Bush insists that the violence in Iraq is largely the product of foreign fighters working with al-Qaeda. Few besides Bush and Dick Cheney believe this assertion; almost everyone with knowledge of the events transpiring inside Iraq know that the vast majority of the violence within Iraq's borders comes from insurgents and natives, much of it targeting rival sects and religious groups, but plenty of it targeting American occupation forces. "There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place fomented, in my opinion, because of the attacks by al-Qaeda causing people to seek reprisal," he says.
And while levels of violence and death escalate beyond any totals reached so far -- November is, like October before it, the deadliest month in Iraq since the war began in March 2003 -- Bush is dismissive of any talk of escalation. "We've been in this phase for a while," he says.
His level of simpleminded rationalizations for sectarian and terrorist violence in other areas of the Middle East continues as well, even as others with more understanding insist otherwise. Of the increasing likelihood of civil war in Lebanon, he says, echoing the same rhetoric he has used about Iraq, "When you see a young democracy beginning to emerge in the Middle East, the extremists try to defeat its emergence. Extremists attack because they can't stand the thought of a democracy. And the same thing is happening in Iraq."
He has also shown little interest in opening talks with Syria and Iran, two neighboring countries who could offer tremendous assistance in promoting peace in Iraq. Instead, he has escalated the rhetoric against the two, today issuing warnings to both countries to not meddle in Iraq's affairs. Al-Maliki has made overtures to both governments, without American sanction. "The Iranians and the Syrians should help not destabilize this young democracy," says Bush, but Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said yesterday, "We are in dire need of Iran's help in establishing security and stability in Iraq." Talabani met yesterday with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. Publicly, Bush says it is not the US's business who Iraq negotiates with: "As far as Iraq goes, the Iraqi government is a sovereign government capable of handling its own foreign policies and is in the process of doing so," he says.
Privately, the relationship between the two governments is souring fast. National security adviser Stephen Hadley tactfully says that Bush and al-Maliki have "a relationship of candor." He adds, "A lot of discussion has been about [Bush] pushing Maliki. Maliki has done a lot of pushing himself. There has been a coordinated effort between the Iraqi government and allied forces to get greater control. ...It has not produced satisfactory progress in a satisfactory timeframe."
Incoming Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says that the time for unilateral decisions from the White House, with rubberstamp approval from the Republican Congressional leadership, has passed; Bush must now work with Democrats on stopping the violence in Iraq. "We want to work in a bipartisan way to settle this," she says. "If the president persists on the course that he is on, that will be more difficult."
Bush also presses many of the 26 NATO allies to do more to marshal resources and troops in Afghanistan, particularly in the volatile south, and calls the Afghanistan mission, which has mobilized over 32,000 troops so far, NATO's top operation. "The commanders on the ground must have the resources and flexibility they need to do their jobs," he says. (AP/Yahoo! News, ABC News)
November 28: Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he and his fellow Democrats will do their part to bring to a close the "do-nothing Congress" as epitomized by the current crop of senators and representatives. Reid says he and his fellow senators will work longer hours than they may be used to. He says that Democrats have a number of agenda items to implement, but the first order of business is to clean up the "financial mess" the Republican leadership is leaving behind (see previous item). The Republicans have decided to just let nine long-overdue spending bills wait until the next session instead of trying to get them dealt with before they leave for recess in early December. The bills cover 13 Cabinet departments for the fiscal year beginning October 1. "They're just leaving town, it appears," says Reid. "And so we're going to have to find a way to fund the government for the next year." Republicans made the choice to leave the funding unaddressed in order to make the Democrats waste their time next year, leaving them less time to address, among other front-burner concerns, Congressional ethics, stem cell research, and the minimum wage. "We're going to put in some hours here that haven't been put in in a long time," Reid says. That means "being here more days in the week, and we start off this year with seven weeks without a break. That hasn't been done in many, many years here."
Reid is not optimistic about the chances of any real bipartisanship from the White House. He says he hopes Bush is willing to work with Democratic congressional leaders, but he adds that the early signs have not been encouraging. He says he hasn't heard from anyone in the White House since his photo-op meeting with Bush in the Oval Office on November 10. "He said when I met with him after the election he wanted to work together, and I told him, 'Mr. President, you said that two years ago and we haven't gotten anything done,'" Reid says. Reid says he looks to January's State of the Union address for an idea of where Bush intends to drive his administration for the last two years of his last term.
Reid says he and his fellow Senate Democrats will conduct hearings to investigate problems in Iraq, but have no immediate plans to cut spending on the war. "Now he's the commander in chief, and we're not going to do anything to limit funding or cut off funds, even though there are some on the outside who suggest that," he says. "I think we want to make sure that the troops have everything that they need." (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 28: A report by the European Parliament accuses several European Union member nations of being complict in the construction of secret US jails for terrorism suspects, and of obstructing an investigation into the transport and illegal detention of prisoners. The report criticizes a number of top EU officials, including foreign policy chief Javier Solana and counter-terrorism coordinator Gijs de Vries, and complains of lack of cooperation from nearly all member states. The report says Nicolo Pollari, a former head of Italy's SISMI intelligence agency, "concealed the truth" when he told European Parliament lawmakers in March that Italian agents played no part in the CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric. On the contrary, SISMI officials played an active role in the abduction of Abu Omar, and it was "very probable" that the Italian government knew of the operation, the report says. The government of Silvio Berlusconi, in power at the time, repeatedly denied any knowledge. Berlusconi's successor Romano Prodi last week replaced Pollari, who faces possible indictment over the Abu Omar affair but denies any wrongdoing. The case is one of the best known of a suspected CIA "rendition," or secret transfer of a terrorist suspect between countries, a practice rights groups say often leads to torture. The European Parliament report says that Abu Omar, abducted in Milan in 2003 and flown to Egypt, had been "held incommunicado and tortured ever since." Rights group Amnesty International said in a statement it was time for politicians to accept their responsibilities. "European leaders cannot continue to deny them just as the EU cannot maintain that it is not its business," says the group.
The report echoes charges from the Council of Europe human rights body that European states were complicit in US abuses during the war on terrorism. It says records, from a confidential source, of an EU and NATO meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last December confirmed "member states had knowledge of the program of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons." In September 2006, Bush reluctantly confirmed that the CIA held high-level terrorism suspects at secret overseas locations, but Washington denies using torture or handing over prisoners to countries that practice it. The EU and Council of Europe inquiries were launched partly in response to media reports last year that the United States ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania. Both countries strongly deny that. But the report complains of a lack of cooperation from the Polish government and regretted Romania's reluctance to investigate thoroughly. The report also terms "totally unacceptable" the fact that the EU Council first hid, then provided only partial information on regular discussions with senior US administration officials. It notes that Solana provided testimony and evidence to the committee full of "omissions and denials." De Vries's evidence lacked credibility and the committee questioned the point of his counter-terrorism coordinator role. The committee notes that neither Europol criminal intelligence boss Max-Peter Ratzel nor NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer agreed to speak to it. Lastly, it "deplore[s]" poor cooperation from Britain, as represented before the committee by Europe Minister Geoff Hoon. (Reuters/Yahoo! News)
November 28: Philip Zelikow, a close advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the controversial, sometimes obstructionist executive director of the 9/11 investigative commission, announces that he will resign his post as "counselor" with the State Department. Zelikow's regisnation deprives Rice of what the Washington Post describes as her "key sounding board at a time when she is still searching for a new deputy and faces difficult challenges in the Middle East. The Post calls Zelikow Rice's "minister without portfolio," a "one-man think tank" for Rice. He has played a critical role in formulating policy at State. Zelikow has long advocated the confrontation of the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the overhauling of the administration's detainee policies, and using the North Korean nuclear crisis to strike a nuclear energy deal with India and to offer to join European-led nuclear talks with Iran. Zelikow has struck sparks with other administration officials because of his willingness to challenge administration orthodoxy, particularly in his advocacy of the administration's need to come to grips with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Pro-Israeli hawks in the administration have long viewed Zelikow as something of an enemy. (Washington Post)
November 28: The new head of the Republican National Committee, is raising questions over his suitability for the post, mostly centered around his connections with disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Martinez's predecessor, Ken Mehlman, who resigned his post after the GOP's massive midterm losses on November 7, has his own problems with his connections to Abramoff. Abramoff had aggressively courted Martinez when he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development on behalf of his tribal clients. In his guilty plea, former Republican representative Bob Ney admitted to lobbying Martinez on Abramoff's behalf. And when Martinez launched his Senate bid in 2004, Abramoff co-chaired a fundraiser that netted him $250,000. Martinez has said that he never met Abramoff when he was Secretary of HUD, but few believe that disclaimer. As for Mehlman, he, too, denies any connections to Abramoff, but in reality, Mehlman was so close to Abramoff that Abramoff's associates referred to him as their "rock star" for his many favors on their behalf. (TPM Muckraker)
November 28: Bush insults senator-elect Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat, over what should have been an innocuous inquiry about Webb's son Jimmy, a Marine serving in Iraq. At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers, Bush asks Webb, "How's your boy?" Webb replies, "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President." "That's not what I asked you," Bush snaps. "How's your boy?" Webb answers, "That's between me and my boy, Mr. President." Webb says later that he was so angered by Bush's response that he was tempted to punch Bush, but did not. "Jim did have a conversation with Bush at that dinner," says Webb's spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd. "Basically, he asked about Jim's son, Jim expressed the fact that he wanted to have him home." As for the rest of it, Todd merely says, "It was a private conversation."
Apparently Webb shows even more restraint than is originally reported. Weeks before the reception, Webb's son was involved in a firefight which claimed the lives of three of his fellow Marines. Bush is very aware of the incident, and of the stress and fear Webb is under. Yet instead of showing any empathy, Bush mocks Webb's feelings -- and the fact that Webb's son, like his fellow US soldiers, is in mortal peril. On December 3, Congressman Jim Moran, a fellow Virginia Democrat, confirms that Bush knew in detail the story of Webb's son: "Not only did Bush know about it, he was specifically briefed on the incident before meeting with Webb, and was cautioned to be extra sensitive in speaking with Webb about his son." And according to the proprietors of the blog Not Larry Sabato, which has excellent sources in the Virginia Democratic Party, "As President Bush is well aware [of the incident threatening Webb's son]. My sources are telling me that the way President Bush approached Webb with his tone, it appeared he was asking the question of how Jimmy was doing in a mocking manner, while he was certainly aware of the tragedy that had hit his unit a few weeks earlier. Webb has every right to be livid as the Commander-in-Chief should not be talking about service members in Iraq in a condescending manner like that. I hope everyone can understand what Webb is going through as a parent with death striking Jimmy's unit that closely, and President Bush should have been a lot more sympathetic to Jim's feelings as a parent." If this is true, then Bush's mockery of a father whose son is in mortal peril because of a war that Bush himself started is beyond unconscionable, and, in the judgment of the editor of this site, approaches the realm of pathological. (The Hill, Not Larry Sabato/Democratic Underground, New York Times/Welcome to Pottersville, Daily Kos)
November 29: In an interesting divide between conservative talk show pundits, Fox's Bill O'Reilly calls NBC's decision to use the phrase "civil war" to describe the debacle in Iraq an attempt to kowtow to terrorists, and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough responds by calling O'Reilly's comments "insane" and "very disturbing." O'Reilly tells his Fox listeners, "NBC News has declared that there is indeed a civil war in Iraq. Now, that's not shocking because NBC is the most aggressive anti-Bush network these days, as they have made a calculated effort to woo left-wing viewers. The question is, is NBC wrong about Iraq? The answer is, yes. Of course, the American media is not helping anyone by oversimplifying the situation and rooting for the USA to lose in Iraq. And that is what some media people are doing." The next night, Scarborough, the conservative former House Republican who hosts his own show on MSNBC, says that O'Reilly is "suggesting that NBC is rooting for America to lose in Iraq" and asks, "What is going on at Fox News? Why is Bill O'Reilly claiming that my network, NBC News, is rooting for terrorists? That's truly insulting to me." Scarborough says, "I think that's insane, that he's suggesting there that NBC is rooting for America to lose in Iraq. Bill O'Reilly has had questions about this war from the very beginning. Bill O'Reilly knows we're engaged in a civil war over there. I'm stunned. What is going on at Fox News? Why is Bill O'Reilly claiming that my network, NBC News, is rooting for terrorists? That's truly insulting to me. ...I have defended Bill O'Reilly time and time again because I know liberals hate Bill because he speaks his mind, and he wins. But I think in this case, it's over the top and it's very disturbing to me." (Fox News/MSNBC/MediaMatters [link to video])

November 29: A federal district judge strikes down Bush's assumed authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying the executive order issued September 24, 2001 is unconstitutional and illegally vague. Some parts of the order tagging 27 groups and individuals as "specially designated global terrorists" are too vague and could impinge on First Amendment rights of free association, says Judge Audrey Collins. The order gave the president "unfettered discretion" to label groups without giving them a way to challenge the designations, she wrote in a November 21 ruling that is made public today. The decision lets stand sections that would penalize those who provide "services" to designated terrorist groupsm including the humanitarian aid and rights training proposed by the plaintiffs. The ruling is praised by David Cole, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented the plaintiff Humanitarian Law Project. It "says that even in fighting terrorism the president cannot be given a blank check to blacklist anyone he considers a bad guy or a bad group and you can't imply guilt by association," according to Cole. The HLP will appeal those portions of the executive order which were allowed to stand. Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller says, "We are pleased the court rejected many of the constitutional arguments raised by the plaintiffs, including their challenge to the government's ban on providing services to terrorist organizations. However, we believe the court erred in finding that certain other aspects of the executive order were unconstitutional." Collins's order is a reversal of her own tentative findings last July in which she indicated she would uphold wide powers asserted by Bush under an anti-terror financing law. She delayed her ruling then to allow more legal briefs to be filed. The long-running litigation has centered on two groups, the Liberation Tigers, which seeks a separate homeland for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, and Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, a political organization representing the interests of Kurds in Turkey. Both groups have been designated by the United States as foreign terrorist organizations. (AP/Yahoo! News)
November 29: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says that Iraq is in the grip of a full-blown civil war, and that Bush should acknowledge that fact. According to CNN reporter Hala Gorani, reporting from Dubai, Powell says during a leadership conference in that Gulf State nation that if he were still in charge of State, he would recommend that the Bush administration adopt that language "in order to come to terms with the reality on the ground." According to Gorani, "Powell says he thinks we can call it a civil war and added if he were still heading the State Department, he probably would recommend to the Bush administration that those terms should be used in order to come to terms with the reality on the ground. I'm paraphrasing what he told me. This was closed to cameras and this was something he said within the context of this academic debate with 2 or 3,000 people watching on in the region." Powell proposes a two-part solution to the problems in Iraq. First, coalition troops must remain, but their numbers must be reduced. Second, a political solution must emerge among Iraqis themselves and not be imposed on them. (CNN, CNN/Think Progress [link to video])
November 29: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will recommend significant changes to specifications for electronic-voting machines next week, including the recommendation that the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) decertify direct record electronic (DRE) machines. The controversial DREs are currently used by more than 30% of jurisdictions across the US and are the exclusive voting technology in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina. NIST says that DRE vote totals cannot be audited because the machines are not software independent -- there is no means of verifying vote tallies other than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to begin with. The machines currently in use are "more vulnerable to undetected programming errors or malicious code," NIST says. The NIST report also notes that "potentially, a single programmer could 'rig' a major election." It recommends "requiring SI [software independent] voting systems in VVSG 2007." NIST is also going to recommend changes to the design of machines equipped with paper rolls that provide audit trails. Currently, the paper rolls produce records that are illegible or otherwise unusable, and NIST is recommending that "paper rolls should not be used in new voting systems." The lack of software independence has come up in Florida's 13th House District, where 18,000 fewer votes were cast than in other races on the same ballot. Recounts are virtually meaningless in that election because Sarasota County uses DRE machines. This has provoked concerns that someone tampered with that election.
Congressional hearings were held throughout the summer and fall, and legislation was introduced that would require the use of some form of voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). These efforts have gathered steam in response to reported machine malfunctions during the March 2006 primaries, as well as studies by the Brennan Center and Princeton University professor Ed Felten, as well as pressure from advocacy groups such as VotersUnite.org. But even VVPAT machines may not solve the problem; a study of the 2006 primaries in Ohio commissioned by Cuyahoga County, Ohio, showed that the results of that election could not be verified despite the presence of VVPAT. The study concluded that "the election system, in its entirety, exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences, especially in the event of a close election." Many former advocates of VVPAT, including John Gideon, executive director of VotersUnite, now favor requiring that all votes be recorded on paper ballots. "DREs are unacceptable as voting devices and...the addition of a VVPAT on a DRE is only a placebo to make some voters feel more comfortable," says Gideon. Doug Jones of the University of Iowa suggests that election officials consider implementing new technologies that enable independent auditing of votes. He points to a system devised by Ted Selker, co-director of the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project. "The state of the art systems aren't even on the market," Jones says. (Internet News)
November 29: The US government agrees to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, who was arrested and jailed for two weeks in 2004 after the FBI botched a fingerprint match and mistakenly linked him to a terrorist attack in Spain. (See the May 23, 2004 item in this site.) The government also issues an unusual apology to Mayfield for the "suffering" caused by his wrongful arrest and imprisonment, and acknowledges that the ordeal was "deeply upsetting" to Mayfield and his family. Mayfield intends to continue his legal challenge to the constitutionality of the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law, which was used to obtain his personal records while he was under investigation. Mayfield was arrested as a material witness in May 2004, after FBI examiners erroneously linked him to a partial fingerprint on a bag of detonators found after terrorists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March, killing 191 people. The bureau compounded its error by refusing to listen to the conclusions of the Spanish National Police, which notified the FBI three weeks before Mayfield was arrested that the fingerprint did not belong to him. In his lawsuit, Mayfield asserted that his civil rights had been violated and that he was arrested because he is a Muslim convert who had represented some defendants in terrorism-related cases. The settlement includes payments of $1.9 million to Mayfield and $25,000 each to his wife and three daughters. The amount is more than twice what the government agreed to pay earlier this year to Wen Ho Lee, a US nuclear scientist who demonstrated in court that government officials violated privacy laws by identifying him as a suspect in a spying investigation, an identification that was proven false. The government has also agreed to destroy all material obtained during electronic surveillance of Mayfield and clandestine searches of his home and office.
For civil libertarians and advocates of the Constitution, the Mayfield case shows how easily the government can abuse its powers to detain alleged terrorism suspects under relaxed standards of probable cause. Mayfield says that he was threatened with the death penalty while in custody, that he and his family were targeted "because of our Muslim religion," and that he looks forward "to the day when the Patriot Act is declared unconstitutional." He continues, "The power of the government to secretly search your home or business without probable cause, under the guise of an alleged terrorist investigation, must be stopped." A report released in March by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine found that although Mayfield's religion was not a factor in his initial identification, it contributed to the FBI's reluctance to reexamine its conclusions after challenges from Spanish police. Fine also found that the FBI used expanded powers under the Patriot Act to demand personal information about Mayfield from banks and other companies, and that the law "amplified the consequences" of the FBI's mistakes by allowing other government agencies to share flawed information.
On March 11, 2004, al-Qaeda terrorists detonated bombs on several commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people. Mayfield's prints, on file because of his service in the US Army, were found by FBI examiners to match a partial print found on a nearby bag of detonaters. Spanish police disputed the FBI's findings, saying that the print belonged to an Algerian national named Ouhnane Daoud. The FBI was obstinate, refusing to listen to the findings of the Spanish police. Three weeks later, in a circus-like media atmosphere orchestrated by the Justice Department, Mayfield was arrested, and touted as the FBI's latest high-profile terror suspect. Leaked information from the Justice Department all but convicted Mayfield in the court of public opinion. (Washington Post)

November 30: President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki meet for breakfast after their scheduled dinner meeting was cancelled. The dinner meeting was scrubbed after a White House memo questioning Maliki's ability to pacify his country was leaked to the US press, and after a key Shi'ite bloc announced a boycott of the Baghdad government. Instead of two full days of talks, the schedule is hurriedly rearranged to allow for only breakfast and a single meeting. Additionally, three-way talks between Bush, Maliki, and Jordan's King Abdullah are cancelled. Although the US press in specific downplays the significance of Maliki's cancellation of the full schedule of discussions, at least one source, the Chicago Sun-Times, writes, "The cancellation was an almost unheard-of development in the high-level circles of a US president, a king and a prime minister."
At a press conference, Bush and Maliki jointly announce their support for a speedier training program of Iraqi security forces. "I told the prime minister that our goal in Iraq is to strengthen his government and support his efforts to build a free Iraq," says Bush. But the summit, held in Amman, Jordan, is rocky, after being held up as a necessity for devising strategies for stemming civil strife in Iraq. White House officials spend the day on the defensive, insisting they had faith in Maliki despite the harsh content of the leaked memo and struggling to explain why a meeting that had been on the president's calendar for days was suddenly scrubbed. Senior Bush aides offer at least four explanations for the cancellation before finally dispatching a more junior official to tell reporters on November 29 that Maliki and Jordan's King Abdullah had decided mutually that a three-way conversation was not necessary. The Jordanian and Iraqi leaders had met earlier in the day and sent word of their decision to Bush as the president flew to Amman from a NATO summit in Latvia. White House officials insist the schedule change was not a snub in response to the memo, disclosed Wednesday by the New York Times, nor was it related, they said, to a government boycott in Iraq by Shi'ite legislators affiliated with anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Bush and Abdullah meet privately for 30 minutes before joining their aides for a dinner lasting more than an hour. They discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon, and Syria, but do not focus on Iraq, according to White House officials. White House spokesman Dan Bartlett attempts to downplay the meeting, formerly heralded as a critical summit meeting; now Bartlett says the meeting had been foreseen as "more of a social meeting anyways." He adds, "Look, they were not going to be doing a full-detail discussion in a [three-way] setting about Iraq and the future of Iraq and the strategy anyway. That just wouldn't be appropriate." Few believe the White House spin.
Still, the surprising change of plans suggested more was at work than a scheduling matter among friends. Bush rarely deviates from plans, and officials have acknowledged that they departed Latvia with the understanding that he would meet with Maliki that night. The Jordanians and Iraqis offered different explanations for the cancellation. A royal court source said Abdullah and Bush met longer than expected and had to cancel the meeting with Maliki. The source said Maliki could be using the delay, which was requested by Abdullah, for political advantage in calming the Sadr movement. The source suggested that Maliki might be claiming that he canceled the meeting as a way to appease hard-line Sadr supporters who have boycotted the government in protest of his meeting with Bush. The Sadr loyalists have denounced Bush as "the biggest representative of evil in the world" and his meeting with Maliki as a "provocation and insult to the feelings of the Iraqi people." Other Iraqi politicians, however, dismissed the gesture as political posturing aimed at Sadr's militant base, millions of mostly impoverished Shi'ites in Baghdad and southern Iraq. Sadr's boycott falls short of his threat last week to withdraw from the government. Such a withdrawal of his 30 members of the Iraqi parliament and several key ministry posts would likely be enough to topple the Maliki government.
The memo, written November 8 by national security advisor Stephen Hadley, hinted at rising tensions between Washington and Baghdad. "His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shia hierarchy and force positive change," the memo says of Maliki. "But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action." The memo stands in stark contrast to Hadley's words of November 28, when he said that Maliki's government was "doing pretty well in a very difficult situation." Administration officials say the memo is a "hard look, a probing look" at the conditions in Iraq but should not be interpreted as a criticism of Maliki. "The president has confidence in Prime Minister Maliki, and the administration is working with the prime minister to improve his capabilities in terms of dealing with the fundamental challenges in Iraq," says White House spokesman Tony Snow. The memo also suggests urging Saudi Arabia should "take a leadership role in supporting Iraq by using its influence to move Sunni populations in Iraq out of violence into politics, to cut off any public or private funding provided to the insurgents or death squads from the region and to lean on Syria to terminate its support for Baathists [followers of Saddam Hussein] and insurgent leaders." The mention of Saudi Arabia could explain why Vice President Dick Cheney paid a surprise visit to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, last week for what Hadley called a "very confidential conversation." (Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times)
November 30: The Bush administration intends to hide critical information about its domestic spying and interrogation policies from the incoming Democratic leadership in Congress, according to Republican senator Arlen Specter. Specter, the outgoing Judiciary Committee chairman, says he looks forward to detailed congressional oversight of the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping. Specter's committee was blocked by the administration this year from conducting a full review of the program, despite an outcry among some lawmakers that the spying was illegal. "We have to really get into the details as to what the program is, as to how many people they are tapping, what they're finding out," he recently told an American Bar Association conference on national security. Specter says he has "grave reservations" that Congress would end up getting the information from the administration, "given the administration's unwillingness to share those secrets." The eavesdropping program allows the NSA to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of US citizens without first obtaining a warrant. Specter and other critics say the program has violated US laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires warrants for all intelligence surveillance. The Bush administration contends the program is legal, narrowly focused on suspected terrorists and authorized by Bush's constitutional powers as commander in chief. When his Republican party was in control of Congress, Specter launched an unsuccessful legislative bid to have the program reviewed by a secret federal court. Now, after victory in the November 7 election, Democrats will take control next year and are vowing to press the White House for greater cooperation on domestic spying as well as the CIA's detention and treatment of terrorism suspects. "Only then, can we conduct thorough oversight of these programs and determine whether they are legal," says John Rockefeller, the incoming Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Specter says the White House is also unlikely to divulge details about its treatment of detainees to the Democratic-controlled Senate intelligence and armed services panels, despite lingering concerns among lawmakers that US interrogations could still violate torture protections. "We still haven't resolved the issue of torture," he says. "The new leadership on armed services will be pushing a lot harder for answers. What they will get remains to be seen. I would expect the president will resist giving information." (Reuters)
November 30: Recent statements by senior State Department analyst Kendall Myers that he is "ashamed" of how Bush treats his British counterpart, Tony Blair, and calling US-British relations "totally one-sided" set off a firestorm of angry denials from Bush administration officials. State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey mounted a damage control effort, after Myers's remarks at an academic forum were reported across the front page of Britain's Times. "We repudiate and disassociate ourselves from these comments," Casey says, and stresses that Myers has no role in formulating American foreign policy. "The comments, frankly, I think, could be described as ill-informed, and I think from our perspective, just plain wrong," he says. The Times quotes Myers, a foreign research analyst in the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, as saying the transatlantic relationship is "totally one-sided" and Britain's self-appointed role as a bridge between America and Europe is "disappearing before our eyes." Myers says, "We typically ignore them and take no notice. ...It's a sad business." He adds that he feels a "little ashamed" of Bush's treatment of Blair. "What I think and fear is that Britain will draw back from the US without moving closer to Europe. In that sense, London's bridge is falling down." Casey says that Myers's position in the State Department is now in jeopardy. "He was not authorized to speak as a department official or in the name of the department, and certainly wasn't doing so, from our perspective. ...Once all the information has been gathered, then the department will look at what actions might be appropriate." Of the ties between the US and Britain, Casey says, "It is a special relationship. It is a very unique one. We certainly know that the world would be a worse place without our partnership." (AFP/Yahoo! News)
November 30: A variety of major problems, "glitches," and irregularities plaged the elections in 17 states on November 7. The nonpartisan group ElectionLine, which tracks states' voting procedures and results, reports that long lines, machine malfunctions and human error resulted in people choosing not to vote, or votes being counted incorrectly nationwide. The states with the most complaints and problems were Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Florida. Some problems were systemic and politically based -- voter fraud and intimidation. Other problems centered around malfunctioning electronic voting machines, or a lack of enough machines to serve voters in a particular precinct. A few problems were freak, one-off occurrences, including an Oklahoma incident where a squirrel chewed through an electrical cable and causing polling stations to lose power, a Pennsylvania voter vandalizing a machine, a bomb scare briefly closing a Wisconsin precinct, and a Kentucky voter assaulting a poll worker.
Too many voters were denied a reasonable opportunity to vote, says ElectionLine editor Dan Seligson: "I think anytime a registered voter shows up to vote and for any reason can't, this is an egregious problem, so whether it was a voting machine error or a poll book or ballot design, these are all egregious."
Machine malfunctions were rampant. The most frequent problem was vote flipping, when voters chose one candidate only to have the machine mark another. This happened in at least a dozen states, including Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Texas. Poll workers had problems turning on machines and difficulty feeding paper ballots into optical scanners. In Florida, Sarasota County is still grappling with a House election that remains undecided due to machines registering 18,000 undervotes, or ballots where voters chose no candidate for the race, with scores of voters complaining that their votes were cast but not counted.
Voter registration was another problem experienced by many states, with Colorado experiencing the most troubles. Denver County used electronic poll books connected to its voter database, but the computers froze several times, in some cases taking as long as 20 minutes to verify a name, and forced poll workers to restart the machines. Voters waited in lines for up to three hours and the Denver mayor promised to void any parking tickets issued while voters waited. Too many Indiana and Ohio voters found their names had been left off the voting rolls, and in Rhode Island and New York, officially dead people were still on the rolls (in New York, up to 2,600 votes were cast by what elections officials call "politically active corpses.")
Voter identification was a major source of contention, with confusion arising in many states over what forms of ID voters were and were not required to have. Poll workers often asked for unnecessary identification in states like Georgia, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Ballot shortages happened in a number of places. Precincts in Boston ran out of ballots, forcing police cruisers to rush ballots to polling places; afterward, the Massachusetts secretary of state threatened to take over the Boston Elections Department in future elections.
Voter fraud and intimidation was an issue in too many areas. While the news report on the ElectionLine findings only reports a few incidents -- some Virginia voters being called and told not to vote, and Hispanic voters in Tucson harassed by a group of men with a camcorder, a clipboard, and a handgun -- other examples are noted in the election coverage of this site. (Stateline)
November 30: North Carolina's 8th District will send incumbent Robin Hayes back to Washington as a US representative, after a slow tally of provisional ballots and two recounts fail to eliminate his slim vote lead over challenger Larry Kissell, a Democrat. (See above items for more information about this race.) Kissell concedes the race, and announces he will run again against Hayes in 2008. He writes in a statement to his supporters, "When I started my run for Congress I said it's not about who you are or how much money you have, it's about what you stand for. The folks who voted for me knew I stood with them. And while the 2006 election is officially behind us, I recognize that the future is already upon us. My vision of the future is simple, help those who have been pushed aside by the Washington politicians and special interests. I offer Congressman Hayes my prayers that he return safely to Washington and that he and his family have a blessed holiday. ...I'm energized and ready to meet those 327 or so voters we missed on election day many times over during the next two years." Kissell nearly pulled off what surely would have been one of the biggest upsets of the campaign season. A social-studies teacher and political unknown, he ran a grass-roots campaign and was written off by national Democrats after their favored candidate dropped out of contention before the primary. Kissell's success this year may encourage national party fundraisers to contribute to his effort in two years. (Congressional Quarterly, Daily Kos)
November 30: Incoming House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank says he will try again in 2007 to tighten government reviews of foreign takeovers of US companies. Earlier this year, Frank backed a bill passed by the full House earlier this year that would have changed how the federal government's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) reviews foreign acquisitions. The Senate passed its own CFIUS reform, as well, but the two chambers failed to hammer out a compromise version. "I'm very frustrated by the Senate's not acting on that,"Frank says. "If they don't act finally, we'll reintroduce our bill" next year. Reform efforts emerged in February 2006 amid controversy over CFIUS approving the purchase by Arab group Dubai Ports World of major assets at six US ports. (Reuters)
November 30: Washington Post political columnist Dan Froomkin writes a piece for the respected journalism blog Nieman Watchdog entitled, straightforwardly enough, "On Calling Bullsh*t." Froomkin, one of the few Washington reporters willing to tell the truth about those in power even if it offends the said powermongers, warns that because of mainstream journalists' tendency to kowtow to power, mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming irrelevant. "It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do," he says, far more than any threat from the Internet or Comedy Central's satirical Daily Show and Colbert Report. The hosts of those two shows, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, are so popular because, writes Froomkin, "more than anything else, ...they enthusiastically call bullsh*t." He continues, "Calling bullsh*t, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullsh*t has never been more vital to our democracy." Froomkin says that so many contemporary journalists are unwilling to "call bullsh*t" for a variety of reasons. "There's the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There's the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There's the fear of being labeled partisan if one's bullsh*t-calling isn't meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum." [Editor's note: I haven't seen anything approaching "precisely equal increments" since the Goldwater-Johnson debate coverage.]
Froomkin continues, "The return of Democrats to political power and relevancy gives us the opportunity to call bullsh*t in a more bipartisan manner, which is certainly healthy. But there are different kinds of bullsh*t. Republican political leaders these past six years have built up a massive, unprecedented credibility deficit, such that even their most straightforward assertions invite close bullsh*t inspection. By contrast, Democratic bullsh*t tends to center more around hypocrisy and political cowardice. Trying to find equivalency between the two would still be a mistake -- and could lead to catty, inside-baseball gotcha journalism rather than genuine bullsh*t-calling.
Froomkin concludes, "If mainstream-media political journalists don't start calling bullsh*t more often, then we do risk losing our primacy -- if not to the comedians then to the bloggers. But here's the good news for you newsroom managers wringing your hands over new technologies and the loss of younger audiences: Because the Internet so values calling bullsh*t, you are sitting on an as-yet largely untapped gold mine. I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullsh*t-calling than a well-informed beat reporter -- whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship -- or whatever it is -- out of the way." (Nieman Watchdog)
November 30: The media watchdog site NewsHounds compares the coverage of Newt Gingrich's recent diatribe against freedom of speech from two separate television news sources, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, host of Countdown, and Fox News's Martha MacCallum, host of Live Desk. The differences are illuminating. Olbermann's piece, which ran on November 28, noted the irony of Gingrich making such an anti-First Amendment speech during the Loeb First Amendment Dinner in Manchester, New Hampshire. Olbermann aired a tape of a portion of Gingrich's remarks and then quoted extensively from the text of the speech as well. His report included the information that Gingrich also proposed re-thinking campaign finance reform and the separation of church and state because he said they allegedly hurt the First Amendment. Olbermann mainly focused on Gingrich's desire to abrogate the freedom of speech. He played audio of Gingrich saying, "My prediction to you is that either before we lose a city or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us." He then read excerpts from the speech where Gingrich said, "This is a serious long term war and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country. It will lead us to learn how to close down every web site that is dangerous." Olbermann then had guest Jonathan Turley, an expert on constitutional law from George Washington University, who warned that Gingrich's appeal will likely fall on receptive ears among some Americans because fear can be a powerful motivator. "People don't seem to appreciate that you really can't save a constitution by destroying it," he said.
MacCallum's piece ran the next night, and was totally different in its focus. She framed the story with an unrelated event -- the guilty pleas of two Texas men to charges that they tried to join the Taliban by using their ATM cards to send money to a charity. Then she quoted only a brief segment of Gingrich's remarks, the scary part: "We need to get ahead of the curve before we actualy lose a city...which I believe could happen in the next decade." Instead of a constitutional law expert, MacCallum had as her guests a former FBI official and a terrorism analyst. They talked, not about Gingrich's advocacy of curtailing freedom of speech, but about the lack of funding for fighting terrorism and the problems following the Constitution raises for law enforcement. MacCallum introduced one of them by asking, "Are we mired in our own muck in terms of our intelligence?" Terrorism analyst David Katz replied, "We need to get out of our own way. We are defining as civil liberties things that are basic to investigative law enforcement, protecting us against terrorism." MacCallum never questioned the Gingrich's premise -- that law enforcement lacks the tools for fighting terrorism. She never expressed any doubts about the loss of free speech and how that would be administered. She never mentioned Gingrich's proposal that web sites that someone deems dangerous should be closed down.
The same story, two completely different foci. Interesting. (NewsHounds [link to videos])
November 30: MSNBC's Keith Olbermann airs another "Special Comment," this time lambasting Republican Newt Gingrich for the former House Speaker's controversial remarks that freedom of speech in this country should be drastically curtained in order to fight the threat of terrorism. Olbermann, as is often the case, pulls no punches with Gingrich, using Gingrich's own words to destroy his arguments.
Olbermann quotes Gingrich as saying, "This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country." Olbermann responds, "Some, in the audience, must have thought they were hearing an arsonist give the keynote address at a convention of firefighters. ...And the arsonist at the microphone, the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was insisting that we must attach an 'on-off button' to Free Speech. He offered the time-tested excuse trotted out by our demagogues, since even before the Republic was founded: widespread death, of Americans, in America, possibly at the hands of Americans. But updated, now, to include terrorists, using the Internet for recruitment. End result, quote, "losing a city." The Colonial English defended their repression with words like these. And so did the Slave States. And so did the policemen who shot strikers. And so did Lindbergh's America-First crowd. And so did those who interned Japanese-Americans. And so did those behind the Red Scare. And so did Nixon's Plumbers. The genuine proportion of the threat is always irrelevant. The fear the threat is exploited to create becomes the only reality."
Olbermann continues: "'We will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find,' Mr. Gingrich continued about terrorists -- formerly Communists, formerly hippies, formerly Fifth Columnists, formerly Anarchists, formerly Redcoats -- '...to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech.' Mr. Gingrich, the British 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1770's. The pro-slavery leaders 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1850's. The FBI and CIA 'broke up our capacity to use free speech' in the 1960's. It is in those groups where you would have found your kindred spirits, Mr. Gingrich. Those who had no faith in freedom, no faith in this country, and, ultimately, no faith even in the strength of their own ideas, to stand up on their own legs, without having the playing field tilted entirely to their benefit. 'It will lead us to learn,' Gingrich continued, 'how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear and biological weapons.' That we have always had 'a very severe approach' to these people is insufficient for Mr. Gingrich's ends. He wants to somehow ban the idea. Even though everyone who has ever protested a movie or a piece of music or a book has learned the same lesson: Try to suppress it, and you only validate it. Make it illegal, and you make it the subject of curiosity. Say it cannot be said -- and it will instead be screamed."
Olbermann notes further that Gingrich's ideas of Internet censorship simply won't work. "As of tomorrow they will have been defeated by a free computer download. Mere hours after Gingrich's speech in New Hampshire, the University of Toronto announced it had come up with a program called 'Psiphon' to liberate those, in countries in which the Internet is regulated. Places like China, and Iran, where political ideas are so barren, and political leaders so desperate, that they put up computer firewalls to keep thought and freedom out. The 'Psiphon' device is a relay of sorts that can surreptitiously link a computer user in an imprisoned country to another in a free one. The Chinese think the wall works, yet the ideas -- good ideas, bad ideas, indifferent ideas, pass through anyway. The same way the Soviet Bloc, was defeated by the images of Western material bounty. If your hopes of thought-control can be defeated, Mr. Gingrich, merely by one computer whiz staying up an extra half hour and devising a new 'firewall hop,' what is all this apocalyptic hyperbole for?
"'I further think,' you said in Manchester, 'we should propose a Geneva convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules, that allow us, to protect civilization by defeating barbarism." Well, Mr. Gingrich, what is more 'massively destructive' than trying to get us, to give you our freedom? And what is someone seeking to hamstring the First Amendment doing, if not 'fighting outside the rules of law'? And what is the suppression of knowledge and freedom, if not 'barbarism'? The explanation, of course, is in one last quote from Mr. Gingrich from New Hampshire, and another, from last week. 'I want to suggest to you,' he said about these Internet restrictions, 'that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of the threat.' And who should those 'impaneled' people, be? Funny I should ask, isn't it, Mr. Gingrich? 'I am not "running" for president,' you told a reporter from Fortune magazine. 'I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.'" That answers Gingrich's self-posed question: he will frighten the American people into electing him president, and letting him do the empaneling to rob the country of its freedoms.
Olbermann says, "Newt Gingrich sees, in terrorism, not something to be exterminated, but something to be exploited. It's his golden opportunity, isn't it? 'Rallying a nation,' you might say, 'to hysteria, to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.' That's from the original version of the movie The Manchurian Candidate -- [the character who makes deals with the] Chinese and Russians, then reveals she'll double-cross them, and keep all the power herself, waving the flag every time she subjugates another freedom. Within the frame of our experience as a free and freely argumentative people, it is almost impossible to conceive that there are those among us, who might approach the kind of animal-wildness of fiction like that -- those who would willingly transform our beloved country into something false and terrible. Who among us can look to our own histories, or those of our ancestors who struggled to get here, or who struggled to get freedom after they were forced here, and not tear up when we reed Frederick Douglass's words from a century and a half ago: 'Freedom must take the day'? And who among us can look to our collective history, and not see its turning points -- like the Civil War, like Watergate, like the Revolution itself -- in which the right idea defeated the wrong idea on the battlefield that is the marketplace of ideas? But apparently there are some of us who cannot see, that the only future for America is one that cherishes the freedoms won in the past, one in which we vanquish bad ideas with better ones, and in which we fight for liberty by having more liberty, not less.
Olbermann concludes by repeating the above quote from Gingrich: "'I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen." Olbermann then says, "What a dark place your world must be, Mr. Gingrich, where the way to save America, is to destroy America. I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you in that dark place. And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it. And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea it represents -- and what a cynical mind. And that you are entitled to do all that, thanks to the very freedoms, you seek to suffocate." (MSNBC/Crooks and Liars [link to video])
November 30: Iconoclastic, conservative radio host Don Imus lets his anti-Semitism fly, calling the "Jewish management" of CBS Radio "money-grubbing b*stards" during his morning radio show, which is also carried live on MSNBC. Imus and his equally jingoistic sidekick, producer Bernard McGuirk, don't restrict themselves to mere anti-Semitism: during a discussion of a past conflict between Imus and his supervisors about hosting the musical group the Blind Boys of Alabama, McGuirk says, "Even if you wear a beanie, how can you not love the Blind Boys?" Imus answers, "I said, 'They're handicapped, they're black, and they're blind. How do we lose here?' And then a light bulb just went off over [the managers'] scummy little heads." CBS Radio owns WFAN, the New York station that is the flagship for Imus's radio show. (Forward/MediaMatters [link to video])
November 30: Progressive author and blogger David Sirota says bluntly, "Sociopaths have taken over the op-ed pages" of tha nation's premier newspapers. He gives several prime examples, including the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, the New Republic's Jonathan Chait, the New York Times's columnist and bestselling author Tom Friedman, and the perennial Washington insider and editorial page fixture, George Will. On November 20, Cohen wrote for the Post, "I originally had no moral qualms about the war.... I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war -- silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.... In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic." Such a statement, even for someone who supports the war, is amazing. "Therapeutic" violence to "cure" the "offensive" opponents of the war?
Less than a week later, Chait, who has long been an outspoken supporter of the war, wrote for the Los Angeles Times that perhaps it is time to bring Saddam Hussein back to power. "Just maybe our best option is to restore Saddam Hussein to power," he wrote, perhaps sarcastically. "Yes, I know. Hussein is a psychotic mass murderer. Under his rule, Iraqis were shot, tortured and lived in constant fear." Sirota notes, "I would be quick to dismiss these statements as the insane blatherings of merely two lunatics who are clearly so embarrassed by their advocacy for the Iraq War, that they have lost all control of their faculties. But such absurd comments have now become a mainstay of today's op-ed pages. Just a few months ago, the New York Times's David Brooks wrote that 'voters shouldn't be allowed to define the choices in American politics.' Then there was was columnist Mort Kondracke on Fox News saying the veterans health care system 'doesn't work' even though by all objective measures, it is the best health care system in the entire country."
As for Friedman, he has admitted on television that he regularly uses his space on the op-ed page to push free trade deals that he hasn't even bothered to read. Friedman was a cheerleader for the war, has backed off that support, and today writes that the US should consider "reinvading Iraq with at least 150,000 more troops" and staying there for 10 more years. Since 2003, Friedman has insisted that everything in Iraq will be taken care of in "six months."
Sirota's favorite self-immolation comes from George Will. Today, Will rants in the Post about how senator-elect Jim Webb was "uncivil" to Bush by telling the president that he wants the troops to come home -- this while Webb's son is fighting in Iraq with his Marine unit, and the Bush daughters are partying like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in South America. Will continues by saying he and his fellow Washington pundits find it nauseating for Webb to have the gall to try to discuss the concept of economic inequality, referring to an already-famous Wall Street Journal op-ed by Webb (see item above). Will even criticizes Webb's writing skills, griping that Webb is "turning out slapdash prose that would be rejected by a reasonably demanding high school teacher."
Sirota lets loose: "Yes, folks -- the sociopaths on the right have been relegated to grammar criticism and demands that everyone in Washington attend Miss Manners. Because what really offends someone like George Will is not Americans dying in a war based on lies (Why should it? He's a Washington insider with connections, dammit, and he's not personally affected by such dirty things); it's not an economic class war being waged on working people (Why should it? he's a well-paid pundit who can't be bothered with such trifles); it's not even his fellow Washington Post pal Richard Cohen saying that violence is 'therapeutic' (what a message for the kids!). No -- what really truly offends [Will's] Capital Grille sensibilities is 'incivility' and grammar. Oh, except for one thing -- that's not offensive when it comes from people like Dick Cheney who told other Senators to 'f*&! off' and George W. Bush, that world famous master of the King's English. None of this is normal, socially acceptable behavior in the real, non-pundit world. These are the kind of sociopathic outbursts that, outside the Beltway, get people fired from their jobs, expelled to pariah status, and ridiculed as having 'lost it.' But I guess the laws of regular society just don't apply to these people. That's not all that surprising. ...[M]ost of the supposedly 'national' opinionmaking apparatus resides not throughout the nation, but instead inside elite circles in Washington and New York City -- places that apparently aren't subjected to the normal rules of America, places where sociopathic behavior gets you labeled a Serious Person. But here's the deal, folks -- just because you read sociopathic claims on your op-ed pages from the Washington opinionmaking machine about how violence is supposedly 'therapeutic,' how we should supposedly bring Saddam Hussein back to power, how voters suppposedly shouldn't be able to make choices in America and how new Senators have no right to tell the President they want the troops home -- remember, that doesn't make these claims truthful or acceptable out here in the real world, and it doesn't make you crazy for thinking that the people who make these claims ARE crazy." (Daily Kos)
November 30: Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who has been divorced three times and forced his female housekeeper to purchase illegal prescription drugs for him, discusses his deep understanding and sympathy for the female of the species. He tells his listeners, "My cat -- here's how you can get fooled. My cat comes to me when she wants to be fed. I have learned this. I accept it for what it is. Many people in my position would think my cat's coming to me because she loves me. Well, she likes me, and she is attached, but she comes to me when she wants to be fed. And after I feed her -- guess what -- she's off to wherever she wants to be in the house, until the next time she gets hungry. She's smart enough to know she can't feed herself. She's actually a very smart cat. She gets loved. She gets adoration. She gets petted. She gets fed. And she doesn't have to do anything for it, which is why I say this cat's taught me more about women, than anything my whole life." (MediaMatters)

Back to November 2006

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 Four

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