30 September 2004

Bush's Toxic Campaign Mix: God, Country and Perpetual Fear
By Arianna Hufffington
Arianna Online, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: Leave no sucker punch unthrown. That seems to be the scorched earth mantra of the GOP campaign as it heads into the final rounds. But if you're thinking these guys can't go any lower, guess again. George Bush doesn't just have his head buried in the sand ‹ he's let his integrity sink below sea level, as well. The latest dirty blows are a contemptible one-two combination with which Team Bush has portrayed John Kerry as both the enemy of God and, if not exactly the ally of al-Qaida, then at least the terrorists' candidate of choice. To hear them tell it, a vote for Kerry is a vote against God and Country. Talk about hitting way, way below the belt. ... This "terrorists for Kerry" routine is as laughable as it is loathsome. Why in the world would the terrorists want to get rid of George Bush? He is their dream president, after all: a man who has alienated our allies, isolated us and united the Muslim world against us. The president's preemptive invasion of Iraq has been such a boon to al-Qaida that the British ambassador to Italy called him the terrorist organization's "best recruiting sergeant." Even Bush's good buddy, Pakistani President Musharraf (a guy who can't afford to share W's delusions when it comes to matters of security), said last week that the war in Iraq has made the world "more dangerous" and "further complicated" the war on terror. Of course, the spinmeisters in the Bush camp would rather you never hear any of this, which is why they've been so quick to smear as unpatriotic anyone painting a less than rosy picture of Iraq ‹ going so far as to imply that Kerry, by merely questioning the president's policies, has given aid and comfort to our enemies. What a load of gutless garbage. As Thomas Jefferson made clear, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." But Bush can't seem to grasp that this country is too strong to be endangered by the truth ‹ and that, indeed, hiding the truth, the hallmark of his administration, is what is making us weaker and less secure. I know the president hates to read, but with the debates looming, maybe he should dust off his library card and brush up on his American history. And on the Bible.
SEE ALSO: David Corn: Bush Team Does Marvelous Job of Infantilizing the Campaign (TomPaine.com)

Faith Without Works?
After four years, the president's faith-based policies have proven to be neither compassionate nor conservative.
By Amy Sullivan
Beliefnet
EXCERPT: The policy of funding the work of faith-based organizations has, in the face of slashed social service budgets, devolved into a small pork-barrel program that offers token grants to the religious constituencies in Karl Rove's electoral plan for 2004 while making almost no effort to monitor their effectiveness. Meanwhile, the plan to extend tax credits for charitable giving has gone nowhere, despite the three enormous tax cut packages Bush has signed. Like any number of this administration's policies, the faith-based initiative has been so ill-considered, so utterly sacrificed to political expediency, and carried out with so little regard for the problems it was supposed to solve, that it bears only the faintest resemblance to the political philosophy it was supposed to embody. The history of the faith-based initiative tells us little about what could have been a truly innovative social policy, but speaks volumes about the cynical politics of the Bush administration.

Party principles have changed
Son of Republican President Eisenhower Announces Support for Kerry
Boston Globe, 30 September 2004
EXCERPT: John Eisenhower, son of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, says in a New Hampshire newspaper column that he will vote for Democratic Sen. John Kerry on Nov. 2. In a public announcement rarely seen from the Talbot County resident in recent years, Eisenhower says he switched his party affiliation from Republican to independent and that he's lost confidence in his former party. "There are times when we must break with the past, and I believe this is one of them," Eisenhower wrote in an opinion-editorial column that he sent to the Kerry campaign. It was published Tuesday in The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H. The 700-word column assails Bush and the GOP for federal budget deficits, for invading Iraq "unilaterally" and for infringing on Americans' personal liberties. The Bush campaign did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment. Eisenhower, 82, declined to be interviewed Wednesday. His wife, Joanne Eisenhower, said by phone from their home in Trappe that, "This is something he felt strongly about." The presidential election of Nov. 2 is one of "extraordinary importance," Eisenhower wrote. He called on Americans to "make cool judgments, unencumbered by habits of the past." "The fact is that today's 'Republican' Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word 'Republican' has always been synonymous with the word 'responsibility,' which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. "Today's whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion," Eisenhower wrote. Eisenhower, a former American ambassador to Belgium and an author, was registered as a member of the GOP for 50 years -- until the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq "as a maverick," he wrote. "Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance," Eisenhower wrote. He went on to question the Republican Party's willingness to protect individual freedoms and privacy. "Of course we must fight terrorism, but have we irresponsibly gone overboard in doing so?" he asked.

Crawford Newspaper Endorses Kerry
YahooNews, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: A tiny weekly newspaper that bills itself as President Bush's hometown paper has endorsed John Kerry for president, saying the Massachusetts senator will restore American dignity.
The Lone Star Iconoclast, which has a weekly circulation of 425, said in an editorial dated Sept. 29 that Texans should rate the candidates not by hometown or political party, but by where they intend to take the country. "Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding Iraq," the editorial said.
The Iconoclast, established in 2000, said it editorialized in support of the invasion of Iraq and publisher W. Leon Smith promoted Bush and the invasion in a BBC interview, believing Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Instead we were duped into following yet another privileged agenda," the editorial said.

FOX News Operating "Pool Cameras" in First Debate
Reuters, 30 September 2004
EXCERPT: The U.S. television networks planning live coverage of the presidential debates said on Wednesday they would disregard ground rules set by the two campaigns to control camera shots of the candidates. And the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, which is not a party to the agreement, said it could not be expected to enforce strictures on network coverage of the four debates. At issue are rules that bar the networks from airing "cutaway" shots of either Republican President Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry while they are waiting their turn to speak during the debates. If this restriction had been enforced in the past, it would have censored the heavy sighs and disapproving expressions of Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 debates or the shot of Bush's father glancing at his watch during a 1992 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. The rules, signed by the managers of the two campaigns, also prohibit the cameras from panning to members of the audience during the question-and-answer periods. Fox News Channel, whose turn it is under a rotation system to operate the "pool" cameras for all the networks in the first debate on Thursday in Coral Gables, Florida, said it would follow its own editorial judgment in operating its cameras. "They don't want reaction shots," said Fox News spokesman Paul Schur told Reuters. "We're not going to bow to outside pressure. We're not going to follow these restrictions."

Bush on His Guard Service: Special Treatment? Who? Me?
Capitol Hill Blue, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush said in a television interview he does not think he received favorable treatment that allowed him to get into the Texas Air National Guard while many of his peers were drafted to fight in Vietnam. "No. I don't... I'm not aware of it," Bush said in the interview broadcast on Tuesday when asked whether family connections had helped him get a coveted place in the Guard. He cited comments by the former commander of his Guard unit, Walter "Buck" Staudt, who, according to Bush, "said the other day, publicly, I got no preferential treatment."
SEE ALSO: Pentagon Releases Still More Bush Guard Records (CHB)
SEE ALSO: Bush's Bald-Faced Lie (CHB)

Judge Blocks U.S. from Secret Searches
Associated Press, 30 September 2004
EXCERPT: Declaring that personal security is as important as national security, a judge Wednesday blocked the government from conducting secret, unchallengeable searches of Internet and telephone records as part of its fight against terrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union called the ruling a "landmark victory'' against the Justice Department's post-Sept. 11 law enforcement powers. "Today's ruling is a wholesale refutation of excessive government secrecy and unchecked executive power,'' said ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero struck down a provision of the Patriot Act that authorizes the FBI to force Internet service providers and phone companies to turn over certain customer records. The companies are then barred from ever disclosing the search took place. In his ruling, the judge called national security of "paramount value'' and said the government "must be empowered to respond promptly and effectively'' to threats. But he called personal security equal in importance and
"especially prized in our system of justice.''

George W. Bush Ain't No Cowboy
See how the little feller measures up to the Cowboy Code, and you tell me.
by Erik Baard
Village Voice, 28 September 2004
eorge W. Bush is a fake cowboy. From media accounts, you'd reckon that the president was a buckaroo to the bones. He plays up the image, big-time, with $300 designer cowboy boots, a $1,000 cowboy hat, and his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. He guns his rhetoric with frontier lingo, saying that he'll "ride herd" over ornery Middle Eastern governments and "smoke out" enemies in wild mountain passes. He branded Saddam Hussein's Iraq "an outlaw regime" and took the vanquished dictator's pistol as a trophy. As for Osama bin Laden, Bush declared, "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' " Britain's liberal newspaper The Guardian noted that "such language feeds the image overseas of Mr. Bush as a hopelessly inarticulate, trigger-happy cowboy."
But liberals from both coasts and Europeans who derisively call Bush a "cowboy" foolishly insult not Bush, but one of America's prime ennobling myths. Instead of ridiculing the myth exploited by George W. Bush, they may want to measure him against it.  ...Here's how Bush stacks up against the Cowboy Code:
1 The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage...

The Promise Of Metro vs. Retro
Chances are, you noticed the flashy "Metro vs. Retro" ads in the newspaper or online last month. But there's more to the ads than just clever comparisons that make for fun conversation starters. The ads promote a free downloadable book called The Great Divide—and the plan its economist authors present is just what the Democrats need right now, says writer Traci Hukill.
Traci Hukill
TomPaine.com, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: John Kerry vs. George W. Bush. Michael Moore vs. Mel Gibson. Hillary Clinton vs. Newt Gingrich. Smarter kids vs. smarter bombs. According to an advertising blitz that saturated The New York Times and The Washington Post starting in early August, the first in each of these pairs is "Metro" and the wave of the future, while the second is "Retro" and consigned to the past.
It was a catchy campaign, but it’s more than clever ad work. The economist authors of The Great Divide, the free downloadable book the ads were created to tout, are providing what the Kerry campaign has failed to: A pithy, forceful, easily grasped conceptual framework that casts the Democrats as the party of a bright and prosperous future and the Republicans as ossified and doomed. It may be the best thing to hit the Democrats all campaign season. ...“The Democrats have got to realize they’ve got to write off Retro America.  It’s gone,” Sperling says.  “They’ve got to become the party of Metro America.  It’s a lot of hard work but the numbers are in their favor.  If they do it they’re almost inevitably going to become the majority party.”
Metro America, according to Sperling and his co-authors, is the seat of the New Economy, the best universities, progressive social and cultural movements, ethnic diversity and secularism—the birthplace of the country’s future wealth and cultural inventions.  Comprising New England, the mid-Atlantic, the Great Lakes states and the West Coast, it’s populous and wealthy.  Home to 65 percent of the U.S. population and growing, richer Metro America pays $200 billion a year to support Retro America through oil, mining and agriculture subsidies.  Between 1991 and 2001, Metro America paid $1.6 trillion more in federal taxes than it received, while Retro states received $800 billion more in services, subsidies and cash than they paid in taxes.

60 Minutes: Shelving a Story to Boost Bush?
CBS puts Niger expose on hold as boss endorses Republicans
FAIR Media Alert, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: In an outrageous politicization of journalism, CBS announced it would not air a report on forged documents that the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war until after the November 2 election (New York Times, 9/25/04). A network spokesperson issued a statement declaring, "We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election."
The 60 Minutes segment was ready to air on September 8, but was bumped in favor of the now infamous report that relied on supposed National Guard memos whose authenticity CBS now says it cannot confirm. The furor over the Guard memos has created a situation where CBS executives say "the network can now not credibly air a report questioning how the Bush administration could have gotten taken in by phony documents" (Newsweek online, 9/22/04).
Of course, what's really inappropriate here is CBS allowing its PR problems to suppress a news report on an important issue until after it no longer matters. The shelved 60 Minutes story deals with the origins of documents purportedly showing that Iraq under Saddam Hussein tried to obtain uranium from Niger-- documents that turned out to be forgeries. The story, according to the Newsweek online report, asks "tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech."
Though such questions are clearly relevant to a presidential campaign that largely revolves around Bush's decision to invade Iraq, CBS intends to keep the answers to itself until the election has passed. Could there be more than the embarrassment over the Guard story behind this decision?
Sumner Redstone, CEO of CBS's parent company Viacom, made an unusual political statement at a gathering of corporate leaders in Hong Kong (Asian Wall Street Journal, 9/24/04): "I don't want to denigrate Kerry... but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people.... But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."

Post-Debate Fact-Checking Is Media's Main Job
FAIR Media Advisory, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: Who "wins" the presidential debate on Thursday may well depend on how well media do their job on Friday.
In past debates, post-debate commentary has frequently focused on the candidates' style, body language and other cosmetic issues. The L.A. Times (9/29/04) suggested that these seemingly unimportant details can swing a campaign: "Who could have predicted that in 1992 the camera would catch an apparently unengaged President George H.W. Bush checking his watch during a debate with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton? (Bush lost the election.) That in 2000, Gore would be remembered for inappropriately grimacing and sighing during his first debate with Bush? (Gore lost.)"  Of course, if one were told that the media would play tape of these moments over and over again, than it would be relatively easy to predict that these would be the moments that voters remember. Something that isn't widely remembered is the fact that initial post-debate polls showed Gore winning that debate in the minds of voters (Daily Howler, 9/28/04); it was only after media commentary focused obsessively on Gore's reaction shots that the perception was created that his performance was a disaster.
The fact is, voters don't need to be told whether they are put off by a candidate's style or mannerisms; they are fully capable of analyzing their own reaction without pundit intervention. What the public cannot easily do is determine whether factual claims made during a debate are accurate or not-- and in this far more critical role, media commentators have often fallen down on the job.

Scalia Describes ‘Dangerous’ Trend
By DANIEL J. HEMEL
Harvard Crimson Online, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: The Supreme Court’s recent decisions protecting abortion rights, upholding the legalization of assisted suicide and striking down anti-sodomy laws represent a “dangerous” trend, Justice Antonin Scalia told a Harvard audience last night. Scalia held the rapt attention of the jam-packed John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum last night, although some students and faculty said they were put off by his conservative judicial philosophy.

29 September 2004

You Call This a Democracy?
By David Sirota
In These Times, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: There is nothing quite as hypocritical as a politician preaching the virtues of democracy while doing everything he can to destroy it. But as Election Day approaches, that is exactly what is happening.
President Bush is traveling the country bragging about supposedly bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan while waging a stealth campaign far different from his rhetoric here at home. Unwilling to wage a fight within legal bounds and undeterred by the odious stench of the 2000 debacle, the president has deployed his operatives to rig the outcome on November 2.
Before you call this conspiracy theory, read on:

• In August 2003, the head of one of the biggest manufacturers of voting machines wrote a fundraising letter saying he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold INC., also “attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors—known as Rangers and Pioneers—at the president’s Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month.” The next week, he invited guests to a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for the Ohio GOP at his mansion in the Cleveland suburbs. This is the man whose machines have no paper trail and will be used by at least 8 million voters in the upcoming election.
• In June 2004, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his political appointees used the guise of clearing felons off voter rolls to hide an attempt to disenfranchise 48,000 traditionally Democratic voters. The list, which was disproportionately African-American, was rife with inaccuracies. Additionally, in a state with a heavily Republican Cuban population, a technical error caused the names of thousands of Hispanic felons to be excluded from the list.The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has asked the Department of Justice to investigate.
• In July, a top GOP official in Michigan gave voice to Republican efforts to squelch minority voter turnout. State Rep. John Pappageorge said, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election.” What did he mean? While Michigan is predominantly white (78 percent), Detroit has an overwhelmingly minority population (88 percent). This strategy is no accident: Polls show that more than four in five blacks believe Bush did not legitimately win the election and two-thirds think deliberate attempts were made to prevent black voters’ ballots from being counted.
• Also in July, the Miami Herald found the Republican Party staking out naturalization ceremonies for new immigrants to trick them into registering Republican. Specifically, GOP operatives have been handing out voter registration forms to new citizens just moments after being sworn in by the U.S. government with the party affiliation box already checked Republican. Once registered, the GOP can target mailing and other campaign outreach to those voters.
• In August, Jeb Bush was at it again—this time having his political appointees at a key county election board hire a law firm with direct connections to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Though the Broward County Elections Board is supposed to be nonpartisan, Bush’s official there hired the law firm Blosser & Sayfie. James Blosser is a top fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney campaign, and Justin Sayfie is co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Broward County. The firm, which was fired after public outrage, was to represent the county in legal challenges should another election debacle occur.

Outrageous, certainly, but at least we have our ability to freely protest against them without being harassed, right? Wrong. The New York Times reports that the FBI has “contacted” a number of people who have organized political demonstrations, forcing some to appear before a grand jury to disclose what they know of protest plans. Want to take your complaint to the top? Think again. The Albuquerque Journal reports that those who wanted to attend a speech by Cheney were refused at the door unless they signed a pledge to vote GOP in November. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that the Secret Service, led by the president’s top personal aide, accosted peaceful AIDS demonstrators during a Bush speech last month. Demonstrators were “shoved and pulled from the room—some by their hair, one by her bra straps—and then arrested for disorderly conduct and detained.”

The Squeeze is On (the Middle Class)
The last three years have hurt the middle class -- no matter what the American Enterprise Institute or Slate might say.
By Jared Bernstein
The American Prospect, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: Other than vague generalities about turning corners, you don’t hear a lot these days from the Republicans on how middle-income American families are doing. The strategy of the Bush campaign is to blame most of our economic woes on September 11, which brings the electorate right back to fear and terror, not changing horses, and painting the other guy as too indecisive to take it to the enemy.
Thus, when conservative economist Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute writes an article dismissing the notion of a middle-class squeeze, it’s worth taking notice.
His article, “The ‘Squeeze’ Play,” marshals an array of statistics to argue that middle-class families are doing fine and will thus support George W. Bush on November 2. To get there, though, Hassett omits some very inconvenient facts.
He makes two basic points. First, the economy is expanding, so middle-income families must be getting ahead. He asks, “If the economy on average is getting richer and richer, how exactly can the middle class be squeezed at the same time?”
Second, he points out that consumption is up, even for middle-income families, and therefore all must be well.
On the first point, Hassett makes the mistake of assuming that middle incomes move with the overall average. In fact, over the past few decades, rising inequality has often served as a wedge between overall growth and the living standards of middle-income families. As a recent Economic Policy Institute report shows, household incomes fell for middle-income households from 2000 to 2003 by 3.4 percent, or $1,500 in 2003 dollars, even though the gross domestic product increased by 5.7 percent over these years.
Note that this three-year decline in real median incomes was front-page news in both The New York Times and the Washington Post just a few weeks ago, yet it does not rate a single mention in Hassett’s piece.
In fact, Hassett argues that income is not the best way to measure how middle-income families are doing. He points out that consumption grew in real terms by 2 percent for such families from 2001 to 2002. But this argument ignores a huge stumbling block for his story: the increase in indebtedness. If households are buying more while their incomes are falling, they must be taking on more debt. And, in fact, the data reveal historically high debt burdens over this period. What’s more, rising interest rates and weak income growth will make those debts harder to pay off.

With Oil Near $50 a Barrel, Gas Prices Start to Inch Up
By SIMON ROMERO
NYT, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: As the price of crude oil flirts with $50 a barrel, gasoline prices are heading up again, ending an unusual period in which gasoline prices were falling even as oil prices rose. Crude oil and gasoline prices began moving in opposite directions in June, a conundrum that was a pleasant surprise for motorists in the peak summer holiday season. Last week, however, gasoline prices jumped 5.1 cents a gallon, to a national average of $1.917 a gallon, still below the record average of $2.06 a gallon in May but 33 cents higher than a year ago, the Energy Department said. If crude oil prices keep going up, as many oil industry officials predict, gasoline prices are expected to keep climbing as well, as is the price of home heating fuel.

Red States Feed at Federal Trough, Blue States Supply the Feed
TaxFoundation.org via TaxProf.blog September 27, 2004
EXCERPT: The Tax Foundation has released a fascinating report showing which states benefit from federal tax and spending policies, and which states foot the bill. The report shows that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are "winners" -- receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 76% are Red States that voted for George Bush in 2000. Indeed, 17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States. Here are the Top 10 states that feed at the federal trough.:

Listen to Journalist James Fallows
Interview on NPR's Fresh Air, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: Fallows is the national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. His latest article in the Atlantic is "Bush's Lost Year." Fallows has written seven books, including Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, and is a commentator on National Public Radio. His articles have appeared in The Industry Standard, Slate, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.
SEE ALSO:
Bush's Lost Year in the October Atlantic Monthly
Large sections of the article are available here and here.
EXCERPT: By deciding to invade Iraq, the Bush Administration decided not to do many other things: not to reconstruct Afghanistan, not to deal with the threats posed by North Korea and Iran, and not to wage an effective war on terror. An inventory of opportunities lost
by James Fallows

A Different Noise
In the first of his weekly columns for Guardian Unlimited, Markos Moulitsas tells how US liberals have fought back against rightwing domination of the media since their 'goring' in 2000
Guardian, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: It was the year 2000, and Democrats were running on a record of peace and prosperity stewarded by the capable, if morally imperfect, Bill Clinton. It was a race that should have been won by their candidate, Al Gore. In fact, it was won by Al Gore, but the Rightwing Noise Machine kept it close enough to be stolen by the Republicans and their allies at the supreme court.
What is the Rightwing Noise Machine? Conservatives in the United States have spent the last 30 years building a vast infrastructure designed to create ideas, distribute them, and sell them to the American public. It spans multiple think tanks and a well-oiled message machine that has a stranglehold on American discourse. From the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh, Wall Street Journal, Drudge Report and Murdoch's Fox News, to (more recently) the mindless drones in the rightwing blogosphere, the right enjoys the ability to control entire news cycles, holding them hostage for entire elections.

Bush's Aura Returns
Karl Rove, inevitability, and Baghdad Bob.
By Chris Suellentrop
Slate, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Best of times or worst of times?
When the Bush campaign released its TV ad last week featuring footage of John Kerry windsurfing, Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry told me it was a good sign for his candidate. The windsurfing footage was a bullet that he knew the Bush campaign would use in an ad eventually, McCurry said, and the fact that they fired it now shows that they're worried, that they think Kerry is narrowing the gap with Bush. I wasn't sure whether McCurry actually believed this or if he just wanted to put the ad in the best possible light for the Democrats. But Sunday's Washington Post made me suspect that the Bush campaign really does think things are going poorly right now. Why? Because Republicans are starting to make preposterously overconfident predictions of a Bush landslide.

Karl Rove in a Corner
Karl Rove is at his most formidable when running close races, and his skills would be notable even if he used no extreme methods. But he does use them. His campaign history shows his willingness, when challenged, to employ savage tactics
Joshua Green
The Atlantic Monthly in the Agonist, November 2004 issue
EXCERPT: The mythologizing portrayals of a "boy genius" that characterized so much media coverage of Rove after 2000, and especially after the Republicans' triumphant sweep in the midterm elections, struck me as sorely out of date when I began this project. The Bush Administration was suffering through the worst of the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the President's approval ratings were plummeting. Clearly, there are many differences between the circumstances in which Rove has been victorious in the past and those he faces now. But that is no reason to discount his record. By any standard he is an extremely talented political strategist whose skill at understanding how to run campaigns and motivate voters would be impressive even if he used no extreme tactics. But he does use them. Anyone who takes an honest look at his history will come away awed by Rove's power, when challenged, to draw on an animal ferocity that far exceeds the chest-thumping bravado common to professional political operatives. Having studied what happens when Karl Rove is cornered, I came away with two overriding impressions. One was a new appreciation for his mastery of campaigning. The other was astonishment at the degree to which, despite all that's been written about him, Rove's fiercest tendencies have been elided in national media coverage. ...Some of Rove's darker tactics cut even closer to the bone. One constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns against opponents. The 2000 primary campaign, for example, featured a widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been rendered mentally unfit for office. More often a Rove campaign questions an opponent's sexual orientation. Bush's 1994 race against Ann Richards featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record--when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for "appointing avowed homosexual activists" to state jobs.
Another example of Rove's methods involves a former ally of Rove's from Texas, John Weaver, who, coincidentally, managed McCain's bid in 2000. Many Republican operatives in Texas tell the story of another close race of sorts: a competition in the 1980s to become the dominant Republican consultant in Texas. In 1986 Weaver and Rove both worked on Bill Clements's successful campaign for governor, after which Weaver was named executive director of the state Republican Party. Both were emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver's star seemed to be rising faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into business for himself and lured away one of Rove's top employees, Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function. Weaver won't reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie. Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and eventually, following McCain's 2000 campaign, he left the Republican Party altogether. He has continued an active and successful career as a political consultant--in Texas and Alabama, among other states--and is currently working for McCain as a Democrat.
...But an interesting thing happened as I worked on this piece. Early in the summer, as Bush was struggling, even Rove's allies professed to doubt his ability to control the dynamics of the race in view of an unrelenting stream of bad news from Iraq. Several insisted that he was in over his head--with an emphasis that seemed to go deeper than mere professional envy. Yet by August, when attacks by the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were dominating the front pages, such comments had become rarer. Then they died away entirely.
If this year stays true to past form, the campaign will get nastier in the closing weeks, and without anyone's quite registering it, Rove will be right back in his element. He seems to understand--indeed, to count on--the media's unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness, laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove's skill but his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an understanding of the media's unstated self-limitations and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.
Rove isn't bracing for a close race. He's depending on it.

How to Debate George Bush
By AL GORE
NYT, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: If Mr. Bush is not willing to concede that things are going from bad to worse in Iraq, can he be trusted to make the decisions necessary to change the situation? If he insists on continuing to pretend it is "mission accomplished," can he accomplish the mission? And if the Bush administration has been so thoroughly wrong on absolutely everything it predicted about Iraq, with the horrible consequences that have followed, should it be trusted with another four years? The biggest single difference between the debates this year and four years ago is that President Bush cannot simply make promises. He has a record. And I hope that voters will recall the last time Mr. Bush stood on stage for a presidential debate. If elected, he said, he would support allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. He promised that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs. He vowed to end partisan bickering in Washington. Above all, he pledged that if he put American troops into combat: "The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well defined." Comparing these grandiose promises to his failed record, it's enough to make anyone want to, well, sigh.

Politics and Sleaze Envelope Orlando
As the presidential campaign approaches its showdown, the Republicans in the state run by George Bush's brother are up to their tricks again.
Andrew Gumbel reports from the heart of Florida
Independent via Common Dreams, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Such is the incestuous nature of politics in Orlando, and in Florida generally, all of it poisoned further by the governor being the President's brother. Mayor Hood was regarded as a consensus-building moderate for much of her time in Orlando, but became more ideological on such issues as gay rights and abortion as she cast around for a new job. Most Democrats believe that, as Secretary of State and as a direct appointee of the governor, her mandate is not to guarantee a free and fair electoral process so much as to do everything in her power to clinch a Bush victory, much as her notorious predecessor, Katherine Harris, did in 2000.

28 September 2004

Campaign Relief: With These Rules, Why Not Get Donald Trump to Moderate Debates?
By John Hanchette
Editor and Publisher, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Start paying attention. Presidential debate season is upon us. The first one, this Thursday at the University of Miami, will focus on foreign policy, the eminent issue so far between President Bush and Senator Kerry, if you don't count the who-did-what during Vietnam mud fling. American voters should expect a chance to scrutinize the candidates under pressure as they argue their views on important issues during a presumably dramatic affair. "If only that were true," lamented The Christian Science Monitor last week on its commentary page. "The debates have become too staged and the answers too canned." Voters apparently sense that, too. As the Monitor noted, when challenger Ronald Reagan took on President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the first debate I covered, about 80 million viewers tuned in. The last match-up between Dubya and Al Gore four years ago (in the closest modern presidential election) seemed important enough for watching to only 47 million. It's not that these events are inherently boring, and certainly they can be influential, as shown in Reagan overtaking Carter that year, helped by a late debate victory ("There you go again!"). But the public senses an insult to the concept of a perfect democracy. Mark Memmott of USA Today last week wrote of another dispiriting development in the debate syndrome. The Bush and Kerry campaigns both have asked the four moderators of the imminent debates to sign a 32-page "memorandum of understanding": acceptance of rules drawn up and mutually agreed upon by Democratic and Republican strategists. And 32 pages? What's with that? This makes moderating a debate almost as complicated as doing your taxes or buying a house. It strikes some journalists and election experts in academia as somewhat similar to the "loyalty oaths" Reform Party candidate Ross Perot asked his supporters to sign in 1992. Memmott quoted Northeastern University professor Alan Schroeder as calling the request "ludicrous" and commenting "They cover these guys. How can they climb into bed with them?" After covering six presidential campaigns, and nine presidential debates, myself, I think I can put this in plain English: Campaign bigwigs for both Kerry and Bush are worried some ringer might slip in a tough question. ...Put me down in the "Severely Disappointed" column. This is yet another black eye for print and electronic journalism. The quartet of respected journalists should tell both Democrat and Republican campaign poobahs to take a hike. The presidential debates increasingly smell like rig jobs with preconceived answers to cream-puff questions. The formats resemble the high-concept scripts of those dopey survivor shows. We might as well ask Donald Trump to moderate, or let the candidates' wives do the questioning.
SEE ALSO:
Swagger vs. Substance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Let's face it: whatever happens in Thursday's debate, cable news will proclaim President Bush the winner. This will reflect the political bias so evident during the party conventions. It will also reflect the undoubted fact that Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation. But what will the print media do? Let's hope they don't do what they did four years ago. Interviews with focus groups just after the first 2000 debate showed Al Gore with a slight edge. Post-debate analysis should have widened that edge. After all, during the debate, Mr. Bush told one whopper after another - about his budget plans, about his prescription drug proposal and more. The fact-checking in the next day's papers should have been devastating. But as Adam Clymer pointed out yesterday on the Op-Ed page of The Times, front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their "body language." After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore's sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush's lies. And even the fact-checking pieces "buried inside the newspaper" were, as Mr. Clymer delicately puts it, "constrained by an effort to balance one candidate's big mistakes" - that is, Mr. Bush's lies - "against the other's minor errors." ...on Thursday night there will be a temptation to revert to drama criticism - to emphasize how the candidates looked and acted, and push analysis of what they said, and whether it was true, to the inside pages. With so much at stake, the public deserves better.
SEE ALSO:
'NY Times' Already Has the Answers in First Bush-Kerry Debate (Editor and Publisher)

Carter Fears Florida Vote Trouble
BBC News, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Voting arrangements in Florida do not meet "basic international requirements" and could undermine the US election, former US President Jimmy Carter says. He said a repeat of the irregularities of the much-disputed 2000 election - which gave President George W Bush the narrowest of wins - "seems likely". Mr Carter, a veteran observer of polls worldwide, also accused Florida's top election official of "bias". ...In an article in the Washington Post newspaper, Mr Carter, a Democrat, said that he and ex-President Gerald Ford, a Republican, had been asked to draw up recommendations for changes after the last vote in Florida was marred by arguments over the counting of ballots. Mr Carter said the reforms they came up with had still not been implemented. He accused Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a Republican, of trying to get the name of independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader included on the state ballot, knowing he might divert Democrat votes. He also said: "A fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61 Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons." Mr Carter said Florida Governor Jeb Bush - brother of the president - had "taken no steps to correct these departures from principles of fair and equal treatment or to prevent them in the future". "It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or biased electoral practices in any nation," he added. "With reforms unlikely at this late stage of the election, perhaps the only recourse will be to focus maximum public scrutiny on the suspicious process in Florida."
SEE ALSO:
Florida Officials Stand by Ballot
BBC News, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Election officials in Florida have rejected a suggestion that the state's preparations for the presidential election are seriously flawed. Jimmy Carter, the former US president and veteran election monitor, predicted polling in the key state would be neither free nor fair. A spokesman for Florida's election body told the BBC it was disappointed by the former president's remarks. He said Mr Carter seemed "misinformed" about the true state of preparations. ..."I think there's some misinformation in it and we're disappointed that he didn't contact us to ensure accurate, up-to-date information," the spokesman said. The BBC's Jill McGivering notes that some may question Mr Carter's own political loyalty to the Democrats as a way of dismissing his comments. Others may argue his longstanding work with the Carter Centre, monitoring elections worldwide, makes him a credible authority, our correspondent says. The row could also revive the bitterness felt by many Democrats last time when George W Bush won the state and the presidency after a long, legal battle about the Florida vote, she adds.

F.B.I. Said to Lag on Translations of Terror Tapes
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings have not yet been translated by linguists at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and computer problems may have led the bureau to systematically erase some Qaeda recordings, according to a declassified summary of a Justice Department investigation that was released on Monday. The report, released in edited form by Glenn A. Fine, the department's inspector general, found that the F.B.I. still lacked the capacity to translate all the terrorism-related material from wiretaps and other intelligence sources and that the influx of new material has outpaced the bureau's resources. Overhauling the government's translation capabilities has been a top priority for the Bush administration in its campaign against terrorism. Qaeda messages, saying "Tomorrow is zero hour" and "The match is about to begin," were intercepted by the National Security Agency on Sept. 10, 2001, but not translated until days later, underscoring the urgency of the problem. The inspector general's report on the F.B.I., the lead agency for combating domestic terrorism, said the bureau faced "significant management challenges" in providing quick and accurate translations. The report offered the most comprehensive assessment to date of the F.B.I.'s problems in deciphering hundreds of thousands of intercepted phone calls, conversations, e-mail messages, documents and other material that could include information about terrorist plots and foreign intelligence matters. It revealed problems not only in translating material quickly, but also in ranking the work and in ensuring that hundreds of newly hired linguists were providing accurate translations. While linguists are supposed to undergo periodic proficiency exams under F.B.I. policy, that requirement was often ignored last year, the inspector general found in the publicly released summary of its investigation. Most of the report remains classified. Congressional officials who have been briefed recently by the F.B.I. on the translation issue said the report offered a much bleaker assessment than the bureau has acknowledged, and leading senators from both parties denounced what they described as foot-dragging in fixing the problem.

DeLay on the Hot Seat
by JACK NEWFIELD
The Nation, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Two investigative bombs with long fuses are sizzling under Tom DeLay, America's Machiavelli of gerrymandering and shakedown fundraising. They both involve active grand juries investigating alleged money-laundering and campaign finance abuses. DeLay, House majority leader, is still laughing off these probes in public, but he has hired criminal attorneys and begun a defense fund.
The first bomb involves the Senate's Indian Affairs Committee, led by John McCain. It is scheduled to hold a hearing on September 29 into the alleged fleecing of Indian tribes by two of DeLay's closest allies, lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Mike Scanlon. They have been paid more than $45 million over three years by casino-owning tribes for services that remain unclear. Dissidents in these tribes, who have asked to testify, claim they were duped and that most tribal members were kept in the dark about these exorbitant fees. Roy Fletcher, spokesman for the Coushatta tribe of Louisiana's pro-casino faction, which retained Abramoff, says the tribe is investigating whether it got what it paid for. But while the hearing may expose some wrongdoing, the more threatening aspect of the Washington probe involves the FBI and a federal grand jury that has been meeting for months. Federal prosecutors have assembled a war room full of banking and billing records as well as e-mails from Abramoff and Scanlon. They are focusing on the laundering of money for personal extravagances and political campaigns. ...The second bomb is sizzling in Texas, where a grand jury has just indicted three close associates of DeLay on charges of violating a state law banning corporate funding of political activity. Democratic county prosecutor Ronnie Earle has been investigating DeLay's fundraising chicanery involving the PAC of Texans for a Republican Majority. The essence of the probe is that TRMPAC illegally contributed corporate money to elect fourteen GOP state legislators in 2002 to gain state legislative control for the first time in 130 years, and then used this majority to crudely gerrymander Texas Congressional districts so that four Democrats might lose their seats this November. DeLay, who was chairman of an advisory board for the Republican Majority group, claims the probe is driven by partisan politics.
SEE ALSO:
AUDIO LINK
Senate Panel to Query Lobbyists on Casino Ties
NPR's All Things Considered, 27 September 2004
This week, a Senate committee holds a hearing on two Republican lobbyists who collected large fees from Indian tribes with casinos. The pair apparently made $50 million from various tribes in less than three years, promising access to top Republicans in Washington. NPR's John Ydstie reports.

U.S. Funds Drying Up for Community Cops
By BECKY BOHRER Associated Press Writer
AP in FindLaw, 27 September 2004
BILLINGS, Mont
EXCERPT: Federal funding for the grant program that has helped hire thousands of community police officers across the country may be drying up. After several years of declining financial support, the Bush administration proposed no funding for that hiring program and others like it for the next fiscal year. Administration officials say the Clinton-era effort met its goal of helping put more than 100,000 officers on the streets and in schools across the country, and that there were no guarantees for long-term funding levels. Many in law enforcement see the timing as unfortunate. Departments across the country, even small ones, are being asked to take on more responsibility in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. At the same time many departments - especially those in rural areas, where even one extra officer is a big benefit - are seeing their own local funding tighten. Many say the potential loss of federal hiring dollars removes one of the best tools they've had in recent years. "When you find something that works, you hate to see it go away, particularly I would think now, when safety has to be a top priority," said Frank Garner, president of the Montana Association of Chiefs of Police. "We clearly have more police officers in uniform than we would have otherwise," said Garner, who also is the police chief in Kalispell, a town of about 14,000 people in the Flathead Valley, not far from Glacier National Park. "For the last two years, we've seen police agencies do all they can to meet demands put on them," said Gene Voegtlin, legislative counsel at the Virginia-based International Association of Chiefs of Police. "The only way you're going to have an effective anti-crime or anti-terror effort is to have people out working with communities," Voegtlin said.

Spy Imagery Agency Takes New Role Inside United States After Sept. 11
KATHERINE PFLEGER SHRADER
AP IN SF Chronicle, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: In the name of homeland security, America's spy imagery agency is keeping a close eye, close to home. It's watching America. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, about 100 employees of a little-known branch of the Defense Department called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency -- and some of the country's most sophisticated aerial imaging equipment -- have focused on observing what's going on in the United States. Their work brushes up against the fine line between protecting the public and performing illegal government spying on Americans. Roughly twice a month, the agency is called upon to help with the security of events inside the United States. Even more routinely, it is asked to help prepare imagery and related information to protect against possible attacks on critical sites. For instance, the agency has modified basic maps of the nation's capital to highlight the location of hospitals, linking them to data on the number of beds or the burn unit in each. To secure the Ronald Reagan funeral procession, the agency merged aerial photographs and 3D images, allowing security planners to virtually walk, drive or fly through the Simi Valley, Calif., route. The agency is especially watchful of big events or targets that might attract terrorists -- political conventions, for example, or nuclear power plants. Everyone agrees that the domestic mission of the NGA has increased dramatically in the wake of Sept. 11, even though laws and carefully crafted regulations are in place to prevent government surveillance aimed at Americans. The agency is not interested in information on U.S. citizens, stresses Americas office director Bert Beaulieu. "We couldn't care less about individuals and people and companies," he said. But that's not good enough for secrecy expert Steven Aftergood, who oversees a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "What it all boils down to is 'Trust us. Our intentions are good,"' he said.

Inquiry on Medicare Finds Improper Limits on Choices
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Federal investigators said Monday that the Bush administration had improperly allowed some private health plans to limit Medicare patients' choice of health care providers, including doctors, nursing homes and home care agencies. The investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, also said that the private plans had increased out-of-pocket costs for the elderly and had not saved money for the government, contrary to predictions by Medicare officials. The study, the most comprehensive assessment of a demonstration project that the administration has described as the best hope for Medicare's future, focused on the program's experience with a form of managed care known as preferred provider organizations, the type of health insurance most popular among people under 65. Medicare is spending $650 to $750 a year more for each beneficiary in such private plans than it would have spent if the same people stayed in traditional Medicare, the investigators said.

'Ownership Society': Why the US Can't Buy In
By David R. Francis
Christian Science Monitor via FindLaw, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Many Americans - perhaps most of them - aren't ready for President Bush's "ownership society." The idea sounds good. Employees could shift a portion of what they pay into Social Security and put it into individual accounts that might gain higher returns in, say, the stock market. They could also reduce their tax bill by starting Health Savings Accounts, Retirement Savings Accounts, and Lifetime Savings Accounts. These options reflect a certain conservative logic. Rather than having the government or your company decide how much retirement money or health care you get, you can decide for yourself. "If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country," Mr. Bush explains. "The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America." The flaw in this logic is Americans' lack of financial sophistication. For example: Less than one-quarter of working-age people characterize themselves as "knowledgeable investors," according to surveys by John Hancock Financial Services. Even this minority shows "considerable confusion." For example: Many surveyed thought money-market funds included stocks and bonds. That doesn't mean Americans are stupid. They just have better things to do. "Many people don't have the time, inclination, or expertise necessary to take full responsibility for their own well-being in areas that are so complex as assuring they have sufficient income for retirement or choosing a health plan appropriate for their circumstances," says Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

On Eve of Big Tour, Springsteen Says Press Has "Let The Country Down"
By Greg Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: On the eve of the Vote for Change tour, which has sparked controversy in newsrooms where reporters have been ordered not to attend the pro-Kerry fundraisers, Bruce Springsteen, one of the stars of the concerts, has a few words for the press. In a wide ranging interview in the just-published Oct. 14 issue of Rolling Stone, Springsteen says, "The press has let the country down. It's taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that....The job of the press is to tell the truth without fear or favor. We have to get back to that standard." Most of his criticism, however, is aimed at TV coverage, and he reveals that as "a dedicated" New York Times reader he has gained "enormous sustenance" from columnists Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. The problem, according to Springsteen, is that "Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power." In this regard, he finds The Washington Post and The New York Times admitting mistakes in their initial reporting about Iraq "very revealing." Overall, while there has been some great reporting in the press, it has fallen far short, Springsteen tells Rolling Stone founder Jann S. Wenner: "Real news is the news we need to protect our freedoms. You get tabloid news, you get blood-and-guts news, you get news shot through with a self-glorifying façade of patriotism, but people have to sift too much for the news that we need to protect our freedoms....The loss of some of the soberness and seriousness of those institutions has had a devastating effect upon people's ability to respond to the events of the day." But Springsteen mainly aims barbs at cable news, mocking the "enormous amount of Fox impersonators among what you previously thought were relatively sane media outlets across the cable channels." He also knocks the media for allowing the White House to get away with the "disgraceful" policy of refusing "to allow photographs of the flag-draped coffins of the returning dead."

Bullies at the Voting Booth
by Anne-Marie Cusac
The Progressive, October issue
EXCERPT: What if Republican shenanigans tip the election? Many members of the media are looking at the dangers voting machines may pose to the integrity of the national election. Others are wondering whether voters may be disenfranchised by use of faulty felon lists, as happened in Florida in 2000. But there is another danger: Republicans may use a variety of tactics to suppress the vote of racial minorities in swing states. These tactics could determine control of the White House or the Senate.
In August, the Zogby International poll raised the number of battleground states from sixteen to twenty. In those states, notes John Zogby, "the pounding has been relentless." Zogby was referring to negative ads, but the sanctity of the vote is also taking a pounding. In some states, Republicans are threatening to conduct widespread vote challenges in heavily minority areas. In others, recent events suggest that poll workers may wrongly turn away voters. In still others, new laws passed or enforced by Republicans have erected hurdles to trip up the minority vote. And on Election Day itself, say advocates, Republicans may direct numerous tricks at Democratic districts in an effort to confuse or frighten voters.
Here's a rundown of what's happening in several swing states.

27 September 2004

AUDIO LINK  Putting Political Discouragement In Perspective...and other things
Howard Zinn on RadioNation Audio Blog
The Nation, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Radical historian Howard Zinn talks with Nation contributing editor Jon Wiener about the electoral choices before and why they do and do not matter. Also discussed is the new documentary film You Can't be Neutral On a Moving Train.

Bush excesses undermines the democratic process
On the Stump, the Art of Distortion
Remarks by Bush, Kerry scrutinized
By Rick Klein
Boston Globe, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: ...Bush appears to be the worse offender this year, in terms of the number of misleading claims and the consistency of their appearance in his stump speech. A review of Bush's public statements in recent days reveals a number of areas where he is repeatedly using exaggerated claims and incomplete statistics, in an apparent attempt to fit his campaign themes. George Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who has written extensively about political addresses, said Bush and his advisers have been masterful at using partial facts and their spin on Kerry's statements to create the perceptions they want. "I've never seen anything like this," Lakoff said. "This is a particular trick, and these guys have mastered it. Each piece is misleading, and together they create a way of understanding Kerry and Bush that is useful to them."  [BWUSA emphasis]

Politics of anything goes...even a "religious purge"
GOP Urges Catholics to Shun Kerry
By Michael Kranish
Boston Globe, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: The Republican Party is attempting to convince Roman Catholics that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry is "wrong for Catholics" and at odds with his church. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee launched a website called "KerryWrongForCatholics.com" that takes the Massachusetts senator to task for voting against the Defense of Marriage Act, favoring civil unions for gays and lesbians, opposing vouchers for private schools, and taking stands on abortion and other issues that are contrary to church teachings. The GOP site points out where Kerry, a Catholic, is at variance with the Vatican. A section on Kerry's stance on same-sex unions, for example, is headlined: "Kerry Said Vatican Should Not Instruct Catholic Politicians, Calling It 'Inappropriate.' "
The site suggests that Bush, a Methodist, has a stronger record on Catholic values. Private groups also have been urging Catholics to oppose candidates who favor abortion and other issues the church condemns. Earlier this month, a nonprofit organization called Priests for Life announced a $1 million campaign, including television commercials, aimed at persuading voters to support candidates who oppose abortion. Another nonprofit, Catholic Answers, is issuing millions of voter guides that list five "nonnegotiable" issues for Catholic voters: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and "homosexual marriage." The combined effect of the party and private efforts could be as significant politically as the swift boat veterans attack on Kerry, the difference being that this one is occurring without blistering television commercials and is mostly "below the radar screen," according to John Green, who studies religion and politics at the University of Akron. And the stakes are high: Twenty-five percent of those expected to cast ballots for president Nov. 2 are Catholics, with even higher percentages in some battleground states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.

Shh! We wouldn't want this to get out...
Massive Military Draft Bill Quietly Moves Through Congress
'Universal National Service Act' would require 'all young persons,' meaning men and women between 18 and 26, to serve indefinitely at the President's discretion
ZNet, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: One of the most interesting aspects of democratic societies with such skewed distributions of wealth and power, is, as is well documented, the subservience of mass media to state power (2). The United States acts no different than other societies in this regard, and the current military draft bill passing through Congress, coupled with virtually complete media silence, is perhaps another testimony to the amazing propaganda achievements of US history. It was only today that I found out about this bill quietly making its way to the congressional voting table, initiated almost 9 months ago, and as far as I know, still without mention in the major media. I am hoping, thus, that the following article will be informative and useful. The bill, entitled the "Universal National Service Act of 2003," while vague in certain details, is quite explicit on whole. It announces primarily the desire "[to] provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." This is an unprecedented move, not because it is the first draft bill proposed in US history, but because young women are not exempt from service (I suppose one can debate whether this can be considered a feminist victory). While the primary intent of the draft begs major questions about the meaning of "common" and "national defense," we can put that aside for now and look at the details of the current bill. All males and females between the ages of 18-26 are obligated upon completion of this bill to follow its orders, whose specifics, including duration and duties, are to be at the complete command of the President.

Unemployment Exhaustion Rate Highest in 60 Years
Economic Policy Institute, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Last year, 43.4% of people who began receiving state unemployment benefits ended up exhausting all the benefits to which they were entitled without finding a job. This exhaustion rate is the highest rate since 1941, and it exceeds the 38.5% rate for 1982 when the unemployment rate was over 10%.

Democrats Capitulate to Supply-Siders
By Doug Ireland
ZNet, 25 September 2004
EXCERPT: This week made it even harder to convince the voters that this country has a genuine, major opposition party. The Congressional Democrats have now completely capitulated to the Republican advocates of supply-side economics -- what the first President Bush once called "voodoo economics" -- by overwhelmingly voting for Dubya's tax cut package. Only one, lone Democratic Senator--retiring octogenarian Fritz Hollings of South Carolina -- had the guts to vote on Thursday against this insane tax cut. And in the House, two-thirds of the Democrats (including a lot of the so-called liberals) voted for the Bush bill, which includes more tax breaks for corporations. Kerry -- although he didn't show up for the vote -- issued a statement supporting the tax cuts, even though (as the Washington Post reported), they include "an array of business tax breaks" worth $13 billion to Corporate America. (On Monday, Public Campaign will issue a study of how the corporate interests bought their tax cuts with campaign cash.) The folly of the Democrats' position was underscored by a new study just released by Citizens for Tax Justice, about the effects of previously-passed Bush tax cuts on the top Fortune 500 Companies. Many of these companies made bigger profits after taxes than they did before taxes!

Kerry Rips Bush on 'Mission Accomplished' Remark
Reuters, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry ripped into President Bush on Sunday for saying he had no regrets over his ``Mission Accomplished'' speech on Iraq and would do it again.
Kerry, expressed outrage after Bush's statement in an interview with Fox News in which he was asked if he would still have shown up in a flight suit for that May 1, 2003 speech aboard an aircraft carrier off the coast of California. ``Absolutely,'' Bush was quoted as saying in excerpts of the interview, which is to air this week.
Kerry, arriving in Madison, Wisconsin for debate preparations, called the statement ``unbelievable.'' ``I will never be a president who just says mission accomplished. I will get the mission accomplished,'' said the Massachusetts senator. ``That's the difference.'' When Bush gave his dramatic speech amid much fanfare, fewer than 150 Americans had been killed in the Iraq war. Since then the U.S. death toll has risen to 1,046.

Does the C stand for 'conservative' now that BS is self-explanatory?
'60 Minutes' Delays Report Questioning Reasons for Iraq War
By Kate Zernike
New York Times, 25 September 2004
EXCERPT: BS News said yesterday that it had postponed a "60 Minutes" segment that questioned Bush administration rationales for going to war in Iraq. The announcement, in a statement by a spokeswoman, was issued four days after the network acknowledged that it could not prove the authenticity of documents it used to raise new questions about President Bush's Vietnam-era military service. The Iraq segment had been ready for broadcast on Sept. 8, CBS said, but was bumped at the last minute for the segment on Mr. Bush's National Guard service. The Guard segment was considered a highly competitive report, one that other journalists were pursuing. CBS said last night that the report on the war would not run before Nov. 2. "We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," the spokeswoman, Kelli Edwards, said in a statement. Ms. Edwards said that the report had been scheduled for June but that it was postponed because of additional news on the subject.

Making the world safer for pollution and hurricanes...
Xtreme Weather Meets Xtreme Media Bubble
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: For the first time in history, four hurricanes ­ Charley, Frances, Ivan (the Terrible), and now Jeanne -- have smacked into Florida's long coastline one after another in a single hurricane season (not yet over), and here's the strangest thing of all: Forget that in March Brazil experienced the South Atlantic's first hurricane ever -- Brazilian meteorologists didn't even know what to name it; or that the Atlantic coast of Canada got whacked by Hurricane Juan, "the storm of the century," late last year (and the Canadian government suspects a link to global warming); or that the United States has already experienced a record number of tornados in 2004; or that Japan has had the worst season of typhoons in memory; or that Xtreme weather events have increased in recent years across the planet, including massive flooding in Europe, Bangladesh, and China, and a deathly summer heat wave that struck Europe in 2003. Forget the rising sea levels and the increased melt-off toward the poles. Forget that the head of at least one (hated) country in the path of Hurricane Ivan -- Fidel Castro -- was ready to warn his people about global warming and hurricanes, or that the Bush administration's closest ally, Tony Blair of Britain, made a major speech, widely ignored in the American press, labeling global warming a danger beyond compare. ("What is now plain is that the emission of greenhouse gases is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long-term. And by long-term I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by unsustainable, I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.") Forget all that, and just focus for a moment on the fact that it took almost to the moment Jeanne hit Florida for our media to produce a spate of pieces that even speculated in passing about possible links between the hurricanes in Florida and global warming -- and almost all of those articles denied that there were any connections at all. It's often been said that, in tossing the Kyoto Agreement out the Ozone hole, relaxing fuel-emission standards, burying or altering governmental global-warming research and the like, the Bush administration, with an Ivan-the-Terrible-style environmental record, has stuck its head in the proverbial sand (probably Tar sands at that). And this couldn't be truer. Ignoring global warming -- and so any preparations to safeguard the world for our children and grandchildren -- is but another form of global terrorism; it's a way of loading and locking another kind of weapon of mass destruction. But in this behavior, as it happens, the Bush administration isn't alone. The American mainstream media has been a major aider-and-abettor in the process.

Presidential Debates Revealed to be a Scripted Hoax Perpetrated on the Public
Bill Moyer's NOW, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: Presidential debates can change the course of elections, but George Farah, a remarkable young author and executive director of Open Debates, has evidence showing that the debates' rules of order have been hijacked by the two main political parties. The result? Moderators can't ask follow-up questions, important issues are never raised, and credible third-party candidates are excluded from the proceedings altogether. Bill Moyers interviews Farah, who details the secretive process by which the party handlers ensure there won't be a real discussion of the issues at what are, for many voters, the most important events of the campaign.
SEE ALSO:
Debate School - Advice for John Kerry
David Sirota
The American Prospect, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: (see the article for more detail on each point)
...the upcoming debates represent his (John Kerry's) best chance yet to go from undefined challenger to legitimate alternative. To get there, here are the top 10 things he must do:
1. Make your Iraq vote an indictment of Bush.
2. Connect the Vietnam experiences to Iraq.
3. Demand answers about specific national-security decisions.
4. Use the word “Halliburton” at least 15 times a debate.
5. Talk about how the Bush-Saudi relationship compromises America's national security.
6. Remind people about Bush's secret war on working families.
7. Connect Bush's money to his decisions.
8. Stop pretending you never served in the Senate.
9. Take a controversial position.
10. Don't try to be something you are not.

25-26 September 2004

Medicare Rules Set Off a Battle on Drug Choices
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT:  The new Medicare law has touched off a huge battle between insurance companies and drug companies that could determine how many medicines will be readily available to Medicare beneficiaries. Under the law, Medicare will rely on private health plans to deliver drug benefits to the elderly and disabled. The government will not specify precisely which drugs must be covered. Rather, each plan will develop a list of drugs approved for reimbursement. In general, drug companies want as many drugs as possible on each list, known as a formulary. Many doctors and consumer groups agree. But insurers and drug benefit managers generally want to limit the number of drugs, and the types of drugs. Otherwise, they say, the new drug benefit will quickly become unaffordable. "We are in a tug of war with the drug companies,'' said Phillip J. Blando, vice president of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, whose members manage drug benefits for 200 million people. Pharmaceutical companies stand to gain or lose billions of dollars depending on whether their drugs or competing products are included in Medicare formularies. The Bush administration has retained a private nonprofit organization, the United States Pharmacopeia, to develop a list of the types of drugs that should be covered. The guidelines, which serve as a model for private plans providing the new drug benefit, list 146 distinct categories and classes of drugs. ...The debate over formularies has produced some odd allies and adversaries. Drug companies have joined patients in arguing that patients should have access to the full array of drugs for AIDS, asthma, depression, diabetes, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis and other diseases.Some Democrats, including Senator John Kerry, the party's presidential nominee, have denounced the law as a giveaway to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. But those two industries now find themselves fundamentally at odds over how to carry out the law they lobbied hard to enact. Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on the Aging, a research and advocacy group, said, "A restrictive formulary with a limited number of therapeutic classes may save money in the short run, but it will cost Medicare and beneficiaries more in the long run,'' by increasing the need for hospital care, nursing home admissions and doctors' visits.

Red Alert: Bush Neglects the Department of Homeland Security
It was billed as America's frontline defense against terrorism. But badly underfunded, crippled by special interests, and ignored by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has been relegated to bureaucratic obscurity.
By Matthew Brzezinski
Mother Jones, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: In the game of smoke and mirrors that is otherwise known as national politics, Americans will go to the polls in November to choose a leader who they think can best protect them from terrorist attack. Other issues will be important in the presidential election‹Iraq, the economy, taxes‹but none will be as central as which candidate can keep us safe. Defending America has been a pillar of President Bush's reelection campaign. Only the president, argue his backers, has the resolve and strength of leadership to prevent another 9/11. This campaign tactic has proved surprisingly effective. Even as public opinion polls show that increasing numbers of Americans are wondering whether the White House has been fighting the right battle in Baghdad, many remain convinced that President Bush will be tougher on terror than his Democratic opponent. This view has been a mainstay of Republican campaign commercials, conservative talk radio shows, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and, of course, the folks at Fox. Unfortunately, like a lot of "popular" notions generated by concerted public relations drives, it's a myth not rooted in reality. The war on terror has many fronts, not the least of which is the one right here at home. But as I learned in more than two years of reporting on the often neglected domestic front lines of the war on terror, defending the homeland simply doesn't appear to have captured the imagination of the White House the way, say, a firefight in Falluja does. Hamstrung by special interests, staffed with B-team political appointees, and crippled by a lack of funding and political support, DHS is a premier example of how the administration's misplaced priorities‹and its obsession with Iraq‹have come at the direct expense of homeland security.
SEE ALSO: Bush's Passion for Secrecy (BG via IHT)

Bush Budget Adds $1.3 Trillion to Deficit
Capitol Hill Blue, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: Responding to an election-season request by Democrats, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Thursday that some of President Bush's budget policies plus other costs would add $1.3 trillion to federal deficits over the next decade. Republicans said the exercise was a blatantly political attempt by Democrats to use the nonpartisan budget office's projections to attack Bush and the GOP.... The congressional analysts said they expect deficits to total $2.3 trillion in the decade ending in 2014 if current tax and spending laws continue unchanged. They have projected that the shortfall will hit a record $422 billion this year alone, with the government's budget year running through Sept. 30.

Perils of an Empty Piggy Bank
By David Ignatius
Washington Post, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: Wall Street is already voting in the 2004 election, and it's giving President Bush surprisingly low marks. Despite strong corporate profits, the Dow Jones industrial average has been stuck just above 10,000 -- trading in the same sluggish range it has maintained all year. Reports this week by two respected economists suggest an explanation. They argue that fiscal and monetary policies during the Bush administration have effectively raided the nation's piggy bank to finance current spending. Without changes in policy, they suggest, we may be looking at an economy that continues to tread water -- or begins to sink. "Campaign 2004 has barely paid lip service to America's biggest economic problem," Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach contends in a commentary this week. "The elephant in the room that the politicians continue to sidestep is the profound shortfall of national saving -- the sustenance of future growth and prosperity for any economy." Under Bush, the federal government has burned through savings at an incredible clip. Roach notes that the government's net savings rate has gone from a surplus of 2.4 percent in 2000 to a deficit of 3.1 percent at the end of July. He reckons that's the largest swing from saving to dis-saving in the nation's history. "Little wonder that the politicians shy away from this issue -- they are the major source of the problem," Roach notes.
SEE ALSO: Bush Misleads on "Middle Class" Tax Cuts (Progress Report)

EDITORIAL CARTOON
2004 GOP Campaign in a Nutshell: Look! Funny Pictures of John Kerry!

Fantasyland extends to the Rose Gaden
Let's Get Real
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: Never mind the inevitable claims that John Kerry is soft on terrorism. What he must address is the question of how his policy in Iraq would differ from President Bush's. And his answer should be that unlike Mr. Bush, whose decisions have been dictated at every stage by grandiose visions and wishful thinking, he will get real - focusing on what is really possible in Iraq, and what needs to be done to protect American security. Mr. Bush claims that Mr. Kerry's plan to secure and rebuild Iraq is "exactly what we're currently doing." No, it isn't. It's only what Mr. Bush is currently saying. And we have 18 months of his administration's deeds to contrast with his words. The actual record is one of officials who have refused to admit that their fantasies about how the war would go were wrong, and who have continued to push us ever deeper into the quagmire because of their insistence that everything is going according to plan. There has been a lot of press coverage of the administration's failure to do anything serious about rebuilding Iraq. Less attention has been given to its parallel failure to take the security problem seriously until much of Iraq had already been lost. Long after it was obvious to everyone else that we were engaged in an escalating guerrilla war, Bush appointees clung to the belief that they were fighting a handful of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.  As a result, they casually swelled the ranks of our foes - remember, Moktada al-Sadr was never going to be our friend, but he didn't have to be our enemy. They even treated Iraqi security forces with contempt, not bothering to provide them with adequate training or equipment.  In an analysis titled "Inexcusable Failure," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies details how the U.S. "failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counterinsurgency effort." U.S. officials, he declares, are "guilty of a gross military, administrative and moral failure." That failure continues. All the evidence suggests that Bush officials still think that one more military push - after the U.S. election, of course - will end the insurgency. They're still not taking the task of fighting a sustained guerrilla war seriously. "Three months into its new mission," The New York Times reported, "the military command in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces has fewer than half of its permanent headquarters personnel in place." At the root of this folly is a continuing refusal to face uncomfortable facts. Confronted with a bleak C.I.A. assessment of the Iraq situation - one that matches the judgment of just about every independent expert - Mr. Bush's response is that "they were just guessing." "In many ways," Mr. Cordesman writes, "the administration's senior spokesmen still seem to live in a fantasyland."

Words lose connection with reality
Bush Upbeat as Iraq Burns
By BOB HERBERT
NYT, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: George W. Bush was a supporter of the war in Vietnam. For a while. As he explained in his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House": "My inclination was to support the government and the war until proven wrong, and that only came later, as I realized we could not explain the mission, had no exit strategy, and did not seem to be fighting to win." How is it that he ultimately came to see the fiasco in Vietnam so clearly but remains so blind to the frighteningly similar realities of his own war in Iraq? Mr. Bush cannot explain our mission in Iraq and has nothing resembling an exit strategy, and his troops - hobbled by shortages of personnel and by potentially fatal American and Iraqi political considerations - are certainly not fighting to win. As the situation in Iraq moves from bad to worse, the president, based on his public comments, seems to be edging further and further from reality. This is disturbing, to say the least. The news from Iraq is filled with reports of kidnappings and beheadings, of people pleading desperately for their lives, of American soldiers being ambushed and killed, of clusters of Iraqis being blown to pieces by suicide bombers, and of the prospects for a credible election in January tumbling toward nil. The war effort has deteriorated so drastically that the administration is planning to take more than $3 billion earmarked for crucial reconstruction projects and shift them to security programs designed to ward off the increasingly deadly insurgency. A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the president contained no really good prospects for Iraq. The best-case scenario was a country with only tenuous stability. The worst potential outcome was civil war. The intelligence estimate was prepared in July, and the situation has only worsened since then.
Even Republicans are starting to voice their concerns about the unfolding disaster. When asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" whether the U.S. was winning the war in Iraq, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, said, "No, I don't think we're winning." He said the U.S. was "in deep trouble in Iraq" and that some "recalibration of policy" would be necessary to turn things around. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said on "Fox News Sunday": "The situation has obviously been somewhat deteriorating, to say the least." He said "serious mistakes" have been made and that most of them "can be traced back to not having sufficient numbers of troops there."
These are not doves talking. These are supporters of President Bush who support the war in Iraq and believe it can be won. But they're also in touch with reality. President Bush does not share their sense of alarm. He acknowledged that "horrible scenes" are being shown on television and the Internet, but he was unmoved by the gloomy intelligence estimates. According to Mr. Bush: "The C.I.A. laid out several scenarios. It said that life could be lousy, life could be O.K., life could be better."
Que sera, sera.
The president said he is personally optimistic and he delivered an upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. Iraq, he said, is well on its way to being "secure, democratic, federal and free." If you spend more than a little time immersed in the world according to Karl Rove, you'll find that words lose even the remotest connection to reality. They become nothing more than tools designed to achieve political ends. So it's not easy to decipher what the president believes about Iraq.

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30 September 2004

Not many new Bush international disasters to report. Remember, this was the day before the big "debate" on foreign policy. Dubya is letting the insurgents in Iraq build strength while he holds U.S. troops back to keep things relatively quiet (and maybe even looking better) until after the election. Luckily, this all emanates from tactical decisions being made by our generals in the field.
     --BWUSA

So much for no disasters...
Three Car Bombs Near U.S. Convoy in Baghdad Kills Dozens
By TERENCE NEILAN
NYT, 30 September 2004
EXCERPT: Three car bombs were set off near an American military convoy in western Baghdad today, killing at least 35 people and wounding dozens, hospital officials said.
Ten American soldiers were wounded in the attack, the military said in a statement from Baghdad. Eight were treated and released and two had more serious injuries and were evacuated to a medical facility, the statement said.
Many Iraqi casualties were also reported, according to the statement, which gave no further details.
Officials at the Yarmouk hospital told Reuters that they were inundated with bodies and had taken in at least 42 dead. They said about 140 people were wounded, most of them children hit by shrapnel.
Residents told the news agency that a ceremony to open a new water and sewage plant was taking place when the attack occurred.
Earlier, an American soldier was killed and three others were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded at a checkpoint in western Baghdad, the military said.
Two Iraqi policemen were also reported killed, and 10 Iraqis wounded.
In an early-morning raid on Falluja, a Sunni Muslim stronghold west of the capital, American forces raided what the United States military said was a successful strike on a known safe house used by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. At least four Iraqis were reported dead. "Significant secondary explosions were observed during the impact indicating a large cache of illegal ordinance was stored in the safe house," a military statement said. Explosions continued in the northeastern side of the city for hours, The A.P. reported.
In the northern city of Talafar, a car bomb aimed at the police chief killed at least 4 people and wounded 16, Iraqi and American officials said, The Associated Press reported. A police officer speaking on condition of anonymity said the police chief, whose name was only given as Colonel Ismail, escaped from the assassination attempt.
Also today, the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera showed footage of what it said was 10 new hostages seized by militants in Iraq. Al-Jazeera said the 10 — 6 Iraqis, 2 Lebanese and 2 Indonesian women — were taken by The Islamic Army in Iraq. The group claimed responsibility for seizing two French journalists last month.

Couldn't get much worse, actually...
Clashes Break Out in the Heart of Baghdad
Associated Press, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: A British hostage pleaded for his government to save his life in a new video aired Wednesday on Arab television after the release of two Italian women and 10 other hostages. In Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi forces raided suspected insurgent hideouts, sparking clashes along a street in the heart of the capital. Meanwhile, violence continued unabated. Thirteen people were killed since Tuesday night in drive-by shootings, ambushes and grenade attacks south of the capital and elsewhere. In Wednesday's raids, Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. troops arrested a suspected terrorist operating on Baghdad's bloodied Haifa Street, cornering the panicked man in a closet as he tried to conceal his face with his wife's underwear, an Iraqi National Guard commander said. Kadhim al-Dafan is believed to be a key neighborhood leader, responsible for car bombs and other attacks in the area, said Col. Mohammed Abdullah. Five other suspected insurgents were also taken into custody as U.S. and Iraqi forces clashed with rebels on the street.

Memo to Kerry from Europe: Help (for Iraq) is Not on the Way
By Bruno Giussani
TomDispatch, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: As the series of presidential debates starts off in Florida, it is easy to guess what the candidates will say about Iraq. President Bush will repeat that things there "are going in the right direction" and reiterate his intention to "stay the course." John Kerry will describe the situation as a "crisis of historic proportions" and point to his four-point plan, outlined in a speech last week at New York University, to turn things around. The first point has now made it into his television ads as a four-word sound bite: "Allies share the burden." I am in doubt about the exact meaning that Senator Kerry gives to the word "allies." He may well be thinking of Russia or Pakistan; but if, as I suspect, he means Europe, well, here is another four-word sound bite: "That will not happen." True: as recent surveys have shown, if Europe could vote in November Kerry would be elected in a landslide. American travelers to Europe these days can expect to be asked time and again, in a hopeful tone, whether Kerry is going to win come November. Earlier in the campaign, the Democratic candidate himself contended that foreign leaders privately favor him over President Bush: an admittedly clumsy claim, not backed up by names, that nonetheless wasn't wrong. ... To "bring the allies to our side," Kerry will have to take the bold step of explicitly and categorically uncoupling the war in Iraq from the wider fight against terrorism. On this premise, there will be plenty of support and help available from Europe for reconstructing Afghanistan, tracking down Osama Bin Laden, sharing intelligence, disrupting terrorist financing networks and blocking their assets, identifying and neutralizing sleeper cells, stopping the spread of WMDs, dealing with rogue states, devising a real(istic) path to peace for Palestine, supporting moderate Islamic governments and organizations with democratic leanings, securing global networks and transportation systems, and so much more.

Troops now dying for 'tenuous stability' in Iraq
Growing Pessimism on Iraq
Doubts Increase Within U.S. Security Agencies
By Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense. While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say. People at the CIA "are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper," said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials. "There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments." "Things are definitely not improving," said one U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq. "It is getting worse," agreed an Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail. "It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago." This weekend, in a rare departure from the positive talking points used by administration spokesmen, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that the insurgency is strengthening and that anti-Americanism in the Middle East is increasing. "Yes, it's getting worse," he said of the insurgency on ABC's "This Week." At the same time, the U.S. commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that "we will fight our way through the elections." Abizaid said he believes Iraq is still winnable once a new political order and the Iraqi security force is in place. Powell's admission and Abizaid's sobering warning came days after the public disclosure of a National Intelligence Council (NIC) assessment, completed in July, that gave a dramatically different outlook than the administration's and represented a consensus at the CIA and the State and Defense departments. In the best-case scenario, the NIC said, Iraq could be expected to achieve a "tenuous stability" over the next 18 months. In the worst case, it could dissolve into civil war.

A Failed "Transition": The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War
A Study by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus, 30 September 2004
Full report with citations (.pdf document)
"Just the Numbers" factsheet feel free to photocopy and share (.pdf document)
KEY FINDINGS
A Failed 'Transition' is the most comprehensive accounting of the mounting costs of the Iraq war on the United States, Iraq, and the world. Among its major findings are stark figures about the escalation of costs in these most recent three months of "transition" to Iraqi rule, a period that the Bush administration claimed would be characterized by falling human and economic costs.
1. U.S. Military Casualties Have Been Highest During the "Transition"
2. Non-Iraqi Contractor Deaths Have Also Been Highest During the "Transition"
3. Estimated Strength of Iraqi Resistance Skyrockets
4. U.S.- led Coalition Shrinks Further After "Transition"

On the Virtues of Changing the Mind
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: It is depressing for me to see George W. Bush on the stump doing a stand-up comedy routine about John Kerry, parroting the predictable line that Kerry has had more than one opinion about Iraq. Serious news reporters who have gone back over the record find that Bush's charge is without merit, and that Kerry has been consistent on his Iraq position.
The thing that most worries me is not when a politician's thinking evolves on a subject and he changes his mind. It is when a politician refuses even to consider changing his mind. Such inflexibility is almost always a sign of rigidity, which can be catastrophic in the most powerful man in the world.
So Bush vowed not to retreat in Iraq. Bush has been refusing to retreat, or even to reconsider, for a long time now.
SEE ALSO:
Despite Accusations, Kerry's Position on Iraq Has Been Consistent
By Thomas Fitzgerald
Knight Ridder Newspapers, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: Sen. John Kerry set his jaw, and even sighed at one point, as he confronted anew the confusion over his stand on the Iraq war, a fog that has enveloped his candidacy for months. "I have one position on Iraq," Kerry insisted this week during a rare news conference. "One position." In fact, he's right, his image as a "flip-flopper" notwithstanding.

Interceptor System Set, But Doubts Remain
Network Hasn't Undergone Realistic Testing
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post, 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: At a newly constructed launch site on a tree-shorn plain in central Alaska, a large crane crawls from silo to silo, gently lowering missiles into their holes. The sleek white rockets, each about five stories tall, are designed to soar into space and intercept warheads headed toward the United States. With five installed so far and one more due by mid-October, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is preparing to activate the site sometime this autumn. President Bush already has begun to claim fulfillment of a 2000 presidential campaign pledge -- and longtime Republican Party goal -- to build a nationwide missile defense. But what the administration had hoped would be a triumphant achievement is clouded by doubts, even within the Pentagon, about whether a system that is on its way to costing more than $100 billion will work. Several key components have fallen years behind schedule and will not be available until later. Flight tests, plagued by delays, have yet to advance beyond elementary, highly scripted events.
The paucity of realistic test data has caused the Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator to conclude that he cannot offer a confident judgment about the system's viability. He estimated its likely effectiveness to be as low as 20 percent. "A system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible capability," said retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, who headed the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s. "I cannot recall any military system being deployed in such a manner."

29 September 2004

Iraq Study Sees Rebels' Attacks as Widespread
By JAMES GLANZ and THOM SHANKER
NYT, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: Over the past 30 days, more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents have been directed against civilians and military targets in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north, according to comprehensive data compiled by a private security company with access to military intelligence reports and its own network of Iraqi informants. The sweeping geographical reach of the attacks, from Nineveh and Salahuddin Provinces in the northwest to Babylon and Diyala in the center and Basra in the south, suggests a more widespread resistance than the isolated pockets described by Iraqi government officials. The type of attacks ran the gamut: car bombs, time bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, small-arms fire, mortar attacks and land mines. "If you look at incident data and you put incident data on the map, it's not a few provinces, " said Adam Collins, a security expert and the chief intelligence official in Iraq for Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group Inc., a private security company based in Las Vegas that compiles and analyzes the data as a regular part of its operations in Iraq.

Catastrophic Success
The worse Iraq gets, the more we must be winning.
By William Saletan
Slate, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: In 1999, George W. Bush said we needed to cut taxes because the economy was doing so well that the U.S. Treasury was taking in too much money, and we could afford to give some back to the people who earned it. In 2001, Bush said we needed the same tax cuts because the economy was doing poorly, and we had to return the money so that people would spend and invest it.
Bush's arguments made the wisdom of cutting taxes unfalsifiable. In good times, tax cuts were affordable. In bad times, they were necessary. Whatever happened proved that tax cuts were good policy. When Congress approved the tax cuts, Bush said they would revive the economy. You'd know that the tax cuts had worked, because more people would be working. Three years later, more people aren't working. But in Bush's view, that, too, proves he was right. If more people aren't working, we just need more tax cuts.
Now Bush is playing the same game in postwar Iraq. When violence there was subsiding, he said it proved he was on the right track. Now violence is increasing, and Bush says this, too, proves he's on the right track.
On July 23, 2003, three months into the occupation, Bush scoffed that Iraqi insurgents were confined to "a few areas of the country. And wherever they operate, they are being hunted, and they will be defeated. ... Now, more than ever, all Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back." A week later, he assured reporters, "Conditions in most of Iraq are growing more peaceful. ... As the blanket of fear is lifted, as Iraqis gain confidence that the former regime is gone forever, we will gain more cooperation." Bush warned that failure to stick with his policies "would only invite further and bolder attacks."
A year later, the insurgents are not defeated, conditions are not more peaceful, the blanket of fear is spreading, cooperation is fraying, and attacks on U.S. personnel are growing bolder. Does this prove Bush is failing? No. It proves he's succeeding.
When the violence increased this spring, Bush, Vice President Cheney, and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said insurgents were growing "desperate" in their efforts to "derail the transition"—the handover of sovereignty scheduled for June 30. "This is precisely what our enemies want," Bush argued. The violence proved Bush was on the right track, and the handover would soon be complete, demoralizing the enemy. The insurgents would be crushed. "In Fallujah, Marines of Operation Vigilant Resolve are taking control of the city, block by block," Bush bragged.
Three months after the handover, the attacks continue to escalate. Fallujah is completely out of control. Is this failure? No, it's success. Things are getting even worse because we're doing even better. Now it's the January 2005 Iraqi elections, not the June 2004 handover, that's supposedly inspiring the enemy's desperation. If we stay the course till January, we'll turn that corner we thought we'd turned in June. "Yes, it's getting worse, and the reason it's getting worse is that they are determined to disrupt the election," Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted Sunday on This Week.

Optimist Club
Some people want to fix things in Iraq. Bush sees only a flawless policy.
By Matthew Yglesias
The American Prospect, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: While the official party line out of the White House -- and parroted by most of the right's pundits -- continues to be that everything's fine in Iraq (also: in Baghdad, the grass is blue and the sky is purple), your more intelligent conservative writers have shifted to a more, shall we say, nuanced view. Iraq may be, in the words of The National Review's Jonah Goldberg, "a mess," in large part because of the president's bungling, but that's not necessarily any reason to vote against him. "So sure," Goldberg concluded, "[George W.] Bush hasn't done everything right -- never mind perfectly -- in Iraq. [Winston] Churchill didn't conduct World War II perfectly every time either."
Max Boot, house neoconservative on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, reached for an analogy to Abraham Lincoln, who "is remembered, of course, for winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves" despite the fact that "along the way he lost more battles than any other president."
On the surface, it's a fair enough point. Mistakes happen, and perfection is not a reasonable standard for political leadership. The problem with this case for Bush, however, is precisely that it isn't Bush's case for Bush. Instead, the president wants us to re-elect him because he's a flawless leader whose mistake-free policies have created a lovely situation in Iraq, where freedom is blossoming and the war has made Americans safer.

Democracy in the eyes of the beholder...
How Much U.S. Help?
The Bush Administration takes heat for a CIA plan to influence Iraq's elections
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER; DOUGLAS WALLER
Time Online edition, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush and interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi insisted last week that Iraq would go ahead with elections scheduled for January, despite continuing violence. But U.S. officials tell TIME that the Bush team ran into trouble with another plan involving those elections — a secret "finding" written several months ago proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favored by Washington. A source says the idea was to help such candidates — whose opponents might be receiving covert backing from other countries, like Iran — but not necessarily to go so far as to rig the elections. But lawmakers from both parties raised questions about the idea when it was sent to Capitol Hill. In particular, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi "came unglued" when she learned about what a source described as a plan for "the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections." Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue.
SEE ALSO:
Pelosi Derails CIA Plan to Buy Iraq Elections
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: Time Magazine reports that the Bush administration had had a plan to use the Central Intelligence Agency to funnel money to candidates it favored in the forthcoming Iraqi elections. The rationale given was that Iran was bankrolling its own candidates. This plan was apparently derailed in part by the intervention of Democratic Minority Leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, who remonstrated with National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice about it. I'd like to make three comments on this story. The first is to point out that this sort of behavior by the Bush administration fatally undermines the ideal of democracy in the Middle East.
SEE ALSO:
Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
By Naomi Klein
Harper's Magazine via TomPaine.com, September 2004 issue
EXCERPT: It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything—not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULAH: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.
Seeing the sign, I couldn’t help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies.” The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.

War-Gaming the Mullahs
The U.S. weighs the price of a pre-emptive strike
By John Barry and Dan Ephron
Newsweek, 27 September issue
EXCERPT: Unprepared as anyone is for a showdown with Iran, the threat seems to keep growing. Many defense experts in Israel, the United States and elsewhere believe that Tehran has been taking advantage of loopholes in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is now within a year of mastering key weapons-production technology. They can't prove it, of course, and Iran's leaders deny any intention of developing the bomb. Nevertheless, last week U.S. and Israeli officials were talking of possible military action—even though some believe it's already too late to keep Iran from going nuclear (if it chooses). "We have to start accepting that Iran will probably have the bomb," says one senior Israeli source. There's only one solution, he says: "Look at ways to make sure it's not the mullahs who have their finger on the trigger."

Official Says US Policy to Blame for War Threat
AP via Boston Globe, 28 September 2004
COMPLETE ARTICLE: North Korea has reprocessed the enriched uranium from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and used it for weapons to serve as a deterrent against a possible nuclear strike by the United States, a North Korean minister said yesterday. Warning that the danger of war on the Korean peninsula ''is snowballing," Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su Hon blamed the United States for intensifying threats to attack the communist nation and destroying the basis for negotiations to resolve the dispute over Pyongyang's nuclear program. Choe said North Korea has been left with ''no other option but to possess a nuclear deterrent."

Typical journalistic failure to note an obvious difference -- Kerry would pay some attention to the Palestinian problem
Sharp Rhetoric, Similar Goals
By Robin Wright
Washington Post , 29 September 2004
EXCERPT: Iraq, the issue most likely to ignite fire in tomorrow's debate, has become the chief symbol of differences between presidential candidates George W. Bush and John F. Kerry. Bush cites Kerry's positions on Iraq to portray him as an indecisive flip-flopper on strategic issues. Kerry says Iraq demonstrates Bush's arrogant misuse of U.S. power.

28 September 2004

Bush Falsehoods about Iraq
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 27 September 2004
FULL ENTRY: Adam Entous of Reuters is too polite to put it this way, but the conclusion is easily extracted from his article that Bush played fast and loose with the facts on Iraq last week. Bush said that the UN electoral advisers are on the ground. In fact, there are only a handful there because it is so dangerous. Voter registration hasn't been conducted. Almost no preparations have been made, and the poor security situation may prevent them from being accomplished. Bush spoke of 100,000 "fully trained and equipped" Iraqi soldiers & police. In fact, only 22,700 Iraqi troops and police have received even minimal training, and only a few thousand are fully trained. The article is worth reading in full, and by the time you get to the end it is clear that Bush was either lying or ignorant, neither of these being a good posture for a president.
SEE ALSO:
AUDIO LINK
State of Iraqi Society and U.S. Politics: Two Views
NPR's All Things Considered, Monday , 27 September 2004
The state of Iraqi society weighs heavily in U.S. political discussions, with much riding on the promise of free elections there. For two views on current U.S. policy in Iraq, NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, and Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan.

Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER
NYT, 28 September 2004
EXCERPT: The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday. The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict. One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said. The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. They were described by the officials after two weeks in which the White House had tried to minimize the council's latest report, which was prepared this summer and read by senior officials early this month. [BWUSA emphasis]

Top 10 Reasons for the US to Get Out of Iraq
by ERIK LEAVER
The Nation, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: The US occupation of Iraq is the cause of, not the solution to, the violence and the mounting deaths that followed the invasion. During the recent fighting led by Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf, as in countless other battles inside Iraq, authorities in Washington have misread the military and political situation. The Bush Administration uses the fighting as justification for the continued presence of foreign military forces. Yet it is precisely the presence of foreign military forces that is a major cause of the instability. Ending the US occupation by bringing the troops home now is a first step toward ending Iraq's nightmare. Most Iraqis agree. In a poll this past June, 55 percent of Iraqis opposed the presence of US forces in Iraq. While Iraqis cheered the overthrow of the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, they didn't sign up for a foreign military occupation as a replacement. Now it is time to let Iraqis themselves choose an alternative. Here are 10 compelling reasons the United States should get out of Iraq.
1) The Human Costs Keep Increasing
2) Iraqis Aren't Better Off
3) The War Is Bankrupting America
4) Halliburton's War Profiteering
5) The "International Coalition" Is Fleeing
6) Recruitment for Al Qaeda Has Accelerated
7) The War Is Draining First Responders From Our Communities
8) Torture at Abu Ghraib
9) Many Americans Oppose the War
10) No "Sovereignty" Has Been Transferred
See article for details.

Controversial Reports Become Accepted Wisdom
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CHAIN OF COMMAND
The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
By Seymour M. Hersh
394 pages. HarperCollins. $25.95.
EXCERPT: Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Seymour M. Hersh, the veteran investigative reporter who 35 years ago broke the My Lai massacre story, has written more than two dozen articles for The New Yorker on intelligence failures, national security policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Mr. Hersh's revelations this spring about Abu Ghraib and a corrosive internal report prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba were picked up by other publications around the world and helped lead to Pentagon investigations and Congressional hearings on abuse at the prison. And much of his post-9/11 reporting - which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared - has since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom: that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (used by the Bush administration to sell Congress and the American public on the war) was selective, sensationalized or just plain wrong; that a group of conservative, utopian civilians dominated thinking about Iraq at the Pentagon; that the C.I.A. was a deeply troubled agency with a director, George J. Tenet, who would not last in the job; and that the Bush administration's war and postwar planning for Afghanistan and Iraq was seriously flawed. With his New Yorker pieces, Mr. Hersh was often far out in front of the pack, walking point. His new book, "Chain of Command" (which draws heavily on those articles), does not always make clear just how far ahead Mr. Hersh often was. Material from his original pieces has been shuffled about: the Abu Ghraib section (including new reporting, which charges that senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration had been warned repeatedly by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused) has been moved to the front of the book. It is followed by chapters on intelligence breakdowns, missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, and problems in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Israel and Turkey. These countries present challenges, Mr. Hersh argues, "that the Bush Administration, driven by its obsession with Iraq, has been unwilling to address." No doubt this narrative reorganization was done by the book's editors to billboard the new Abu Ghraib reporting, but the decision to reject a more chronological approach (or simply to run the original articles, with dates, in the order in which they first appeared) soft-pedals Mr. Hersh's prescience while playing down the ways in which the Abu Ghraib scandal was a symptom and byproduct of other misjudgments during the war against Iraq.
This, however, is a quibble. Whether consumed in this volume or in the pages of The New Yorker, Mr. Hersh's work is necessary reading for anyone remotely interested in what went wrong and continues to go wrong in Iraq, and how the Bush administration came to take America to war there in the first place. Some readers may question Mr. Hersh's heavy reliance on unidentified sources (described by their jobs or expertise but often not by name), but as David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, notes in the book's introduction, "the problem is that in the areas in which Hersh reports, especially intelligence, it is usually impossible to get officials to provide revelatory, even classified, information and at the same time announce themselves to the world."
As the book's vociferous epilogue makes clear, Mr. Hersh does not write in the decorous tradition often associated with The New Yorker but in a much feistier vein. And some of his subjects may take issue with the conclusions he draws from his reporting, as many in the current Bush administration already have. He asserts at one point, for instance, that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism." The outrage that stokes Mr. Hersh's writing, however, seems less like ideological or partisan outrage than an old-fashioned muckraker's outrage, fueled by the disparity he sees between the reality described by senior-level officials and spinmeisters, and the reality on the ground as observed by soldiers, lower-level bureaucrats, operational experts and by the reporter himself.

27 September 2004

Key Bush Assertions About Iraq in Dispute
By REUTERS, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: Many of President Bush's assertions about progress in Iraq -- from police training and reconstruction to preparations for January elections -- are in dispute, according to internal Pentagon documents, lawmakers and key congressional aides on Sunday. Bush used the visit last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to make the case that ``steady progress'' is being made in Iraq to counter warnings by his Democratic presidential rival, Sen. John Kerry, that the situation in reality is deteriorating. Bush touted preparations for national elections in January, saying Iraq's electoral commission is up and running and told Americans on Saturday that ``United Nations electoral advisers are on the ground in Iraq.'' He said nearly 100,000 ``fully trained and equipped'' Iraqi soldiers, police officers and other security personnel are already at work, and that would rise to 125,000 by the end of this year. And he promised more than $9 billion will be spent on reconstruction contracts in Iraq over the next several months. But many of these assertions have met with skepticism from key lawmakers, congressional aides and experts, and Pentagon documents, given to lawmakers and obtained by Reuters, paint a more complicated picture.
The documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as ``untrained,'' and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.
Six Army battalions have had ``initial training,'' while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or ``awaiting equipment.'' Just eight Guard battalions have reached ``initial (operating) capability,'' and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been ``uneven.''
Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralized training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.
They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them ``minimally effective at their tasks,'' in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.
``Let me tell you exactly what the story is. They're saying they're trying to train them, yet they have not trained,'' Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on CNN. The White House defended its figures, and a senior administration official defined ``fully trained'' as having gone through ``initial basic operations training.''
[AND NOTE THE FAIR AND BALANCED TREATMENT OF THIS ISSUE ON SUNDAY'S NEWS PROGRAMS] Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command that covers Iraq, told NBC's ``Meet the Press'' that the number of trained Iraqi forces ``will continue to grow.'' On CBS ``Face the Nation,'' Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Bush needed to deploy more troops to secure areas of Iraq before the elections. ``We are making progress, but we need to adjust,'' Graham said. ...The status of election planning in Iraq is also in question. Of the $232 million in Iraqi funds set aside for the Iraqi electoral commission, it has received a mere $7 million, according to House Appropriations Committee staff. While Bush said the commission has already hired personnel and begun setting election procedures, congressional aides said preparations in other areas were behind schedule. According to a one-page election planning ``time line,'' registration materials are supposed to be distributed in early October and initial voter lists to go out by the end of October, which is during the holy month of Ramadan. So far, the United Nations has been reluctant to send staff back into the battle zone. It only has 30 to 35 people now in Baghdad, no more than eight working on the elections. ``The framework for it (free and fair elections) hasn't even been set up. The voter registration lists aren't set. There have to be hundreds of polling places, hundreds of trained monitors and poll watchers. None of that has happened,'' Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State for President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, told ABC's ``This Week.''

U.S. Air Attacks in Falluja Kill 15 in 24 Hours
Reuters, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: U.S. aircraft blasted the rebel stronghold of Falluja for a third time in 24 hours in a concerted effort to hit militants loyal to guerrilla chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Washington's number one enemy in Iraq. The strike came just before Secretary of State Colin Powell said the insurgency in Iraq was worsening, but the United States was taking action to improve security ahead of elections in January. ``We are fighting an intense insurgency,'' Powell said on Sunday on ABC's ``This Week'' program. ``Yes it's getting worse and the reason it's getting worse is that they are determined to disrupt the election. ``And because it's getting worse we will have to increase our efforts to defeat it, not walk away and pray and hope for something else to happen,'' Powell said.

An Un-American Way to Campaign
NYT editorial, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush and his surrogates are taking their re-election campaign into dangerous territory. Mr. Bush is running as the man best equipped to keep America safe from terrorists - that was to be expected. We did not, however, anticipate that those on the Bush team would dare to argue that a vote for John Kerry would be a vote for Al Qaeda. Yet that is the message they are delivering - with a repetition that makes it clear this is an organized effort to paint the Democratic candidate as a friend to terrorists. When Vice President Dick Cheney declared that electing Mr. Kerry would create a danger "that we'll get hit again," his supporters attributed that appalling language to a rhetorical slip. But Mr. Cheney is still delivering that message. Meanwhile, as Dana Milbank detailed so chillingly in The Washington Post yesterday, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, said recently on television that Al Qaeda would do better under a Kerry presidency, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has announced that the terrorists are going to do everything they can between now and November "to try and elect Kerry." This is despicable politics. It's not just polarizing - it also undermines the efforts of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to combat terrorists in America. Every time a member of the Bush administration suggests that Islamic extremists want to stage an attack before the election to sway the results in November, it causes patriotic Americans who do not intend to vote for the president to wonder whether the entire antiterrorism effort has been kidnapped and turned into part of the Bush re-election campaign. The people running the government clearly regard keeping Mr. Bush in office as more important than maintaining a united front on the most important threat to the nation.

Abizaid Predicts Flawed Iraqi Elections, Expresses Doubt about Legitimacy of Bush's  Election in 2000
Associated Press, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: The top U.S. military commander for Iraq said Sunday he expected flawed elections and much violence ahead of the voting scheduled for January. Gen. John Abizaid's assessment followed a week in which President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi spoke optimistically about the situation despite the beheadings of two more Americans and the deaths of dozens of people in car bombings. On Friday, the military said four Marines died in separate incidents, adding to a toll that has topped 1,000 since the U.S.-led invasion. Abizaid, commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East, said the elections will be carried out. But he warned that voting may not be possible in parts of Iraq where the violence is too intense. "I don't think we'll ever achieve perfection and when we look for perfection in a combat zone we're going to be sadly disappointed,'' he said on NBC's "Meet the Press.'' Abizaid compared the situation in Iraq to the disputed U.S. presidential election in 2000 that put George W. Bush in the White House following a protracted fight that ended up in the Supreme Court. "I don't think Iraq will have a perfect election. And if I recall, looking back at our own election four years ago, it wasn't perfect either,'' he said.

Why do they hate us? Hmm...(worth a revisit)
More Iraqi Civilians Killed by US Forces Than By Insurgents, Data Shows
By Nancy A. Youssef
Knight-Ridder via Common Dreams, 25 Septmeber 2004
EXCERPT: Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder. According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said. While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher. During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed. Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government. That suggests that more aggressive U.S. military operations, which the Bush administration has said are being planned to clear the way for nationwide elections scheduled for January, could backfire and strengthen the insurgency. American military officials said "damage will happen" in their effort to wrest control of some areas from insurgents. They blamed the insurgents for embedding themselves in communities, saying that's endangering innocent people.
BushWhackedUSA Note: This question may be a bit obvious to most of our readers, but for those who marvel at the persistence of the Iraqi resistance it deserves a bit of thought: If America were occupied by, oh, say, Arab troops who were killing twice as many Americans as the insurgent Americans who opposed them, which side would you choose?

Things are really looking up now!
Iraq Commander Accused of Militant Links
Associated Press, 27 September 2004
EXCERPT: Two car bombs wounded American and Iraqi troops west of the capital Sunday and a few hours later the U.S. military announced the arrest of a senior Iraqi National Guard commander on suspicion of ties to insurgents, underscoring the challenges to building a strong Iraq security service capable of restoring stability. The two attackers who died in the twin blasts tried to ram their cars into a National Guard base in Kharma, a town on the outskirts of the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity. The number of U.S. and Iraqi casualties was not immediately clear, but a statement from the U.S. Marines said there were no serious injuries among American troops at the base. The National Guard is the centerpiece of U.S. plans to turn over security responsibilities after elections slated for January and guardsmen have been targeted repeatedly by insurgents who are trying to undermine Iraq's interim government and drive out the U.S.-led coalition. But the threat may not only come from outside the force. Guard Brig. Gen. Talib al-Lahibi, who previously served as an infantry officer in Saddam Hussein's army, was detained Thursday in the province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, a U.S. military statement announced. The statement provided no details, but said he was suspected of having links to militants who have been attacking coalition and Iraqi forces for 17 months.

How Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power
Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president
By Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell
The Guardian (UK), 25 September 2004
EXCERPT: George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany. The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy. The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. ... Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

25-26 September 2004

Violence in Iraq Belies Claims of Calm, Data Show
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post,26 September 2004
EXCERPT: Less than four months before planned national elections in Iraq, attacks against U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful, according to statistics compiled by a private security firm working for the U.S. government. Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials. ...In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country. Speaking with President Bush at the White House on Thursday, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said the security situation in Iraq was "good for elections to be held tomorrow" in 15 of the country's 18 provinces. Elections for a national assembly are scheduled for January. Allawi told Washington Post reporters and editors on Friday that "for now the only place which is not really that safe is Fallujah, downtown Fallujah. The rest, there are varying degrees. Some -- most -- of the provinces are really quite safe." The Kroll reports are based on nonclassified data provided by U.S.-led military forces, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, private security companies working in Iraq and nongovernmental organizations. The reports, which Kroll has refused to distribute to journalists, were provided to The Post by a person on the list to receive them. They cover the period of Sept. 13 through Sept. 22 -- but do not include Sept. 15, 18 or 19, for which reports were not available. To many natives and foreigners living in Iraq, the portrait of progress that Allawi painted during his trip to Washington does not depict reality.

Dance of the Marionettes
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: It's heartwarming, really. President Bush has his own Mini-Me now, someone to echo his every word and mimic his every action. For so long, Mr. Bush has put up with caricatures of a wee W. sitting in the vice president's lap, Charlie McCarthy style, as big Dick Cheney calls the shots. But now the president has his own puppet to play with. All last week in New York and Washington, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq parroted Mr. Bush's absurd claims that the fighting in Iraq was an essential part of the U.S. battle against terrorists that started on 9/11, that the neocons' utopian dream of turning Iraq into a modern democracy was going swimmingly, and that the worse things got over there, the better they really were.
It's the media's fault, the two men warble in a duet so perfectly harmonized you wonder if Karen Hughes wrote Mr. Allawi's speech, for not showing the millions of people in Iraq who are not being beheaded, kidnapped, suicide-bombed or caught in the cross-fire every day; and it's John Kerry's fault for abetting the Iraqi insurgents by expressing his doubts about our plan there, as he once did about Vietnam. "These doubters risk underestimating our country and they risk fueling the hopes of the terrorists," Mr. Allawi told Congress in a rousing anti-Kerry stump speech for Bush/Cheney, a follow-up punch to Mr. Cheney's claim that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for another terrorist attack on America.
First the Swift boat guys; now the swift dhow prime minister.

6-Nation North Korean Nuclear Talks in Doubt
By JAMES BROOKE
NYT, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT:  With North Korea's nuclear threat flaring up this week, Senator John Kerry vowed in Philadelphia on Friday to get the talks about the country's weapons program "back on track" if elected president. In Vienna, the annual meeting of the 137-nation International Atomic Energy Agency ended Friday, saying it "particularly welcomes" multinational talks on North Korea. But in Northeast Asia, where the talks are to take place this weekend in Beijing, North Korea watchers are unsure when the next round will occur, or if they will occur at all. The urgency of defusing North Korea's arsenal became clear this week when American and Japanese officials reported that soldiers and vehicles were gathering around North Korean missile sites, and the country's main newspaper warned that North Korea could "turn Japan into a nuclear sea of fire." The Kyodo news agency of Japan said the latest analysis indicated that North Korea was conducting missile preparedness drills in northwestern North Korea. At a site in the east, North Korea may be preparing the test burn of an engine of a modified Soviet-made submarine-launched missile, Kyodo reported Saturday. Known as an SSN6, this missile has a range of up to 2,500 miles, roughly the distance from North Korea to Guam.
Two weeks ago, North Korea's Foreign Ministry issued a statement linking its future participation in the nuclear talks to a meeting in early November of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' watchdog group in Vienna. After disclosures that South Korean scientists had done experiments that could be used to make raw materials for nuclear weapons, North Korea tied any future meeting to an International Atomic Energy Agency report due in November. On Saturday, an agency team completed a second inspection of South Korean nuclear facilities. "The resumption of the talks can no longer be discussed unless the U.S. drops its hostile policy based on double standards toward" North Korea, the Korean Central News Agency said Sept. 18.

Work-Vacation-Vote Iraq -- Calm, Safe, Serene
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: In the map below I made the present security-challenged provinces red, and those that saw recent heavy fighting purple. I ask you if this looks like the problems are in "3 of 18 provinces," or whether it looks to you like elections held only in the white areas (as Donald Rumsfeld seems to envision) would produce a legitimate government:

SEE ALSO:
5 US Troops, at least 9 Iraqis Dead
Violence up 36 Percent in Iraq
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 26 September 2004
EXCERPT: The incidents of violence on Friday and Saturday in Iraq that appeared in the newspapers were a very small proportion of the whole. The press did tell us that guerrillas killed 5 US troops in separate incidents on Friday and Saturday. The US continued to bomb Fallujah, killing 9 and wounding 16.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post has gotten hold of some daily violence reports on Iraq done for the US Agency for International Development by Kroll Security International. They demonstrate that my point on Friday about most of Iraq being dangerous was correct, but apparently I should have colored in more of the map red than I did. There are continuing acts of violence in Amarah and Samarra. Muthanna province should not have been white. Attacks are occurring everywhere but the three majority-Kurdish provinces in the far north, on a regular basis, some 70 a day nation-wide. These include car bombings, rocket propelled grenade attacks, machine gun attacks, etc. In June there had been 40 to 50 such attacks per day, so the situation is getting worse. [BWUSAemphasis]

UK Officials Told in 2002 Allawi was Viewed as US Stooge
By Michael Smith
Telegraph (UK), 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: British officials gave warning more than two years ago that Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, was seen as "a western stooge" who "lacked domestic credibility", secret documents seen by The Telegraph reveal. The Cabinet Office told ministers a year before the war in Iraq that the external opposition, made up of Mr Allawi's Iraqi National Accord and Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, was "weak, divided and lacks domestic credibility". Mr Allawi, who was closely aligned with the CIA, and Mr Chalabi, who was initially the choice of many within the administration as Iraqi leader, were regarded by most Iraqis as "western stooges", warned a "Secret UK Eyes Only" options paper. A coup attempt in 1996 allegedly organised by Mr Allawi, a neurosurgeon who was trained in Britain, in tandem with the CIA ended in "wholesale executions", according to the paper, which was prepared by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat in March 2002.
SEE ALSO: Misleading Claims About Bush's Man in Baghdad (Progress Report)

The apex of hypocrisy...?
Bush Accuses Kerry of Risking Relations with Allies
Associated Press, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: Democrat John Kerry wrongly questioned the credibility of the interim Iraqi leader, and "you can't lead this country" while undercutting an ally, President Bush said Friday. Bush and interim Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi had hopeful words for the future of Iraq (news - web sites) a day earlier, which Kerry characterized as putting the "best face" on a Bush administration policy in Iraq that has gone wrong. "This brave man came to our country to talk about how he's risking his life for a free Iraq, which helps America," Bush said at a campaign event in battleground Wisconsin. "And Senator Kerry held a press conference and questioned Mr. Allawi's credibility. You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility." ... "I must say I was appalled at the complete lack of respect Senator Kerry showed for this man of courage," Cheney said at an event Friday morning in Lafayette, La. "Ayad Allawi is our ally. He stands beside us in the war against terror. John Kerry is trying to tear him down and to trash all the good that has been accomplished, and his words are destructive."
SEE ALSO: Violence, Allawi, Sistani and Elections (Informed Comment)

Why do they hate us?
U.S. Forces Linked to More Deaths Than Insurgents
Operations are killing twice as many civilians as militants are, statistics show
By NANCY A. YOUSSEF
Knight Ridder Tribune News
EXCERPT: Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder. According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 — when the ministry began compiling the data — until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said. While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher. During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed. Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.

Abuse, Torture and Rape Reported at Unlisted US-run Prisons in Iraq
By Lisa Ashkenaz Croke
New Standard, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: American legal investigators have discovered evidence of abuse, torture and rape throughout the US-run prison system in Iraq. A Michigan legal team meeting with former detainees in Baghdad during an August fact-finding mission gathered evidence supporting claims of prisoner abuse at some 25 US-run detention centers, most of them so far not publicly mentioned as being embroiled in the Iraq torture scandal. "That list was something that we came back with -- we only knew of three prisons going there," investigator Mohammed Alomari told The NewStandard, referring to the few detention centers in Iraq where concerns over treatment of prisoners have already been raised publicly. The list includes some actual prisons, such as Al-Salihiya Prison in Baghdad, the notorious prison in Abu Ghraib, and a prison at Camp Bucca, a Coalition-built POW camp in the southern port city of Um-Qasr. Other detention centers have been established at military bases, such as the US Military compound at Al-Dhiloeia, north of Baghdad; a US base outside Fallujah; and the Hilla military compound, a joint US-Polish base where Alomari said he has recently been informed of allegations against US and Polish personnel. "Nobody talks about it. All everyone talks about is Abu Ghraib because of the pictures," said Alomari. "But in these other

If there was any doubt left about Rumsfeld's sanity...
US Officials Clash over Iraq Elections
Landmark vote will take place in all regions - free and open to all, deputy contradicts Rumsfeld
By Julian Borger
The Guardian (UK), 25 September 2004
EXCERPT: Senior officials in the Bush administration clashed yesterday over Iraq's transition to democracy after the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, suggested that the elections in January might be limited because of the chaos in parts of the country. Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state contradicted the suggestion, insisting that the landmark vote had to take place in all regions, including those racked by insurgency. "I know of no changes and no plans," Mr Armitage said yesterday. "I think we're going to have an election that is free and open, and that has to be open to all citizens," he told a congressional committee. "We've got to do our best efforts to get in troubled areas. ... I think we're going to have these elections in all parts of the country." Mr Rumsfeld agreed yesterday that every Iraqi "deserves the right to vote". But he added that the situation was "uneven" and that "some locations are going to present somewhat greater challenges than others". Earlier he had said that an election in three-quarters of the country would be better than no vote at all. The defence secretary added yesterday that US troops could start leaving Iraq before the country was peaceful again, and he compared the situation in the war-torn areas of the country to US inner cities. "We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What's the difference? We just didn't see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night," Mr Rumsfeld said.

US Could Withdraw Troops Before Peace in Iraq : Rumsfeld
ABC Radio Australia News, 24 September 2004
EXCERPT: The United States says it could begin to withdraw troops from Iraq before the country is at peace. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the comment after meeting in Washington with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. He says a "perfect peace" is not possible and is nover likely to be. The comments were in jarring contrast to President George W. Bush's vow to "stay the course" in Iraq and his portrayal of the situation in Iraq as one of steady progress despite an onslaught of insurgent violence.
SEE ALSO:
Rumsfeld Hints at Earlier Pull Out From Iraq
By Alec Russell in Washington
Tellegraph, 25 September 2004
EXCERPT: America is examining how to pull its troops out of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, signalled last night, saying there was no need to wait for peace to begin a withdrawal. "Any implication that that place has to be peaceful and perfect before we can reduce coalition and US forces would obviously be, I think, unwise because it has never been peaceful and perfect, and it isn't likely to be," he said. Mr Rumsfeld gave no timetable for a possible withdrawal but his remarks reflected a growing consensus in administration circles that America is looking for an exit strategy. Britain is believed to have argued that America cannot "cut and run" but that it might be a mistake to launch an all-out offensive on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, as some Washington hawks have proposed. But privately officials say that the administration is expecting to step up its training of Iraqi forces, to take over the Americans' duties, before starting a "decorous" withdrawal probably in about two years.
SEE ALSO:
Allawi Pooh-Poohs Iraq Carnage
Tiapei Times, 25 September 2004
"He has this real chicken-and-egg problem," said Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "He can't really gain political support unless he can show that he's making progress combatting the problem of violence and petty crime, and he doesn't have the political support to make progress in those areas." Allawi took his insistences past geography, telling Bush that he didn't think more foreign troops were needed on the ground in Iraq and suggesting that Iraqis could be trained to secure the election. According to Allawi's teachings, only three provinces in Iraq are pocked by violence. The city of Fallujah, scene of much death, injury and woe, sits in a "vast, very big" province called al-Anbar, where there are "many other important towns, such as Ana, such as Rawa, such as Ramadi" unmarked by such problems, he said. And even in Fallujah, violence is happening only in "a small pocket," fanned by unhappy Baathists and "terrorists" from outside Iraq, he insisted. Still, elections will go on. "I am not trying to undermine that there are dangers," Allawi continued. Iraq is in the thick of "a terrorist onslaught," and he personally gets a threat every day -- "In the last four weeks, they found four conspiracies to kill me," Allawi said. US lawmakers warmly gave Allawi the benefit of the doubt, interrupting his speech before a joint meeting of Congress with applause and standing ovations. Swept up in the moment, Allawi applauded too, and when he was done he smiled, shook a lot of hands and chatted with a few key senators. But away from the pomp and circumstance, some members of Congress harbored reservations about Allawi's sunny assessment.

UN Criticises Iraq Poll Warning
BBC News, 25 September 2004
EXCERPT: Violence is still a regular occurrence in many parts of Iraq  The leader of the UN team organising Iraq's elections has criticised the US defence secretary for suggesting only a limited vote might take place. Such speculation was unhelpful and ran the risk of making people feel excluded from the poll scheduled for January, Carlos Valenzuela told the BBC. Donald Rumsfeld had raised the possibility that voting might not be held in areas worst hit by violence. But a top state department official said voting must be open to all. Richard Armitage, number two at the state department, told reporters he knew of no plans to exclude violent areas from the elections. Any delay to the poll was ruled out by Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and US President George W Bush who had talks on Thursday. The Iraqi leader also said he would seek an explanation from United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan about his attitude to Iraq's elections when they meet later on Friday.

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