October 2006: Week Two: This Far and No Further

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October 8: The British "Operation Sinbad," an attempt to root out insurgents in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, has been an abject failure and resulted in devastating counterattacks. Around 1,000 British soldiers are part of Sinbad, seen as a crucial test of the British-led coalition force in southern Iraq to "clean up" Basra, the country's second-largest city. The operation, which begun on September 27, includes around 2,300 Iraqi troops, and is designed to cordon off sections of the city one by one, retake police stations dominated by what the British call "rogue elements," and and allow contractors to carry out quick projects aimed at boosting public confidence, such as repairing street lights and clearing rubbish. Unfortunately, as British military spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge says, the operation has been plagued by coordinated attacks on military convoys. One of the prime objectives, to insert Royal Military Police "transition teams" into police stations in order to bring them back into the fold and root out insurgents operating out of those stations, has not yet been successful. Many police stations in Basra are bases for corruption, organized crime and assassinations. "From time to time death squads turn up in Basra, sometimes in police cars," says Burbridge. "These are the people we are targeting." He denies that British forces were seeking to confront powerful Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army, which have close ties to the government, saying: "They are part of the structure of Iraq, but there are elements which have broken away, and are not under their central control." Many British military planners and commanders feel that Sinbad was a bad idea from the outset, and Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki demanded that the operation be heavily restricted from the outset. Now it has ground to a virtual halt. Louise Heywood, head of the UK armed forces programme at the Royal United Services Institute in London, and a Territorial Army officer who served in southern Iraq until earlier this year, sees Sinbad as "almost a last attempt to be seen to be doing something" before security responsibilities are handed over to the Iraqi government, possibly in the first half of next year. "The aim is to replicate what the Americans have been seeking to do in Baghdad, which is to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, clearing out the militias. But there are not enough British troops available." Iraqi expert Toby Dodge says, "Britain has never had the forces needed to make a sustained difference to law and order, and meaningful reconstruction is almost non-existent. Their role is a minor one, and the question is whether it justifies the casualties and the cost." (Independent)
October 8: The Iraq Study Group, an independent commission set up by Congress and chaired by former Bush I secretary of state James Baker, will recommend that Iraq be divided into three autonomous regions when it makes its report, say informed sources. The ISG is holding off on issuing its report until after the elections. Baker says that neither "cutting and running" nor "staying the course" are viable options. "The Kurds already effectively have their own area," says a source close to the group. "The federalization of Iraq is going to take place one way or another. The challenge for the Iraqis is how to work that through." Baker, an old Bush family friend who was secretary of state during the first Gulf war in 1991, said last week that he met the president frequently to discuss "policy and personnel." His group will not advise "partition," but is believed to favor a division of the country that will devolve power and security to the regions, leaving a skeletal national government in Baghdad in charge of foreign affairs, border protection and the distribution of oil revenue. The Iraqi government will be encouraged to hold a constitutional conference paving the way for greater devolution. Iran and Syria will be urged to back a regional settlement that could be brokered at an international conference. Baker has already met with Syrian representatives and plans to visit with the Iranian ambassador to the UN in New York. "My view is you don't just talk to your friends," he said last week. "You need to talk to your enemies in order to move forward diplomatically towards peace." His group has yet to reach a final conclusion, but there is a growing consensus that America can neither pour more soldiers into Iraq nor suffer mounting casualties without any sign of progress. It is thought to support embedding more high-quality American military advisers in the Iraqi security forces rather than maintaining high troop levels in the country indefinitely. Although Bush and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice have resisted the idea of breaking up Iraq, they may be reconsidering, says the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb. "They have finally noticed that the country is being partitioned by civil war and ethnic cleansing is already a daily event," says Gelb. Gelb is the co-author with Senator Joseph Biden, a leading Democrat, of a plan to divide Iraq. "There was almost no support for our idea until very recently, when all the other ideas being advocated failed," he says.
Opinion is divided on the division of Iraq. The Kurds want a fully autonomous nation of their own. Shi'a leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is pressing for regional autonomy, but not complete nationhood. Most Sunnis are opposed to a carve-up of Iraq, which would further deprive them of the national power they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein and could leave them with a barren tranche of the country bereft of oil revenue. Many Middle East experts are horrified by the difficulty of dividing the nation. "Fifty-three per cent of the population of Iraq live in four cities and three of them are mixed," says Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, who fears a bloody outcome. Baghdad, the hub of the country's violence, is largely divided by the Tigris River, with Shi'ites largely populating the eastern portion of the city and Sunnis the western; though there has always been plenty of commingling and overlap, ethnic cleansing on both sides of the river is slowly stratifying the city. Neither Cordesman nor Gelb harbor many illusions about the future of Iraq. Cordesman says that the US may have already passed the point where it can determine Iraq's future, saying, "The internal politics of Iraq have taken on a momentum of their own." As for Gelb, when asked about the prospects of success, he says simply, "Everything is a long shot at this point." (Sunday Times)
October 8: Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Paul Salopek, who recently spent 34 days in a pestilential jail in Darfur, publishes his report of his experience in that chaotic region of Sudan. He, his translator Suleiman Abakar Moussa, and his driver Idriss Abdulrahman Anu, were charged with espionage, spreading "false news," and entering Darfur without a visa. Salopek feels that their real crime was "reporting on a humanitarian catastrophe that is largely invisible to the outside world, and that is poised to grow worse in the weeks ahead." Salopek reports that the area, riven by an ethnically driven civil war and witness to genocidal massacres, is poised to see a new outbreak of violence, as a peace deal between the government in Khartoum and a major insurgent group crumbles. But Salopek wasn't there to report on the civil war. He and his colleagues, both natives of Chad, crossed into Darfur on a freelance assignment from the National Geographic on the Sahel, "the immense and turbulent band of savanna that runs across northern Africa, home to some 90 million struggling people," he writes. Darfur was, for Salopek, a side trip, sparked by reports that some Darfur refugees who had fled to Chad were drifting back to their ruined villages to rebuild their homes and their lives. "It seemed a rare chance to profile civilians clinging to life in an intractable war zone," he writes. "With our arrest, we unwittingly became part of that survival story."
News from Darfur is spotty at best. Foreign correspondents have some success by slipping into rebel-held territory from Chad, but get little news or cooperation from the Sudanese government. "Thus," Salopek writes, "much of what the world knows about a conflict that has killed at least 200,000 people comes from quick reportorial forays into the beautiful, lawless, corrugated plains and rocky escarpments controlled by Darfur's half-starved rebels." Those rebels are anything but unified; a May cease-fire accord fragmented the uneasy rebel coalition into smaller, competing bands. Salopek and his colleagues were captured by a unit answering to Minni Minnawi, a pro-peace former rebel who only two weeks earlier had shaken Bush's hand in the White House.
After three days in the custody of Minnawi's drunken, demoralized forces, the three were traded to the Sudanese army for a box of uniforms. They were flown, under fire, to a "ghost house," one of the government's clandestine jails -- frightful places. They were held incommunicado for ten days and interrogated. Salopek writes, "Obviously, Moussa, Anu and I saw little of Darfur: a succession of pestilential huts, mud-brick prison cells and interrogation rooms. Still, we kept our ears and eyes open while inside the belly of the very security agencies that were helping prosecute the government's war in Darfur. And our keyhole view of the conflict offered some bleak insights into the future."
Salopek writes of that bleak future: "Vastly oversimplified as a good-versus-evil contest between African farmers and rampaging Arab herdsmen armed by Khartoum, the complicated struggle in Darfur is about to get a lot murkier -- and more unstoppable. Once loosely united by the neglect and cruelty of the central government, the region's squabbling rebels now maul each other. They are a messy obstacle to peace. Many have devolved into ethnic militias, or worse, simple bandits. Insurgents I interviewed on the Chad border had little vision for the future of their people. Some resembled warlords from such dismal places as eastern Congo: sleek businessmen of war using children as cannon fodder. Flouting the peace deal, the Sudanese government has unleashed an offensive that is supposed to crush the remaining rebels. Whispered conversations with our jailers confirmed that, so far, it has failed miserably. Khartoum reportedly lost dozens of vehicles and hundreds of soldiers. ...Military activity is set to escalate when the battlefields dry after the rains. Even our pudgy guards were being mobilized. An African Union peacekeeping force can't stanch the bloodshed in Darfur, despite a promised addition of 4,000 troops. Sources as varied as Sudanese military officers, rebels, refugees and even frustrated AU officials themselves said the ill-equipped force remains outgunned and overwhelmed. Moreover, their credibility as an honest broker is in tatters. A typically depressing incident overheard in prison: In August, pro-government raiders called janjaweed attacked women and children gathering wood within sight of an AU firebase in southern Darfur. Several women were shot down. I was told that the AU contingent of Nigerian soldiers didn't lift a finger. Only when infuriated villagers surrounded the peacekeepers' base, chanting and waving sticks, did the AU at last react -- dispersing the civilians with armored personnel carriers.
Salopek attempted to conduct a hunger strike, protesting his separation from Moussa and Anu, and their secret incarceration, but for seven days, while he refused to eat, "the bored duty officers simply shrugged, mentioning Guantanamo, the US military base in Cuba, where several Sudanese are being held as terror suspects. Disheartened, I resumed eating on the eighth day."
Salopek believes that he and his crew were jailed as a "biillboard-size warning to foreign journalists: Khartoum is fed up with the drumbeat of negative news emanating from Darfur." But someone must have spoken up on their behalf. The three were transferred to a civilian jail, where they were treated almost civilly. Six days later, the US vice consul in Sudan and several American military advisers to the AU negotiated better conditions for them at a courthouse jail. On Sept. 9 we were pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir, thanks to the humanitarian intercession of Governor Bill Richardson, a New Mexico Democrat, and what Salopek calls "the Herculean efforts of the US Embassy in Khartoum. Worldwide pressure from the journalistic community, in particular our tireless colleagues at the Chicago Tribune and National Geographic, gave us heart. So did letters of support from public figures as diverse as Bono and former President Jimmy Carter."
Salopek and his crew were able to escape the nightmare of Darfur. But the people who live in that region cannot. After years of pressure, the Bush administration is finally classifying Darfur's suffering as genocide, and is now pushing for a UN force of 20,000 police and soldiers to replace the all-but-useless African Union peacekeepers. Sudan is resisting bitterly. On Thursday, Khartoum sent threatening letters to nations promising troops to a UN force. But Salopek says that "even a powerful UN force will do much better than the AU in Darfur. The violent badlands of western Sudan are larger than Texas. And the proliferating gangs of rebels and pro-government militias, whether steered by Khartoum or renegade commanders, recall the nightmare of Bosnia. There, blue-helmeted UN troops hunkered down and performed abysmally. ...Meanwhile, the ancient roots of Darfur's feuding will remain: racism between ethnic Arabs and Africans, and competition for threadbare natural resources -- water and pastureland. 'A political settlement has been completely overlooked or downplayed by the US,' insists Alex de Waal, co-author of the book Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. 'The whole debate has gone off on a red herring -- UN troops. From experience, we know that, ultimately, there is no real military solution to these kinds of complicated ethnic wars.' Yet relations between the West and Sudan are now so polarized that negotiating a new peace accord before the killing flares anew seems like a pipe dream." Salopek was able to get one straight answer from one of his interrogators. After a grueling session, Salopek asked about the fate of Darfur. The interrogator's answer: "More war." (Chicago Tribune)

GOP congressman admits knowing about Foley e-mails in 2000

October 8: GOP congressman Jim Kolbe admits that he saw some of the e-mail exchanges between Mark Foley and underage House pages in 2000, or possibly 2001, after being given some of the exchanges by a former page. Through his spokeswoman, Korenna Cline, Kolbe says he personally confronted Foley about the inappropriate e-mails. Last week, a Kolbe staff member suggested to the ex-page who first broke the story that he take the matter to the Clerk of the House, Karen Haas. Speaker Dennis Hastert continues to assert that the first time any lawmakers knew of the e-mail exchanges was in the fall of 2005. Cline says that the e-mails Kolbe saw in 2000 were not sexually explicit, and says that the page who brought them to his attention was made "uncomfortable" by their comments; a knowledgeable source says that the e-mails Kolbe saw were, indeed, explicit. Kolbe insists that "corrective action" was taken, though he refuses to say what that action was. Several pages say Kolbe was one of the few members of Congress who took a personal interest in them, and, like Foley, offered to mentor pages and keep in touch with them. Kolbe is the only openly gay Republican in Congress; he is retiring after his term ends this year. Kolbe even invited four former pages to use his Washington home while he was out of town, according to an IM between Foley and former page Jordan Edmund, in January 2002. The pages were unable to take Kolbe up on his invitation because of a snowstorm, according to one of the four pages. Cline says one of the youths invited was a former page of Kolbe's. Because the congressman frequently travels on weekends, either to his Arizona ranch or abroad, the house is often available to friends, constituents, staffers and former staff members, such as a former page, she says. Hastert's spokesman Ron Bonjean says of Kolbe's admission, "Allegations of inappropriate conduct by members of Congress towards pages need to be fully reviewed by the ethics committee and law enforcement. ...This allegation reiterates why the speaker has also called for a full review of the House page program to ensure that it is as safe and secure as possible." As of yet, no page has accused Kolbe of inappropriate conduct.
Kolbe says in a prepared statement, "Some time after leaving the Page program, an individual I had appointed as a Page contacted my office to say he had received e-mails from Rep. Foley that made him uncomfortable. I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit. It was my recommendation that this complaint be passed along to Rep. Foley's office and the clerk who supervised the Page program. This was done promptly." In response, Speaker Dennis Hastert replies, "I don't know anything more about it. If there's something that was of a nature that should have been reported or brought forward, then he should have done that."
Hastert is growing increasingly more difficult to believe. Kolbe insists he spoke to Foley's office and the page clerk at the time of the contact, either in 2000 or 2001. Hastert, as Speaker of the House, is responsible for oversight of everything to do with that clerk. Hastert's claim of ignorance means, at the very least, that he wasn't performing his duties as Speaker. And, typically, Hastert attempts to duck responsibility for his not knowing: "He [Kolbe] was on the page board. That was his job to do that, that confrontation. I don't know anything more about that."
Kolbe's revelation takes some of the air out of the GOP's attempt to twist the Foley scandal against Democrats. The same day Kolbe makes his admission, House member Jack Kingston, the vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, insinuates on Fox News that Democrats were behind the revelations of Foley's actions and the release of electronic messages showing Foley having sexually graphic or highly suggestive conversations with former pages. "What I don't understand is where have these e-mails been for three years?" Kingston demands. "Are we saying that a 15-year-old child would have sat on e-mails that were triple-X-rated for three years and suddenly spring them out right on the eve of an election? That's just a little bit too suspicious, even for Washington, DC." Democrat Martin Meehan, appearing alongside Kingston, retorts, "If there's any evidence that you need that the values in Washington have turned upside down, you could just hear what Jack had to say. Only in Washington, DC, can you take a group of people in charge of the House and basically have evidence that they've been looking the other way while a predator has been...going after 15- and 16-year-old pages, [and] they somehow...have the audacity to turn that into a political attack against Democrats." Kingston's assertions, like those of his Republican and conservative colleagues, will have a tough time fitting Kolbe's revelations into their conspiracy theories. (Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC)
October 8: A former House page reveals that he and disgraced Republican congressman Mark Foley had sex after receiving explict e-mails from Foley in which Foley described assessing the sexual orientation and physical attributes of underage pages but waiting until later to make direct advances. The page, who prefers to keep his identity concealed, says that he and Foley began corresponding shortly after he left the House page program, when he was a junior in high school. He and Foley had their sexual encounter in the fall of 2000, when the ex-page was 21. In the exchanges, Foley says that he is cautious not to engage in actual sex with the pages because of their age. Foley has consistently denied having sex with anyone underage. In the District of Columbia, the age of sexual consent is 16. but Foley authored legislation making it a federal crime to have any sexual contact, including e-mails and instant messages, with anyone under 18.
While Foley may have been careful about having actual sex with underage boys, he was quite open in his e-mails about "checking them out," describing how years earlier, he had looked to see whether the former page had an erection in his tight white pants while the then-teenager was working near the congressman. Under his screenname of Maf54, Foley speculated about the sexual attributes of other males in the same page class, including the observation that one young man was "well hung." The ex-page says that he is gay, and had only the one sexual encounter with Foley before the contacts abruptly ended.
The young man says that while serving as a page, he and his fellow pages gossiped frequently about Foley's overly friendly behavior but did not complain about him to program supervisors or other members of Congress. They nicknamed him "Triple F," for "Florida F*g Foley." One evening, four of the boys made an unannounced visit to Foley's home. "We knocked on his door and he let us in. Nothing happened, but he was very friendly," the former page says. Foley's flirtations made the young man feel important at a time when he was struggling with his emerging sexuality. "It seemed cool that he was taking an interest," he says. "I knew he was gay, and he was attracted to me." After leaving the program, the former page began receiving messages from Foley. He is uncertain how Foley knew his college instant-message name, but assumed the congressman had access to a directory listing former pages' whereabouts. The exchanges quickly became explicit, with Foley asking about details of the young man's genitalia.
The ex-page says that in 2000, he had a sexual encounter with Foley at the congressman's Washington home. Then 21, he was in Washington as an intern in an unrelated program. The two had wine and pizza on a backyard patio and then retired to a spare bedroom, he recalls. The ex-page, who served as a page during Foley's first term in Congress (1995-96), says he believes Foley became bolder in his behavior during his decade in Congress, and says he is surprised it took so long for Foley "to get caught." (Los Angeles Times)
October 8: Vice President Dick Cheney is once again resorting to GOP "fear and smear" tactics in campaigning for Republican congressional hopefuls. He stays relentlessly on message, warning voters about the prospects of "mass death in the United States" if Democrats win control of either house of Congress. Terrorism, and the vulnerability of the US to terror attack, is a central part of his message, where he lauds Bush for "protecting America" while, in his view, Democrats advocate "reckless" policies that add up to a "strategy of resignation and defeatism in the face of determined enemies." Cheney's message is carefully targeted; more than half of Cheney's fundraisers in this two-year cycle have been behind closed doors. Many Republican candidates are unwilling to appear on stage with him or have their pictures snapped with Cheney, although in private, they line up to take the funds he helps raise. GOP strategist Glen Bolger says Cheney's prime strategy is, besides raising money, to energize the party's base. But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's John Lapp retorts, "When he threatens Democrats and calls them names, it's something that really fires up our base" as well. Cheney's fundraising visits often end up as fodder for opponents of those he tries to help. "Dick Cheney, Big Oil and Big Drug Companies Threw Curt Weldon a secret Washington thank you party," reads a Democratic brochure targeting the Republican Pennsylvania congressman. "And we got stuck with the bill."
Once the unquestioned power behind the throne, many insiders believe that his influence is waning as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's is rising. Possibly influenced by Rice, Bush has been more receptive to diplomatic overtures to "axis of evil" nations Iran and North Korea, in contrast to Cheney's undiluted belligerence. And, unusually for modern politics, Cheney is not a vice-president who is seeking to succeed his boss as chief executive. However, White House aides say it would be a mistake to underestimate Cheney even now. Although he is viewed favorably by just 34% of the public in the most recent Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, he remains a champion of conservatives at a time when the right has been angry at Bush over issues such as deficit spending and immigration. So Cheney's mission is to bring home core Republican voters when they are needed most. "He's a good carrier of the Republican message," says Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis, noting that a Cheney visit to Grand Rapids last month raised between $750,000 and $1 million, a record for western Michigan. "He exudes a confidence. He makes you feel good and comfortable that he's vice president of the country." Cheney's job is "a lot of volume, a lot of what we call McFundraisers," GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers says. Cheney has headlined 111 fundraisers so far in this two-year cycle, bringing in more than $39 million and already surpassing his total of 106 events for the entire 2002 cycle. Cheney is also regularly dispatched to conservative radio shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. He takes the shots the White House does not want Bush to take or wants to test out first. When Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman was defeated by antiwar challenger Ned Lamont in the Connecticut primary, Cheney called reporters to say the result would encourage "al-Qaeda types" who want "to break the will of the American people." He is more than willing to throw specific allegations at Democrats by name, particularly focusing on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, DNC chairman Howard Dean, and congressman John Murtha, though others, from Ted Kennedy to John Conyers, come up for hits as well.
He talks mainly about terrorism and Iraq, arguing that US withdrawals from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 and from Somalia in 1993 emboldened terrorists. "If we follow Congressman Murtha's advice and withdraw from Iraq the same way we withdrew from Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993, all we will do is validate the al-Qaeda strategy and invite even more terrorist attacks," Cheney told a Milwaukee audience. In Houston last week, he accused Democrats of "apparently having lost their perspective concerning the nature of the enemy." The crux of his pitch is what he calls the continuing "danger to civilization." Cheney, who warned in 2004 that the United States would be hit by terrorists if Democrat John Kerry was elected president, has not gone that far this time but does say that it "is not an accident" that the country has not suffered another attack since September 11, 2001, giving Bush credit that many feel the president does not deserve. Democrats regularly punch back, suggesting Cheney is out of touch and desperate. "At a time when the Bush Administration finds itself increasingly isolated on Iraq, Vice President Cheney today went on the attack," Senate Democrats said in a statement last week. "Instead of ranting and raving on the campaign trail, Bush and Cheney should spend their time on the trail of Osama bin Laden." Five years after 9/11 Cheney's message may be wearing. Some find it too limited. "To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed," David Huibregtse, head of Wisconsin's Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay party members, said after a speech. "Too much on how great President Bush is doing and very little on why we should vote for the Republicans." (Washington Post)
October 8: Senator and former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry says he will help lead the charge against the attempts to "swift boat" Democratic congressional candidates. The group Swift Boat Veterans for America was, in 2004, quite successful in smearing Kerry's war record, even though almost all of their claims were proven to be complete lies. Now the same group has resurrected itself as the Economic Freedom Fund, and is targeting Democrats around the country. "We're not going to give them an ounce of daylight," says Kerry, who is considering another run at the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. He adds that his response to the commercials in 2004 was not strong enough. "We thought the fact that the truth was out there was enough," he says. "Clearly it wasn't." (AP/Woonsocket Call)
October 8: Beleagured senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican, is found to have hidden from Congress stock options he received for his work as a director of a high-tech company. He also asked the Army to help another business that gave him similar options. Congressional rules require senators to disclose to the Senate all deferred compensation, such as stock options. The rules also urge senators to avoid taking any official action that could benefit them financially or appear to do so. Those requirements exist so the public can police lawmakers for possible conflicts of interest, especially involving companies with government business that lawmakers can influence. Allen's stock options date to the period from January 1998 to January 2001 when Allen was between political jobs and had moved into the corporate world. During that time, Allen joined three high-tech companies that he had assisted as governor of Virginia, serving on the boards of directors of Xybernaut and Commonwealth Biotechnologies, and advised a third company called Com-Net Ericsson, all government contractors. Allen twice failed to promptly alert the Securities and Exchange Commission of insider stock transactions as a Xybernaut and Commonwealth director. The SEC requires timely notification and can fine those who file late. He kept stock options provided to him for serving as a director of Xybernaut and Commonwealth, but steered other compensation from his board service to his law firm.
Being Allen, he denies any wrongdoing, and even denies that he made any significant money from the stock options, except for $250,000 from his Com-Net Ericsson stock. He claims he lost money on the Xybernaut stock, and hasn't sold his Commonwealth options because he would lose money on the sale. "I actually got no money out of Xybernaut," he says. "I got paid in stock options which were worthless. Commonwealth Biotech asked me to be on their board. Glad to do it. I learned a lot on their board and enjoyed working with 'em, and they seem to be doing all right, I guess." (Subsequent investigations prove Allen is lying; his Xybernaut options were worth as much as $1.1 million, not "worthless" as he claims.) He claims he did not report his Commonwealth options on his past five Senate disclosure reports because their purchase price was higher than the current market value, and, according to his aides, never thought he had to report them. He did disclose the options once on an amendment to his 2000 ethics report filed three months after the normal filing period ended, but excluded the options from subsequent reports. Allen's lawyer says he isn't familiar with the Senate ethics requirement that such options must be reported each year regardless of value. The lawyer has asked the Senate Ethics Committee to look into the matter. "While we continue to believe that we have disclosed more than is required, we will abide by the formal ruling of the committee," says Allen spokesman John Reid. "As an ethical matter, it's irrelevant whether the exercise price of those stock options is above or below the current market price of the stock," says Kathleen Clark, a Washington University of St. Louis law professor, former prosecutor and former Democratic congressional aide. "If he owns stock options, he does have such a financial stake, whether the exercise price is above or below current market value." Lawyer Marc Elias says the conflict issue is even clearer because Commonwealth gets federal contracts. "Unlike some other controversies that have come up from time to time, this is a situation where the underlying asset is in a company that has business before Congress," he says.
And Allen has been expected to help his companies. When Allen left the board for the Senate, Commonwealth made clear it hoped he would help the company in his new job. "We, of course, wish him much success in Washington and look forward to his pro-business agenda reaping benefits for CBI, the commonwealth and the nation," company chairman Richard Freer says. Both Commonwealth and Xybernaut have suffered through difficult times and federal contracts have been an important financial lifeline in recent years. Allen's office acknowledges he has met socially over the years with company executives and his office has granted "routine courtesy meetings" from company lobbyists "to hear their opinion on legislation and issues before the federal government." In December 2001, Allen steered a lucrative Army contract to Xybernaut. At that point, he still owned options to buy 110,000 shares of Xybernaut stock, which could be affected by any new federal contracts. Allen says he recalls nothing of the 2001 incident. As Virginia's governor, Allen took representatives of Xybernaut and Ericsson on trade missions. He helped steer $4 million in tax-exempt bonds to Commonwealth for new headquarters and announced an $800,000 state grant to help Lynchburg, Virginia, prepare a site for an Ericsson expansion. Then he went to work for those companies. Allen joined Commonwealth's board of directors about two months after leaving the governor's office in January 1998. Xybernaut named him a director that August, and he became a Com-Net Ericsson adviser in February 2000. "He was an ex-governor and pre-senator," Commonwealth's Harris says. "He represented a skill set that was of value to the company in terms of his corporate legal experience and he was, and is, a high-profile person prominent in Virginia and elsewhere." Com-Net Ericsson joined the Tyco conglomerate, and reported its first full year of profitability in 2005. Xybernaut sought bankruptcy protection last year and is being sued by shareholders. The SEC also is investigating the company. Allen's office says he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing at Xybernaut. He sold his Xybernaut stock at a modest loss in 2005.
There have been numerous instances where Commonwealth and Xybernaut have reported that Allen failed to file required reports on insider stock transactions on time. Though it is the director's individual responsibility to file such reports, Allen's office says he considered it the companies' responsibility to file the reports and the SEC never contacted him or took action against him. (AP/ABC News, Bloomberg/AmericaBlog)
October 8: More instances of George Allen's casual, frequent use of racial slurs are reported by friends and acquaintances of his during his days as a University of Virginia student. A nurse, Leah Deason, who used to host poker games for Allen and his friends, says, "He just threw it [the term "nigg*r"] around so casually, it's like he didn't know any better." In poker games, "whenever he'd get a black card that he didn't like, he would refer to it as a 'nigg*r card' he needed to get rid of. Allen was in law school at the time." Deason says she brought it up after watching Allen on television deny others' claims about his usage of racial slurs. "What infuriated me was the way he got up there and flat out lied about it," she says. Another classmate, who often joined Allen in those poker parties, confirms Deason's recollections. "It was part of his everyday speech," he says. "It just rolled off his tongue. He'd get a black card he didn't like and he'd toss it back and say, 'I don't need that nigg*r ten.'" Allen's spokesman, Chris LaCivita, calls the allegations "baseless" and says he will not ask Allen about the allegations. His former teammate Ken Shelton, who has spoken about Allen's racist language and actions -- including stuffing a severed deer head into the mailbox of a black family -- says, "Allen has called me a liar. To me, George should come forward and be honest about his past and prove that he is different." Shelton adds Allen showed disrespect to the college and the school's mostly black cleaning staff by walking down the hallways of Newcomb Hall as a student and spitting tobacco juice "on the floors in the hallway and on the walls." Why bring it up now? Shelton is asked. He replies, "He absolutely denied ever having used the term [and] was testing the political waters for a potential presidential bid." Allen is also combating charges of spray-painting racial slurs on the walls of his high school in Southern California; he admits to spray-painting the walls, but not with racial slurs. (Charlottesville Daily Progress)
October 8: Newly uncovered information shows that Republican representative Duncan Hunter grossly underreported a home he bought in 1994 in order to avoid paying his fair share of California property taxes. In the winter of 1994, after California Republicans gerrymandered California to ensure that politicians like Hunter would have an easy time retaining their seats, Hunter bought a home outside Alpine for $175,000. The home was in disrepair, and Hunter and his wife sunk $160,000 of repairs and improvements into the property. Tax rolls listed the property as a two-bedroom, 2½-bath house with 2,946 square feet of living space. The property records were wrong. According to Hunter's insurance carrier, the house was more than twice that size -- about 6,200 square feet. The property also featured a 2,000-square-foot guest house, a swimming pool and tennis court. A county assessor visited the six-bedroom house soon after Hunter bought it and took pictures, the congressman says. but the home's description wasn't corrected in the property file. The house was reappraised at $249,000 -- above the sale price but well below its market value. The discrepancy resulted in Hunter paying significantly less in taxes than others in similar-sized properties, although the amount he saved is not clear. The county relies on square footage, lot size, comparable home sales and other factors to calculate assessments, but does not discuss specific parcels without a release from the homeowner. Hunter refuses to give assessors permission to discuss details about his property, and says it is not his responsibility to make sure records and tax assessments on his home are accurate. Hunter's home was burned three years ago in a huge forest fire that destroyed over 2,200 homes. Hunter and 30 others told the county their homes were larger than property records indicated. County planners had been directed to expedite permits for those who wanted to rebuild at the same square footage. If a property owner claimed his home was larger than what county records showed, he had to prove it. Hunter provided a letter from his insurance carrier stating that the main house was about 6,200 square feet and the guest house 2,000 square feet.
Hunter also claims he did not know that the property was owned by the federal government months before he bought it. The estate was built in 1975 and owned by Edgar Jack Ridout, a globe-trotting plastics magnate who convalesced at the home after surviving the crash of two Boeing 747s on the Canary Islands in 1977. The collision killed 583 people and was the deadliest aviation disaster in history until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Ridout is retired and living in Italy. In the late 1980s, he was entangled in a messy divorce and let the property deteriorate. The house went into foreclosure in 1993, by which time the lender had been seized by the Resolution Trust Corporation, the agency formed by Congress in 1989 to bail out hundreds of failed thrifts. Hunter was among those who voted to create the RTC. The resulting sell-off of more than 700 savings-and-loan institutions and their assets was estimated by the government to cost taxpayers at least $325 billion. According to county records, the RTC sold the property at public auction on December 15, 1993. State Street Bank and Trust paid $175,000 for the parcel and took title January 4, 1994. Even though State Street is listed in county records as the buyer, a spokeswoman said the company never formally owned the property. Rather, it was acting as a trustee for the RTC. The organization, which closed in 1995 and handed operations to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, had rules prohibiting insider trading and conflicts of interest as it sold off thousands of seized properties. The Code of Federal Regulations prevented contractors from buying real estate they were hired to liquidate. The law also excluded "related parties," described as key federal employees and others, from the government sales. County records show that Hunter bought the property from State Street for the same price -- $175,000 -- less than two months later. The house appeared on the multiple listing service February 1, 1994, and Hunter made an offer and opened escrow by February 28. The deal closed May 9. The congressman said he had no idea the US government had liquidated the property.
Because Hunter refuses to allow the records to be released, it is as yet impossible to tell how much profit he made on the insurance claim on the home, but the transaction seems suspicious. A similar home and acreage selling in the same area was selling for $495,000, yet he bought the property for $175,000. And both a real estate agent and a friend of Hunter's have different recollections of the circumstances under which he bought the property. Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who now runs Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says the 1994 transaction and amount of taxes paid do not look good. Members of Congress "should be avoiding the appearance of impropriety," she says. "This could be an appearance problem" for Hunter. Robert Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles says a congressman buying a home so recently owned by the federal government raises serious questions. "It doesn't surprise me. It bothers me," he says. "The question I would ask is, 'Why didn't [State Street] make a profit on it?' When you buy property, you buy it to sell at a profit." Today, the rebuilt homes in the area are selling for $785,000 and up. Hunter is rebuilding his home as well, a five-bedroom estate. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
October 8: The small number of openly gay Republicans working in Washington, around 10 members who form what they call "The P Street Project," say that since the Foley revelations, they and other gay Republicans have operated under what one calls a state of "siege and suspicion." While conservative groups blame the "gay lifestyle" and the "gay agenda" for the scandal, others continue to assert the long-debunked connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. Gay Congressional staffers are also being targeted, with many conservative commentators and Internet bloggers suggesting that the party was betrayed by gay men trying to hide misconduct by one of their own. In the meantime, a group of gay activists, angered by what they see as hypocrisy by gay Republicans, have begun circulating a document known as The List, a roster of gay Congressional staff members and their Republican bosses. "You can see where it would be easy for some people to blame gays for something that might bring down the party in Congress," says Brian Bennett, a gay Republican political consultant. He was a longtime chief of staff to former Republican representative Bob Dornan, who regularly referred to gays as sodomites. Of the Foley case, Bennett says, "I'm just waiting for someone in a position of authority to make this a gay issue."
Homosexuals have long played a key, yet hidden, part in Republican life, and more so in recent years. They have played decisive roles in passing legislation, running campaigns and advancing careers. Known in some insider slang as the Velvet Mafia or the Pink Elephants, gay Republicans tend to be far less open about their sexual orientation than their Democratic counterparts. The Republicans may call themselves a party of tolerance and diversity, in real life most Republicans are openly hostile to gays. Their "traditional values" agenda deliberately shuts out gays, and many conservatives routinely attack the "radical gay subculture." There are few Republican gay role models; retiring House member Jim Kolbe is the only openly gay Republican in Congress.
Many Washington insiders feel that the Republican leadership has handled the Foley case so poorly because of their squeamishness over dealing with a so-called gay issue; many Republican staff members worry that their gay colleagues will be unfairly targeted. Former Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham is shaping up to be a particular target, as is former House clerk Jeff Trandahl, both of whom are openly gay. Already the blame is falling on those two for "failing to act more aggressively" to stop Foley from continuing his Internet predations and perhaps taking part in the Republican coverup. While little support for this tack exists, it serves to misdirect the American public's attention away from those actually responsible and towards the gay staffers, who make a convenient target. "[T]there are just going to be some days when it's hard to be a gay Republican," says Bennett. But though their public rhetoric continues to vilify homosexuals, some say that Republicans are privately showing more acceptance of gays. Steve Elmendorf, an openly gay Democratic strategist who was the chief aide to former Representative Richard Gephardt, says, "Now there's more of an evolution to a 'don't ask, don't tell' rule." A gay Republican staffer adds, don't flaunt your sexuality. "You just don't wear it on your sleeve, bottom line," he says. Like other gay Republicans, Bennett says he took steps to keep his sexuality a secret: "I always made a point of dating women," he says. Former Republican congressional staffer Tracey St. Pierre, who came out as a lesbian during her final months on the staff of House member Charles Canady, says, "For many conservative Republicans, just being gay in itself is an act of indiscretion." And like many of her gay Republican colleagues, she took part in specifically anti-gay actions, in her case helping Canady draft legislation that would ban gay marriage.
For virtually all Republican officeholders, being homosexual is something to keep completely secret. Even the allegation of being gay led Foley to decide not to run for the Senate in 2004. Though Foley kept quiet, his sexual orientation was pretty much common knowledge in Washington. "It was commonly known on Capitol Hill by staff and members," says Foley's House colleague Ray LaHood. "People have their own lifestyles as long as they mind their own business and play by the rules." Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, now a talk show host on MSNBC, says, "If you're a gay Republican, you have to act like a Republican." Scarborough says that entails going out on the campaign trail "talking about guns, chewing tobacco and riding around in a pickup truck." He says it is far easier for gay Democrats to live an openly gay lifestyle and still be accepted.
Gay members of both parties worry that the Foley matter may jeopardize the role that gay men and lesbians have assumed in Republican politics. One gay Republican campaign strategist says he fears that conservatives would "play to the base" and redouble their efforts to vilify homosexuals. "It's one of the places the party goes when it's in trouble," he says. "A lot of us are holding our breath to see how this plays out."
Financier and blogger Stirling Newberry writes a long and well thought-out article, "The Revolution Eats Its Own," on this subject that goes into far more detail than this item. It is available at the TPM Cafe link just below. (New York Times, TPM Cafe)
October 8: Combative House Democrat Rahm Emanuel, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, shuts down the attempt by Republican Adam Putnam to shift blame for the Foley debacle away from the House leadership. Emanuel was scheduled to go up against NRCC head Thomas Reynolds on ABC's This Week, but Reynolds backed out of the interview, sending Putnam to go in his place. Putnam begins by asserting that "[t]he only people who acted were the House of Representatives," but his attempt to claim that only the House leadership took action falls flat, with host George Stephanopoulos reminding him of the many claims of the early warnings the House leadership received and apparently ignored. Putnam says, "Based on the information we have today, the speaker's office acted proactively, they acted aggressively, and within hours, within hours of the explicit e-mails coming to light, they demanded Foley's resignation. Contrast that to previous scandals."
Emanuel fires back: "What we know now, as you just said, is as far back as 2002, 2003, there were warning signs, and there were multiple conversations. And what happened since that time? Mark Foley runs for Congress in 2004 even while they know there was problems. 2005, gets appointed to head the Missing and Abused Children Caucus for the Congress. When he wants to retire, they ask him to run for reelection in 2006, even knowing, clearly, that there's something amiss and wrong here. And the whole -- the whole point here, let's just take one analogy. If a high school teacher was found doing this with a child, and the principal knew and not only said to the teacher, we're going to renew your contract, the community and parents would have that principal and teacher out." Emanuel flatly denies that any Democrats knew anything about the e-mails before they were revealed by the press, saying, "Let me go right through the facts. One, Brian Ross, who broke the story on your network, said it came from a Republican source. Very unusual to do that. Fact two, The Hill paper said it came from a Republican source. All the Republicans and staff people are coming forward are Republicans. Mark Foley, who wrote the e-mails originally, at the bottom of this whole problem, Republican. The leadership of the Congress, from Tom Reynolds to John Boehner to Speaker Hastert, who can't come on this show...." After an interruption by Stephanopoulos, Emanuel reiterates, "Never saw them. No involvement. ...Never saw them. The first time I ever saw these things, right here when Brian Ross broke this show and when the Post had the story. What you guys want to do is take your dirty laundry and throw it over the fence and try to blame other people for the problems."
Putnam says, "The dirty laundry in our conference is gone. His resignation was demanded within hours. Contrast that to previous scandals, where, frankly, two people at this table have had to cover for their former boss' sexual misdeeds while in office, and did not demand his resignation. We need a thorough investigation." (Putnam is referring to the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal.) Emanuel takes that apart, too: "Let me address the double standard. First of all, let me correct you on something. I left the White House in 1996. Number two, this issue has been brought up by other Republicans." Emanuel reminds Putnam that in 1983, when the Democratic leadership learned that House Democrat Gerry Studds had had sexual contact with a 17-year old page, they took the issue straight to the House Ethics Commiteee, who voted to censure Studds. Emanuel says that the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans "is that every time that there is a conflict between the majority's political interests and the institution and its integrity, they put their thumb down on the scale as it comes down to the political authority."
Emanuel then reminds Putnam, and the viewers, of the twelve years of failure racked up by the House leadership and the Republican governance in general. "[Y]ou guys came to power in 1994. You said you were going to change Washington. Washington changed you. You promised a balanced budget. You've added $3 trillion to the nation's debt. You promised to make America more secure. We've got ourselves in a quagmire in Iraq. You promised to clean up this swamp, and you've created a deeper set of swamps around here. At every point that you promised to do something in 1994 with your Contract with America, you're in a breach of contract. And the fact is that this election, the American people know full well, Adam, that they do not want to stay on the course that you've set for this country. They want a new direction. They want a change. And that's what this election is about: a change from the endless occupation in Iraq to a change from this wageless recovery, and most importantly, they also want...a different Congress using a different tone." After Putnam attacks the prospect of having Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House and Charles Rangel and Barney Franks as the chairmen of House committees, Emanuel retorts, "It's amazing. Six years of a Republican majority in the White House, the House and the Senate, and all you've got is fear. The fact is, there will be a change. We'd have a middle-class tax cut. We'd have an increase in the minimum wage." (ABC/Crooks and Liars [link to video of full interview])
October 8: GOP representative Jack Kingston, already trying to step out in front of the Republicans' attempt to accuse Democrats of covering up their knowledge of the Foley scandal, continues to spray baseless accusations, this time demanding that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats testify, apparently to the House Ethics Committee, over whether or not they engaged in political trickery by releasing Mark Foley's e-mail messages weeks before the midterm elections. Like many Republicans, including House leaders Dennis Hastert and John Boehner, Kingston is desperately attempting to link Democrats to what, so far, is a strictly Republican scandal. As of this writing, there has not been any evidence whatsoever of any Democratic involvement in the release of the Foley material; ABC's Brian Ross, who first broke the story on a national level, says his source is a Republican House staff member. According to a recent Time magazine poll, 67% of the country's voting-age adults believe that there indeed was a cover-up -- by the Republican house leadership.
But Kingston continues to work it. In his letter to Pelosi, which was copied to Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean, Kingston asks Pelosi and Dean to disclose whether Democrats played a role in publicizing Foley's correspondences. "Just as it must be determined whether any Republican members or political operatives were aware of and attempted to conceal Mr. Foley's activities, it must also be determined whether any Democrat members or political operatives were aware of and attempted to conceal these same activities," Kingston writes. His letter is signed by 10 other GOP lawmakers. Hastert has accused Democrats of resorting to "outing" Foley's sexual predation because they have no other political tactics for the November elections: "Our friends on the other side of the aisle really don't have a story to tell, and maybe they're resolving to another way, to another political tactic." And Republicans, led by Representative Joe Barton, have been quick to remind voters of Democrats' own sex scandals, including the 1973 incident with House Democrats Gerry Studds and a 17-year old page. After spraying accusations of Democratic involvement, Kingston adds in a statement accompanying his letter that the Foley matter "should not be a partisan issue."
On Fox News, Chris Wallace gives Kingston a free ride, allowing him to falsely assert that CREW, the organization that originally alerted the FBI to Foley's e-mails, is a "partisan 527 organization" similar to MoveOn.org and other organizations specifically formed to support Democratic and liberal/progressive candidates. In reality, CREW is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, strictly bound to stay out of partisan political matters. Kingston paints a broad conspiracy theory involving Democrats and CREW, and the ever-credulous Wallace asks for no proof or details that might bolster Kingston's theory.
Kingston's own perceptions are evidently disordered, as well. During an October 6 appearance on MSNBC's Hardball, Kingston dismissed the initial e-mails revealed by the House page as "G-rated." The liberal blog The Ostroy Report slams Kingston with a series of increasingly angry questions about his characterization: "Let's break this down a bit for the Congressman, whose own moral judgment is clearly impaired. Was it considered 'G-rated' by the boy, who complained to his parents and told his pal, another page, that it was 'sick, sick, sick' when Foley flirted with him and asked for a picture? Was it considered 'G-rated' by the boy's parents, who complained to their representative, Rodney Alexander? Was it considered 'G-rated' by Alexander when he ran to tell Reynolds and Boehner? Was it considered 'G-rated' by Alexander, Reynolds and Boehner when, as they claim, they told Hastert about it (Hastert does not recall being told)? Was it considered 'G-rated' by Hastert's office when they informed the Clerk of the House about it? Was it considered 'G-rated' by the Clerk, who then told Page Board Chair Rep. John Shimkus? Was it considered 'G-rated' by Shimkus when he chose not to tell the lone Democrat on the Page Board? And was it considered 'G-rated' by all of these amoral liars, including Hastert, when they confronted Foley and warned him not to contact the boy again?" (CNN, Ostroy Report, MediaMatters)
October 8: Along with Kingston (see item above), Republican representative Patrick McHenry has spearheaded the charge of attempting to smear Democrats as conspirators in releasing the Foley information just weeks before the election. But McHenry is caught flat-footed by, of all people, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. Usually a reliable shill for the Republicans, Blitzer responds to McHenry's talk of "fact points" about the Democratic conspiracy by asking McHenry five separate times whether he has any evidence at all to support his claims. McHenry fails to provide any. The conversation goes as follows:
McHenry: "Well, look, all the fact points lead to one question: Did Rahm Emanuel or Nancy Pelosi have any involvement on the strategic or tactical level? This morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, [see above item] the question was asked of Rahm Emanuel. His reaction was he did not see the instant messages or e-mails. He repeatedly said, he did not see. I've asked him to testify under oath to assure the American people that he was not involved in this issue in any way, shape or form."
Blitzer: "Do you have any evidence at all that Democrats or others might have been behind the timing of this scandal?"
McHenry: "Look, let's be honest...."
Blitzer: "Do you have any evidence to back that charge up?"
McHenry: "No, no, actually, if the Democrats had any issue with saying this, putting all the facts out on the table, they would say, certainly, I'll testify under oath that I had no involvement in it. They've said no."
Blitzer: "Well, you don't have any evidence, though, right?"
McHenry: "Well, look at the fact points."
Blitzer: "Yes or no, do you have any evidence, Congressman?"
McHenry: "Do you have any evidence that they weren't involved?"
Blitzer: "I'm just asking if you're just throwing out an accusation or if you have any hard evidence."
McHenry: "No. It's a question, Wolf. The question remains, were they involved? And if they were not involved, they need to say clearly. And it's a question. It's not an accusation." (CNN/Think Progress [link to video])
October 8: During author and journalist Bob Woodward's appearance with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press, where he shut down the administration's every attack point and reiterated his evidence that the administration has systematically lied about the Iraq war, Woodward reveals that Vice President Cheney cursed him out over his revelation that GOP doyen Henry Kissinger is one of Bush's closest advisors on foreign policy. Woodward says that he was called around September 30 by Cheney, who complained about Woodward's detailing of the meetings between Bush, Cheney, and Kissinger. Woodward says, "I had interviewed Vice President Cheney last year a couple of times at length about material I'm gathering on the Ford administration, on-the-record interviews, but he volunteered, he said, 'Oh, by the way, Henry Kissinger comes in' and he, Dick Cheney, sits down with him once a month and the president every two or three months. And Cheney was upset I was quoting him. And I said, 'Look, this -- on-the-record doesn't have anything to do with Ford, you volunteered that.' He then used a word which I can't repeat on the air. And I said, 'Look, on the record is on the record,' and he hung up on me. ...He said what I was saying was bull-something. And so -- now, what does he do instead of saying, 'Well, OK, I look at it this way, you look at it that way.' It's a metaphor for what's going on. Hang up when somebody has a different point of view or information you don't want to deal with." (MSNBC/Crooks and Liars [link to video])
October 8: Los Angeles Times columnist Jonathan Chait says he finds it hysterically funny that the Wall Street Journal is claiming that the entire Mark Foley scandal is a distraction that should be minimized: "The war on terror, and Iraq, really are the largest issues in front of the American people," urged the editors. "We need a clear reading on that in November, not on the personal ruin of Mark Foley." Chait can't help but remember the Journal's witch hunt of Bill Clinton over Whitewater and, later, Monica Lewinsky; as Chait writes, "The Journal published so many editorials on these personal scandals that it compiled them into a book, Whitewater, that reached a staggering 541 pages. Then it proceeded to write enough subsequent scandal editorials to fill up five more books of comparable length. Now, though, it wants an earnest forum on the issues. To which I say: ha, ha, ha." But, Chait writes, the Journal has a point. As obscene and disgusting as the Foley scandal is -- both his actions and the desperate cover-up by the Republican House leadership -- there are bigger issues to consider. Perhaps voters should make their decisions, not on the Foley scandal, but on the Bush administration's attempt to privatize -- i.e. dismantle -- Social Security. Or perhaps on the dismally performing economy. Or on Iraq. Or on the Bush administration's failure to prepare for 9/11. Or even on Bush's "strong suit," the war on terror, which is being used as an excuse to dismantle over 200 years of American civil liberties. "So yes, by all means," Chait writes, "let's have a 'clear reading' on the issues." (Los Angeles Times)
October 8: Political commentator Keith Olbermann, one of MSNBC's fastest-rising stars, has his "special commentaries" profiled by the Associated Press. Olbermann's commentaries, which have blistered several aspects of the Bush administration's policies and practices, have become the most popular segment of his show Countdown, and videos of his commentaries are among the most popular of their kind on the Internet; the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin says that Olbermann "is fast becoming the Howard Beale of the anti-Bush era: He's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore." His first commentary came on August 30 (and is detailed on the August 2006 page of this site), lambasting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for equating Americans who disagree with the administration's Iraq policy with Nazi-era appeasers. "As a critic of the administration, I will be damned if you can get away with calling me the equivalent of a Nazi appeaser," Olbermann says. "No one has the right to say that about any free-speaking American in this country." Since that first commentary, Olbermann's nightly audience has increased 69%, according to Nielsen Media Research. On October 2, 834,000 people tuned in, virtually double his season average and more than CNN competitors Paula Zahn and Nancy Grace. He still trails Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly. Since his first commentary, Olbermann has lambasted the administration's use of the 9/11 attacks for political gain, saying, "Not once, in now five years, has this president ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space and to this, the current and curdled version of our beloved country," and implying that Bush's conduct merits impeachment. On October 7, he blasted Bush's campaign attacks on Democrats and his propensity for lying in general: "Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?" he asked. (Both of those commentaries are detailed on this page.) Olbermann is not a liberal, though he has become a favorite of liberals (and a target for hatred from the right), but he has been a regular critic of the Bush administration since at least late 2004, when he was the only media figure of any national prominence to report on the 2004 election fraud. Some see Olbermann as MSNBC's successor to the more frankly liberal Phil Donahue, but MSNBC executives note that Olbermann's show is less expensive to create, and Olbermann a more entertaining figure than the sometimes strident, sometimes humorless Donahue. But the "zeitgeist" of political commentary has changed since Donahue was forced off the air in 2002, says former Donahue producer Jeff Cohen. Olbermann says that as long as the show is popular, he foresees no difficulty in maintaning his heat on the Bush administration. "The purpose of this is to get people to think and supply the marketplace of ideas with something at every fruit stand, something of every variety," he says. "As an industry, only half the fruit stand has been open the last four years." (AP/Woonsocket Call, Washington Post)
October 8: The St. Petersburg Times's Robyn Blumner writes a punchy editorial advancing a simple proposition: that the passage of the Military Commissions Act is the end of American democracy as we know it. Blumner writes, in part, that September 29, 2:47 pm, was the "seismic minute that Congress passed the Military Commissions Act and formally granted President Bush royal powers he had been unilaterally arrogating. The historic action may one day be remembered as the moment the great American experiment in liberty ended. It was a good run." Bad enough for "a renegade executive to crown himself like Charlemagne and declare that his (cough) wisdom is exceptional enough to designate Americans and foreigners as enemies to be detained indefinitely," she writes. "It is quite another for 315 members of Congress to go along. When the people's representatives collude to collapse the separation of powers into one omnipotent executive, our nation becomes defined by that act. We are a nation of laws, even when it's a really bad one." As it has done so many times before -- but never in such a nakedly unconstitutional and unAmerican fashion -- Congress, faced with "a quandary because Bush had proven that he could not be trusted to respect the boundaries of law," held accountable by an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling striking down his "kangaroo military tribunals and resurrecting the Geneva Conventions," Congress either needed to stand with the Supreme Court, the rule of law, and the Constitution, or it needed to capitulate and give Bush the tyrannical powers he insisted he already had. As Blumner writes, "So Congress assented. Problem solved. America's bedrock principles may be a pile of rubble, but the Republican president won a political victory. Proving once again that there is no national conscience anymore. Holding power is all that matters." She continues, "Bush, with his reverse Midas touch, has led this nation into a muck-pile of intractable problems. But even had Bush been the most talented chief executive in history, Congress should not have handed him the powers it did under the Military Commissions Act. The right to habeas corpus, which is the ability to get before a judge to challenge the legitimacy of your imprisonment, is nonnegotiable. Congress may suspend habeas corpus only in cases of invasion or rebellion, according to the express terms of the Constitution. But Congress has now eliminated habeas rights for noncitizens not in response to a massive invasion, but an amorphous 'global war on terror' where the enemy is anyone seeking to do us or our friends harm."
In the short term, the hopes of hundreds of detainees in Guantanamo and other secret and not-so-secret detention sites for a fair trial in accordance with American law have been dashed. Their trust that America will abide by the Geneva Conventions has now been trampled, as the Act renders the Conventions unenforceable. Blumner is righteously furious: "The law is a true abomination. It is our fault. We let this happen. We allowed them to draw the false dichotomy between security and freedom. We accepted Bush's Torture Nation and his untouchable island prison." She concludes, "Judge Learned Hand said 'Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; if it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.' Americans no longer understand what liberty means. They think it has something to do with tax-free shopping and their right never to be offended by others' opinions. E Pluribus Unum be damned. Here's America's new motto: If we can't pronounce your name, we don't care what happens to you. Now let us get back to our Happy Meals." (St. Petersburg Times)

North Korea test-fires nuclear missile

October 9: North Korea test-fires a low-yield nuclear missile, drawing condemnation from around the world. Bush calls it "a threat to international peace and security," and the UN Security Council is weighing severe sanctions to punish the impoverished communist nation. The US quickly says that it is not contemplating any military action against North Korea (though US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, a notable belligerent, advocates "actions, not words" against the regime), and Chinese diplomats say that, while they may or may not support sanctions, China intends to continue using diplomatic means to rein in North Korea. China is urging North Korea to rejoin the six-way diplomatic talks with Russia, China, South Korea, Japan, and the US, which it has boycotted for over a year over US financial sanctions. (AP/Yahoo! News)

"Bandar, I guess you're the best *sshole who knows about the world. Explain to me one thing -- Why should I care about North Korea?" -- George W. Bush to Prince Bandar bin Saud in 2000, quoted in Bob Woodward's State of Denial

October 9: Leading the conservative talk radio charge to make as much hay for the Republicans as possible over the North Korea nuclear test, Sean Hannity spends the bulk of his three-hour radio broadcast blaming Bill Clinton for the North Koreans launching a nuclear test weapon. Blogger Andy Ostroy reminds us of the truth that escapes Hannity. In October 1994 Clinton ushered through his Agreed Framework between the US and North Korea which primarily called for: the replacement of North Korea's weapons-producing power plants with light water reactor (LWR) power plants; the providing of oil, heating and electricity while the reactors were shut down; the two sides to move toward full normalization of political and economic relations; the US to provide formal assurances against the threat or use of nuclear weapons; North Korea to remain a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; IAEA inspections to resume; existing spent nuclear fuel stocks to be stored and ultimately disposed of without reprocessing; and North Korea to come into full compliance with its safeguards agreement with the IAEA before delivery of key LWR nuclear components. North Korea did not comply fully with the framework, but when Clinton left office in January 2001, North Korea was still years away from successfully developing a nuclear weapon.
Just as importantly, the framework never received any support from the GOP-controlled Congress. As Ostroy writes, "Many in the party considered it appeasement, and the US soon failed to deliver the transitional oil supplies, as outlined, in a timely manner." Any pretense of living up to the US end of the framework was abandoned in 2001 when Bush took office: "his foreign policy strategy with North Korea was no foreign policy strategy at all. Since coming into office, Bush has refused repeated overtures by Kim Jong Il to open direct talks, insisting that all negotiations with the North occur within a 6-party framework." As New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof reminds us, there was no weapons-producing plutonium obtained by North Korea during the Clinton years. Under Bush, the nation obtained enough to make eight nuclear bombs. Bush has done nothing for six years to prevent North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons -- the only surprise is that it has taken them so long to develop one. Ostroy writes, "Hannity's MO is simple: he spews nothing but inflammatory, hateful deceptive rhetoric and lies as he attempts to bolster the Busheviks' positions. He accused Democrats today of 'retreating and waving the white flag in the war on terror.' He says Democrats follow the 'Clinton style' which is 'pathetically weak on defense.' These are absurd claims. Given what we now know about WMD, Iraq and terrorism from the recent NIE, the new Bob Woodward book, and other very credible sources, it's a miracle that he has any listeners at all after vomiting such bile. It makes me want to puke when I hear Hannity claim that this week's...nuclear test is a 'see, Bush was right' moment. Bush is right about nothing. Nothing. And even if he was right about N. Korea, what the hell has he done about it in the last six years? He's not supposed to be right. He's supposed to do his job." (Ostroy Report)
October 9: The United Nations names South Korean foreign minister Ban Ki-Moon as the next Secretary-General, replacing the outgoing Kofi Annan. One of the reasons for Ban's ascension is to help counter the nuclear ambitions of North Korea. He is a career diplomat and presidential advisor who, unlike Annan, is considered somewhat of a faceless bureaucrat. (AP/Yahoo! News)
October 9: Newsweek prints a hefty excerpt from Bob Woodward's new book State of Denial. The book's contents have been discussed and hotly debated throughout the media, and covered extensively elsewhere on this site, this excerpt provides new material focusing on the role of Donald Rumsfeld as the architect of the adminstration's spectacular failure in Iraq, and his refusal to accept responsibility for his compendium of errors and misjudgments.
On March 21, 2001, Rumsfeld writes the four-page "Anchor Chain" memo, revising and adding to it as time goes on. It reads in part, "After two months on the job, it is clear that the Defense establishment is tangled in its anchor chain." Two months into his second tour as Secretary of Defense (Rumsfeld held the position under Ford), he was already frustrated. Congress required hundreds of reports. It seemed to Rumsfeld there might be more auditors, investigators, testing groups and monitors looking over their shoulders than there were "front-line troops with weapons." He wrote, "The maze of constraints on the Department force it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does will inevitably be a decade or so late." The memo comes to define Rumsfeld's impatience with the bureaucracy and oversight process of the Pentagon, so much so that he seemed to give up on making any major changes during his tenure. "Our job," he wrote in a later version of the memo, "is to work together to sharpen the sword that the next president will wield."
One of the changes he did implement early on was to insist that he alone would communicate with Bush and other senior White House advisors on military matters. Everything would run through him, Rumsfeld insisted. Rumsfeld ran roughshod over both Pentagon officials and Congressional lawmakers, with one memorable harping encounter with Senator Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican, leaving the senator's voice quivering (whether in fear or anger is uncertain). When an aide suggested that he call Snowe to apologize, Rumsfeld snapped, "Hell, she needs to apologize to me." His micromanagement of Pentagon affairs would become legendary, to the point where he was revamping seating arrangements on aircraft to suit himself.
Rumsfeld personally selected retired general and defense executive Jay Garner to head up the postwar reconstruction of Iraq, a selection he would quickly come to regret. After six weeks of intensive preparation, Garner visited the White House on February 28, 2003, to meet with Bush and top White House officials for the first time. Garner passed out copies of his handout, an 11-point presentation, and told the assemblage that four of the nine tasks assigned to his small team under Bush's NSPD-24 mandate were completely beyond their capabilities, including dismantling weapons of mass destruction, defeating terrorists, reshaping the Iraqi military and reshaping the other internal Iraqi security institutions. Woodward writes, "The president nodded. No one else intervened, though Garner had just told them he couldn't be responsible for crucial postwar tasks -- the ones that had the most to do with the stated reasons for going to war in the first place -- because his team couldn't do them. The import of what he had said seemed to sail over everyone's heads." During Garner's intensive discussion of interagency planning, Bush suddenly interrupted. "Just a minute," he said. "Where are you from?" Garner replied, "Florida, sir." Apparently trying to place Garner's accent, Bush demanded, "Why do you talk like that?" Garner responded, "Because I was born and raised on a ranch in Florida. My daddy was a rancher." Bush, whose brother is governor of Florida, said approvingly, "You're in." Garner finished his presentation, with no questions and little commentary, and as he was leaving the room, Bush made his other contribution to the postwar planning: "Kick *ss, Jay."
Before Garner could even move into Iraq after the initial invasion, Rumsfeld had already decided to replace Garner with someone more politically reliable, Paul Bremer, a protege of Henry Kissinger. Three days after entering Iraq, on April 25, Rumsfeld told Garner that Bremer was replacing him, but asked Garner to stay on. Garner had been able to accomplish little besides putting together a preliminary advisory group of Iraqis. Garner told Rumsfeld, "It doesn't work that way. You can't have the guy who used to be in charge and the guy who's now in charge there, because you divide the loyalties of the people. So the best thing for me is just to step out of here." Rumsfeld convinced Garner to stay on temporarily, and Garner and Bremer clashed almost immediately over Bremer's plan to ban 50,000 former Ba'athists from government employ. "Hell," Garner told him, "you won't be able to run anything if you go this deep." Bremer ignored Garner's advice. The next day, Bremer unveiled his second order, disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Hussein's bodyguard and special paramilitary organizations. "Garner was stunned," Woodward writes. "The de-Baathification order was dumb, but this was a disaster. 'We have always made plans to bring the army back,' he insisted. This new plan was just coming out of the blue, subverting months of work. 'Well, the plans have changed,' Bremer replied. Bremer then met with the Iraqi advisory group Garner had agreed to work with. 'One thing you need to realize is you're not the government,' he told them. 'We are. And we're in charge.' The next day, the group went home." Garner came home in June, and refused to discuss his experiences in Iraq with anyone at the Pentagon. Finally, on June 18, he met with Rumsfeld to discuss the debacle. "We've made three tragic decisions," Garner said. "Three terrible mistakes." He cited the extent of the de-Baathification, getting rid of the army, and summarily dumping the Iraqi leadership group. Disbanding the military had been the biggest mistake. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. Garner made his final point: "There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around." Rumsfeld stared at Garner, then said, "Well, I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are."
Garner met with Bush shortly afterwards. He could tell that Bush was massively uninterested in any of his criticisms or observations, so he confined himself to telling colorful stories and positive reports of the Iraqi people welcoming American troops. Bush was satisfied. On his way out, Bush slapped Garner on the back. "Hey Jay, you want to do Iran?" he said. Garner replied, "Sir, the boys and I talked about that and we want to hold out for Cuba. We think the rum and the cigars are a little better. ...The women are prettier." Bush laughed. "You got it. You got Cuba." Woodward writes, "Of course with all the stories, jocularity, buddy-buddy talk, bluster and confidence in the Oval Office, Garner had left out the headline. He had not mentioned the problems he saw, or even hinted at them. He did not tell Bush about the three tragic mistakes. Once again the aura of the presidency had shut out the most important news -- the bad news. It was only one example of a visitor to the Oval Office not telling the president the whole story or the truth. Likewise, in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news, and a good time had by all."
Soon Rumsfeld began to become disenchanted with Bremer as well, and later accused Bremer of going solo on him without reporting in regularly. Rumsfeld also refused to take any part in overseeing the hunt for Iraqi WMDs, telling CIA director George Tenet that he wanted nothing to do with any of the reports from the field.
The story of Rumsfeld's attempted ouster in 2004 by Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, has been told elsewhere in this site. The Newsweek excerpt points up the support for Rumsfeld's ouster by outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said, "If I go, Don should go." Card, who was planning on his own resignation as well, had a number of candidates in mind to replace Rumsfeld, including conservative Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman and Republican senator John McCain, but Card was high on his "sleeper" candidate, former Secretary of State and Bush family loyalist James Baker. "Everyone would say, 'Phew,'" Card told Woodward. "No learning curve. Great. Interesting." Card considered Baker the best modern White House chief of staff in recent history, and thought his handling of the 2000 Florida recount for Bush would be an additional plus. Woodward writes of Card's thinking, "Mr. President, this is my quiet counsel, Card said. Put a diplomat in the Defense Department." But Rumsfeld didn't want to leave, and Bush refused to even have anyone talk to Baker about taking the slot. And Karl Rove said to hold another set of Senate confirmation hearings atop Rice's (as the new secretary of state) and Alberto Gonzalez as the new attorney general would overload the system and give Democrats too much fodder for attack. Everyone said that any hearings for Defense would become hearings over the conduct of the Iraq war. So Rumsfeld stayed.
As reported elsewhere on this page, Rice's new counselor at State, her old friend Philip Zelikow, gave to Rice on February 10, 2005, a 15-page secret memo that read, "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change." Woodward writes, "This was a shocking notion -- 'a failed state,' after two years, thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars." Zelikow's memo was only one leak in the dike. In midsummer 2005, General Jim Jones, the NATO commander, told his old friend General Pete Pace, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "You're going to face a debacle and be part of the debacle in Iraq." US prestige was lower than in living memory. Jones said he was so worried about Iraq and the way Rumsfeld ran things that he wondered if he himself should not resign in protest. "How do you have the stomach for eight years in the Pentagon?" he finally asked. Pace replied that someone had to be the chairman, and who else would do it? Jones was not mollified. "Military advice is being influenced on a political level," he said. The JCS had improperly "surrendered" to Rumsfeld. "You should not be the parrot on the secretary's shoulder." Jones confided his concerns to the two ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner and Carl Levin. He told them that Congress needed new legislation to re-empower the service chiefs or make some kind of sense of the dysfunctional system. "The Joint Chiefs have been systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld," Jones said. While Pace denies that Jones said anything of the above to him, Jones confirmed it to Woodward directly. "That's what I told him," Jones said.
In March 2006, Rumsfeld asked six of the most senior of the Pentagon's outside advisors to meet with him to discuss Iraq. One of the six was Ken Adelman, a longtime Rumsfeld friend and staunch early supporter of the war who had become entirely disillusioned over the administration's handling of the postwar. Adelman was not interested in grooming Rumsfeld's ego. "What metrics would you use for success in Iraq?" he asked. "You know, for winning the war?" "Oh, there are hundreds," Rumsfeld replied. "It's just so complicated that there are hundreds." Adelman refused to be put off. "Wait a minute," he insisted. "A former boss of mine always said identify three or four things, then always ask about, get measurements and you'll get progress or else you'll never get any progress." The former boss was Rumsfeld himself, who had driven the point home to Adelman 35 years ago, when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity. What are they? Adelman insisted. Rumsfeld said it was so complicated that he could not give a list. "Hundreds," he insisted. Adelman knew that meant there was a total lack of accountability. If Rumsfeld didn't agree to any criteria, he couldn't be said to have failed on any criteria. "Then you don't have anything," Adelman said. He left as disturbed as ever. There was no accountability."
Rumsfeld circulated a six-page secret memo on May 1, 2006, proposing some fixes, entitled "Illustrative New 21st Century Institutions and Approaches." It was similar in tone and content to his "Anchor Chain" memo from 2001. He blamed the bureaucracy of the Defense Department, the US government, and the entire world's geopolitical structure for the failures in Iraq. He wrote, "The charge of incompetence against the US government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible." In other words, the task of making the military work was completely impossible, and therefore, could not be Rumsfeld's fault.
On Wednesday, May 24, 2006, the intelligence division of the Joint Staff, the J-2, circulated a secret intelligence assessment that showed that the forces of terror in Iraq were not in retreat. It put hard numbers on trends that had been reported to Bush all year. Terrorist attacks had been steadily increasing. The insurgency was gaining. Attacks were now averaging 700 to 800 a week. The current number of attacks was as high as they had ever been, exceeding 3,500 a month. Rumsfeld was dismissive of the report when Woodward discussed the subject with him. It was probably true that the numbers were going up, but, he said, "It is also probably true that our data's better, and we're categorizing more things as attacks. A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you've got a whole fruit bowl of different things -- a banana and an apple and an orange." Woodward writes, "I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a 'fruit bowl,' a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal IEDs, standoff attacks with mortars, and close-engagements such as ambushes -- as far from bananas, apples and oranges as possible." Woodward notes that by a similar point in Vietnam, after several years of "Vietnamization," insurgent attacks had been down, not up.
In a subsequent interview, Rumsfeld denied that he had been the one to block any large-scale troop increases in Iraq from his early requirement of around 140,000. It was all General Tommy Franks's decision, he said. The original plan had called for some 275,000 boots on the ground, but that plan was gutted by Rumsfeld, who orchestrated General Eric Shinseki's ostracism when Shinseki went public with his belief that the troop levels, mandated by Rumsfeld, had been too low. But now Rumsfeld said it was Tommy Franks's fault. By the summer of 2006, Rumsfeld was dancing around the subject with Woodward. "It's entirely possible there were too many at some point and too few at some point, because no one's perfect," he said. "In retrospect I have not seen or heard anything from the other opiners that suggests to me that they have any reason to believe that they were right and we were wrong. Nor can I prove we were right and they were wrong. The only thing I can say is they seem to have a lot more certainty than my assessment of the facts would permit me to have."
How long will it take to defeat the insurgency? Woodward asked. "It could take eight to 10 years," he replied. "Insurgencies have a tendency to do that." Overall he said, "Our exit strategy is to have the Iraqis' government and security forces capable of managing a lower-level insurgency and ultimately achieving victory over it and repressing it over time. But it would be a period after we may very well not have large numbers of people there." Asked whether the Sunni Arab insurgency was gaining strength, as indicated by the May 2006 NIE, Rumsfeld, who should have been intimately familiar with the NIE and knew the question was coming (having vetted them in advance), danced. "Gosh, I don't know," he replied. "I don't want to comment on it. I read so many of those intelligence reports" -- Woodward had never said he was quoting from an intelligence report "and they are all over the lot. In a given day you can see one from one agency, and one from another agency, and then I'll ask Casey or Abizaid what they think about it, or Pete Pace, 'Is that your view?' And try and triangulate and see what people think. But it changes from month to month. I'm not going to go back and say I agree or don't agree with something like that." His best-case scenario for Iraq: "a long, hard slog."
Rumsfeld then began to rail about torture being acceptable for Iraqis, but not for American soldiers: "There's something about the body politic in the United States that they can accept the enemy killing innocent men, women and children and cutting off people's heads, but have zero tolerance for some soldier who does something he shouldn't do." Rumsfeld was apparently unconcerned with the idea that Americans hold themselves, or should hold themselves, to a higher standard.
At the end of his second and last interview with Rumsfeld, Woodward tried one more time for some accountability. He quoted former defense secretary Robert McNamara: "Any military commander who is honest with you will say he's made mistakes that have cost lives." Rumsfeld replies, "Um hmm." Woodward: "Is that correct?" Rumsfeld: "I don't know. I suppose that a military commander...." Woodward: "Which you are." The secretary of defense: No I'm not." Woodward: "Yes, sir." Rumsfeld: "No, no. Well...." Woodward: "Yes. Yes," and began ticking off the hierarchy: "It's commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander." Rumsfeld snaps back, "I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a conflict having to make decisions that result in people living or dying and that that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps removed, make the case." Woodward was flabbergasted. He writes, "Indirection? Two or three steps removed? It was inexplicable. Rumsfeld had spent so much time insisting on the chain of command. He was in control -- not the Joint Chiefs, not the uniformed military, not the National Security Council or the NSC staff, not the critics or the opiners. How could he not see his role and responsibility?" (MSNBC)
October 9: Ohio reporters Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, who were critical in the exposure of the systematic 2004 vote fraud in that state, ask why Ohio secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell, one of the key players in that fraud and now running for the Ohio governorship, is campaigning with an acknowledged white supremacist. Blackwell is not only an infamous GOP operative, but an African-American. They report, "Polls show Blackwell trailing between 12-20 points in his gubernatorial race, but few Ohio insiders doubt his ability to steal the necessary votes, if he can get away with it. Currently, Blackwell operatives are stressing that he's 'only 12 points down' and that they believe the race will tighten significantly by Election Day." Blackwell toured Ohio with Larry Pratt, author of Armed People Victorious, which advocates the creation of militant right-wing militias. Pratt has spoken and shared platforms in the past with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi Aryan Nation members. He was forced to take a leave of absence from Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential campaign over charges of white supremacist and anti-semitic views. Pratt's 150,000-member Gun Owners of America is proudly to the right of the National Rifle Association. Pratt says that Blackwell, an advocate of gun rights, is "our kind of guy." Blackwell campaign spokesperson attorney Eric Seabrook concedes that while Pratt is indeed a white supremacist, Blackwell's appearance with Pratt "was all about the gun rights issue."
However, Blackwell has lined up with racists and anti-semites before Pratt. Earlier this year Blackwell posted on his website a picture of himself addressing the Council for National Policy. The CNP has deep neo-fascist and Ku Klux Klan, and embraces a broad spectrum of powerful, reactionary bigots. Among them are members of the Ahmanson family, major funders of extremist publications and electronic voting machines. The Ahmanson's financial and political ties are thoroughly intertwined with both ES&S and Diebold, mainstays of the electronic hardware used to steal the Ohio vote. Among their associates are Bob and Todd Urosevich, whose executive and programming work has helped shape the two voting machine companies. Others associated with the CNP include Richard Shoff, a former Ku Klux Klan leader in Indiana; John McGoff, an ardent supporter of the former apartheid South African regime; R.J. Rushdoony, the theological leader of America's "Christian Reconstruction" movement, which advocates that Christian fundamentalists take "dominion" over America by abolishing democracy and instituting Old Testament Law; Reed Larson, head of the anti-union National Right to Work Committee; Don Wildmon, TV censorship activist and accused anti-Semite; and Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other principals from the Iran-Contra Scandal. After a public uproar, Blackwell pulled his CNP photo off his website. But he has thus far made no similar backtrack on Larry Pratt. "We're happy to have his support," says a campaign spokesman. (Columbus Free Press)
October 9: Several mainstream media pundits weigh in on the Mark Foley scandal on the round of morning talk shows. On ABC's This Week, Cokie Roberts says, "The only proper response to something like this is absolutely unbridled outrage. ...The mothers of America are furious! In these emails you have a guy saying, 'My mom's calling, I have to go now.' Come on, guys! They've learned nothing from the Catholic bishops. They've learned nothing from the scandals that have gone before. You don't sit and dillydally and try to cover up and circle the wagons -- and, by the way, once they've circled, start shooting inside. I mean, it is just the silliest reaction I've ever seen grownup men give." On NBC's Chris Matthews Show, columnist Maureen Dowd observes, "Republican women see Denny Hastert and Rummy and these old codgers who are hiding the truth and hurting kids -- kids in Iraq and kids in the page system. And I think women will really be turned off by that." On The McLaughlin Group, columnist Eleanor Clift says, "The notion that Denny Hastert is some innocent bystander who stood aside and didn't 'out' somebody -- it isn't about outing somebody, it's about seeing a potential problem in their midst, and basically this inclination was to protect the club, protect the majority. And bringing in Nancy Pelosi -- he called her to notify her he wanted to bring [former FBI director] Louis Freeh in to look at the page problem -- she said, 'The page program isn't a problem. The page program is fine. It's the membership of Congress, the leadership, who overlooked the misbehavior.'" To round out these observations, Democratic senate candidate Claire McCaskill says on NBC's Meet the Press, "Clearly what has happened here is an arrogance of power. It is about holding onto power instead of doing the right thing. ...This shouldn't be about power. This should be about protecting kids and calling the authorities, calling the Ethics Committee. They didn't even tell the Democrat on the Page Committee. This was about a cover-up. I think it's wrong. I think it is a great example of how out of touch Washington is, and how they've got their priorities all wrong." And Democratic House member Rahm Emanuel sums up the obvious on This Week: "If a high school teacher was found doing this with a child, and the principal knew...and said to the teacher, 'We're going to renew your contract,' the community and parents would have that teacher and principal out." (Daily Kos)
October 9: Pundits and political observers from all sides are wondering what the Republicans' "October Surprise" will be, as they grow increasingly desperate to stem the tide of Democratic victories predicted for November 7. Rolling Stone political reporter Mark Binelli writes, "Republicans seem to be relying, thus far, on their perennial tactic: spooking Americans on homeland security. Unfortunately for Bush, public skepticism regarding terror alerts has been steadily rising." The New York Times's Frank Rich says, "It's amazing to me how short a shelf life even the London terror plot had -- it was basically a day. I don't think they can play that card anymore. It's the boy who cried wolf." In fact, for some Americans, the scare tactics of the Republicans may be backfiring, according to pollster Peter Hart. "The recent stress on national security has helped the Republicans, but it's been a marginal effect," he says. "I don't think that issue cuts the same way anymore." Poll numbers show that 73% of Americans believe the country is unprepared for a biological or chemical attack, and 61% consider Bush's comparison of Islamic terrorists and the Nazis to be both inappropriate and self-serving. But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, like most Democrats, believe something is coming: "We know the Republicans will come up with something. In October, unencumbered by money, fact or decency, they will pull anything to win. They think they can undermine us on national security. What's sad about what John Boehner said about Democrats being 'more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people' was not only that it was over-the-top, but that he didn't even think it was. You should know when you're lobbing a hand grenade and not just passing a bonbon. But this is the nature of the comments you will see. We're dealing with desperate people, so they have to revert as usual to their politics of fear. It should come as no surprise to anyone. I just hope the American people don't fall for their gimmick."
Binelli asked a number of political pundits for their take on the possible "October Surprise," and got a wide range of responses. Conservative Pat Buchanan says the Republicans should rally their base by building a $5 billion fence along the Mexican border: "It would rally the Reagan Democrats to Bush and put the Democrats in a real bind with their Hispanic base." Democratic strategist Donna Brazile is fairly conventional in her predictions: terror alert levels raised, domestic terror plots foiled, or senior al-Qaeda leaders -- possibly even Osama bin Laden -- captured or killed just in time for the elections. Author Larry Beinhart comes up with one of the wilder and more fanciful speculations: Karl Rove engineers the assassination of Bush and blames it on bin Laden. "It solves everything," he says. "It rallies Americans around this terrorist assassination and gets rid of this loser who's embarrassing them. Dick Cheney steps grimly to the helm, declares martial law and becomes President for Life." Comedian Bill Maher says simply, "Who needs an October Surprise when you've got Diebold?" Retired general John Batiste says that firing Donald Rumsfeld would give Americans a shot of confidence in its leadership: "Putting aside politics completely, the guy has so much baggage with respect to failed policy, bad decision-making and taking us to war with the wrong plan that we really have no alternative but to hold him accountable for the fiasco in Iraq. We need a new strategy: We have to get serious about training and equipping Iraqi security forces and consider other alternatives for governing Iraq. But none of this will happen until we get rid of Rumsfeld -- his arrogance will probably stand in the way of him doing the right thing and stepping down on his own." Frank Rich says, "Another October Surprise would be coming up with some band-aid for Iraq, some bogus troop withdrawal -- like cutting back drastically to 50,000 troops. No matter how they slice it, Iraq is the real problem. What else does Bush have to play with? There's nothing dramatic that can happen with the economy. He can't magically rebuild New Orleans." And columnist Arianna Huffington says blackly, "Taking a page from Nixon in '68, the Bush administration will announce it has a secret plan to end the war in Iraq. They just won't let it slip that it involves selling the entire country to Halliburton." (Rolling Stone)
October 9: The Military Commissions Act is the final piece of the puzzle for Bush administration plans to potentially begin incarcerating tens of thousands of Americans for what can only be termed "crimes against the state," according to law professor and author Marjorie Cohn. Bush can declare, by law, any US citizen he chooses to be an "unlawful enemy combatant," and imprison them with no guarantee of legal representation or a speedy trial. Detained aliens have no right to habeas corpus, according to the Act, but Cohn expects the Supreme Court to find that provision unconstitutional. The prisoners so detained by the administration may be housed at the new "detention facility" being built in an undisclosed location in America by Halliburton subsidiary KBR. Cohn warns, "We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy." (AlterNet)
October 9: A new sex scandal threatens to break over Washington. Last week, federal agents raided the home of Deborah Palfrey, who they accuse of running what amounts to a prostitution ring for 13 years. Palfrey's business, Pamela Martin & Associates, stands accused of being an escort service for high-priced prostitutes serving a wealthy clientele. Palfrey, who has already served one jail term for operating a prostitution ring, is being investigated for possible connections with disgraced Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who is currently serving his own jail sentence for accepting massive bribes. As of yet, no connection between Palfrey and Cunningham, or any other lawmakers, has been proven. (The Smoking Gun)

October 10: Battered by accusations of allowing North Korea to develop nuclear weapons without effective US intervention, Bush administration spokesmen are telling the press that the recent North Korean nuclear test is less significant than the media is reporting. Officials say that, two days after the test, they can't even be sure that North Korea actually detonated an actual nuclear weapon, given the relatively small yield of the underground blast. Press secretary Tony Snow says it will take more time, possibly days, to come to a conclusion, and that there is a "remote possibility that we'll never know." Snow also casts doubts on the ability of the North Koreans to have developed a bomb in the two years since Pyongyang expelled UN inspectors. "What's interesting here is that if there was a nuclear test, ask yourself: They just unlocked Pyongyang a couple of years ago. You seriously believe that they have actually done everything within two years? You could have something that is very old and off the shelf here as well," he says. But asked if he considered the reported test a big deal, Snow replies, "No, I think it's an important deal...there are a lot of ifs, aren't there?" Democrats have sought to use the reported nuclear test to blame Bush for a failure of international diplomacy. They are calling for a shift in strategy to include direct engagement with North Korea, which the White House has ruled out. (Reuters)
October 10: Former Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham will tell the House Ethics Committee that several years ago, he was told by then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl that a drunken Mark Foley tried to enter the House pages' dormitory sometime in 2003. Fordham will tell the committee that this is the event that convinced both him and Trandahl to warn Dennis Hastert's office, with Fordham designated to speak to Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer. Fordham had already spoken with Foley about the impropriety of his actions after he and Trandahl had observed Foley's behavior with pages. According to ABC's inside source, Fordham will tell the committee that he told Palmer of Foley's pattern of inappropriate behavior towards the pages. Palmer denies being told anything, saying, "What Kirk Fordham said did not happen."
Now another representative, Republican Ginny Brown-Waite, has revealed that she was told about the dormitory incident from first-hand sources last month. After reading about the inappropriate e-mail exchanges between Foley and underaged pages, Brown-Waite alerted GOP leaders about the dormitory incident as well as about pages who felt uncomfortable with Foley's advances. Brown-Waite's warnings came hours before the news of the scandal erupted. As for Hastert, he still insists that he knew nothing until it was revealed in the news, and adds that he knows nothing of any dormitory incident.
Senator John McCain, an ostensibly independent Republican, has broken from the Republican party line and begun calling for an independent investigation. "We cannot tolerate the intolerable," he says, and adds that congressional leadership should have called for an outside group of highly respected former congressmen to get to the bottom of inappropriate contact Foley may have had with pages and whether anyone in the House leadership erred by not doing something sooner about the problem. Such a group will need to be selected and "look at this quickly and assign responsibility and recommend measures that need to be taken," McCain says. An independent investigation would restore "credibility" to the leadership, he says, because after all, "there's conflicting stories as we all know as to who knew what and when." Evoking the Watergate scandal, McCain says the scandal invokes the words of former Republican senator "Howard Baker's famous comment: 'What did they know and when did they know it?'" (ABC News)
October 10: Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe is contradicting his own spokeswoman over his version of events surrounding his revelation that he was told about the Mark Foley e-mail exchanges with underage House pages in either 2000 or 2001. Kolbe's spokeswoman, Korenna Kline, told the Washington Post that he had personally confronted Foley about his inappropriate exchanges. Kolbe now says he merely "recommended" that the page's complaint "be passed along to Rep. Foley's office and the Clerk who supervised the Page program." Kline also told the Post that the page had showed the offending messages to Kolbe. In his statement, Kolbe denies ever seeing the messages. According to a Post source, the messages, which have not been released, were "sexually explicit." Kolbe gives no explanation as to why his version of events contradicts that of his spokeswoman. Kolbe also implies now that this really wasn't his problem, since "the young man was no longer a Page and not subject to the jurisdiction of the program." Interestingly, in the Post's own story about Kolbe's contradictory statement, it fails to report that his statement is in direct contrast to Kline's. AmericaBlog's John Aravosis writes, "[T]omorrow's Post article doesn't tell you all of that. Why not? Who knows. They just reprint Kolbe's statement when they know he's just contradicted his own spokeswoman and a second source. i.e., the Washington Post pretty much knows Kolbe is lying, but they reprint what he says anyway, with no additional information."
Kolbe says, "I have been contacted by news organizations about former Rep. Foley's e-mail contacts with former pages. This is my best recollection of the single incident I was made aware of. Some time after leaving the Page program, an individual I had appointed as a Page contacted my office to say he had received e-mails from Rep. Foley that made him uncomfortable. I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit. It was my recommendation that this complaint be passed along to Rep. Foley's office and the Clerk who supervised the Page program. This was done promptly. I did not have a personal conversation with Mr. Foley about the matter. I assume e-mail contact ceased since the former Page never raised the issue again with my office. I believed then, and believe now, that this was the appropriate way to handle this incident given the information I had and the fact that the young man was no longer a Page and not subject to the jurisdiction of the program. I began my own political career as a Page for Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1958. As a result, I have a special empathy for the program and have always sought to make the experience a meaningful one for them. I visit with the Pages at the back of the chamber to explain politics and parliamentary procedures on the House Floor. I have written college and graduate school recommendations for scores of the young men and women, and I have always participated in various official page activities when asked to do so by the program, such as speaking at their graduation." (Washington Post/TPM Muckraker, AmericaBlog)
October 10: Incumbent Republican congressman Richard Pombo, running for reelection in California, has insisted that he was never lobbied by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Records show Abramoff billed a client for at least two contacts with Pombo a decade ago. The lobbying records released by the Northern Mariana Islands show that Abramoff billed once for calls to Pombo, chairman of the House Resources Committee, and a second time for a discussion with him, while lobbying in 1996. On more than two dozen other occasions from 1996 through 2001, Abramoff associates called or met with members of Pombo's staff, including his chief of staff, the records indicate. As the contacts picked up, Pombo voted Abramoff's way on a bill important to Abramoff's clients. Pombo's campaign calls the records lies and say the recorded contacts are "greatly inflated." The records put in question Pombo's campaign-trail assertions that he barely knew Abramoff and was never lobbied by him. Pombo is running against Democrat Jerry McNerney and is favored to win an eighth term representing California's Central Valley, though the race is tightening. Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to tax evasion and wire fraud and is cooperating in a wide-ranging federal bribery investigation that has already led to guilty pleas from GOP representative Bob Ney and several congressional aides. Recently, an aide to presidential strategist Karl Rove resigned after a congressional report showed she had extensive contacts with Abramoff. "I met the guy two or three times in my whole life -- he never once lobbied me on anything," Pombo said of Abramoff last week in a debate against McNerney. Pombo's spokesman Brian Kennedy says that the documented meetings simply "never happened," that the staff-level contacts were "greatly inflated," and that Abramoff is "an admitted felon" who can't be trusted.
Records show that Pombo is lying. The Northern Mariana Islands, a chain of 14 islands near Guam, became a US commonwealth in 1986. Residents have nonvoting citizenship but the islands are exempt from many federal labor laws. Democrats, complaining about reported abuses at low-paying garment factories, have sought to end those exemptions and increase the minimum wage, now $3.05 an hour. The Marianas government hired Abramoff to block such moves. The NMI records, covering 1996 to 2001, indicate contacts beginning in March 1996 between officials at Abramoff's then-law firm, Preston Gates, and Pombo's staff. One focus was legislation in the Resources Committee, of which Pombo was then a junior member, to give the Marianas a nonvoting delegate to Congress. Then-Marianas Governor Froilan Tenorio was opposed. Abramoff and his associates lobbied the Hill, including a July 29, 1996, contact with Pombo's office. Three days later the bill was narrowly defeated in committee. Pombo voted no. "I have great news!" Abramoff wrote to Tenorio on August 1, 1996. The delegate bill "was DEFEATED at the markup which finished about an hour ago. ...We were able to add four conservative Republicans to the block of Democrat opponents and defeat the bill by a vote of 13-12." Pombo's office insists that his vote had nothing to do with Abramoff. But on September 10, 1996, Abramoff billed for a discussion with Pombo. Two days later he gave Pombo a $500 donation, the first of what would become $7,500 in campaign contributions. (AP/San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones)
October 10: The Chicago Tribune's Frank James believes that the Republicans, desperate to shift responsibility for the Foley scandal from their own shoulders, may be preparing to engineer a backlash against Republican gay staff members in Washington. One of the early signs of such a backlash comes from Tony Perkins, the head of the right-wing evangelical Family Research Council, who in an article for his organization's newsletter accuses gay GOP staffers of being, in essence, a fifth column within the congressional Republican power structure, thwarting legislative initiatives dear to social conservatives. "Sunday's New York Times revealed that a homosexual former Clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl, was 'among the first to learn' of Mr. Foley's' messages to pages," Perkins writes. "The Clerk's job is described as a 'powerful post with oversight of hundreds of staffers and the page program.' This raises yet another plausible question for values voters: has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and or staffers? When we look over events of this Congress, we have to wonder. This was the first House to pass a pro-homosexual hate crimes bill. The marriage protection amendment was considered very late in the term with no progress toward passage. Despite overwhelming popular approval, the party seldom campaigns as the defender of marriage. The GOP will have to decide whether it wants to be the party that defends the traditional moral and family values that our nation was built upon and directed by for two centuries. Put another way, does the party want to represent values voters or Mark Foley and friends?" James writes, "...Perkins is essentially accusing gay staffers of willfully sabotaging the gay marriage amendment while greasing the skids for its own hate-crimes legislation. Perkins doesn't offer an explanation as to how non-gay members of Congress could be bamboozled to the point that they'd go along with legislative moves that would weaken their position with conservative voters. But American history is littered with examples of powerful accusations being made in the absence of evidence. Think Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 1950s. The last line of Perkins' is an unmistakable challenge to congressional Republicans. He is essentially putting the Republican Party on notice, saying it's either us or them, the religious right's agenda or that of gay Americans."
A column by Cliff Kincaid, editor of the conservative organization Accuracy in Media's AIM Report, covers much the same ground, warning readers about the damage gays in the congressional Republican establisment have done to the conservative agenda. In a column entitled "Homosexual Blackmail on the Capitol Hill," Kincaid writes, "For the sake of honest and open government, not to mention protection of the children, the secret Capitol Hill homosexual network must be exposed and dismantled. But only Republican leaders can do that. Their failure to do so suggests that the network may go higher and deeper -- and have more power -- than even the New York Times article indicated." James asks, "So is this the start of a movement to purge gays from the senior staff positions on Capitol Hill? Such undertakings usually begin with jeremiads such as the ones we are witnessing that are then transformed into action." Democrat Barney Frank, an openly homosexual House member, tells the Advocate, a gay publication, that he fears just such a move: "This is a real crisis, since before, gays in the Republican Party were willing to be tolerated, but Republicans will now be more nervous having gay people in positions of power. They have been critical of people who are out and gay -- there could be a real purge of gays in the Republican Party now. It's probably just enough for people to be perceived to be gay."
Other items in this section discuss "The List," a document listing gay staffers working for various Republican congressmen and senators, and the possibility that that list will be used to implement some sort of public purge. The Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association has received the list, and says he is convinced that a secretive gay "clique" boring within the Republican-controlled Congress is responsible for covering up Foley's sexual predation toward teenage male House pages. Wildmon is calling on the Republican Party leadership to promptly purge the "subversive" gay staffers. "They oughtta fire every one of 'em," Wildmon says. "I don't care if they're heterosexual or homosexual or whatever they are. If you've got that going on, that subverts the will of the people; that subverts the voters. That is subversive activity. There should be no organization among staffers in Washington of that nature, and if they find out that they're there and they're a member, they oughtta be dismissed el pronto." Wildmon is using his call for a gay purge to insist that Hastert is innocent of any allegations of a cover-up. "I think the identification of the members of the homosexual clique is going to come out," Wildmon says. "I think it's going to come out whether or not Hastert knew what he says, and at this point I'm inclined to believe he's telling the truth. I'm beginning to think that the homosexuals shielded their former Congressman Foley and that Denny Hastert did not know the depth of what's going on up there." Hastert himself has begun to blame his own staffers, including his openly gay chief of staff Scott Palmer, who he says may have engaged in a "cover-up." Hastert has stopped short, so far, of suggesting that his staffers are part of any gay clique.
Nation reporter Max Blumenthal writes, "Even though Fordham and Trandahl are key figures in the Foley scandal, the disclosure of their actions does not absolve House Republican leaders of their own roles in keeping Foley's licentious and possibly illegal behavior from the public. Yet Fordham and Trandahl are tempting targets for the gay-obsessed Christian right. In their desperate effort to stave off a Democratic takeover of Congress and preserve their political agenda, Wildmon and his allies have volunteered as Hastert's surrogates, casting him as the victim of a gay Republican cabal. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins first laid out the strategy on October 9, writing in FRC's newsletter: 'Has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and or staffers? When we look over events of this Congress, we have to wonder.' Perkins continued: 'Does the [Republican] party want to represent values voters or Mark Foley and friends?' Though a portrait of Trandahl appeared beside Perkins's missive, Perkins stopped just short of calling for a purge of gay GOP staffers." Focus on the Family founder James Dobson has yet to get on the gay-bashing bandwagon, instead blaming the "liberal media" for blowing the entire scandal out of proportion and saying that Foley was merely the victim of a joke by some of the pages. (Chicago Tribune, The Nation)
October 10: Former congressional page Jordan Edmund is interviewed by the FBI about Mark Foley's contacts with him. Edmund was not subpoenaed. Edmund, the deputy campaign manager for Oklahoma Republican Ernest Istook's gubernatorial campaign, will also testify before the House Ethics Committee. (ABC News)
October 10: During a press conference infelicitously held in front of a graveyard, House Speaker Dennis Hastert attempts to shift the blame for the Foley scandal to his staff, and says he will fire any of his staff members who helped cover up Foley's e-mails or IMs to House pages. He then says that, as of the moment, no one on his staff did anything improper. "I don't think that anybody at any time in my office did anything wrong," Hastert says. "If there was a problem, if there was a cover-up, we'll find out through the investigation, they'll be under oath. ...If they did cover something up, then they should not continue to have their jobs." Hastert continues to insist that he knew nothing about the Foley e-mails until they were brought to his attention in late September, though the details of his story keep changing. He says, "I understood what my staff told me, and I think from that response, they've handled it as well as they should. However, in 20/20 hindsight, probably you could do everything a little bit better. If there is a problem, if there was a cover up, then we should find that out through the investigation process. They'll be under oath and we'll find out. If they did cover something up, they should not continue to have their jobs. But I -- but I didn't think anybody at any time in my office did anything wrong. I found out about these revelations last Friday. That was the first information I had about it." (Bloomberg, MSNBC, CNN/Think Progress [link to video])
October 10: The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who is one of the original sources for the Mark Foley e-mails, provides specific refutations to the charges of partisanship and dishonesty being bandied about by Republicans in the wake of the Foley scandal. CREW addresses each charge:
- Lie: The email messages between Foley and a former page have been in CREW's possession as far back as April. Fact: CREW received the emails on July 21, 2006 and promptly sent them to the FBI, and no one else, that same day. CREW did not discuss the email messages or their content with anyone else. The only call CREW's Executive Director Melanie Sloan made regarding the matter was to the Washington FBI agent to whom she sent the emails to confirm receipt of the messages.
- Lie: CREW provided the FBI with incomplete information and heavily redacted emails. CREW refused to disclose the page's name and contact information to the FBI. Fact: The emails Sloan sent to the FBI were not edited or redacted in any way. The page's full name and email address were in the emails, as was the name and email address of the Congressional staffer to whom the page was sending the emails.
- Lie:The FBI investigation into Foley was hampered because CREW refused to comply with the agency's request for additional information. Fact: After CREW sent the emails to the FBI, CREW's only subsequent contact with the Bureau was one telephone call from the special agent to whom CREW had sent the material confirming that the emails were from Foley. CREW had no further contact with the FBI. According to several government officials, the FBI sent the emails to three squads: a public corruptions squad, a criminal squad and a cyber-squad. After reviewing the matter, the FBI determined that there wasn't enough evidence at the time to suggest any criminal activity and did not move forward with an investigation.
- Lie: Fox News' Sean Hannity said on October 5, 2006 that CREW had "been bragging about [the emails] on its website as early as July 21st." Fact: CREW first posted the emails to www.citizensforethics.org on September 29, 2006, one day after ABC News reported them.
- Lie: CREW has been working with ABC on the Foley story and was reporter Brian Ross' source for the emails. Fact: Ross told the New York Times he received the emails from Republicans. CREW was not involved in the broadcasting of his story. In fact, Ross didn't even know that CREW had the emails until after he broke the story.
- Lie: Mark Foley resigned from Congress after CREW posted some of his email exchanges with a former page. Fact: Brian Ross has reported that Foley resigned hours after ABC questioned him about the sexually explicit internet messages.
- Lie: The blog Stop Sex Predators is owned and operated by CREW. Fact: CREW does not own, operate, or have any connection or involvement with the Stop Sex Predators blog. CREW first heard of the blog in media reports after the Foley scandal broke.
- Lie: One of CREW's funders, George Soros, was behind the Foley scandal and has been directing CREW's involvement in the case. Fact: George Soros had no knowledge that CREW had the Foley emails, nor does he have any input over CREW's day to day activities. CREW has not discussed the emails with any donors or Democratic operatives, strategists or staffers. All CREW did was send the messages to the FBI. After ABC broke the story, CREW posted the messages to its website.
- Lie: Republican representative Jack Kingston called CREW a "partisan 527 organization" on the October 8, 2006 edition of Fox News Sunday. Fact: CREW is a nonpartisan and nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.
(CREW)
October 10: GOP senator John McCain blames the North Korean nuclear test on...former president Bill Clinton. During a Detroit campaign stop, McCain says that the 1994 Agreed Framework between the US and North Korea is a failure. McCain says, "Prior to the agreement, every single time the Clinton administration warned the Koreans not to do something -- not to kick out the IAEA inspectors, not to remove the fuel rods from their reactor -- they did it, and they were rewarded every single time by the Clinton administration with further talks." Think Progress's Judd Legum notes, "The 1994 Agreed Framework wasn't perfect and North Korea was not in 100% compliance. But it was the only thing that stopped North Korea from producing nuclear weapons and separating plutonium. During the Clinton administration, North Korea didn't make any nuclear bombs. Today, the country possesses material for as many as 13 nuclear weapons. The vast majority of that material was created during the George W. Bush administration. (All the rest was created during his father's adminstration.) The difference between the Clinton administration's North Korea policy and the Bush administration's North Korea policy is the difference between success and failure." (CNN/Think Progress [link to video])
October 10: Desperate for a positive story during the ever-widening Mark Foley scandal, Speaker Dennis Hastert chooses to meet with an eccentric, disreputable "evangelist," K.A. Paul, and Paul's associate Dennis Ryan. Hastert encountered Ryan at a Plano, Illinois restaurant, and Hastert quickly agreed to an early-morning meeting without consulting with his advisors. Hastert and Paul met for 40 minutes, with Ryan videotaping the meeting. The two prayed together, Paul "laid hands" on Hastert -- and advised Hastert to resign. No explanation of why Hastert chose to meet with Paul, how Paul evaded traditional security checks, or why Hastert isn't going on record about any of this, has yet been made public. Interestingly, Hastert now claims he was "duped" into meeting with Paul, a claim Paul derides. "He never said that," Paul says. "I don't dupe anybody. That's ridiculous." Hastert was "gracious," Paul adds. "He welcomed me, he hosted me." Paul says that he has met Hastert before, and met with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay "many times." Paul, whose ministry includes counseling world leaders in trouble, particularly despots, murderers and troublemakers, describes himself as ministering to the "scum of the earth." (Chicago Sun-Times/TPM Muckraker, TPM Muckraker)

Army estimates troops to remain unchanged in Iraq through 2010

October 11: The Army is preparing to keep current troops levels in Iraq through at least 2010, yet another indication that conditions there are too unstable to foresee an end to the war. General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, says that it is easier to scale back later if conditions allow, than to ramp up if they don't. "This is not a prediction that things are going poorly or better," Schoomaker says. "It's just that I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot." There are now 141,000 US troops in Iraq. At a Pentagon news conference, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said that as recently as July he had expected to be able to recommend a substantial reduction in US forces by now. But that plan was dropped as sectarian violence in Baghdad escalated. While arguing that progress is still being made toward unifying Iraq's fractured political rivalries and stabilizing the country, Casey also said the violence amounts to "a difficult situation that's likely to remain that way for some time." Casey refused to predict when troop levels might begin to drop. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that the Pentagon will attempt to take some of the strain off the Army and the Marine Corps, the two branches that have borne the brunt of the conflict, by making more use of Air Force and Navy personnel. (AP/Yahoo! News)

New study estimates 655,000 Iraqi war dead

October 11: A study funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports that nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, a far higher death toll than other estimates. Researchers attempted to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer. "Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," says Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study. The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published October 12 on the Web site of the Lancet, an eminent medical journal. Other estimates show the death toll to be around 50,000. "They're almost certainly way too high," says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticizes the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the November 7 election. "This is not analysis, this is politics," he says. The work updates an earlier Johns Hopkins study, that one was released just before the November 2004 presidential election. At the time, the lead researcher, Les Roberts of Hopkins, said the timing was deliberate. Many of the same researchers were involved in the latest estimate. Burnham says the estimate was much higher than others because it was derived from a house-to-house survey rather than approaches that depend on body counts or media reports. The watchdog group Iraqi Body Count says it has recorded about 44,000 to 49,000 civilian Iraqi deaths, but it notes that those totals are based on media reports, which it says probably overlook "many if not most civilian casualties." The survey participants attributed about 31 percent of violent deaths to coalition forces. Accurate death tolls have been difficult to obtain ever since the Iraq conflict began in March 2003. When top Iraqi political officials cite death numbers, they often refuse to say where the numbers came from. (AP/Yahoo! News)

Foley accused of inappropriately touching a male page on the floor of the House of Representatives

October 11: Former House page Richard Nguyen, now a student at the University of Michigan, says he saw Mark Foley pat another male page's behind on the floor of the House of Representatives in early 2001. Nguyen, then 16, says he did not report the inappropriate touching to authorities because he wasn't sure how to interpret it. "I wasn't sure if it was a social norm I wasn't accustomed to," he says. "I mean, you see athletes patting each other's *sses all the time on the field." He says that many of the pages in his class were suspicious of Foley. "We always saw that Mr. Foley was very friendly to male pages. There were signs, for an observer like myself, but I never knew what I know now." Nguyen says he never felt threatened. The dormitory where he and the other pages lived was guarded by police, and the page program enforced curfews and a buddy system. "I always felt safe when I was there," he says, "but then again, I was a Democratic page." He adds, "If there were people who knew that the pages were being sexually harassed, you have to ask yourself, are these the right people to be in charge of young people and to be in charge of our country?" (Michigan Daily)
October 11: A staff supervisor at the dorm for congressional pages intervened when former Representive Mark Foley tried to pay the teens a nighttime visit in the summer of 2000. According to a former page, who was 17 at the time, the pages were having an informal "mixer" party in their dorm at the Tip O'Neil building behind the Capitol. "It was a beautiful summer evening, and I recall Mr. Foley arriving in his blue Series 3 BMW convertible about 9:30 at night," the former page says. "Several of us saw him and went outside to chat." A page program supervisor came out to warn the pages "not to go far because they weren't signed out" and shooed them back inside, he recalls. The page supervisor was one of the adult staffers who worked for the House Clerk's office, which oversees the page program. It is not known if any formal report was filed regarding Foley's surprise visit. The former page says he then began receiving instant messages and e-mails from Foley which became sexually explicit immediately following his 18th birthday. He says he has not retained any of the messages or e-mails. "I would turn on my instant messenger, and he would be online at all hours of the day or night. The talk would quickly turn sexual," he recalls. He says Foley requested that he send photos of himself performing sexual acts. It was the report of a similar nighttime visit by an inebriated Foley to the page dorm sometime in 2002 or 2003 that caused Foley's then Chief of Staff, Kirk Fordham, to alert Speaker Dennis Hastert's office to the congressman's inappropriate actions, a warning Hastert's office now says they never received. (ABC News)
October 11: Two media sources for the Foley e-mails confirm that they made the e-mails public because of concern about the pages, not for any partisan reasons. They also confirm that Democratic operatives have been trying to alert the press about the e-mails since May of 2006, badly damaging claims by Republicans that the scandal was somehow "timed" to influence the November elections. Harper's confirms that it was offered the e-mails in May by a Democratic source. The most sexually explicit material -- the instant messages that forced Foley's abrupt resignation on September 29 and turned his actions into a full-fledged scandal -- appears to be disconnected from politics. The two former pages who revealed the correspondence to ABC News and the Washington Post, however, may never have come forward had Democratic operatives not divulged the five more benign, yet suspicious, e-mails that Foley had sent to a Louisiana boy. The exchanges that triggered the scandal were written by Foley to a former Louisiana page, Jordan Edmund, in 2004. Those e-mails were characterized as "overly friendly" by House Republican leaders, and were originally leaked from Republican Rodney Alexander's office. Alexander was Edmund's sponsor. The e-mails have been available to various press outlets for over a year, but one publication after another declined to print them. ABC News finally went public with the e-mails in September because reporter Brian Ross had put the story on hold for over a month while he finished up other assignments. "There was never a plan to undermine the GOP or to destroy Hastert personally, as the speaker has vaingloriously suggested," Ken Silverstein, Washington editor for Harper's, says. "I know this with absolute certainty because Harper's was offered the story almost five months ago." Silverstein said while his source was a "Democratic operative," the same source that had provided the e-mail exchanges to the St. Petersburg Times in November 2005. Both the magazine and the paper declined to publish a story, Silverstein says the source "was not working in concert with the national Democratic Party. This person was genuinely disgusted by Foley's behavior, amazed that other publications had declined to publish stories about the emails, and concerned that Foley might still be seeking contact with pages." A second source emerged in September with the e-mails; Ross has confirmed that his source is a Republican.
Two of the primary sources who delivered the instant messages came forward this week to clarify their motives. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear that exposure would leave them open to harassment, especially from bloggers.
One of ABC News's sources, a former page, says he went public with his knowledge of the instant messages on September 29 only after the network, the day before, published the questionable e-mails that Foley had sent to the Louisiana boy. The former page and current college student stresses that he is a "staunch Republican" who "wouldn't vote for a Democrat ever." He also says that he is not calling for the resignation of Hastert or any other Republican leader. "I in no way knew or intended to have all the brouhaha about what the GOP leadership knew and when they knew it," he says. "Truthfully, I am very troubled about what it seems has gone on behind the scenes, but that in no way affects my wish to have a continued GOP control of Congress. There are bad apples everywhere." The Post subsequently received the instant messages from a Democratic college student who had served as a page with the two teenagers who had corresponded with Foley and had shared their instant messages. Unlike the ABC News source, the Post's source conceded that he would like to see the Democrats seize control of the House in November, but when approached by a Post reporter about the instant messages, he was reluctant to provide them. Days later, he did so. The two sources say they had conferred about the instant messages, which they had known about for months. The Republican former page said he had decided it was up to the victims to come forward with them, but once ABC News published the e-mails, "I knew everything I had already known about Foley was finally going to come out. His attraction to young men. His sexual conversations with them, etc. I decided that it was in the best interests of kids in general, pages and my friends specifically that Foley be dealt with quickly and swiftly so that he couldn't hurt anyone else. We've seen how long the Justice department and every other government bureaucracy can take to deal with criminal issues and abuse. I knew the media would be the fastest way to get Foley the justice he deserved." As for the Post's source, Foley's initial response to the disclosure of the e-mails finally persuaded him to share his information, he says. "When the first e-mails came out, Foley's campaign came out saying it was all a well-timed Democratic smear. Those rumors were unfounded, and I knew that to be untrue," the Democratic former page says. Before the ABC News report, "we were reluctant to take on Congress as young politicos ourselves, but when first blows were made, there was no harm in coming forward." (Washington Post)
October 11: Conservative leader Paul Weyrich says Dennis Hastert assured him that House Majority Leader John Boehner was wrong when he said that he had told Hastert months ago about the page problem with Foley. "As to Congressman Thomas M. Reynolds, the speaker said, 'If he had mentioned this problem to me, I surely would have taken notice,'" Weyrich says. According to Weyrich, Hastert told him that Reynolds often came to him with numerous requests to help incumbents in trouble. "The speaker said he signs off on the majority of requests and only listens with one ear because the requests are repetitive," Weyrich says. "Did Reynolds during such a session drop the bombshell about Foley in the speaker's lap without the speaker's comprehending what was being told to him? 'That is possible but unlikely,' the speaker said. In any case, he has absolutely no recollection." (AP/Cleveland Plain Dealer)
October 11: Melanie Sloan, the executive director of the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), offers to testify before the House Ethics Committee concerning how her organization obtained the Mark Foley e-mail exchanges with underaged House pages. Sloan and CREW have been the subject of unfounded attacks by Republicans blaming the organization for releasing the e-mails in an orchestrated "October Surprise" operation designed to damage Republicans in the November midterm elections. The organization says, "CREW received the emails in July and immediately forwarded them to a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Various inaccurate stories have circulated regarding exactly what CREW sent the FBI and how the agency responded upon receiving the emails, including false reports that CREW gave the FBI redacted emails, that CREW refused to cooperate with the FBI, and that CREW was ABC's source for Foley's emails and instant messages." (CREW)
October 11: Bob Corker, the Republican former mayor of Chattanooga now battling for the US Senate with Democrat Harold Ford Jr, finds himself defending charges that the "blind trust" he set up as mayor to shield himself from conflicts of interest wasn't blind, after all. Corker and Ford are contending for the Senate seat of Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader, who is not running for re-election. Records show that Corker met often with employees from his private companies while mayor from 2001 to 2005, and he shared business tips with others. Corker also got help organizing his 2001 mayoral campaign from City Hall, where a government secretary passed on voting lists and set up meetings for the millionaire commercial real estate developer. Many of the records are e-mails that Chattanooga officials declared lost, but were retained in the files of his executive assistant, Shirley Pond. Corker says that he has now sold most of his business holdings, including office buildings leased to federal agencies, to avoid any appearance of conflict. "All I have now is two pieces of property [and] my home," he says. "I've got a pickup truck and the personal vehicles that our family has. I want for people to know: I've read about all these conflicts at the national level, and have bent over backwards.'" But Alex Knott, political editor at the Center for Public Integrity, says Corker's claims of propriety seem dubious. "Blind trusts are often created so that there's a perception of no conflicts of interest. But in actuality there's always the potential still there.'" Corker has been quite secretive about his finances and his business dealings, including a questionable land deal presided over by Corker, where his administration pushed through legislation to build a road next to a land parcel he owned, which was then sold to Wal-Mart for $4.6 million.
Perhaps the most egregrious conflict of interest came when Mayor Corker had the city invest its employee pension plan into risky startup business ventures run by Corker's business cronies, without letting on that these businessmen were his former partners and cronies who wanted to cash in on Chattanooga's pension fund. Corker also failed to warn the city that the last business venture he and his partners tried lost a million dollars. Currently, city workers of Chattanooga are still paying for Corker's pension fund shell game, as their plan's value has fallen 12% since beginning the investments with Corker's partners. According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, "As a private investor, Bob Corker lost more than $1 million in a speculative Internet venture he shared with Delta Capital Management, a Memphis investment firm. Undeterred, Corker courted Delta when he became Chattanooga's mayor, opening a door that allowed the firm to get $1 million in Chattanooga city employee pension funds in 2004 to invest in startup companies. The pension investment, while still in its early stages, is down 12 percent, according to a June 30 performance report." The Appeal continues, "Corker, the Republican nominee for US Senate, said he played no role in awarding pension funds to Delta and wasn't even present for the January 2004 pension board vote approving the investment. Yet, City Hall e-mail messages show Corker met frequently with Delta, went golfing with its general manager, and encouraged the firm's quest for a share of public pension funds." Corker ignored a negative report on Delta from the city's pension investment consultant and even from an FBI probe of Delta's receipt of public pension funds in Memphis. He says he wasn't aware of any of this, because, though he was a voting member of the pension board with power to appoint the others, "I never went to any of the meetings to make the [pension] allocations, nor did I try to influence people in that regard."
Corker's previous business ventures with these partners were disastrous. "Freeliant was an unmitigated failure," says one former business partner, Darren Metz, of an earlier venture. "Delta lost the $2 million they put in in the first place, plus another million. Plus, they lost tremendous credibility with all their investors, because all the investors took a bath, too." Metz estimated Corker's losses at $1.3 million., but Corker is unusually truthful about the losses: "It was more than that," he says. But despite the losses of money and credibility, Corker pushed for the same venture partners to be allowed to run Chattanooga's pension fund, even though city officials, familiar with their record of mismanagement and failure, did not want their involvement.
Evidence shows that Corker, far from leaving his holdings in the so-called "blind trust," was quite active in managing his business affairs while mayor, even when his responsibilities as mayor impacted his business dealings. He met frequently with officials from his private firm, the Corker Group, particularly over the Wal-Mart land deal. Knott says, "Being a representative of this company and meeting with government officials basically makes him a lobbyist." And since the Corker Group provided official Lynda Childress as Corker's personal secretary, that makes Corker "somewhat indentured to the company. ...He may want to repay that generosity in the form of legislation or city action." Records also show that former Corker executive Michael Compton, who became Mayor Corker's chief of staff, passed on details about Corker's privately held stock, and wrote in a November 2001 e-mail that he had to attend "the Corker Group leasing meeting." And Pond, who also served under previous mayor Jon Kinsey, used her city e-mail to pass Bush voter lists to Corker as he prepared to run for mayor in 2000 and to set up meetings with "the right people." (Memphis Commercial Appeal, Commercial Appeal/Daily Kos)
October 11: A CBS News analysis reminds us that the timing of the Foley scandal is irrelevant to anyone except Republicans trying to counter the damage of the revelations. Harper's journalist Ken Silverstein writes, "The Republican leadership is lying when they claim that Democrats have engineered an 'October Surprise;' there was never a plan to undermine the GOP or to destroy Hastert personally, as the speaker has vaingloriously suggested. I know this with absolute certainty because Harper's was offered the story almost five months ago and decided, after much debate, not to run it here on Washington Babylon. In May, a source put me in touch with a Democratic operative who provided me with the now-infamous emails that Foley had sent in 2004 to a sixteen-year-old page. He also provided several emails that the page sent to the office of Congressman Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana Republican who had sponsored him when he worked on Capitol Hill. 'Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but seriously, this freaked me out,' the page wrote in one email. In the fall of 2005, my source had provided the same material to the St. Petersburg Times -- and I presume to the Miami Herald -- both which decided against publishing stories. It was a Democrat who brought me the emails, but comments he made and common sense strongly suggest they were originally leaked by a Republican office. And while it's entirely possible that Democratic officials became aware of the accusations against Foley, the source was not working in concert with the national Democratic Party. This person was genuinely disgusted by Foley's behavior, amazed that other publications had declined to publish stories about the emails, and concerned that Foley might still be seeking contact with pages." CBS's Vaughn Ververs writes, "But the Foley story is what it is, the e-mails are there and more first-hand accounts are coming out. How or when it broke is really beside the point in this case." (CBS News)
October 11: Republican representative Christopher Shays defends House Speaker Dennis Hastert's handling of the Mark Foley scandal by saying that no one died like at Chappaquiddick in 1969 when Democratic senator Ted Kennedy was involved. "I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day," Shays says. "Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody." Shays's comments seem to be driven by a recent visit to Connecticut by Kennedy, in support of Shays's opponent, Democrat Diane Farrell. "This is symptomatic of Chris losing his composure in a tight race," Farrell says. "Chris just seems to be lashing out in anger." Farrell says she was personally affected by the Foley scandal, because her 19-year-old daughter Margaret was a Senate page when she was 16. "My first reaction to this whole scandal had nothing to do with politics," she says. "It was as a parent who had a child participating in the program." Farrell has called for Shays to return any money raised for him by Hastert. She and other Democrats have called for Hastert to resign. So far, neither has happened. In recent weeks, Shays, viewed as a moderate Republican, has become increasingly shrill and extremist; with his approval, the National Republican Congressional Committee recently mailed out a flier called "Diane Farrell: Coffee Talk with the Taliban," that drew heavy criticism from Farrell and fellow Democrats. "This is absolutely the worst kind of politics in America," says Democratic senator Christopher Dodd, also from Connecticut. "The people who associate themselves with that party and these things must be held accountable." Shays later attempted to disassociate himself from the mailing, calling it "garbage." (ABC News, MSNBC)

October 12: The investigation of the House Ethics Committee into the Foley scandal is bringing its attention to bear on three of Speaker Dennis Hastert's senior aides to ascertain when they learned of Foley's actions, and if, or when, they alerted their boss. The three, chief of staff Scott Palmer, deputy chief of staff Mike Stokke, and counsel Ted Van Der Meid, have woven a protective net around Hastert for years, wielding unusual autonomy in their dealings with politics, policy, and House operations. Palmer, who is openly but quietly gay, and Stokke live together in a Capital Hill townhouse. A former Republican leadership aide, now a lobbyist, says, "It would be very hard to believe if Palmer knew that kind of detail, he wouldn't have acted upon it, and it's hard to imagine Scott Palmer would have spared the speaker that knowledge." Inside Hastert's staff, preparations may be underway to make Van Der Meid the scapegoat. It was Van Der Meid, a former chief Republican counsel for the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, who helped engineer the failed effort to change GOP ethics rules to allow an indicted lawmaker to remain in the leadership. The power play was designed to keep then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay at his post, but it backfired spectacularly, embarrassing many Republicans and leaving a blemish on Hastert's record. One House leadership aide said Van Der Meid lacks the personal connections with the speaker that Palmer and Stokke have, making him the most vulnerable of the three. Hastert's own timeline points to Van Der Meid and Stokke as central players in the Foley matter. According to Hastert, after Republican Rodney Alexander's staff alerted a low-level Hastert aide in the fall of 2005, Stokke directed the information to Van Der Meid. Later that day, Stokke met with Alexander's chief of staff, then summoned House Clerk Jeff Trandahl to the speaker's office. Later, Trandahl informed Van Der Meid that action had been taken to stop Foley's communications with the Louisiana youth. A senior GOP aide says it makes little sense to have a political hand such as Stokke handle the Foley matter, a delicate issue involving personnel questions and possible legal violations. "Did they make an affirmative decision to have the political guy work on this?" he asks. "It clearly was a bad damn idea." Palmer is not mentioned in the speaker's timeline. But former leadership aides question how a powerful chief of staff could have been left out of such complicated deliberations and how they would have been kept from Hastert. The latter point is especially true if Foley's behavior came to Palmer's attention in 2003, one former aide says. In recent months, as the House has become consumed in scandal and political trouble, Hastert has been less engaged in the day-to-day activities of the House, he says, but that was not true in 2003. (Washington Post)
October 12: Former Mark Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham testifies before the House Ethics Committee for five hours. The testimony was given behind closed doors, but Fordham's lawyer, Timothy Heaphy, says Fordham's testimony was "consistent in his accounts." Fordham has already been questioned by the FBI. Fordham's account of informing Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, in 2003 has been denied by both Hastert and Palmer, but Fordham remains firm in his contentions. Representative John Shimkus, the head of the House Page Board, will testify on October 13.
A certain amount of knowledge is available about what Fordham testifies about. According to sources familiar with his planned testimony, Fordham is adamant that he spoke to Palmer in 2003 about Foley's contacts with underage pages. He also discusses the efforts by Clerk of the House Jeff Trandahl to raise alarms among House leaders. According to Foley, as early as 2000, Trandahl periodically called Fordham to say Foley was spending too much time with pages, and Fordham would have to "pull him back a little." In brief, awkward conversations, Fordham would tell Foley: "I just got a call from Jeff Trandahl. And Mark, you just need to be conscious of appearances. Everyone knows you're gay. You're being held to higher standards than everyone else. They see the stereotype -- a gay man going after kids." In 2003, Trandahl placed another call to Fordham, after Foley was seen drunk outside the pages' dormitory after the 10 pm curfew, trying to get in. Exasperated, Fordham reputedly told Trandahl, "I don't know if my saying something [to Foley] would make any difference." At that point, both Fordham and Trandahl decided that Fordham should call Palmer. Fordham did so, expressing his concern about Foley's "over-friendliness" to pages, although he failed to mention that Foley was seen outside the pages' dorm. Palmer said he would talk to Foley about it; two days later, Fordham checked in with Palmer. Palmer said that he spoke with Foley and that he told Hastert about it.
Former Capitol Police officer Peggy Sampson told the committee on October 11 that she warned pages to stay away from Foley, and may have confirmed Foley's attempt to get into the pages' dormitory. A current staff member who has corroborated Palmer's meeting with Foley has also offered to cooperate with investigators. House Majority Leader John Boehner, who said he told Hastert about the Foley matter this spring, has been asked to testify; House Republican Rodney Alexander and his chief of staff will testify next week. The 2005 e-mails from Foley, which asked one of Alexander's former pages for a picture and what he wanted for his birthday, came to the attention of Hastert's aides Mike Stokke and Ted Van Der Meid that fall, the speaker's office says. (Washington Post, ABC News)
October 12: In early 2006, Mark Foley had all but decided not to run for office again, but was forced to run by White House political guru Karl Rove. A source for the New Republic says, "Mark's a friend of mine. He told me, 'I'm thinking about getting out of it and becoming a lobbyist.'" Foley told the source in the spring that he would instead run for re-election. Why? According to the source, Foley capitulated to pressure from "the White House and Rove gang," who insisted that Foley run. If he didn't, Foley was told, it might impact his lobbying career. "He said, 'The White House made it very clear I have to run,'" explains Foley's friend, adding that Foley told him that the White House promised that if Foley served for two more years it would "enhance his success" as a lobbyist. "I said, 'I thought you wanted out of this?' And he said, 'I do, but they're scared of losing the House and the thought of two years of Congressional hearings, so I have two more years of duty.'" Daily Kos blogger "Bedobe" observes acidly, "And there you have it folks, we have a Republican party, led by the Bush & Rove gang, so desperate to retain control, that they are willing to sacrifice just about anyone -- including the young congressional pages -- to remain in power and prevent Democrats from disturbing all those GOP skeletons that have piled up a mile high over the past six years." (The New Republic, Daily Kos)
October 12: After testifying before the House Ethics Committee, Republican House member Shelley Moore Capito, a member of the House Page Board, says that the House leadership hid from her Mark Foley's sexual exchanges with teenaged male paged. Capito says, "I'm a member of the page board who was not informed of the e-mail messages that were sent. I want the investigation to go forth quickly and reach a conclusion." Capito has been taking fire from her Democratic opponent, who accuses her of failing to do her part to protect the pages. Capito and Democrat Page Board member Dale Kildee both say that no one ever told them about Foley. Capito says she knew nothing about Foley's conduct until the scandal broke on September 29. "It disturbs me greatly. I am very upset about it and I think it is disgusting, quite frankly," she said in a recent debate. She has called for more members on the page board, more training for those members, and peer counseling for the pages. (AP/Orlando Sun-Sentinel)
October 12: The Pentagon kept tabs on nonviolent protesters of the Iraq war, including a Broward County group that planned a protest for the annual Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show, by collecting information and storing it in a military antiterrorism database, according to documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union. Such spying on nonviolent, law-abiding dissent groups is illegal under the Constitution. The documents can be viewed at the ACLU's Web page, The Government Is Spying on Americans; the ACLU obtained the documents from the Department of Defense through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents show that the Miami-Dade Police Department sent information to the Pentagon in April 2005, reporting on a planned protest by the Broward Anti-War Coalition. "The Broward Anti-War Coalition (BAWC), with support from other local groups...is planning to conduct a large-scale protest at the Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show," says the report, dated April 12, 2005. One section of the document says, "Incident type: suspicious activities/incidents." The report continues, "BAWC plans to counter military recruitment and the 'pro-war' message with guerrilla theater and other forms of subversive propaganda." The report was made part of the Department of Defense's Threat and Local Observation Notice database, or TALON. "It is clear that many people have become alarmed at how the Bush Administration has run roughshod over the Constitution in its response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11," says Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. "The ACLU plays a vital role in challenging many of these excesses, including the warrantless spying on Americans." The ACLU says that the documents it obtained from the Pentagon show that the TALON database, which was intended to track groups or individuals with links to terrorism, was being used to store information on antiwar protesters gleaned by the Department of Homeland Security, local police departments and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
The ACLU documents numerous other instances of illegal surveillance on antiwar groups, none of which have any connections whatsoever with domestic or foreign terrorist organizations. One Pentagon document, labeled "potential terrorist activity," lists events such as a "Stop the War NOW!" rally in Akron, Ohio on March 19, 2005 by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), otherwise known as the Quakers. The source of the report notes that the rally "will have a March and Reading of Names of War Dead" and that marchers would pass a military recruitment station and the local FBI office along the way. In a document listing upcoming Atlanta area protests by the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, the Pentagon -- citing the Department of Homeland Security as its source -- states that the Students for Peace and Justice network poses a threat to DOD personnel. To support that claim, the TALON report cites previous acts of civil disobedience in California and Texas, including sit-ins, disruptions at recruitment offices and street theater. Describing one protest in Austin, Texas, the document notes: "The protesters blocked the entrance to the recruitment office with two coffins, one draped with an American flag and the other covered with an Iraqi flag, taped posters on the window of the office and chanted, 'No more war and occupation. You don't have to die for an education.'" How this poses any sort of physical threat to DOD personnel is never made clear. (Miami Herald)
October 12: E-mails between Mark Foley and Florida governor Jeb Bush from 2004 surface, indicating that the White House was snubbing Foley. Considering Foley's success as a campaign fundraiser and his position as the leader of the House caucus on missing and abused children, it is hard to understand why the White House would refuse contact with Foley except as it relates to Foley's sexual predations -- which leads to the question of who at the White House knew about Foley's escapades. On September 29, 2004, Foley wrote Governor Bush: "Have I done something to offend the White House ... I am always getting the shaft ... they came to ft pierce a few weeks ago and said I was not allowed to attend ... yet joe negron is there ... Tomorrow Potus [George W. Bush] is in Martin County and I am told I am not allowed to be there either. I can't quite figure what I have done but this is a continuing pattern of slights ... I have constantly put the President in the best possible light on everything from haiti to hurricanes ... sorry to trouble you ... and I wouldn't if this wasn't so frequent ..." Foley's message referred in part to President Bush's visits to Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Jeanne. The governor responded that afternoon, "I will try to help. I know it is nothing you have done. Promise. I think it relates to debate prep time. Jeb." Foley and Jeb Bush have had a warm, collegial relationship for years, as detailed in their frequent e-mail and phone contacts, contrasting to the president's recent characterization of Foley as "despicable" and "disgusting." On October 3, 2005, Foley contacted Jeb Bush around the same time that the House leadership claims to have first learned of his inappropriate contacts, and asks to meet with Bush about an undisclosed issue. Foley asked Bush to call him on his cell phone. What the two discussed is not known. On October 13, presidential press secretary Tony Snow tells reporters that he wasn't sure if the White House had indeed made a decision to snub Foley. "As far as we know the answer is no," says Snow, "but I'll try to give you an actual definitive [answer]." (Palm Beach Post, Think Progress)
October 12: Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega gives a cogent analysis of the possibility that Bush may grant a pardon to Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff for Dick Cheney currently awaiting trial for his role in revealing the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. One of the key elements of the Bush administration's machinations to avoid criminal prosecution for Libby is the orchestrated "revelation" that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is the person who revealed Plame's identity to conservative columnist Robert Novak. Armitage's role in the "outing" of Plame was revealed in Hubris, by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. De la Vega writes, "I have no doubt that Armitage did disclose this classified information to Novak on that day, but everything else about the story (not the book itself) -- including its details, its provenance, and the reaction it has provoked -- is highly suspect."
De la Vega notes a number of what she calls "red flags." Her first is that the "bombshell" revelation of Armitage's name is not news. The story has "floated through both commercial and independent media since November of 2005, shortly after the [Libby] indictment was released. Furthermore, as in-court statements by Libby's attorneys clearly indicate, they've known that the first person to leak to Novak -- 'official A' in the indictment -- was Armitage all along. In addition, as the Libby defense team well knows, the trial judge has made it equally clear that possible leaks by Armitage or anyone else are irrelevant to whether or not Libby made intentional false statements." De la Vega goes on to list a number of internal contradictions and gaps in the Armitage story, including Armitage's apparent hard-to-believe ignorance that he was Novak's original source, and, more tellingly, Armitage's and his boss Colin Powell's immediate contact with former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein. Both have insisted that their decision to contact Duberstein was not an attempt to get help in getting their stories straight, but instead an attempt to have Duberstein contact Novak and confirm that Armitage was indeed his source. De la Vega asks a simple question: "If Armitage were genuinely surprised by this sudden revelation and truly felt he had nothing to hide, why didn't he just call Novak himself?" De la Vega also discusses the contact between State Department lawyer William Taft IV and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, wherein Gonzales did not want to know the name of the leaker.
As a former prosecutor, de la Vega's hackles were rising. By early October of 2003, Armitage not only had an obvious reason for concealing the truth, but knew just how to do so. He knew he would not be in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act if he had not acted intentionally. So Armitage began to insist that he had revealed Plame's identity to Novak as an act of mere "gossip." The prosecution chose not to charge him because it could not prove he knew Plame was a covert agent. Even better, from the White House's perspective, Armitage's "admission" would get Rove and Libby off the hook. De la Vega writes, "If the investigation had focused solely on the genesis of the disclosures that led to Novak's column, as the Bush administration obviously thought it would, Libby would not have been at risk at all and Armitage's story would have absolved Rove as well. Armitage claimed he had acted inadvertently and Rove, on his part, was merely confirming a rumor to a trusted columnist. This is, in fact, just what Rove and Libby have been saying all along. Coincidentally, this MO for the two leaks to Novak precisely mirrors the information-laundering technique Rove is famous for using, especially with Novak. As Corn and Isikoff explain, Rove will frequently give information to Novak off the record, suggesting that Novak call someone else to confirm it, thereby using 'Novak to play political brushback without leaving any fingerprints.' And what of Armitage's voluntary trip to the FBI in October 2003? The nonconfession confession, such as the one he offered that day, is an old ploy in multiple-defendant cases. You offer up one person as a fall guy -- a scapegoat -- who suffers only minor scratches because he admits to nothing more than inadvertence or confusion, all the while appearing to be remorseful and disarmingly honest. Everyone else then blames that person, maybe even seeming to be angry with him. If the plan works, the case will go away and all can ride off happily together into the sunset."
De la Vega believes that Armitage allowed his friends and confidants to leak the story in a manner favorable to him. Even more importantly, Gonzales knew that a State Department official was involved in the leak, but said nothing about it to Bush. "Notwithstanding its cavalier tone, the account of Gonzales' declining State Department attorney Taft's offer of information is extremely damaging to Gonzales," she writes. "Under these circumstances, such a refusal would not be 'playing by the book' at all -- at least not by any law book. Gonzales was counsel to the President. In other words, President Bush was his client and the only person whose interests he represented. Beginning in late September, the President was publicly insisting that he wanted to know who the leakers were and he wanted to 'know the truth.' Therefore, the matter of the leak inquiry was of the utmost concern to Gonzales' client -- the President -- and, as such, Gonzales was ethically obligated to communicate Taft's offer of information to him. Any failure to do so would violate the Code of Professional Responsibility -- not, apparently, the book by which Gonzales was playing. Yet the White House has let this account of a serious ethical breach stand without offering comment or defense, and none of the President's surrogate spokespersons have issued a peep."
The question of Duberstein is, to de la Vega, the "final tell." Armitage's confession has him revealing Plame's identity to Novak on July 8, 2003, during the very time when the White House was engaged in massive damage control stemming from Plame's husband Joseph Wilson's op-ed disproving the Iraq-Niger uranium connection. Novak claims to have been contacted by Armitage's office on June 22, though he does not know why, and according to Hubris, Duberstein told "others" that he "may have" arranged the meeting between Novak and Armitage as a favor to Powell. Though neither Duberstein nor Powell have spoken publicly about the incident, they both have allowed the story to be offered and repeated throughout the media. In the stories, Duberstein is described as a friend and advisor to Powell.
Duberstein is far more than just Powell's friend, he is a key advisor to, and "fixer" for, a variety of Republicans. De la Vega sums him up: "He shepherded Clarence Thomas through the Supreme Court nomination process for the first President Bush. He began the 2000 presidential primary season as Arizona Senator John McCain's campaign adviser, but when McCain was deciding whether to drop out, Duberstein acted as a conduit to the Bush campaign. Not long after that, he joined Rove and Vice President Cheney's key advisor Mary Matalin, in the 'Gang of Six,' Bush's inner circle of campaign counselors. (At the same time, Armitage, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice were members of the President's foreign policy brain trust.) In May of 2003, when Wilson's allegations were surfacing publicly, Duberstein -- along with Karl Rove, Andy Card, and others -- was already meeting with Bush to plan for the 2004 election. In 2005, when the Armitage story began leaking out, Duberstein, Rove, and friends were, of course, gearing up for the 2006 congressional elections." And not only is Duberstein such a useful "fixer" for the GOP's heaviest hitters, he is one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, working for, among others, the American Gaming Association, the Direct Marketing Association, the National Cable Television Association, AARP, St. Paul Companies, Fannie Mae, and Time-Warner, as well as numerous pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors. One of his clients is Boeing. Armitage consulted for Boeing before he was appointed Deputy Secretary of State. Another of Duberstein's clients is General Motors, who employed then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card as its head of government relations before Bush took office. And Duberstein also lobbies for ConocoPhillips, one of the three oil companies that benefited most directly from the reopening of trade relations with Libya, a project the State Department was working on during Armitage's tenure there.
Now, in the fall of 2006, "moderates" like Powell and Armitage have distanced themselves from the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation, and even criticized it in public. But in the spring of 2003, before the invasion, Powell and Armitage were, at least in public, as strongly behind the invasion as were the neocons spearheaded by Rove, Cheney, Libby, and others. Their need to discredit Joseph Wilson was as strong as anyone in the Rove-Cheney axis. Moreover, as de la Vega writes, "Perhaps more significant, Wilson's persistent comments were inviting inquiry into the entire case for war and, in the process, potentially jeopardizing Bush's chances for reelection. Keeping a Republican president in office and a Republican majority in Congress was -- it now seems clear -- the overriding motivation of all of the actors, including Armitage, in this whole sordid affair. Ultimately, every phase of the CIA leak case, including the propaganda campaign that is occurring right now, has been about maintaining the wealth and power of the Republican Party.
So what is Armitage doing nowadays? Profiting from his actions, it seems. He is on the board of ManTech International, whose US defense and homeland security contracts have increased roughly 20% each quarter since he signed on in the spring of 2005. Along with Duberstein, he is also on the board of ConocoPhillips, the company that has now been able to reopen its oil pipelines in Libya. Finally, Duberstein is a Trustee Emeritus of the Hudson Institute, the corporate-funded conservative think tank where Scooter Libby now works.
And electoral politics once again come into play. De la Vega writes, "Both Armitage and Duberstein, as well as numerous other powerful Republicans, are also now acting as informal advisers for Arizona Senator John McCain's possible 2008 presidential campaign. Reportedly, McCain and Rove have made peace for the sake of the party -- and McCain's candidacy. Things would work out so much better for everyone if that pesky Libby case and, indeed, the entire Special Counsel investigation, went away." Bush and his fellow players know that the president doesn't have to wait for Libby, or anyone, to be convicted or even charged before issuing a pardon. De la Vega concludes, "Given that our Chief Executive has demonstrated an utter disregard for the truth and the law in the execution of nearly all of his presidential duties, there is every reason to believe that an October surprise is not the only one in the offing. I dearly hope I am completely wrong about this, but if the Libby trial remains set for January, a December surprise may also be in store." (TomDispatch)
October 12: According to Republican representative Christopher Shays, National Guard troops at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison "were involved in a sex ring and they took pictures of soldiers who were naked. But it wasn't torture." Shays says during a debate with his election opponent Diane Farrell, "Now I've seen what happened in Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture. It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops from [Maryland] who were involved in a sex ring and they took pictures of soldiers who were naked. And they did other things that were just outrageous. But it wasn't torture." In reality, an Army military police unit, not a National Guard unit, was involved in a large amount of the Abu Ghraib incidents. After the debate, Shays defends his comments, saying he doesn't doubt that there has been torture at other prisons, but not at Abu Ghraib. "It was a National Guard unit run amok. ...I saw probably 600 pictures of really gross, perverted stuff," Shays says. "It was torture because sex abuse is torture. It was gross and despicable.... This is more about pornography than torture. ...The bottom line was it was sex.... It wasn't primarily about torture." The liberal blog Corrente Wire observes laconically, "If this is sex, then Republicans have really weird ideas about sex. ...Of course, since to a Republican, abuse of power is sex, or even better than sex, you can see how Shays might have become confused on the difference between a sex ring and torture. And Shays, God help us all, is a moderate. But it looks like he's really pandering to the Kool-Aid drinkers on this one...."
Fellow liberal blogger "Digby" expresses his (or her) outrage more fully. "I don't know what kind of sex these GOP freaks are having, but I don't think most of these things (from the Taguba report) are normally considered 'sex,' even in Rush [Limbaugh]'s wildest S&M fantasies -- certainly when they are perpetrated against prisoners against their will," he writes. After listing some of the "sex games" the guards played with the prisoners, including breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees, threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol, pouring cold water on naked detainees, beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair, threatening male detainees with rape, slamming detainees into the walls of their cells, sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, in one instance actually biting a detainee, Digby writes, "What in the hell is wrong with these people? That's not torture? That stuff is over and above the things we've all seen with the forced masturbation, simulated fellatio, smearing feces on prisoners and forcing them to wear women's underwear while chained in stress positions to their cells or beds. Characterizing what happened at Abu Ghraib as a 'sex ring' is bizarre enough but [Shays] defends his comment the next day which means it wasn't a slip of the tongue or a badly worded phrase. He's thought about this and he believes it."
Digby continues, "He said he looked at all those pictures and saw sex. Did you? I sure didn't. But then we libertine lefties base our belief that people should be able to do whatever they like in their private lives on the bedrock principle of individual freedom, agency and rights. It's the coercion that makes all this stuff so wrong. When somebody is coerced or forced into doing 'sexual' things against their will, it can most certainly be torture. (I can't believe I even have to make that argument.) Furthermore, in the case of Abu Ghraib, it's well known that what we saw in those pictures were techniques that were developed and shipped in from Guantanamo when General Geoffrey D. Miller was brought over to 'straighten out' the prison and get actionable intelligence. They believed that these sexual techniques were a particularly potent way to break conservative Muslims. This stuff was common and it was pervasive -- if it was a 'sex ring' it was a mighty big one that went all the way to Rumsfeld and probably Bush and Cheney too. This is exactly why you draw bright lines on torture. Chris Shays is pretty much telling the world that the only problems with what went on at Abu Ghraib were matters of inappropriate sex and, therefore, don't violate the Geneva Conventions prohibition against torture. I'll be anxious to hear him explain to the families of American troops in the future that they shouldn't sweat it when their relatives are repeatedly raped or paraded around naked and forced to perform sex acts for cameras. (Hell, even being bitten by dogs or beaten with chairs isn't torture according to him.) Republicans apparently find these actions little more opprobrious than they find one of their friends hitting on underage boys but I would bet the families of these troops won't see such treatment as being part of a 'sex ring' and might just believe their loved one is being tortured. Shays and his pals will have to explain to them why that isn't so." (MSNBC, Corrente Wire, Stamford Advocate/Hullabaloo)
October 12: Arizona state representative Russell Pearce, a Republican, is drawing fire for sending his supporters information from a white separatist group, the National Alliance. Pearce also wants to reinstute the 1950s federal deportation program nicknamed "Operation Wetback." Though Pearce has apologized for sending the e-mail, state Republicans are still critical of Pearce: Arizona Republican Chairman Matt Salmon calls the e-mail a "severe mistake," while US representative J.D. Hayworth says he no longer supports Pearce's re-election bid. "Given the regrettable and disturbing nature of the e-mail Russell Pearce circulated earlier this week, I cannot in good conscience lend my endorsement to his candidacy for State Representative," says Hayworth. The article lashes out at how the media portrays "any racially conscious White person who looks askance at miscegenation or at the rapidly darkening racial situation in America." It adds that the "media masters" force on the public their view of "a world in which every voice proclaims the equality of the races, the inerrant nature of the Jewish 'Holocaust' tale, the wickedness of attempting to halt the flood of non-White aliens pouring across our borders...." Pearce claims that he didn't know the National Alliance is a racist group, and that he didn't read the entire article before e-mailing it to his mailing list. "My heart is really hurt to think something like that would go out under my name," he says. "I was very embarrassed I didn't have better diligence and read the whole article." But according to Democratic governor Janet Napolitano, Pearce is displaying what she calls "an accelerating pattern" of extremism. He has refused to apologize for calling illegal Mexican immigrants "wetbacks." Napolitano says, "I think it's becoming clear that Russell Pearce is out of the mainstream of Arizona. He doesn't speak for Arizonans. He's so far to the right that his contribution to public discourse is limited." (AP/ABC News)

Ney pleads guilty to Abramoff-related charges

October 13: Republican representative Bob Ney of Ohio pleads guilty to charges stemming from the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling investigation. Republican House leaders say that if Ney does not step down by the time they return to Washington after the November 7 elections, he will be expelled. Ney is not running for re-election. Pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements, Ney admits before the court that he took trips, tickets, meals, and campaign donations from Abramoff in return for official actions on behalf of Abramoff's clients. While he could be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in jail, the Justice Department has recommended a more modest 27 months behind bars. Ney's lawyers plan to recommend him for a Bureau of Prisons alcohol treatment program, which could cut dramatically the time he serves behind bars. Ney, along with his lawyers, promise that he will resign in the next few weeks. White House spokesman Tony Snow says Ney's criminal activity "is not a reflection of the Republican Party." House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner, a fellow Republican, says he will introduce a resolution to kick Ney out of the House as soon as Congress returns to Washington. But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, faults Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and the entire Republican leadership for allowing Ney to remain in office -- and on the public payroll -- since he signed papers in September agreeing to plead guilty. House GOP leaders "have a long pattern of protecting Republican members," she says. Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett calls Ney "a cancer in the Congress." Abramoff, the powerful Republican lobbyist, admitted guilt in January. Two former aides to former GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have also pleaded guilty, as has Ney's former chief of staff. DeLay still maintains his innocence in his long and extensive dealings with Abramoff. Former White House official David Safavian, who was the Bush administration's top procurement official, was convicted of covering up his dealings with Abramoff. He is scheduled for sentencing on October 27. Karl Rove's aide, Susan Ralston, resigned over her acceptance of gifts and bribes from Abramoff. And Roger Stillwell, a former Interior Department official, pleaded guilty in August to a misdemeanor charge for not reporting that Abramoff had given him tickets to football games and concerts. Abramoff's lobbying team had 485 contacts with the Bush White House in three years, according to a recent House report.
Ney confessed his criminal acts during a half-hour session at a federal courthouse a few blocks from the Capitol, where until recently he wielded a gavel as chairman of the House Administration Committee. Responding to each of 25 questions asked by the judge, Ney agreed he had conspired to deprive the government of his "honest services," a fraud-related charge often used in public corruption cases. Ney also acknowledged making false statements on his financial disclosure forms by concealing that Abramoff and a foreign businessman were the true source of gifts Ney received. The gifts ranged from a trip to Scotland bankrolled by Abramoff's clients to thousands of dollars in gambling chips Ney got on two overseas junkets from foreign businessman Fouad al-Zayat, a Syrian-born aviation company owner in Cyprus. "I allowed myself to get too comfortable with the way things have been done in Washington, DC, for too long," Ney says. "I never acted to enrich myself or to get things I shouldn't," he adds, though evidence shows that Ney is lying on that front. He had to admit to giving $5,000 from one gambling trip to a staff member to carry across the border so Ney could report a lower dollar amount to US Customs officials. More damning was the evidence showing that Ney agreed to push legislation helpful to Abramoff clients including Indian tribes and a foreign beverage distiller. He also agreed to help Al-Zayat get a visa to enter the United States and a legislative exemption to laws barring the sale of US-made airplanes and parts to a foreign country. Regarding Abramoff, Ney acknowledged accepting all-expense-paid and reduced-price trips to play golf in Scotland in August 2002, to gamble and vacation in New Orleans in May 2003 and to vacation in New York in August 2003. The total cost of all the trips -- in which others, including some aides, participated -- exceeded $170,000, prosecutors showed. The congressman also admitted accepting meals and sports and concert tickets for himself and his staff. (CNN)
October 13: Republican representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania is under investigation by the FBI to determine if he traded his political influence for over $1 million worth of lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter. The FBI, which opened an investigation in recent months, has formally referred the matter to the department's Public Integrity Section for additional scrutiny. At issue are Weldon's efforts between 2002 and 2004 to aid two Russian companies and two Serbian brothers with ties to strongman Slobodan Milosevic. The Russian companies and a Serbian foundation run by the brothers' family each hired a firm co-owned by Weldon's daughter, Karen, for fees totaling nearly $1 million a year. Karen Weldon was 28 and lacked consulting experience when she and Charles Sexton, a Weldon ally and longtime Republican leader in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, created the firm of Solutions North America Inc. in 2002. Both are registered with the Justice Department as representatives of foreign clients. Weldon's lawyer William Canfield says Weldon is not aware that any such investigation is taking place, and denies the existence of the investigation. Weldon calls the report "crazy." An FBI source confirms that Weldon has not yet been officially informed of the investigation. The investigation is affecting Weldon's chances at re-election: currently he is locked in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent, retired vice admiral Joe Sestak. Weldon has long-term business and political interests in Russia and Serbia, and his daughter's consulting firm has apparently reaped financial benefits from her father's political and business influence. In 2004, after a Los Angeles Times expose, watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called for an investigation from the House Ethics Committee and from John Ashcroft's Justice Department, a request ignored by both outfits, though Canfield says the committee conducted an "informal inquiry" restricted to documents submitted by Weldon. Canfield says he has heard nothing of any such inquiry, so he assumes the matter was dropped.
Solutions North America Inc (SNAI) first landed a Russian client, the huge Itera energy group based in Moscow. In May 2002, Weldon and a congressional delegation had visited Itera during an official trip to Russia. Itera was drawing scrutiny at the time because of allegations that it had bought assets from a state-run energy giant for hundreds of millions of dollars below their true value. Two months before Weldon's visit, the US Trade and Development Agency scrapped plans to award an $868,000 grant to Itera to study gas deposits in Russia because the firm refused to identify all of its owners. But Weldon, at a news conference after returning from Russia, called on the Bush administration to release the grant. Weldon also complained to presidential adviser Karl Rove and to then-energy secretary Spencer Abraham about the company's treatment by the US government. The grant was never approved. On Sept. 30, 2002, Itera signed a $500,000, one-year contract with Solutions North America, a deal that included a $170,000 payment up front. It also gave Solutions a 10% "finder's fee" for any sales it generated, an arrangement barred by federal contracting regulations. On Sept. 24, 2002, six days before Solutions got the contract, Weldon introduced a House resolution encouraging "improved cooperation with the Russian Federation on energy development issues." That night, assisted by his daughter's firm, he hosted a dinner at the Library of Congress honoring Itera's chairman, an event attended by nearly 30 members of Congress and 18 members of the Russian Duma, that country's parliament.
In January 2003, SNAI landed a second client, a one-year, $20,000-a-month contract to represent a Russian firm that had designed a "flying saucer" drone to deliver supplies to war zones. Payments, however, would start only if Solutions landed some business for the firm, Saratov Aviation Plant. Another illegal 10% finder's fee was included. Weldon visited Saratov in Russia later that month, reportedly accompanied by his daughter. Weldon was impressed with the potential of the unmanned aircraft and contacted the Naval Air Systems Command, headquartered at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. According to Navair, Karen Weldon met with John Fischer, Navair's director of research and engineering sciences, in May 2003 to pursue the matter without Fischer knowing she was representing Saratov. That September, at a meeting in Russia, Fischer and a Saratov executive signed a three-page letter of intent to work together on the new aircraft.
Solutions got its third foreign client, the Serbian Karic Foundation, after Weldon took on the unpopular job of seeking a US visa for Dragomir Karic and reportedly, one for his brother, Bogoljub. In the early 1990s, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control had listed the Karic brothers among parties whose US assets were frozen because of their close ties to Slobodan Milosevic, who died in his cell last spring while facing war crimes charges stemming from the genocides in Bosnia. Recently, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs issued an international warrant for the arrest of Bogoljub Karic as part of a tax evasion investigation. The Karic Foundation agreed to pay Solutions $20,000 per month, to assist with its humanitarian work, including setting up a US branch. Solutions later paid more than $2,300 for Mike Conallen, who was Weldon's chief of staff at the time, to travel to Belgrade, Yugoslavia -- a trip approved by Weldon. Conallen later reimbursed the firm because members of Congress and their aides are barred from accepting money from foreign agents. The Times quoted Conallen as saying he phoned the State Department so many times pushing for visas for the Karic brothers that he didn't have to say why he was calling. Conallen said he was surprised to learn of the current Justice Department inquiry, but declined further comment. In late 2003, Sexton and Karen Weldon set up a new firm, Solutions Worldwide Inc., but ended their representation of Saratov even before the news stories broke.
On November 2, the Philadelphia Inquirer reveals further details about Karen Weldon's connections to the Serbian family of Bogoljub Karic, a former associate of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. As Curt Weldon publicly supported the Karic family, a Serbian family with close ties to war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, lobbyist Karen Weldon in 2003 won a $240,000 contract to help improve the Karic family's image. Her relationship with the Karic family continued into late 2004, months after the House Ethics Committee began an investigation of her contracts and the role of her father. Karen Weldon tried to help the wife of Serbian tycoon Bogoljub Karic get a visa to visit Florida, a request that was turned down by the State Department because of Karic's links to regional terrorists. "Karic wanted the visa to try to make himself respectable," recalls former ambassador Richard Gelbard, who was Bill Clinton's personal envoy to the Balkans. "Getting a US visa is like getting the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." Karic has been a fugitive since February 2006, after being charged with embezzling Serbian state funds. The Karics were once referred to as "the Rockefellers of Serbia." The FBI is now investigating Karen Weldon's work for the Karics and other clients, trying to determine whether Curt Weldon used his position to help her win contracts. Like so many other Republicans facing ethics investigations, Weldon says that the investigation is timed to interfere with his chances of winning on November 7. "I think it's extremely disturbing that we've had a series of bureaucratic leaks so close to the election that are obviously calculated to undermine Congressman Weldon," says a campaign spokesman. "That strikes me as being particularly unfair."
In 2003, Weldon unsuccessfully lobbied US diplomats and immigration officials to allow Dragomir Karic, Bogoljub's brother, to enter the USA as his guest at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. Later that year, Weldon led a congressional delegation to Serbia to meet with Bogoljub Karic and the Serb's trade group. Weldon has acknowledged that he has reviewed extensive, and troubling, US intelligence reports about the Karic family's ties with Milosevic. "They told me that he and his brothers owned Milosevic, that they owned the banking system," Weldon said in a 2002 hearing before his House Armed Services Committee, speaking of conversations with US Army intelligence officers. "The wives of the Karic brothers were best of friends with Milosevic's wife," Weldon told the committee. "The Karic brothers actually owned the house Milosevic lived in that we bombed." Weldon came to believe that the Karics were humanitarians who were bullied into supporting Milosevic, according to a former staffer. Karen Weldon's firm received a $20,000-a-month contract from the Karic family foundation in March 2003 to burnish the Karics' image and help them establish a "Serbia House" in Washington. Weldon has insisted that he knows nothing of any investigation, but also makes the contradictory claim that he has been cleared by the investigation. (McClatchy News, AP/CNN, Philadelphia Inquirer)
October 13: Some Republican strategists are privately complaining that Bush is displaying so much overconfidence in the Republicans' ability to win in November that he and his senior officials have no strategy to deal with a possible loss. Bush's recent press conference has only exacerbated their concerns. "They aren't even planning for if they lose," says a GOP insider who informally counsels the administration. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush's final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock. "The Bush White House has had no relationship with Congress," says a Bush ally. "Beyond the Democrats, wait till they see how the Republicans -- the ones that survive -- treat them if they lose next month." GOP insiders are upset by Bush's seeming inability to come up with new ideas or fresh approaches. There is even a heightened sensitivity to the way Bush talks about advisers who served his father. At the president's news conference on October 11, allies of his father complained that the president seemed dismissive of former Secretary of State James Baker, who remains close to the elder Bush and is co-chairman of a bipartisan panel studying the war in Iraq. "I think it's good to have some of our elder statesmen -- I hate to call Baker an elder statesman -- but to go over there and take a look, and to come back and make recommendations," Bush said during the conference. Baker fans felt this made the former secretary seem out-of-date and irrelevant. (US News and World Report)
October 13: Representative John Shimkus, the Republican who heads the House Page Board, testifies today behind closed doors to the House Ethics Committee. Shimkus has admitted refusing to tell the other two Page Board members, Dale Kildee and Shelley Moore Capito, of the Foley incident, but justifies his actions by saying he was merely following the wishes of the parents of one of the pages. The spokesman for Speaker Dennis Hastert, Ron Bonjean, has said, "The ethics committee is investigating this matter and we are confident in its ability to determine the real facts. The speaker has said that any person who is found guilty of improper conduct involving sexual contact or communication with a page should immediately resign, be fired, or be subjected to a vote of expulsion." (AP/ABC News)
October 13: Former presidential candidate John Kerry, a Democratic senator, says that Republicans are lying about the Foley scandal just like they are lying about the war in Iraq and the administration's handling of North Korea. "A lie, a lie, a lie, a lie," Kerry tells an audience at a New Hampshire fundraiser. "What we have in Washington is a house of lies, and in November, we need to clean house. ...They tell us we're making progress in Iraq and that there is no civil war. That is a lie. It's immoral to lie about progress in that war in order to get through a news cycle or an election cycle." Kerry was known during the 2004 elections for forbidding his staff to use the word "lie" in speeches and comments about Republicans. Kerry criticizes the Bush administration for blaming the North Korean nuclear test on former President Clinton. "That is a lie. North Korea's nuclear program was frozen under Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush turned his back on diplomacy, Kim Jong Il turned back to making bombs, and the world is less safe because a madman has the Bush bomb." Republicans also are lying when they claim the page scandal surrounding Mark Foley is a Democratic plot to win the midterm elections, Kerry adds: "This issue is here because of a Republican cover-up. And those from the party that preaches moral values that covered this up have no right to preach moral values anymore." (Washington Post)
October 13: After Fox News's repeated misidentification of Mark Foley as a Democrat for its viewers on October 3 (see above), numerous other "misidentifications" of Foley and other embattled Republicans as Democrats have been noted in the mainstream media. It is hard to believe that, considering the Republicans and the media outlets involved, this is anything except an orchestrated attempt to confuse voters.
Several media outlets, most notably CNN, misidentified former GOP representative Daniel Crane, who admitted to having sex with a female page in 1983, as a Democrat. They have also misidentified GOP senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island as a Democrat; Chafee currently trails his Democratic challenger, Sheldon Whitehouse, by double digits. Whitehouse was identified as a Republican. While some media outlets have since corrected the errors, Fox News has refused to do so. O'Reilly Factor executive producer David Tabacoff told Editor & Publisher on October 5 that the mislabeling was "an honest mistake," and Tabacoff said he "didn't feel it was necessary to run a specific on-air correction" the next day because "'everyone knows' Foley ... is a Republican." An Associated Press story sent over the wires on October 4 also misidentified Foley as a Democrat, as did stories appearing on the conservative Web site NewsMax. (MediaMatters)
October 13: Conservative radio host Michael Savage (Michael Weiner) says of the impending takeover of Congress by the Democrats, "My fear is that if the Democrats win, and I'm afraid that they might, you're going to see America melt down faster that you could ever imagine. It will happen overnight, and it could lead to the breakup of the United States of America, the way the Soviet Union broke up." (MediaMatters)

October 14: Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, planning for a 2008 GOP presidential bid, is fending off charges that his administration falsely claimed to conduct safety inspections in the "Big Dig" tunnel that collapsed and killed a woman in July of 2006. The Securities and Exchange Commission is poring over state financial documents from 2005, cited in a new report by state Inspector General Gregory Sullivan, that indicate Romney was reviewing the safety of the Big Dig, when in fact the administration was only checking leaks in the Interstate 93 tunnel. "Despite repeated assurances to bondholders, [MassHighway and Romney's Executive Office of Transportation] did not inspect the I-90 connector tunnel section where the July 10, 2006, collapse occurred," Sullivan's report states. "It is clear that casual disregard for the truth was grossly inappropriate." The federal probe threatens to undercut Romney's efforts to portray himself as a friend of taxpayers on the problem-plagued $15 billion project as he lays the groundwork for a presidential run. The SEC drafted a letter to several state agencies August 23 requesting documents pertaining to safety reviews allegedly conducted in Big Dig tunnels between 2004 and the present. Sullivan's report said Romney administration officials repeatedly declined requests from the state's bond counsel to change language in financial documents about the Big Dig inspections. Romney finally said he would change the language in late July, after the fatal collapse and before the SEC probe. A spokesman for the administration called Sullivan's report a "shoddy" piece of work. "No one fought harder and more aggressively than Governor Romney to gain control of the Turnpike Authority," spokesman Jon Carlisle says. The ceiling collapse in the I-90 Seaport connector tunnel killed Milena Del Valle and triggered attacks by Romney against former Turnpike Authority Chairman Matthew Amorello, who resigned rather than face termination by the governor. While the inspector general's report also cites "an alarming lack of stewardship" by the Turnpike, it singles out the Romney administration for abdicating its responsibility to verify the safety of the project. (Boston Herald)
October 14: The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is investigating whether or not GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez's campaign illegally accessed an FBI criminal database for attack ad ammunition against his Democratic opponent, Bill Ritter. Ritter and the CBI want to know how Beauprez obtained information that Ritter says is highly restricted and only available to law enforcement. "Your campaign broke the law," Ritter told Beauprez during a recent debate. Ritter accuses Beauprez, a US representative, of getting someone to improperly obtain information from the FBI's National Crime Information Center database for use in an ad criticizing his handling of a plea-bargain for an illegal immigrant offender while Ritter was Denver's district attorney. Beauprez denies any wrong-doing and accuses Ritter of trying to switch the subject from his record of granting plea-bargains that the congressman contends allowed immigrants -- both legal and illegal -- to avoid deportation. "This is a bait and switch," Beauprez retorts. "He's trying to divert off the point. He's supposed to preserve the public safety and I don't believe he did." Beauprez said his campaign has nothing to hide, and adds, "We'll go through the file, we'll demonstrate we got our information legally." CBI guards the security of the highly restricted FBI database also used by state and local police agencies. CBI spokesman Lance Clem says police officers have lost their jobs for abusing database access and a law enforcement agency that fails to safeguard NCIC could be barred from using it. "These kinds of allegations are looked at very seriously, because the integrity of that [NCIC] system is very important to CBI," he says. The computerized system's security software should reveal if someone accessed records for the criminal featured in the attack ad. "When you do an NCIC check, it identifies the individual doing the check," says Denver trial lawyer Scott Robinson. "If Bob Beauprez wants to reveal the source of the information, we ought to be able to determine who did it. The attorney general could subpoena them. An attorney general who wants to enforce election laws could force Bob Beauprez's camp into revealing the documentation. It is a problem for them."
At issue is how the Beauprez campaign confirmed that an illegal immigrant, identified in the ad as "Carlos Estrada Medina," was the same man arrested in Denver in 2001 for heroin possession under the name "Walter Noel Ramo," according to court records. The ad blames Ritter for allowing Ramo to plead to felony trespass on agricultural land, a controversial move that Ritter used in at least 151 cases, many involving immigrant defendants. The ad also blasts Ritter for "bad judgment" claiming that Ramo -- who received 63 days in jail and a suspended two-year prison term -- was later arrested in San Francisco under the name "Eugene Alfredo Estrada-Acosta" for lewd and lascivious acts with a child, a knife violation and sexually battery of a "medically institutionalized person." Estrada-Acosta pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in 2003. The question is, how could the Beauprez campaign know that offenders with three different names and the same birthday were all the same person? Beauprez campaign manager John Marshall originally told the press that "in federal criminal databases, the guy's information matches up." Now Marshall is backing off that statement, saying only that "I deduced" that campaign researchers used a criminal database, "but I don't necessarily know exactly how they went about that." Marshall says that multiple sources provided the campaign with the information, including codes used by federal immigration authorities to track illegal immigrants' arrest and deportation histories. NCIC contains such information, which is not available to the public. "I'm not going to reveal my sources," says Marshall. "Hell no, we haven't obtained this improperly."
CBI officials say it shouldn't take long to determine if someone improperly used a federal criminal justice database to mine ammunition for an attack ad against Bill Ritter. It can be a violation of state and federal law to misuse a database. If Beauprez did access the NCIC database, he or someone in his campaign is guilty of violating a number of federal and state statutes, including conspiracy to defraud the US, knowingly conveying or receiving federal records, official misconduct by a public official, and embezzlement of government property. The maximum penalty for all counts would be around 20 years in prison and huge fines. (Rocky Mountain News)
October 14: Bush takes part in the dedication of the Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. During his speech, he tells the audience, "We saw the importance of air power six days ago -- six decades ago, after our nation was attacked at Pearl Harbor. Soon after the attack, General Hap Arnold called Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle into his office and gave him an unprecedented mission -- retaliate against Tokyo. Just over four months later, Doolittle's raiders had shocked the world by striking the enemy capital some 4,000 miles away from Pearl Harbor. To do it, they had to load B-52 bombers on the deck of an aircraft carrier, sail within a few hundred miles of enemy territory, take off and drop their payloads, knowing they had little chance to make it safely to China." Listeners with a grasp of history could be forgiven a bit of confusion: not only is the B-52, with a wingspan of 185 feet, too large to land on or take off from an aircraft carrier, the aircraft was not built until ten years after the attack on Tokyo. (White House, Democratic Underground)

Back to October 2006 | On to October 2006: Week Three

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

October 2006:

Week Two

GOP congressman admits knowing about Foley e-mails in 2000

North Korea test-fires nuclear missile

Army estimates troops to remain unchanged in Iraq through 2010

New study estimates 655,000 Iraqi war dead

Foley accused of inappropriately touching a male page on the floor of the House of Representatives

Ney pleads guilty to Abramoff-related charges

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