Gonzales's Truthfulness Long Disputed
Claims of Misstatements to Shield Bush Stretch Back a Decade
By Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, July 30, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/29/AR2007072901327.html
When Alberto R. Gonzales was asked during his January 2005 confirmation hearing whether the Bush administration would ever allow wiretapping of U.S. citizens without warrants, he initially dismissed the query as a "hypothetical situation."
But when Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) pressed him further, Gonzales declared: "It is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes."
By then, however, the government had been conducting a secret wiretapping program for more than three years without court oversight, possibly in conflict with federal intelligence laws. Gonzales had personally defended the effort in fierce internal debates. Feingold later called his testimony that day "misleading and deeply troubling."
The accusation that Gonzales has been deceptive in his public remarks has erupted this summer into a full-blown political crisis for the Bush administration, as the beleaguered attorney general struggles repeatedly to explain to Congress the removal of a batch of U.S. attorneys, the wiretapping program and other actions.
In each case, Gonzales has appeared to lawmakers to be shielding uncomfortable facts about the Bush administration's conduct on sensitive matters. A series of misstatements and omissions has come to define his tenure at the helm of the Justice Department and is the central reason that lawmakers in both parties have been trying for months to push him out of his job.
Yet controversy over Gonzales's candor about George W. Bush's conduct or policies has actually dogged him for more than a decade, since he worked for Bush in Texas.
Whether Gonzales has deliberately told untruths or is merely hampered by his memory has been the subject of intense debate among members of Congress, legal scholars and others who have watched him over the years. Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities.
Administration officials say Gonzales's enemies are distorting his words for political gain. The Justice Department has portrayed the criticism as unavoidable and a matter of routine misunderstanding, provoked by the attorney general's presence at a "friction point between the executive branch and Congress when it comes to national security policy," as spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Friday.
Gonzales told senators earlier this year that allegations that he had been untruthful "have been personally very painful to me." But Gonzales's critics on and off Capitol Hill say he has had trouble with the truth for more than a decade, pointing to a controversy over Gonzales's account of why Bush was excused from jury duty in 1996 while serving as the governor of Texas.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who joined other Democrats last week in calling for an inquiry into possible perjury by Gonzales, said Friday that "most public servants -- Democratic or Republican, conservative, moderate or liberal -- seem to want to try to tell the truth. . . . With Gonzales, whatever answer fits he will tell, whether it's true or not. It almost seems pathological."
Over the past 2 1/2 years, lawmakers have accused Gonzales of dissembling on many topics, including civil liberties abuses under the USA Patriot Act and his role in reviewing aggressive interrogation tactics. After a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February 2006, Gonzales sent the panel a six-page, single-spaced letter to "clarify" six major points of testimony, including his erroneous claim that the Justice Department had never undertaken a legal analysis of domestic wiretapping.
But scrutiny of Gonzales increased dramatically this year as a result of Democrats' aggressive investigations into the Justice Department's firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Gonzales has particularly come under fire for his shifting explanations of his role in the dismissals and for his statements that he could not recall a host of details about the firings.
At a Senate hearing in April, for example, Gonzales said more than 60 times that he could not recall events or facts related to the firings, including a final, high-level meeting in his office at which the dismissal plan was formally approved.
Democrats and some experts on the use of language say that Gonzales's gaffes are too numerous and consistent to be chalked up to misunderstandings. In most instances, his answers, or his refusals to answer, have served to obscure events that would be damaging to the administration, Gonzales or Bush.
One example involves the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which allowed the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls between the United States and overseas in which one party had been tied to al-Qaeda. Gonzales has testified repeatedly that there was never "serious disagreement" among administration officials about the program and that an unusual visit by Gonzales to the hospital bed of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was focused on "other intelligence activities."
But FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III testified last week that the NSA program was the subject of a fierce debate within the administration and was the issue under discussion during the hospital visit.
Gonzales and his aides say the differing accounts boil down to a dispute over terminology: Gonzales was referring only to the surveillance program in the precise form that was confirmed publicly by Bush.
A news account yesterday said that the legal wrangling was about an effort to mine databases for sensitive information, which was linked to the NSA program but not acknowledged by Bush. That suggests that Gonzales's description might have been technically accurate.
But others privy to details of the surveillance activities -- including several lawmakers and Mueller -- have suggested that they were all part of a single NSA program. Gonzales's critics say his distinction was a lawyerly one that stretched the bounds of the truth.
"He's a slippery fellow, and I think so intentionally," said Richard L. Schott, a professor at the University of Texas's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. "He's trying to keep the president's secrets and to be a team player, even if it means prevaricating or forgetting convenient things."
"This almost subconscious bond of loyalty" between the attorney general and the president "may be driving a lot of this," said Schott, who has studied relations between the executive and legislative branches of government and the role of psychology in political behavior. "It's obvious that Gonzales owes Bush his career. Part of his behavior comes from this gratitude and extreme loyalty to Bush."
Bill Minutaglio, a University of Texas journalism professor and author of biographies of Gonzales and Bush, said Gonzales kept an "extremely, extremely low profile" in the three jobs Bush gave him in the Texas government -- general counsel, secretary of state and judge on the Supreme Court -- and had little practice before he came to Washington at responding publicly to stiff scrutiny. "The grilling he's enduring right now is beyond anything he had ever experienced in his life. He was ill prepared for it," Minutaglio said.
Gonzales has irritated congressional Democrats, and a few Republicans, by saying that he is responsible for decisions made within the Justice Department but distancing himself from the process that led to the prosecutor firings. At the April hearing, he said a dozen times that he accepted responsibility. But he also has told Congress that he did not know who placed the names of prosecutors on the firing list, and he has pinned much of the responsibility on his outgoing deputy, Paul J. McNulty, who has said he was only marginally involved.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told Gonzales at the hearing that much of his testimony was "a stretch," and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said he was "taken aback" by Gonzales's memory lapses. Last week, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the Judiciary Committee's senior Republican, warned Gonzales to review his remarks, saying: "I do not find your testimony credible, candidly."
Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University who has written about the confrontational character of dialogue in public life, said Gonzales's responses to grilling by lawmakers are an extreme example of a rhetorical style that many politicians adopt when they get into trouble. Although accepting responsibility, she said, they "very explicitly stop short of, 'I made a mistake. I'm at fault.' "
Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at the New York University School of Law, said that Gonzales's strengths "may lie elsewhere, but they are not in management."
"The idea that nine U.S. attorneys could be fired and the head of the department is only casually in the loop -- it is preposterous that a manager would let that happen." Gillers also said he thinks that Gonzales has exacerbated his problems because "when the inconsistencies are pointed out, he refuses to back down," adding: "He is digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole."
Questions about Gonzales's willingness to shade the truth on Bush's behalf came to prominence in the 1996 episode in which Bush was excused from Texas jury duty in a drunken-driving case. Bush was then the state's governor, and Gonzales was his general counsel. If Bush had served, he probably would have had to disclose his own drunken-driving conviction in Maine two decades earlier.
The judge, prosecutor and defense attorney involved in the case have said that Gonzales met with the judge and argued that jury service would pose a potential conflict of interest for Bush, who could be asked to pardon the defendant. Gonzales has disputed that account. He made no mention of meeting with the judge in a written statement submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Time magazine Media Whore JOHN CLOUD whitewashes Ann Coulter's nasty career in 6,000 word bio....
Thanks, John Cloud and TIME magazine, for this TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE of MEDIA WHORING in America....
In this case, Mr. Cloud's bio of ANN COULTER is mostly FICTION, pushing the narrative that Coulter is a respectable and legitimate spokeperson for the radical-right agenda. Ann Coulter IS the perfect spokesperson for the Radical Right agenda, precisely because she is NOT respectable: her HATE-FILLED RANTS _INCITE and GLORIFY VIOLENCE_ and contempt for the democratic institutions of law and US governance.
As this following excellent MediaMatters.org expose reveals:
-------------------------------------------------
Even after Time's cover story, you still don't know "the real Ann Coulter"
Mon, Apr 18, 2005
by Media Matters for America, MediaMatters.org
http://mediamatters.org/items/200504180001
"[Y]ou don't know the real Ann Coulter," Time magazine declares in teasing its cover story on the right-wing pundit.
But after reading the magazine's nearly 6,000-word profile of Coulter, readers still don't know the real Ann Coulter. They don't know the real Ann Coulter because Time carefully hid her from view, glorifying her legal work, whitewashing her habitual lies, and downplaying her -- at best -- grossly inappropriate rhetoric.
Early in the Time article, author John Cloud writes that Coulter "doesn't think of herself as an entertainer but as a public intellectual. Many would say she's more of a shrieking ideologue, but regardless, her paychecks come solely from writing and giving speeches. She earns nothing from TV." But Coulter's lack of a television paycheck may not be, as Cloud suggests, evidence of Coulter's high-minded preference for writing and speech-making. Perhaps she just can't get a TV paycheck; she was, after all -- as Cloud noted much, much later in the article -- fired from her job as an MSNBC commentator.
In establishing Coulter's bona fides as a serious person, Cloud notes that Coulter was a lawyer before becoming a commentator, explaining her "biggest case":
"And of course the biggest case Coulter ever helped handle as an attorney (she got her law degree from the University of Michigan in 1988) was a sexual-harassment claim of an unsophisticated woman against her powerful former boss. Coulter was one of a handful of informal legal advisers quietly helping Paula Jones, who had alleged in a 1994 lawsuit that she suffered distress and retaliation at her state job after refusing Arkansas Governor Clinton's request for oral sex in 1991. Coulter interviewed Jones and helped write her legal briefs."
Left out is one seemingly important detail: the case was dismissed for complete and total lack of merit. It was a glorified nuisance suit:
In a ruling that shocked both sides, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright rejected all of Jones's claims stemming from her 1991 encounter with Clinton in a hotel suite. Even if Clinton did make a crude proposition, the judge concluded that it would not constitute sexual assault and that there was no proof Jones was emotionally afflicted or punished in the workplace for rebuffing him. "There are no genuine issues for trial in this case," she wrote.
Also left out is Coulter's admission that to her, the purpose of the case wasn't to serve Jones's interests, but rather "bringing down the President."
While embellishing Coulter's legal work, pretending it was something more than partisan hackery, Cloud downplays Coulter's history of outrageous comments, unquestioningly quoting Coulter friend Miguel Estrada downplaying her vicious attacks as "a little bit of a polemicist" (Coulter herself sees no need for the qualifier; she told the Sunday Times of London that "I am a polemicist. I am perfectly frank about that") and writing that "Coulter can occasionally be coarse."
"Occasionally" coarse? A "little bit" of a polemicist? This about a "commentator" who claimed that the Democratic Party "supports killing, lying, adultery, thievery, envy"; who said of the idea that the American military were targeting journalists, "Would that it were so!"; who said President Clinton "was a very good rapist"; who insisted that "[l]iberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole"; who said that "I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days" to talk to liberals; who said it was lucky for former senator Max Cleland's political career that he lost an arm and two legs in Vietnam; who has said her "only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building"; and who wrote that the only real question about Bill Clinton was "whether to impeach or assassinate."
What, exactly, would it take for Time to declare that someone is "frequently" coarse?
Perhaps taking note of her threats against liberals would do it:
When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that [American Taliban supporter] John Walker [Lindh] is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.
Perhaps it would ... if Time had seen fit to include the full quote instead of cutting it off after "intimidate liberals," thus excluding the portion of the quote in which she intimates that liberals should fear for their lives -- just as she suggested assassinating a sitting president, bemoaned Timothy McVeigh's decision not to murder employees of The New York Times, and wished aloud that reporters in Iraq would get shot.
Along with downplaying Coulter's divisive rhetoric, Time unquestioningly repeats many of her comments.
Cloud writes that Coulter "has never wobbled on Bush's signature deed, the war in Iraq. 'The invasion of Iraq has gone fabulously well,' she wrote last June," comparing her consistency on the topic with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's comments suggesting the U.S. might have to pull out of Iraq. But Coulter's lack of wobble aside, what about the substance of her comments? Cloud doesn't say; Time readers are left to guess. The Coulter column declaring that the Iraq war was going "fabulously well" appeared in June 2004; April and May 2004 were, at the time, the two deadliest months for U.S. troops in Iraq -- 136 Americans died in Iraq in April, and 84 died in May. Was Coulter right, or was she wrong? Arguments can be made either way, but Time simply acts as though it doesn't matter.
Cloud writes of Coulter's thoughts on terrorism:
Coulter says profiling makes sense when Muslims have committed virtually all the terrorist attacks against Americans for the past 25 years--she begins a terrorism timeline in her latest book with Iranian militants taking Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979. She says of Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City, Okla., "One does not a pattern make."
One need only turn to page 15 of the very same issue of Time for a reminder that Timothy McVeigh isn't the only non-Muslim, American-born terrorist who has attacked the U.S. in recent years. Eric Rudolph, Time's "Milestones" column notes, pleaded guilty last week to "to the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics and attacks on abortion clinics in Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., and an Atlanta gay club, leaving a total of two dead and more than 150 injured." Given the timing of the plea, it seems it would be worth noting in response to Coulter's contention about Muslims. Perhaps Time simply lacked space in its 5,800-word profile.
But it gets worse. Time's Cloud quoted Coulter's claim that "liberals" have "produced" only one error of fact in her writing; this obvious lie is presented without rebuttal:
Slander was followed in 2003 by Treason, and by then Coulter had inspired an industry of debunkers, people who scour her every utterance for mistakes large and small. Entire websites were devoted to this purpose.
When I asked Coulter about her mistakes, she responded by e-mail: "I think I can save you some time ... The one error liberals have produced is that I was wrong when I said the NYT didn't mention Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page the day after his death. There have been novels and Broadway plays written about Ann Coulter's one mistake, which was pretty minor IMHO [in my humble opinion] -- the Times article DID begin: 'His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.' "
Actually, it didn't. The article began, "Stock car racing's greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today ..." The article doesn't mention Wal-Mart, although a subsequent piece did.
Though Cloud noted that Coulter's defense of her Earnhardt mistake was, itself, also untrue, he didn't take issue with her contention that "liberals" have identified only one mistake in her writing. This is an obvious falsehood; liberals and others have identified many, many errors of fact in Coulter's writing, as a search of Media Matters for America, Spinsanity.org, or countless other resources would reveal.
But Cloud deems Coulter mostly accurate: "Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words 'Ann Coulter lies,' you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors."
One would have hoped that the author of a 5,800-word Time magazine cover story would go beyond performing a simple Google search; Nexis would be a good start. But even Cloud's simple Google search should have been enough to dispel the notion that it's difficult to find "outright Coulter errors." The fourth "hit" that Cloud's Google search yields is a review of Coulter's Slander on the nonpartisan Spinsanity.org website, which revealed Coulter to have erred about:
The number of articles the New York Times printed about "Selma" over a six-year period;
The frequency of the Times' use of the phrase "moderate Republican" vs. that of "liberal Republican"; and
Former Vice President Al Gore's claim to have been the inspiration for the book Love Story.
Likewise, a quick look at just the first three of 11 pages of search results for "Coulter" at Media Matters finds examples of Coulter lying or being wrong about:
The New York Times "outing" gays (the people mentioned in the article in question were already "out") and ignoring former atheist William Murray's conversion to Christianity (the paper didn't ignore it; it covered it.)
Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry supposedly running for president "under invented names" (they didn't);
The Bush administration's refusal to reimburse the District of Columbia for costs incurred during Bush's inauguration;
Long-discredited allegations that President Clinton "sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery."
In short: Coulter is wrong very, very often, and Cloud's suggestion to the contrary is simply bizarre.
Equally bizarre is Cloud's assessment of Coulter's writing on gender issues:
Coulter -- who likes to shock reporters by wondering aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to vote -- howls at the idea that she was a college feminist. But even today, she can write about gender issues with particular sensitivity.
Here are some quotes Cloud probably didn't have in mind when he wrote of Coulter's alleged "sensitivity":
September 23, 2004: "I'm so pleased with my gender. We're not that bright."
Same day: "Women, though they're not as bright, don't want to die any more than men."
From How to Talk To a Liberal (If You Must): "The real reason I loathe and detest feminists is that real feminists, the core group, the Great Thinkers of the movement, which I had until now dismissed as the invention of a frat boy on a dare, have been at the forefront in tearing down the very institutions that protect women: monogamy, marriage, chastity, and chivalry. And surveying the wreckage, the best they have to offer is: 'Call me Ms.'"
May 5, 2004: "I think the other point that no one is making about the [Abu Ghraib] abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation. I mean, this is lesson, you know, one million and 47 on why women shouldn't be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious."
—J.F.
In this case, Mr. Cloud's bio of ANN COULTER is mostly FICTION, pushing the narrative that Coulter is a respectable and legitimate spokeperson for the radical-right agenda. Ann Coulter IS the perfect spokesperson for the Radical Right agenda, precisely because she is NOT respectable: her HATE-FILLED RANTS _INCITE and GLORIFY VIOLENCE_ and contempt for the democratic institutions of law and US governance.
As this following excellent MediaMatters.org expose reveals:
-------------------------------------------------
Even after Time's cover story, you still don't know "the real Ann Coulter"
Mon, Apr 18, 2005
by Media Matters for America, MediaMatters.org
http://mediamatters.org/items/200504180001
"[Y]ou don't know the real Ann Coulter," Time magazine declares in teasing its cover story on the right-wing pundit.
But after reading the magazine's nearly 6,000-word profile of Coulter, readers still don't know the real Ann Coulter. They don't know the real Ann Coulter because Time carefully hid her from view, glorifying her legal work, whitewashing her habitual lies, and downplaying her -- at best -- grossly inappropriate rhetoric.
Early in the Time article, author John Cloud writes that Coulter "doesn't think of herself as an entertainer but as a public intellectual. Many would say she's more of a shrieking ideologue, but regardless, her paychecks come solely from writing and giving speeches. She earns nothing from TV." But Coulter's lack of a television paycheck may not be, as Cloud suggests, evidence of Coulter's high-minded preference for writing and speech-making. Perhaps she just can't get a TV paycheck; she was, after all -- as Cloud noted much, much later in the article -- fired from her job as an MSNBC commentator.
In establishing Coulter's bona fides as a serious person, Cloud notes that Coulter was a lawyer before becoming a commentator, explaining her "biggest case":
"And of course the biggest case Coulter ever helped handle as an attorney (she got her law degree from the University of Michigan in 1988) was a sexual-harassment claim of an unsophisticated woman against her powerful former boss. Coulter was one of a handful of informal legal advisers quietly helping Paula Jones, who had alleged in a 1994 lawsuit that she suffered distress and retaliation at her state job after refusing Arkansas Governor Clinton's request for oral sex in 1991. Coulter interviewed Jones and helped write her legal briefs."
Left out is one seemingly important detail: the case was dismissed for complete and total lack of merit. It was a glorified nuisance suit:
In a ruling that shocked both sides, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright rejected all of Jones's claims stemming from her 1991 encounter with Clinton in a hotel suite. Even if Clinton did make a crude proposition, the judge concluded that it would not constitute sexual assault and that there was no proof Jones was emotionally afflicted or punished in the workplace for rebuffing him. "There are no genuine issues for trial in this case," she wrote.
Also left out is Coulter's admission that to her, the purpose of the case wasn't to serve Jones's interests, but rather "bringing down the President."
While embellishing Coulter's legal work, pretending it was something more than partisan hackery, Cloud downplays Coulter's history of outrageous comments, unquestioningly quoting Coulter friend Miguel Estrada downplaying her vicious attacks as "a little bit of a polemicist" (Coulter herself sees no need for the qualifier; she told the Sunday Times of London that "I am a polemicist. I am perfectly frank about that") and writing that "Coulter can occasionally be coarse."
"Occasionally" coarse? A "little bit" of a polemicist? This about a "commentator" who claimed that the Democratic Party "supports killing, lying, adultery, thievery, envy"; who said of the idea that the American military were targeting journalists, "Would that it were so!"; who said President Clinton "was a very good rapist"; who insisted that "[l]iberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole"; who said that "I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days" to talk to liberals; who said it was lucky for former senator Max Cleland's political career that he lost an arm and two legs in Vietnam; who has said her "only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building"; and who wrote that the only real question about Bill Clinton was "whether to impeach or assassinate."
What, exactly, would it take for Time to declare that someone is "frequently" coarse?
Perhaps taking note of her threats against liberals would do it:
When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that [American Taliban supporter] John Walker [Lindh] is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.
Perhaps it would ... if Time had seen fit to include the full quote instead of cutting it off after "intimidate liberals," thus excluding the portion of the quote in which she intimates that liberals should fear for their lives -- just as she suggested assassinating a sitting president, bemoaned Timothy McVeigh's decision not to murder employees of The New York Times, and wished aloud that reporters in Iraq would get shot.
Along with downplaying Coulter's divisive rhetoric, Time unquestioningly repeats many of her comments.
Cloud writes that Coulter "has never wobbled on Bush's signature deed, the war in Iraq. 'The invasion of Iraq has gone fabulously well,' she wrote last June," comparing her consistency on the topic with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's comments suggesting the U.S. might have to pull out of Iraq. But Coulter's lack of wobble aside, what about the substance of her comments? Cloud doesn't say; Time readers are left to guess. The Coulter column declaring that the Iraq war was going "fabulously well" appeared in June 2004; April and May 2004 were, at the time, the two deadliest months for U.S. troops in Iraq -- 136 Americans died in Iraq in April, and 84 died in May. Was Coulter right, or was she wrong? Arguments can be made either way, but Time simply acts as though it doesn't matter.
Cloud writes of Coulter's thoughts on terrorism:
Coulter says profiling makes sense when Muslims have committed virtually all the terrorist attacks against Americans for the past 25 years--she begins a terrorism timeline in her latest book with Iranian militants taking Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979. She says of Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City, Okla., "One does not a pattern make."
One need only turn to page 15 of the very same issue of Time for a reminder that Timothy McVeigh isn't the only non-Muslim, American-born terrorist who has attacked the U.S. in recent years. Eric Rudolph, Time's "Milestones" column notes, pleaded guilty last week to "to the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics and attacks on abortion clinics in Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., and an Atlanta gay club, leaving a total of two dead and more than 150 injured." Given the timing of the plea, it seems it would be worth noting in response to Coulter's contention about Muslims. Perhaps Time simply lacked space in its 5,800-word profile.
But it gets worse. Time's Cloud quoted Coulter's claim that "liberals" have "produced" only one error of fact in her writing; this obvious lie is presented without rebuttal:
Slander was followed in 2003 by Treason, and by then Coulter had inspired an industry of debunkers, people who scour her every utterance for mistakes large and small. Entire websites were devoted to this purpose.
When I asked Coulter about her mistakes, she responded by e-mail: "I think I can save you some time ... The one error liberals have produced is that I was wrong when I said the NYT didn't mention Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page the day after his death. There have been novels and Broadway plays written about Ann Coulter's one mistake, which was pretty minor IMHO [in my humble opinion] -- the Times article DID begin: 'His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.' "
Actually, it didn't. The article began, "Stock car racing's greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today ..." The article doesn't mention Wal-Mart, although a subsequent piece did.
Though Cloud noted that Coulter's defense of her Earnhardt mistake was, itself, also untrue, he didn't take issue with her contention that "liberals" have identified only one mistake in her writing. This is an obvious falsehood; liberals and others have identified many, many errors of fact in Coulter's writing, as a search of Media Matters for America, Spinsanity.org, or countless other resources would reveal.
But Cloud deems Coulter mostly accurate: "Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words 'Ann Coulter lies,' you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors."
One would have hoped that the author of a 5,800-word Time magazine cover story would go beyond performing a simple Google search; Nexis would be a good start. But even Cloud's simple Google search should have been enough to dispel the notion that it's difficult to find "outright Coulter errors." The fourth "hit" that Cloud's Google search yields is a review of Coulter's Slander on the nonpartisan Spinsanity.org website, which revealed Coulter to have erred about:
The number of articles the New York Times printed about "Selma" over a six-year period;
The frequency of the Times' use of the phrase "moderate Republican" vs. that of "liberal Republican"; and
Former Vice President Al Gore's claim to have been the inspiration for the book Love Story.
Likewise, a quick look at just the first three of 11 pages of search results for "Coulter" at Media Matters finds examples of Coulter lying or being wrong about:
The New York Times "outing" gays (the people mentioned in the article in question were already "out") and ignoring former atheist William Murray's conversion to Christianity (the paper didn't ignore it; it covered it.)
Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry supposedly running for president "under invented names" (they didn't);
The Bush administration's refusal to reimburse the District of Columbia for costs incurred during Bush's inauguration;
Long-discredited allegations that President Clinton "sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery."
In short: Coulter is wrong very, very often, and Cloud's suggestion to the contrary is simply bizarre.
Equally bizarre is Cloud's assessment of Coulter's writing on gender issues:
Coulter -- who likes to shock reporters by wondering aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to vote -- howls at the idea that she was a college feminist. But even today, she can write about gender issues with particular sensitivity.
Here are some quotes Cloud probably didn't have in mind when he wrote of Coulter's alleged "sensitivity":
September 23, 2004: "I'm so pleased with my gender. We're not that bright."
Same day: "Women, though they're not as bright, don't want to die any more than men."
From How to Talk To a Liberal (If You Must): "The real reason I loathe and detest feminists is that real feminists, the core group, the Great Thinkers of the movement, which I had until now dismissed as the invention of a frat boy on a dare, have been at the forefront in tearing down the very institutions that protect women: monogamy, marriage, chastity, and chivalry. And surveying the wreckage, the best they have to offer is: 'Call me Ms.'"
May 5, 2004: "I think the other point that no one is making about the [Abu Ghraib] abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation. I mean, this is lesson, you know, one million and 47 on why women shouldn't be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious."
—J.F.
Friday, July 27, 2007
White House SUCCEEDS in putting ONUS of Gonzales testimony ON DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS....
Senators Charles E. Schumer, left, Dianne Feinstein, Russ Feingold and Sheldon Whitehouse, calling for an inquiry on the attorney general.
TALK ABOUT "THIN RED LINE"!
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales LIED, bold-faced, under oath, to senators during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, July 24th, but because the enterprise that Mr. Gonzales was trying to cover up and stonewall was so vast, and because the Bush White House's control of 'media spin' is so complete, the entire news story devolves down to "FOUR SENATORS CALL FOR PERJURY INVESTIGATION into Attorney General Gonzales."
What was an in-your-face stonewall and overt lying by the Attorney General, under oath, becomes another COMPLEX "inside Washington government" "he said, she said" news story.
By 7:00 on Friday night, the network/cable news coverage on CNN news reverted to "WAR ON TERROR" alerts, warnings, and international sit-reps; while CNN's "headline prime" had Glen Beck interviewing Billy Ray Cyrus, Fox 'news' led with the helicopter crash following a high-speed pursuit, CNBC had the stock market losses for the week; and only MSNBC's 'Hardball' news show ran with the story about the Attorney General's disgraceful testimony... and even then in terms of "FBI Director CONTRADICTS Gonzales testimony."
In short,the White House will CONTINUE to use their powers to INFLUENCE the national news coverage, by MUDDYING and CONFLATING the stories of purge-gate, illegal surveillance, obstruction of justice, and targetting vote-registration activists in close elections by partisan prosecutors to swing close elections to White House friendly candidates.
Today, the White House has ALREADY succeeded in putting the ONUS of the "perjury investigation requested" story on the Democratic senators... the above scandal, in its grandiosity and premeditated intent, is SUBORDINATED to the usual "complex Washington government" meme.
=========================================
F.B.I. Chief Gives Account at Odds With Gonzales’s
(i.e. "FBI Director Mueller directly contradicts Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' sworn testimony.")
By David Johnston and Scott Shane
Published: July 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/washington/27gonzales.html
WASHINGTON, July 26 — The director of the F.B.I. offered testimony Thursday that sharply conflicted with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s sworn statements about a 2004 confrontation in which top Justice Department officials threatened to resign over a secret intelligence operation.
The director, Robert S. Mueller III, told the House Judiciary Committee that the confrontation was about the National Security Agency’s counterterrorist eavesdropping program, describing it as “an N.S.A. program that has been much discussed.” His testimony was a serious blow to Mr. Gonzales, who insisted at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that there were no disagreements inside the Bush administration about the program at the time of those discussions or at any other time.
The director’s remarks were especially significant because Mr. Mueller is the Justice Department’s chief law enforcement official. He also played a crucial role in the 2004 dispute over the program, intervening with President Bush to help deal with the threat of mass resignations that grew out of a day of emergency meetings at the White House and at the hospital bedside of John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general.
In a separate development, Senate Democrats, who were unaware of Mr. Mueller’s comments, demanded the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether Mr. Gonzales committed perjury in his testimony on Tuesday about the intelligence dispute. The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, issued a subpoena to Karl Rove, the White House senior political adviser, and another presidential aide, J. Scott Jennings, for testimony about the dismissal of federal prosecutors, another issue that has dogged Mr. Gonzales.
White House officials said the Democrats had engaged in political gamesmanship.
“What we are witnessing is an out-of-control Congress which spends time calling for special prosecutors, starting investigations, issuing subpoenas and generally just trying to settle scores,” said Scott M. Stanzel, a White House spokesman. “All the while they fail to pass appropriations bills and important issues like immigration reform, energy and other problems go unanswered.”
The conflict underscored how Mr. Gonzales’s troubles have expanded beyond accusations of improper political influence in the dismissal of United States attorneys to the handling of the eavesdropping program, in which Mr. Gonzales was significantly involved in his previous post as White House counsel.
“I had an understanding that the discussion was on a N.S.A. program,” Mr. Mueller said in answer to a question from Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.
Asked whether he was referring to the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or T.S.P., he replied, “The discussion was on a national N.S.A. program that has been much discussed, yes.”
Mr. Mueller said he had taken notes of some of his conversations about the issue, and after the hearing the committee asked him to produce them.
An F.B.I. spokesman declined Thursday night to elaborate on Mr. Mueller’s testimony.
In a four-hour appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Gonzales denied that the dispute arose over the Terrorist Surveillance Program, whose existence was confirmed by President Bush in December 2005 after it had been disclosed by The New York Times. Mr. Gonzales said it centered on “other intelligence activities.”
Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said Thursday night that Mr. Gonzales had testified truthfully, saying “confusion is inevitable when complicated classified activities are discussed in a public forum where the greatest care must be used not to compromise sensitive intelligence operations.”
The spokesman said that when Mr. Gonzales had said there had been no controversy about the eavesdropping operation, he was referring only to the program to intercept international communications that Mr. Bush publicly confirmed.
“The disagreement that occurred in March 2004 concerned the legal basis for intelligence activities that have not been publicly disclosed and that remain highly classified,” Mr. Roehrkasse said.
The four senators seeking an inquiry into Mr. Gonzales’s testimony sent a letter to the Justice Department saying “it is apparent that the attorney general has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements.”
The senators asked for the appointment of a special counsel. While the Justice Department is not obliged to act on their request, the letter reflected the chasm of distrust that has opened between lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee and Mr. Gonzales.
The senators who signed the letter were Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Dianne Feinstein of California, Charles E. Schumer of New York and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Ms. Feinstein, Mr. Feingold and Mr. Whitehouse are members of the Intelligence Committee and have been briefed on the intelligence programs at issue.
The senators’ letter was sent to Paul D. Clement, the solicitor general, because Mr. Gonzales is recused from investigations of his own conduct. In addition to his statements to Congress about the intelligence controversy, the letter raised the possibility that Mr. Gonzales had lied about the prosecutor firings.
In what amounted to a warning to the attorney general, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, sent Mr. Gonzales the transcript of Tuesday’s hearing, asking him to “mark any changes you wish to make to correct, clarify or supplement your answers so that, consistent with your oath, they are the whole truth.”
Similar requests are routinely sent to witnesses after hearings, but Mr. Leahy’s pointed language underscored his view of the seriousness of the dispute over Mr. Gonzales’s veracity.
Still, neither Mr. Leahy nor Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee’s top Republican and a tough critic of Mr. Gonzales, joined in the call for a perjury investigation.
“I don’t think you rush off precipitously and ask for appointment of special counsel to run that kind of an investigation,” Mr. Specter said.
Doubts about Mr. Gonzales’s version of events in March 2004 grew after James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general, testified in May that he and other Justice Department officials were prepared to resign over legal objections to an intelligence program that appeared to be the N.S.A. program.
Mr. Gonzales’s testimony Tuesday was his first since Mr. Comey’s account drew national attention. He stuck to his account, repeatedly saying that the dispute involved a different intelligence activity.
Mr. Gonzales described an emergency meeting with Congressional leaders at the White House on March 10, 2004, to discuss the dispute. That evening, he and the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., went to the hospital bedside of Mr. Ashcroft in an unsuccessful effort to get his reauthorization for the secret program.
Lawmakers present at the afternoon meeting have given various accounts, but several have said that only one program, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, was discussed.
In addition, in testimony last year, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the N.S.A. director when the program started and now heads the Central Intelligence Agency, said the March 2004 meeting involved the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
More Articles in Washington »
Thursday, July 26, 2007
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, wrong, wrong wrong wrong.... the sad record of the DC press corps/US media....
MAGNIFICENT column by Tom Engelherdt (at TomDispatch.com) sums up, in one commentary, TWO DECADES worth of servile idiocy and/or outright lies by the national "major media," starting with the slavish to "Conventional Wisdom" and feckless-to-power DC press corps.
Remember, President Clinton was IMPEACHED for "lying under oath," and Martha Stewart was CONVICTED, and IMPRISONED, _NOT_ for "insider trading" or "dumping stock" but for "lying" to FBI (SEC?) investigators.
But two days ago, the Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, LIED (badly and miserably at that), under oath, to a Congressional committee (the Senate Judiciary Committee), for the third time out of his three appearances before that committee. In one moment Mr. Gonzales stating that he did not go to the room of hospitalized then Attorney General John Ashcroft, late at night, to discuss the "terrorist surveillance act, " and then in the next moments agreeing that he had taken with him the document to EXTEND the TSA for the sedated Ashcroft (who had given up his powers to go under surgery) to sign!
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG WRONG! is the insanity the DC press corps has inflicted on America over the past dozens+ years... here is a compilation of those falsehoods and bogus issues by the numbers.
---------------------------------------
Wrong Again!Bush's Logic and Ours
By Tom Engelhardt (Tomgram: Only in Washington)
July 15, 2007
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174820
Short, perhaps, of Jefferson Davis, has any American leader ever been more relentlessly wrong? Since September 12, 2001, hardly a single move this administration has made in foreign policy hasn't turned out -- and relatively quickly at that -- to be the equivalent of a roadside bomb, exploding under the Humvee of American foreign policy.
For the benefit not of the public, but of our Congressional representatives who may have been in Washington a little too long and spent a little too much time reading the Washington-inspired press corps, here, at a glance, is the actual record of the President and his administration on Iraq (and allied topics) since 2001.
Top administration officials, the President, and/or Vice President claimed that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program; that he was searching for yellowcake uranium in Niger; that the Iraqi dictator had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (and that they knew where these were); that he had "mobile biological warfare labs"; that he had unmanned aerial vehicles capable of spraying the East Coast of the U.S. (hundreds of miles inland, no less) with deadly toxins, including anthrax; that he was allied with al-Qaeda; and that he had something to do with the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
Top administration officials, the President, and/or Vice President claimed that the Iraqis -- the previously oppressed Shiites, in particular -- would welcome us as liberators ("I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators" -- Dick Cheney); that they might strew "bouquets" of flowers at the feet of our troops; that the war would be a "cakewalk"; that the war and occupation would cost perhaps $40 billion or, at most, $100 billion (actual cost so far: at least $450 billion); that the occupation could easily be funded thanks to the "sea of oil" on which Iraq "floated"; that the neighbors in the region, especially Syria and Iran, would be shock-and-awed into submission or would fall before our might -- as some neocons then put it: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."; that, by August 2003, American troop strength in that country would be down to 30,000-40,000 troops.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
On September 14, 2001, George W. Bush stood on a pile of rubble in downtown New York City, a megaphone in his hands, and swore that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon"; not so long after, he claimed that Afghanistan had been "liberated" from the Taliban and al-Qaeda; soon after, he ordered American military attention (and crucial forces) shifted from Afghanistan and those al-Qaeda remnants to Iraq, where plans for a much-desired invasion were already in progress; on May 1, 2003, speaking under a "mission accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, he proclaimed "major combat" in Iraq "ended"; in July 2003, he challenged the Iraqi insurgency ("bring ‘em on").
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
In the ensuing years, the President promised "victory" in Iraq again and again, and he has indicated that "progress" was being made there in just about every speech or news conference he's ever given on the subject. On November 30, 2005, the President announced that he had a specific "strategy for victory in Iraq" in a speech in which he used the word "victory" 15 times and "progress" 28 times; until the Golden Mosque in Samarra was bombed in late February 2006, he and his top officials and military commanders continued to insist that Iraq was not in a state of incipient civil war; throughout all these years, he and his Vice President have repeatedly indicated that the press was simply feeding bad news to the American public and avoiding the "good news" in Iraq.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
Top administration officials, the President and/or the Vice President claimed that the following were "milestones" and/or "turning points" in Iraq: the killing of Saddam's two sons in July 2003; the capture of Saddam himself in December 2003 (The President even accepted Saddam's pistol from some of the American soldiers who captured him as a memento and placed it in a study beside the Oval Office, near a bust of Winston Churchill. "He really liked showing it off," according to a visitor); the official turning over of, as the President put it, "complete, full sovereignty" to an Iraqi "interim government" in June 2004; the "purple finger" election of January 30, 2005 that led to the writing of the Iraqi Constitution; the nationwide voting of December 15, 2005 that elected a national parliament; the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006 (about which the President felt so strongly that he personally congratulated the pilot of the plane that killed him on a trip to Baghdad and returned home reportedly feeling "buoyant").
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
When, before the invasion of Iraq, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki testified before Congress that "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed for an occupation of Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called him "wildly off the mark" and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared him "far off the mark"; when a relatively small American force took Baghdad in April 2003 and stood by while the Iraqi capital and its cultural treasure houses were looted, the Defense Secretary declared "freedom's untidy" and "stuff happens"; in June 2004, Wolfowitz denied that an insurgency was even taking place in Iraq ("An insurgency implies something that rose up afterwards ... [This] is a continuation of the war by people who never quit…"); by that June, the administration's viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, had already officially dissolved the Iraqi military and issued 97 legal orders, "binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people" (to remain in force even after any transfer of political authority), meant to control practically all Iraqi acts down to how you drove your car; in these years, the administration's representatives refused to deal diplomatically with Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
The Pentagon arrived in Iraq with plans to build four vast permanent military bases; later, the administration embarked on the construction of the largest embassy on the planet ("George W's Palace," as Iraqis sardonically dubbed it) in the heart of Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone; American officials, handing out enormous no-bid contracts to crony corporations, promised that Iraq would be "reconstructed," that electricity service would be suitably restored; that potable water would be delivered; that damaged sewage systems would be repaired; and that the oil industry would soar above the production levels of the end of the Saddam era.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
This January, in a speech to the nation, the President announced a "new way forward in Iraq" and assured Americans that his new "surge" plan would: "change America's course in Iraq," "help us succeed in the fight against terror," and "put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad"; that "America would hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced"; that "the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November"; that "Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis"; that "Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year"; that "the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution"; that the administration plan would use "America's full diplomatic resources to rally support for Iraq from nations throughout the Middle East," "bring us closer to success," and "hasten the day our troops begin coming home."
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
And the flood of misstatements, mistakes, missed predictions, and mistaken assessments of the Iraqi and global situations continue to pour in. To take just a few examples from the last week of news:
*Since 2005, the President has been repeating the ad-jingle-style mantra about the Iraqi military: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." In fact, $19 billion dollars has already been poured into training, advising, and equipping that military and the Iraqi police. Yet, according to the White House Progress Report, "Despite stepped-up training, the readiness of the Iraqi military to operate independently of U.S. forces has decreased since President Bush's new [surge] strategy was launched in January." Outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace, in fact, claims that "the number of Iraqi army battalions that operate independently, with no assistance from U.S. forces, has dropped from 10 to six over the last two months."
*The President promised in January that, in areas touched by his surge plan, American and Iraqi troops would begin to establish real "security," end sectarian cleansing, and allow no place to be a "safe haven" for militias. However, Julian E. Barnes and Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times, reporting from a militia-controlled Baghdad neighborhood, write: "[A]s the experience of the troops in Ubaidi indicates, U.S. forces so far have been unable to establish security, even for themselves. Iraqis continue to flee their homes, leaving mixed areas and seeking safety in religiously segregated neighborhoods. About 32,000 families fled in June alone, according to figures compiled by the United Nations and the Iraqi government that are due to be released next week."
*The President began his global war on terror by swearing that the U.S. would be eternally "on the hunt" for al-Qaeda and has claimed ever since that U.S. forces have radically weakened Osama bin Laden's organization (though, just recently, a frustrated Congress raised the price on Osama's head from $25 million to $50 million). At his most recent news conference, Bush offered the slippery formulation: "[B]ecause of the actions we have taken, al Qaeda is weaker today than they would have been." But a new administration intelligence report from the National Counterterrorism Center entitled "Al-Qaida Better Positioned to Strike the West," reportedly claims that "the terrorist network is gaining strength and has established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan for training and planning attacks."
*The President has constantly pointed to "progress" in Iraq. As Bob Woodward just revealed in the Washington Post, however, CIA Director Michael Hayden, offering an assessment of progress to the Iraq Study Group in a meeting last November, stated that "the inability of the [Maliki] government to govern seems irreversible." He added that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around.... We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function." Last week as well, a new intelligence assessment, a document signed off on by all 16 of the agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community, offered significantly grimmer news than the already grim White House interim Progress Report on possibilities for Iraqi national reconciliation and so "cast new uncertainty about the chances of success for President Bush's plan to contain the war through the deployment of an additional 28,000 U.S. troops, mostly in and around Baghdad."
But why go on? Only in Washington would such a consistent record of woeful failure lead to "stalemate." Only in Washington would a group of officials with such a record still be able to set the basic ground rules for debate. No individual would go back to the lot that sold you a string of automotive lemons, or let the doctor who had repeatedly misdiagnosed your disease (and maybe killed your neighbor with an overdose of anesthetic), operate on you.
In relation to Iraq, the situation can be summed up this way: The greatest gamblers in our history rolled the dice for a long-desired invasion, based on a dream of dominating the oil heartlands of the planet. This vision of a Pax Americana planet was based on the vaunted ability of the highest-tech military anywhere to dominate all in its path. (Domestically, a high-tech, well-oiled, utterly disciplined Republican Party was to establish political and lobbying dominion -- a Pax Republicana -- over Washington and the nation for a generation or more to come). On both imagined dominions, as on everything else, they were wrong. They were, that is, wrong in their expectations at the planetary level, and they have been wrong at every lesser level ever since. It has proven to be a cavalcade of stupidity.
If you take just the situation in Iraq in six-month increments, starting with the taking of Baghdad in 2003, any reasonable assessment would conclude that the American position has weakened and the country grown more chaotic, dangerous, and murderous in each of them. There is no reason to believe that, under the ministrations of this President, this Vice-President, these officials, and this set of military commanders anything could possibly change for the better as long as we remain stuck on the idea of occupying Iraq.
That's the logic of recent history. If you prefer the logic of dreams and of an empire of stupidity, then do stick with the present "stalemate."
Otherwise, it would make more sense to play an opposite's game with whatever positions the President and his officials take. Your odds on being right are guaranteed to be phenomenally high. Why, in fact, listen to them for one more second? Why be forced to look back and say "Wrong again!" one more time?
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books).
Remember, President Clinton was IMPEACHED for "lying under oath," and Martha Stewart was CONVICTED, and IMPRISONED, _NOT_ for "insider trading" or "dumping stock" but for "lying" to FBI (SEC?) investigators.
But two days ago, the Attorney General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, LIED (badly and miserably at that), under oath, to a Congressional committee (the Senate Judiciary Committee), for the third time out of his three appearances before that committee. In one moment Mr. Gonzales stating that he did not go to the room of hospitalized then Attorney General John Ashcroft, late at night, to discuss the "terrorist surveillance act, " and then in the next moments agreeing that he had taken with him the document to EXTEND the TSA for the sedated Ashcroft (who had given up his powers to go under surgery) to sign!
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG WRONG! is the insanity the DC press corps has inflicted on America over the past dozens+ years... here is a compilation of those falsehoods and bogus issues by the numbers.
---------------------------------------
Wrong Again!Bush's Logic and Ours
By Tom Engelhardt (Tomgram: Only in Washington)
July 15, 2007
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174820
Short, perhaps, of Jefferson Davis, has any American leader ever been more relentlessly wrong? Since September 12, 2001, hardly a single move this administration has made in foreign policy hasn't turned out -- and relatively quickly at that -- to be the equivalent of a roadside bomb, exploding under the Humvee of American foreign policy.
For the benefit not of the public, but of our Congressional representatives who may have been in Washington a little too long and spent a little too much time reading the Washington-inspired press corps, here, at a glance, is the actual record of the President and his administration on Iraq (and allied topics) since 2001.
Top administration officials, the President, and/or Vice President claimed that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program; that he was searching for yellowcake uranium in Niger; that the Iraqi dictator had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (and that they knew where these were); that he had "mobile biological warfare labs"; that he had unmanned aerial vehicles capable of spraying the East Coast of the U.S. (hundreds of miles inland, no less) with deadly toxins, including anthrax; that he was allied with al-Qaeda; and that he had something to do with the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
Top administration officials, the President, and/or Vice President claimed that the Iraqis -- the previously oppressed Shiites, in particular -- would welcome us as liberators ("I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators" -- Dick Cheney); that they might strew "bouquets" of flowers at the feet of our troops; that the war would be a "cakewalk"; that the war and occupation would cost perhaps $40 billion or, at most, $100 billion (actual cost so far: at least $450 billion); that the occupation could easily be funded thanks to the "sea of oil" on which Iraq "floated"; that the neighbors in the region, especially Syria and Iran, would be shock-and-awed into submission or would fall before our might -- as some neocons then put it: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."; that, by August 2003, American troop strength in that country would be down to 30,000-40,000 troops.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
On September 14, 2001, George W. Bush stood on a pile of rubble in downtown New York City, a megaphone in his hands, and swore that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon"; not so long after, he claimed that Afghanistan had been "liberated" from the Taliban and al-Qaeda; soon after, he ordered American military attention (and crucial forces) shifted from Afghanistan and those al-Qaeda remnants to Iraq, where plans for a much-desired invasion were already in progress; on May 1, 2003, speaking under a "mission accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, he proclaimed "major combat" in Iraq "ended"; in July 2003, he challenged the Iraqi insurgency ("bring ‘em on").
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
In the ensuing years, the President promised "victory" in Iraq again and again, and he has indicated that "progress" was being made there in just about every speech or news conference he's ever given on the subject. On November 30, 2005, the President announced that he had a specific "strategy for victory in Iraq" in a speech in which he used the word "victory" 15 times and "progress" 28 times; until the Golden Mosque in Samarra was bombed in late February 2006, he and his top officials and military commanders continued to insist that Iraq was not in a state of incipient civil war; throughout all these years, he and his Vice President have repeatedly indicated that the press was simply feeding bad news to the American public and avoiding the "good news" in Iraq.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
Top administration officials, the President and/or the Vice President claimed that the following were "milestones" and/or "turning points" in Iraq: the killing of Saddam's two sons in July 2003; the capture of Saddam himself in December 2003 (The President even accepted Saddam's pistol from some of the American soldiers who captured him as a memento and placed it in a study beside the Oval Office, near a bust of Winston Churchill. "He really liked showing it off," according to a visitor); the official turning over of, as the President put it, "complete, full sovereignty" to an Iraqi "interim government" in June 2004; the "purple finger" election of January 30, 2005 that led to the writing of the Iraqi Constitution; the nationwide voting of December 15, 2005 that elected a national parliament; the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006 (about which the President felt so strongly that he personally congratulated the pilot of the plane that killed him on a trip to Baghdad and returned home reportedly feeling "buoyant").
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
When, before the invasion of Iraq, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki testified before Congress that "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed for an occupation of Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called him "wildly off the mark" and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared him "far off the mark"; when a relatively small American force took Baghdad in April 2003 and stood by while the Iraqi capital and its cultural treasure houses were looted, the Defense Secretary declared "freedom's untidy" and "stuff happens"; in June 2004, Wolfowitz denied that an insurgency was even taking place in Iraq ("An insurgency implies something that rose up afterwards ... [This] is a continuation of the war by people who never quit…"); by that June, the administration's viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, had already officially dissolved the Iraqi military and issued 97 legal orders, "binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people" (to remain in force even after any transfer of political authority), meant to control practically all Iraqi acts down to how you drove your car; in these years, the administration's representatives refused to deal diplomatically with Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
The Pentagon arrived in Iraq with plans to build four vast permanent military bases; later, the administration embarked on the construction of the largest embassy on the planet ("George W's Palace," as Iraqis sardonically dubbed it) in the heart of Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone; American officials, handing out enormous no-bid contracts to crony corporations, promised that Iraq would be "reconstructed," that electricity service would be suitably restored; that potable water would be delivered; that damaged sewage systems would be repaired; and that the oil industry would soar above the production levels of the end of the Saddam era.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
This January, in a speech to the nation, the President announced a "new way forward in Iraq" and assured Americans that his new "surge" plan would: "change America's course in Iraq," "help us succeed in the fight against terror," and "put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad"; that "America would hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced"; that "the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November"; that "Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis"; that "Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year"; that "the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution"; that the administration plan would use "America's full diplomatic resources to rally support for Iraq from nations throughout the Middle East," "bring us closer to success," and "hasten the day our troops begin coming home."
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong again!
And the flood of misstatements, mistakes, missed predictions, and mistaken assessments of the Iraqi and global situations continue to pour in. To take just a few examples from the last week of news:
*Since 2005, the President has been repeating the ad-jingle-style mantra about the Iraqi military: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." In fact, $19 billion dollars has already been poured into training, advising, and equipping that military and the Iraqi police. Yet, according to the White House Progress Report, "Despite stepped-up training, the readiness of the Iraqi military to operate independently of U.S. forces has decreased since President Bush's new [surge] strategy was launched in January." Outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace, in fact, claims that "the number of Iraqi army battalions that operate independently, with no assistance from U.S. forces, has dropped from 10 to six over the last two months."
*The President promised in January that, in areas touched by his surge plan, American and Iraqi troops would begin to establish real "security," end sectarian cleansing, and allow no place to be a "safe haven" for militias. However, Julian E. Barnes and Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times, reporting from a militia-controlled Baghdad neighborhood, write: "[A]s the experience of the troops in Ubaidi indicates, U.S. forces so far have been unable to establish security, even for themselves. Iraqis continue to flee their homes, leaving mixed areas and seeking safety in religiously segregated neighborhoods. About 32,000 families fled in June alone, according to figures compiled by the United Nations and the Iraqi government that are due to be released next week."
*The President began his global war on terror by swearing that the U.S. would be eternally "on the hunt" for al-Qaeda and has claimed ever since that U.S. forces have radically weakened Osama bin Laden's organization (though, just recently, a frustrated Congress raised the price on Osama's head from $25 million to $50 million). At his most recent news conference, Bush offered the slippery formulation: "[B]ecause of the actions we have taken, al Qaeda is weaker today than they would have been." But a new administration intelligence report from the National Counterterrorism Center entitled "Al-Qaida Better Positioned to Strike the West," reportedly claims that "the terrorist network is gaining strength and has established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan for training and planning attacks."
*The President has constantly pointed to "progress" in Iraq. As Bob Woodward just revealed in the Washington Post, however, CIA Director Michael Hayden, offering an assessment of progress to the Iraq Study Group in a meeting last November, stated that "the inability of the [Maliki] government to govern seems irreversible." He added that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around.... We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function." Last week as well, a new intelligence assessment, a document signed off on by all 16 of the agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community, offered significantly grimmer news than the already grim White House interim Progress Report on possibilities for Iraqi national reconciliation and so "cast new uncertainty about the chances of success for President Bush's plan to contain the war through the deployment of an additional 28,000 U.S. troops, mostly in and around Baghdad."
But why go on? Only in Washington would such a consistent record of woeful failure lead to "stalemate." Only in Washington would a group of officials with such a record still be able to set the basic ground rules for debate. No individual would go back to the lot that sold you a string of automotive lemons, or let the doctor who had repeatedly misdiagnosed your disease (and maybe killed your neighbor with an overdose of anesthetic), operate on you.
In relation to Iraq, the situation can be summed up this way: The greatest gamblers in our history rolled the dice for a long-desired invasion, based on a dream of dominating the oil heartlands of the planet. This vision of a Pax Americana planet was based on the vaunted ability of the highest-tech military anywhere to dominate all in its path. (Domestically, a high-tech, well-oiled, utterly disciplined Republican Party was to establish political and lobbying dominion -- a Pax Republicana -- over Washington and the nation for a generation or more to come). On both imagined dominions, as on everything else, they were wrong. They were, that is, wrong in their expectations at the planetary level, and they have been wrong at every lesser level ever since. It has proven to be a cavalcade of stupidity.
If you take just the situation in Iraq in six-month increments, starting with the taking of Baghdad in 2003, any reasonable assessment would conclude that the American position has weakened and the country grown more chaotic, dangerous, and murderous in each of them. There is no reason to believe that, under the ministrations of this President, this Vice-President, these officials, and this set of military commanders anything could possibly change for the better as long as we remain stuck on the idea of occupying Iraq.
That's the logic of recent history. If you prefer the logic of dreams and of an empire of stupidity, then do stick with the present "stalemate."
Otherwise, it would make more sense to play an opposite's game with whatever positions the President and his officials take. Your odds on being right are guaranteed to be phenomenally high. Why, in fact, listen to them for one more second? Why be forced to look back and say "Wrong again!" one more time?
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books).
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The Bush-Rove-Gonzales PURGE of US Attorneys involved CRIMINAL VIOLATIONS of the law...
Ho Hum. Let's make a drinking game of how many WEASEL WORDS the press and media can use to DOWNPLAY Purge-gate, they typical Rovian-Cheney-Gonzales effort to SMEAR competent US Attorneys in an effort to justify FIRING them, so as to replace them with partisan hacks. (Like Rove's own deputy, Tim Griffin, installed as US Attorney for Arkansas after Republican Bush nominated US Attorney Bud Cummings was fired in the Rove-Gonzales post-2006 election purge... despite Griffin NEVER HAVING PARTICIPATED IN A SINGLE CRIMINAL PROSECUTION in his entire legal career!)
Well, right off the top we have the headline, "REPORT SUGGESTS laws broken."
If Bill Clinton were president, the Washington Post headline would read "POSSIBLE CRIMINAL VIOLATIONS in Attorney Purge"!
Otherwise, an actually informative report, that does start to enumerate some of the legal (not to mention ethical) violations that the Bush White House had piled on, in an effort to stem the damage of Election 2006 handing the House and Senate to the Democrats.
----------------------------------------------------
Report Suggests Laws Broken in Attorney Firings
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 25, 2007; A03
House Democrats, preparing for a vote today on contempt citations against President Bush's chief of staff and former counsel, produced a report yesterday that for the first time alleges specific ways that several administration officials may have broken the law during the multiple firings of U.S. attorneys.
The report says that Congress's seven-month investigation into the firings raises "serious concerns" that senior White House and Justice Department aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year may have obstructed justice and violated federal statutes that protect civil service employees, prohibit political retaliation against government officials and cover presidential records.
The 52-page memorandum, from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), seeks to explain why Democrats are trying to overcome an effort by the White House to shield officials and documents from the congressional inquiry through a claim of executive privilege. The report also provides the first written account of the Democrats' interpretation of the firings and the administration's response to the controversy.
The investigation "has uncovered serious evidence of wrongdoing by the department and White House staff," Conyers says.
The memorandum says the probe has turned up evidence that some of the U.S. attorneys were improperly selected for firing because of their handling of vote fraud allegations, public corruption cases or other cases that could affect close elections. It also says that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior Justice aides "appear to have made false or misleading statements to Congress, many of which sought to minimize the role of White House personnel."
In addition, the memorandum asserts repeatedly that the president's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was the first administration official to broach the idea of firing U.S. attorneys shortly after the 2004 election -- an assertion the White House has said is not true.
In one of more than 300 footnotes, the Democrats point to a Jan. 6, 2005, e-mail from an assistant White House counsel that says that Rove "stopped by to ask . . . how we planned to proceed regarding U.S. attorneys, whether we were going to allow them to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc."
The memorandum says that lawmakers need access to White House information to determine whether laws were broken and to rewrite laws regarding U.S. attorneys.
Yesterday evening, White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto responded to the Democrats' contentions by saying: "Repeating unsubstantiated assertions over and over again won't make them come true. After months of hearings and thousands of pages of documents, the committee appears to have now shown what little they have to show for it."
Conyers released the memorandum to Judiciary Committee members, who are set to vote on two contempt-of-Congress resolutions. One is against White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, who is the custodian of the e-mails and other documents related to the firings that lawmakers have been seeking. The other is against former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, who was subpoenaed to testify before the panel two weeks ago but did not appear.
Last week, White House officials vowed that if the full House holds the two officials in contempt, they would block lawmakers' ability to bring the charges before a federal judge by preventing any U.S. attorney from pursuing such a case. The administration cited a 1984 Justice Department legal opinion, never adjudicated in the courts, that said that a federal prosecutor cannot be compelled to bring a case seeking to override a president's executive privilege claim.
In the memorandum, the Democrats provide the first legal justification for countering the White House's view, saying that the 1984 legal opinion "does not apply here." For one thing, the Democrats contend, Bush has not invoked the privilege properly because he has not furnished a signed statement or "privilege logs" specifying the documents being withheld. In addition, the memo says, "there is not the slightest indication" the 1984 opinion would apply to a former executive branch official, such as Miers.
Well, right off the top we have the headline, "REPORT SUGGESTS laws broken."
If Bill Clinton were president, the Washington Post headline would read "POSSIBLE CRIMINAL VIOLATIONS in Attorney Purge"!
Otherwise, an actually informative report, that does start to enumerate some of the legal (not to mention ethical) violations that the Bush White House had piled on, in an effort to stem the damage of Election 2006 handing the House and Senate to the Democrats.
----------------------------------------------------
Report Suggests Laws Broken in Attorney Firings
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 25, 2007; A03
House Democrats, preparing for a vote today on contempt citations against President Bush's chief of staff and former counsel, produced a report yesterday that for the first time alleges specific ways that several administration officials may have broken the law during the multiple firings of U.S. attorneys.
The report says that Congress's seven-month investigation into the firings raises "serious concerns" that senior White House and Justice Department aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year may have obstructed justice and violated federal statutes that protect civil service employees, prohibit political retaliation against government officials and cover presidential records.
The 52-page memorandum, from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), seeks to explain why Democrats are trying to overcome an effort by the White House to shield officials and documents from the congressional inquiry through a claim of executive privilege. The report also provides the first written account of the Democrats' interpretation of the firings and the administration's response to the controversy.
The investigation "has uncovered serious evidence of wrongdoing by the department and White House staff," Conyers says.
The memorandum says the probe has turned up evidence that some of the U.S. attorneys were improperly selected for firing because of their handling of vote fraud allegations, public corruption cases or other cases that could affect close elections. It also says that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior Justice aides "appear to have made false or misleading statements to Congress, many of which sought to minimize the role of White House personnel."
In addition, the memorandum asserts repeatedly that the president's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was the first administration official to broach the idea of firing U.S. attorneys shortly after the 2004 election -- an assertion the White House has said is not true.
In one of more than 300 footnotes, the Democrats point to a Jan. 6, 2005, e-mail from an assistant White House counsel that says that Rove "stopped by to ask . . . how we planned to proceed regarding U.S. attorneys, whether we were going to allow them to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc."
The memorandum says that lawmakers need access to White House information to determine whether laws were broken and to rewrite laws regarding U.S. attorneys.
Yesterday evening, White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto responded to the Democrats' contentions by saying: "Repeating unsubstantiated assertions over and over again won't make them come true. After months of hearings and thousands of pages of documents, the committee appears to have now shown what little they have to show for it."
Conyers released the memorandum to Judiciary Committee members, who are set to vote on two contempt-of-Congress resolutions. One is against White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, who is the custodian of the e-mails and other documents related to the firings that lawmakers have been seeking. The other is against former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, who was subpoenaed to testify before the panel two weeks ago but did not appear.
Last week, White House officials vowed that if the full House holds the two officials in contempt, they would block lawmakers' ability to bring the charges before a federal judge by preventing any U.S. attorney from pursuing such a case. The administration cited a 1984 Justice Department legal opinion, never adjudicated in the courts, that said that a federal prosecutor cannot be compelled to bring a case seeking to override a president's executive privilege claim.
In the memorandum, the Democrats provide the first legal justification for countering the White House's view, saying that the 1984 legal opinion "does not apply here." For one thing, the Democrats contend, Bush has not invoked the privilege properly because he has not furnished a signed statement or "privilege logs" specifying the documents being withheld. In addition, the memo says, "there is not the slightest indication" the 1984 opinion would apply to a former executive branch official, such as Miers.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Ft. Lauderdale Scum-Sentinel BURIES "Bush orders aides to DEFY Congress" story under wishy-washy headline, page A-3....
"PANEL PUSHES CONTEMPT ISSUE" ??!
WHAT the hell does that mean?
For a real-life translation, let's pretend that President Clinton were still in office.... here's how the Sun-Sentinel headline would read:
"PRESIDENT CLINTON ORDERS STAFFERS to DEFY CONGRESS; OBSTRUCTS Congressional Subpoena"!!
That the "major media" can portray the serial, criminal, obstructionist conduct of the Bush-Rove-Cheney White House under such anemic, wishy-washy, muddy headlines, illustrates how callow, vacillating, and enabling the Democratic 'leadership' is.
But just because the Democratic 'leadership' is weak, anemic, and willing to throw its own under the bus, does not give the American press-media the 'right' to distort, divert, and misinform readers.... (except that, in the real-world of hard-ball politics, it does).
==============================================
Panel pushes contempt issueBush's ex-aides are likely to face vote in full House
By Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times
July 24, 2007
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sfl-flaattorneys0724nbjul24,0,925935.story
WASHINGTON The House Judiciary Committee said Monday that it would move forward with contempt of Congress proceedings against President Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas pertaining to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
The panel's chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said the committee would vote Wednesday on a resolution to hold both Bolten and Miers in contempt for refusing to turn over documents and testimony sought by the panel in the politically charged case.
The decision ratchets up a battle between Congress and the White House in which the Bush administration has sought to invoke executive privilege to keep documents about the firings under wraps. The resolution would go to the House floor for a vote if, as expected, the committee approved it.
Only twice since the Watergate investigations of the mid-1970s has the full House voted to hold an administration official in contempt of Congress. In 1982, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Anne Gorsuch refused to turn over documents; a year later another EPA official, Rita Lavelle, refused to appear before a House committee. The Justice Department refused to prosecute Gorsuch, and Lavelle was acquitted in court.
"This investigation, including the reluctant but necessary decision to move forward with contempt, has been a very deliberative process, taking care at each step to respect the executive branch's legitimate prerogatives," Conyers said.
"I've allowed the White House and Ms. Miers every opportunity to cooperate with this investigation, either voluntarily or under subpoena. It is still my hope that they will reconsider this hard-line position, and cooperate with our investigation so that we can get to the bottom of this matter," he said.
Congressional investigators have reviewed thousands of pages of Justice Department documents and testimony, but the investigation has hit a wall at the White House, which has declined to make officials available for public questioning under oath.
The administration has offered to make some officials available for private questioning without a transcript and without the opportunity for follow-up questions. Legislators have said those conditions are unacceptable.
"It seems now that we have a fishing expedition that's woefully short on fish," White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday. "This is one of these things where Congress can get its facts and do its due diligence without having to get to this point, and we continue to hold open the possibility of accommodation."
Under federal law, being in contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, and cases are referred to the U.S. Attorney's office for the District of Columbia for prosecution. The penalty is one to 12 months in jail and $100 to $1,000 in fines.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
WHAT the hell does that mean?
For a real-life translation, let's pretend that President Clinton were still in office.... here's how the Sun-Sentinel headline would read:
"PRESIDENT CLINTON ORDERS STAFFERS to DEFY CONGRESS; OBSTRUCTS Congressional Subpoena"!!
That the "major media" can portray the serial, criminal, obstructionist conduct of the Bush-Rove-Cheney White House under such anemic, wishy-washy, muddy headlines, illustrates how callow, vacillating, and enabling the Democratic 'leadership' is.
But just because the Democratic 'leadership' is weak, anemic, and willing to throw its own under the bus, does not give the American press-media the 'right' to distort, divert, and misinform readers.... (except that, in the real-world of hard-ball politics, it does).
==============================================
Panel pushes contempt issueBush's ex-aides are likely to face vote in full House
By Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times
July 24, 2007
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sfl-flaattorneys0724nbjul24,0,925935.story
WASHINGTON The House Judiciary Committee said Monday that it would move forward with contempt of Congress proceedings against President Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas pertaining to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
The panel's chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said the committee would vote Wednesday on a resolution to hold both Bolten and Miers in contempt for refusing to turn over documents and testimony sought by the panel in the politically charged case.
The decision ratchets up a battle between Congress and the White House in which the Bush administration has sought to invoke executive privilege to keep documents about the firings under wraps. The resolution would go to the House floor for a vote if, as expected, the committee approved it.
Only twice since the Watergate investigations of the mid-1970s has the full House voted to hold an administration official in contempt of Congress. In 1982, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Anne Gorsuch refused to turn over documents; a year later another EPA official, Rita Lavelle, refused to appear before a House committee. The Justice Department refused to prosecute Gorsuch, and Lavelle was acquitted in court.
"This investigation, including the reluctant but necessary decision to move forward with contempt, has been a very deliberative process, taking care at each step to respect the executive branch's legitimate prerogatives," Conyers said.
"I've allowed the White House and Ms. Miers every opportunity to cooperate with this investigation, either voluntarily or under subpoena. It is still my hope that they will reconsider this hard-line position, and cooperate with our investigation so that we can get to the bottom of this matter," he said.
Congressional investigators have reviewed thousands of pages of Justice Department documents and testimony, but the investigation has hit a wall at the White House, which has declined to make officials available for public questioning under oath.
The administration has offered to make some officials available for private questioning without a transcript and without the opportunity for follow-up questions. Legislators have said those conditions are unacceptable.
"It seems now that we have a fishing expedition that's woefully short on fish," White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday. "This is one of these things where Congress can get its facts and do its due diligence without having to get to this point, and we continue to hold open the possibility of accommodation."
Under federal law, being in contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, and cases are referred to the U.S. Attorney's office for the District of Columbia for prosecution. The penalty is one to 12 months in jail and $100 to $1,000 in fines.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
Monday, July 23, 2007
New York lyin' Times whores "APPROVAL UP" for Iraq invasion poll.. SELECTIVE HEADLINE, to say the least!
Talk about SELECTIVE EDITING... and a grossly MISLEADING headline!
Thanks to New York Whore Times writers MEGAN THEE, Marina Stefan, and their editor(s) for this TEXT-BOOK EXAMPLE of the NY Times WHORING for the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq.
Strictly speaking, Ms. Thee and Marina Stefan and their Times editors are correct:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20070723_poll_results.pdf
BUT, the larger, more important poll-number factoid the Whore Times PREFERS TO KEEP OUT OF ITS HEADLINE: that TWO THIRDS of Americans polled believe the USA shold REDUCE its forces in Iraq!
Poll indicates A VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS are AGAINST the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq... the New York Times WHORE editors prefer to headline "APPROVAL OF INVASION UP."
Herr Joseph Goebbels must be smiling. as he spins in his grave, at his 'journalistic' heirs at the New York Slimes...
===============================
Support for Initial Invasion Has Risen, Poll Shows
By MEGAN THEE
Published: July 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/us/24poll.html?hp
Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq.
Complete Poll Results (pdf) But two-thirds of those polled said the United States should reduce its forces in Iraq, or remove them altogether. Support for the invasion had been at an all-time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the invasion of Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out. The latest poll made clear that a two-thirds majority of Americans continue to say the war is going badly.
However, the number of people who say the war is going “very badly” has fallen from 45 percent earlier in July to a current reading of 35 percent, and of those who say it is going well, 29 percent now describe it as “somewhat well” compared with 23 percent just last week.
Many of those who said the invasion was correct made it clear, however, that they are no longer convinced the United States should remain there.
“At the time that we went into Iraq, we had just come out of 9/11. The nation was in shock, frightened,” Sally Fisher of Garden City, Mich., said in a follow-up interview after the poll was conducted. “Looking back, I still think we should have gone in. Should we have stayed as long as we did? No.”
The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Friday through Sunday with 889 adults. The margin of sampling error for all adults is plus or minus three percentage points and larger for subgroups.
The poll’s findings are in line with those of one conducted last week by The New York Times and CBS News. Although both polls show a similar rise in overall support for the invasion, there was no change in measures like Mr. Bush’s handling of the war or how well the increase in troops is working, making it difficult to discern what the public may be reacting to.
At the end of a week that included a contentious Senate debate leading to an all-night session, Americans have a low opinion of Congress. Six in 10 Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing in general. When asked specifically about their opinions of how the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are handling the war, disapproval ratings are similar — 65 percent disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of Iraq and 59 percent disapprove of the Democrats’.
“If Congress isn’t ready to really go over there with enough force to change things now we might as well get out,” said Shawn Taylor of Hardin, Mont. “Either push the envelope and make it happen or leave it alone.”
The modest gains in support for the invasion of Iraq come at a time when Bush administration and top military commanders have called attention to what they say are signs of progress, and have urged patience pending a report due this fall from the top American commander in Iraq. The administration has also issued new warnings about heightened terrorist activity.
A majority of Americans say that in the long run, the United States will be safer from terrorism if it stays out of the affairs of countries in the Middle East. But there is a sharp party divide on the issue — 73 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 28 percent of Republicans agree.
Americans are divided over whether the Bush administration’s discussion of terrorism reflects a genuine concern or is a political tool. Half of those polled say the administration talks about the threat of terrorism to gain a political advantage; 39 percent say it is a genuine issue.
News about Iraq has captured Americans’ attention recently, with two-thirds of respondents reporting that they have paid “a lot” or “some” attention to news about the war in Iraq over the last few weeks.
Complete results and methodology are available at nytimes.com/polls.
Marina Stefan contributed reporting.
Thanks to New York Whore Times writers MEGAN THEE, Marina Stefan, and their editor(s) for this TEXT-BOOK EXAMPLE of the NY Times WHORING for the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq.
Strictly speaking, Ms. Thee and Marina Stefan and their Times editors are correct:
<< Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq HAS RISEN somewhat >>from 35% approving the invasion in May, to 45% approving the invasion today, as measured by a NYT/CBS poll taken this week.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20070723_poll_results.pdf
BUT, the larger, more important poll-number factoid the Whore Times PREFERS TO KEEP OUT OF ITS HEADLINE: that TWO THIRDS of Americans polled believe the USA shold REDUCE its forces in Iraq!
Poll indicates A VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS are AGAINST the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq... the New York Times WHORE editors prefer to headline "APPROVAL OF INVASION UP."
Herr Joseph Goebbels must be smiling. as he spins in his grave, at his 'journalistic' heirs at the New York Slimes...
===============================
Support for Initial Invasion Has Risen, Poll Shows
By MEGAN THEE
Published: July 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/us/24poll.html?hp
Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq.
Complete Poll Results (pdf) But two-thirds of those polled said the United States should reduce its forces in Iraq, or remove them altogether. Support for the invasion had been at an all-time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the invasion of Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out. The latest poll made clear that a two-thirds majority of Americans continue to say the war is going badly.
However, the number of people who say the war is going “very badly” has fallen from 45 percent earlier in July to a current reading of 35 percent, and of those who say it is going well, 29 percent now describe it as “somewhat well” compared with 23 percent just last week.
Many of those who said the invasion was correct made it clear, however, that they are no longer convinced the United States should remain there.
“At the time that we went into Iraq, we had just come out of 9/11. The nation was in shock, frightened,” Sally Fisher of Garden City, Mich., said in a follow-up interview after the poll was conducted. “Looking back, I still think we should have gone in. Should we have stayed as long as we did? No.”
The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Friday through Sunday with 889 adults. The margin of sampling error for all adults is plus or minus three percentage points and larger for subgroups.
The poll’s findings are in line with those of one conducted last week by The New York Times and CBS News. Although both polls show a similar rise in overall support for the invasion, there was no change in measures like Mr. Bush’s handling of the war or how well the increase in troops is working, making it difficult to discern what the public may be reacting to.
At the end of a week that included a contentious Senate debate leading to an all-night session, Americans have a low opinion of Congress. Six in 10 Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing in general. When asked specifically about their opinions of how the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are handling the war, disapproval ratings are similar — 65 percent disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of Iraq and 59 percent disapprove of the Democrats’.
“If Congress isn’t ready to really go over there with enough force to change things now we might as well get out,” said Shawn Taylor of Hardin, Mont. “Either push the envelope and make it happen or leave it alone.”
The modest gains in support for the invasion of Iraq come at a time when Bush administration and top military commanders have called attention to what they say are signs of progress, and have urged patience pending a report due this fall from the top American commander in Iraq. The administration has also issued new warnings about heightened terrorist activity.
A majority of Americans say that in the long run, the United States will be safer from terrorism if it stays out of the affairs of countries in the Middle East. But there is a sharp party divide on the issue — 73 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 28 percent of Republicans agree.
Americans are divided over whether the Bush administration’s discussion of terrorism reflects a genuine concern or is a political tool. Half of those polled say the administration talks about the threat of terrorism to gain a political advantage; 39 percent say it is a genuine issue.
News about Iraq has captured Americans’ attention recently, with two-thirds of respondents reporting that they have paid “a lot” or “some” attention to news about the war in Iraq over the last few weeks.
Complete results and methodology are available at nytimes.com/polls.
Marina Stefan contributed reporting.
Washington Post whores Dictatorial claims to power by the Bush-Cheney administration...
Well, whadda ya know.. the Washington Whore Post, who, just a few years ago, supported Repulbican Senators and Congressional subpoenaes and investigations into EVERY FACET of the Clinton White House, now replay their "ENERGY TASK FORCE? TOP SECRET!" genuflection to the Bush-Cheney White House.
How long would it take for the WHORE editors and publishers of the Cowardly Washington Post to DEMAND that officials in a DEMOCRATIC White House be HAULED OFF TO JAIL for OBSTRUCTING and refusing a Congressional demand for testimony into possible ILLEGAL actions by that White House?
Why, in mere nano-seconds, the Washington Whore Post would be publishing indignant "WHITE HOUSE DEFIES CONGRESS! OBSTRUCTS JUSTICE!" headlines, were there DEMOCRATS, not REPUBLICANS, refusing to answer Congressional subpoenaes.
-----------------------------------------------
The White House Throws a "Hail Mary Obstruction of Justice Pass"editorial by Mark Karlin
Mon, 07/23/2007
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/149
Well, the Busheviks stole the presidency, and have survived through an endless Iraq War with an ever-changing mission, so no one has ever accused them of being timid. While the Democrats worry if their trousers are creased or if their slip is showing, the Busheviks are punching them in the face.
No matter how many times the Busheviks gouge out the eyes of the Dems and kick them in the groin, the refs keeping finding some excuse to keep from throwing a penalty marker down. That’s because the Republican effort to control the judiciary, which began in full force with Reagan, is finally reaping its full benefits in protecting GOP wrongdoing.
The Busheviks, in large part, control the federal courts in most districts, as well as the Supreme Court. Through the Department of Justice – as we have painfully learned – they also control a largely partisan group of U.S. Attorneys.
In fact, the federal justice system in the United States has, in general, become an extension of the Republican Party.
That is why the Busheviks dropped the bombshell Friday, through "anonymous sources," that if Congress issues contempt charges against individuals invoking executive privilege (in order to protect Bush and Cheney -- and Rove), then Bush would probably prohibit the Department of Justice from having the Washington D.C. U.S. Attorney pursue the charges.
According to a Friday, July 20, Washington Post article:
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
You see, in case you haven’t kept up, once Congress has authorized contempt charges, they are referred to the U.S. Attorney in D.C. to decide if they merit prosecution. The White House now is arguing that it can obstruct justice by prohibiting the Department of Justice from pursuing justice.
This is the Bushevik version of a "Hail Mary Obstruction of Justice" pass.
According to the Post:
Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration's stance "astonishing."
"That's a breathtakingly broad view of the president's role in this system of separation of powers," Rozell said. "What this statement is saying is the president's claim of executive privilege trumps all."
Can the niceties! It’s White House obstruction of justice taken to a new level of violating the Constitution.
It’s unlikely that the D.C. U.S. Attorney would seriously pursue the contempt charges, when they come down, anyway. That’s because he was appointed by Bush, and being in D.C., you can be sure that he is a "made man."
But the Busheviks apparently aren’t going to take any chances that the D.C. U.S. prosecutor might show some integrity and actually present the contempt charges to a grand jury; they are going to prohibit the DOJ from allowing any prosecutor to pursue contempt charges in anyway whatsoever.
The Post cites its White House source for the latest and boldest Bushevik assault on justice yet:
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, added: "It has long been understood that, in circumstances like these, the constitutional prerogatives of the president would make it a futile and purely political act for Congress to refer contempt citations to U.S. attorneys."
(Now, before we go on, does anyone other than the Washington Post ever believe that someone in the Bushevik White House would speak about such a bombshell "on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly"? Obviously, this was an authorized leak. No Bushevik would talk to the press about something this significant without a heads up from Rove, Cheney or Bush. How can the Post be so lame?)
So, the White House is signaling to Congress, "Don’t bother with contempt citations. You’re not going anywhere. We control the judges; we control the prosecutors; and we control the Department of Justice."
Those who argue that calling the Busheviks totalitarian is extremist haven’t yet awakened to the radical anti-Constitutional actions of the White House.
The only remedy for the obstruction of justice on such a grand scale is impeachment.
Otherwise, Congress will continue to be rendered impotent at every turn because the Busheviks control the federal justice system.
The Democrats on the Hill need to start landing some punches, because Gonzales is still the Attorney General, and you can’t leave the consigliere in charge of the courts and expect justice.
Congressman Conyers, it’s way past time for the "I" word to begin.
How long would it take for the WHORE editors and publishers of the Cowardly Washington Post to DEMAND that officials in a DEMOCRATIC White House be HAULED OFF TO JAIL for OBSTRUCTING and refusing a Congressional demand for testimony into possible ILLEGAL actions by that White House?
Why, in mere nano-seconds, the Washington Whore Post would be publishing indignant "WHITE HOUSE DEFIES CONGRESS! OBSTRUCTS JUSTICE!" headlines, were there DEMOCRATS, not REPUBLICANS, refusing to answer Congressional subpoenaes.
-----------------------------------------------
The White House Throws a "Hail Mary Obstruction of Justice Pass"editorial by Mark Karlin
Mon, 07/23/2007
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/149
Well, the Busheviks stole the presidency, and have survived through an endless Iraq War with an ever-changing mission, so no one has ever accused them of being timid. While the Democrats worry if their trousers are creased or if their slip is showing, the Busheviks are punching them in the face.
No matter how many times the Busheviks gouge out the eyes of the Dems and kick them in the groin, the refs keeping finding some excuse to keep from throwing a penalty marker down. That’s because the Republican effort to control the judiciary, which began in full force with Reagan, is finally reaping its full benefits in protecting GOP wrongdoing.
The Busheviks, in large part, control the federal courts in most districts, as well as the Supreme Court. Through the Department of Justice – as we have painfully learned – they also control a largely partisan group of U.S. Attorneys.
In fact, the federal justice system in the United States has, in general, become an extension of the Republican Party.
That is why the Busheviks dropped the bombshell Friday, through "anonymous sources," that if Congress issues contempt charges against individuals invoking executive privilege (in order to protect Bush and Cheney -- and Rove), then Bush would probably prohibit the Department of Justice from having the Washington D.C. U.S. Attorney pursue the charges.
According to a Friday, July 20, Washington Post article:
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
You see, in case you haven’t kept up, once Congress has authorized contempt charges, they are referred to the U.S. Attorney in D.C. to decide if they merit prosecution. The White House now is arguing that it can obstruct justice by prohibiting the Department of Justice from pursuing justice.
This is the Bushevik version of a "Hail Mary Obstruction of Justice" pass.
According to the Post:
Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration's stance "astonishing."
"That's a breathtakingly broad view of the president's role in this system of separation of powers," Rozell said. "What this statement is saying is the president's claim of executive privilege trumps all."
Can the niceties! It’s White House obstruction of justice taken to a new level of violating the Constitution.
It’s unlikely that the D.C. U.S. Attorney would seriously pursue the contempt charges, when they come down, anyway. That’s because he was appointed by Bush, and being in D.C., you can be sure that he is a "made man."
But the Busheviks apparently aren’t going to take any chances that the D.C. U.S. prosecutor might show some integrity and actually present the contempt charges to a grand jury; they are going to prohibit the DOJ from allowing any prosecutor to pursue contempt charges in anyway whatsoever.
The Post cites its White House source for the latest and boldest Bushevik assault on justice yet:
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, added: "It has long been understood that, in circumstances like these, the constitutional prerogatives of the president would make it a futile and purely political act for Congress to refer contempt citations to U.S. attorneys."
(Now, before we go on, does anyone other than the Washington Post ever believe that someone in the Bushevik White House would speak about such a bombshell "on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly"? Obviously, this was an authorized leak. No Bushevik would talk to the press about something this significant without a heads up from Rove, Cheney or Bush. How can the Post be so lame?)
So, the White House is signaling to Congress, "Don’t bother with contempt citations. You’re not going anywhere. We control the judges; we control the prosecutors; and we control the Department of Justice."
Those who argue that calling the Busheviks totalitarian is extremist haven’t yet awakened to the radical anti-Constitutional actions of the White House.
The only remedy for the obstruction of justice on such a grand scale is impeachment.
Otherwise, Congress will continue to be rendered impotent at every turn because the Busheviks control the federal justice system.
The Democrats on the Hill need to start landing some punches, because Gonzales is still the Attorney General, and you can’t leave the consigliere in charge of the courts and expect justice.
Congressman Conyers, it’s way past time for the "I" word to begin.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Chris Mathews whores NYT disgraced writer Judith Miller as - a media hero!
Judith Miller was THE Bush administration's most persistent megaphone for WMD-LIES-TO-WAR, and as such, her columns in the New York Times on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq illustrate that the NY Times, FAR from having a "liberal media bias," is actually an EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE, HAWKISH, NEO-CON enterprise, whose abuse of the truth (When Ho Lee "treason" proven wrong; Jeff Gerth's "Whitewater" reporting proven abysmal; the Times' trumpetting of "Lincoln Bedroom scandal" and "White House Trashing scandal" all egregious examples of pro-Republican propaganda) borders on the criminal.
JUST THE PERFECT case for uber Media "Monica-gate" whore CHRIS MATHEWS to trumpet Judity Miller as a "hero" for helping to LIE America into an unprovoked war.
===============================
Chris Matthews Calls Judy Miller a Hero!
Posted July 19, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-amato/chris-matthews-calls-judy_b_56857.html
Chris Matthews had on the disgraced, ex-NY Times war propagandist Judy Miller on Hardball to share with us her thoughts on our terror readiness.
Matthews: Judy, you're a hero to the press. You are a woman to be trusted with secrets and thank you for coming on.
Dick Cheney thanks her too for printing as much WH propaganda as she could get her hands on so it could be used by the administration to take us to war. Arianna Huffington says
There's one key date of September 8, when Judy Miller writes a story on the front page of the The New York Times about the aluminum tubes that posed -- the greatest evidence supposedly we had about the nuclear threat that Iraq presented to this country. And this is clearly a story, as we're now finding out, that had been fed to her by Scooter Libby, the senior administration official quoted in the story, and on that same day Cheney goes on Meet the Press and touts the nuclear threat and says it's not me saying that, it's The New York Times. So we see that way in which the administration was feeding Judy Miller information and then going on TV to quote her story to prove their case.
She certainly is the person I want to hear from.
It's bad enough that she's back on teevee, but Matthews called her a hero because she went to jail for Scooter Libby, who leaked and leaked and leaked all over her until we were invading Iraq....She's a class-A stenographer (with the help of Michael Gordon) and is nothing more than a disgusting scab on the face of our nation that reminds us how culpable the media and the NY Times were in providing material for the Bush/Cheney/Lieberman/Neocon wet dream fantasy now taking place in the Middle East. And Chris has the audacity to call her a hero when innocent Iraqis and American Soldiers are being killed everyday because she was so damn trusted by the White house. End of rant!
JUST THE PERFECT case for uber Media "Monica-gate" whore CHRIS MATHEWS to trumpet Judity Miller as a "hero" for helping to LIE America into an unprovoked war.
===============================
Chris Matthews Calls Judy Miller a Hero!
Posted July 19, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-amato/chris-matthews-calls-judy_b_56857.html
Chris Matthews had on the disgraced, ex-NY Times war propagandist Judy Miller on Hardball to share with us her thoughts on our terror readiness.
Matthews: Judy, you're a hero to the press. You are a woman to be trusted with secrets and thank you for coming on.
Dick Cheney thanks her too for printing as much WH propaganda as she could get her hands on so it could be used by the administration to take us to war. Arianna Huffington says
There's one key date of September 8, when Judy Miller writes a story on the front page of the The New York Times about the aluminum tubes that posed -- the greatest evidence supposedly we had about the nuclear threat that Iraq presented to this country. And this is clearly a story, as we're now finding out, that had been fed to her by Scooter Libby, the senior administration official quoted in the story, and on that same day Cheney goes on Meet the Press and touts the nuclear threat and says it's not me saying that, it's The New York Times. So we see that way in which the administration was feeding Judy Miller information and then going on TV to quote her story to prove their case.
She certainly is the person I want to hear from.
It's bad enough that she's back on teevee, but Matthews called her a hero because she went to jail for Scooter Libby, who leaked and leaked and leaked all over her until we were invading Iraq....She's a class-A stenographer (with the help of Michael Gordon) and is nothing more than a disgusting scab on the face of our nation that reminds us how culpable the media and the NY Times were in providing material for the Bush/Cheney/Lieberman/Neocon wet dream fantasy now taking place in the Middle East. And Chris has the audacity to call her a hero when innocent Iraqis and American Soldiers are being killed everyday because she was so damn trusted by the White house. End of rant!
Media Whores relentlessly pound "GOP good," while DISPARAGING Democrats mantra....
Are Broadcast and Cable News Dying?
http://allspinzone.com/wp/2007/07/18/why-broadcast-and-cable-news-are-dying/
The day is coming that TV news is going to have to change dramatically to maintain an audience. Howard Rheingold, Ester Dyson, and other tech futurists foresaw this need several years ago. Still, until the advertisers and eyeballs actually start a shift (which may begin to happen soon), we’re stuck with what we’ve got. And it ain’t pretty news.
Commentary By: Richard Blair
When I woke up this morning, I turned on CNN while I was dressing and having a cup of coffee. My expectation was that two stories would be dominating the news: 1) The Brazilian airliner crash, and 2) the Senate “all-nighter”. Unfortunately, I was wrong on both accounts. This morning, all cable news channels (CNN, Headline News, MS-NBC, and Fox) were focused on the murder / suicide case of WWE wrestler Chris Benoit. Every single channel was leading with it.
CNN’s American Morning host John Roberts then had an interview with Sen. John Edwards. Was the focus on Edwards’ “Road to One America” campaign tour? No. Roberts focused on the haircut controversy and the purchase of Edwards’ expensive home. MS-NBC’s “Cup of Joe” (Joe Scarborough) was locked in like a laser beam on the latest NEI report, and stoking the al-Qaida and terror fires. Fox was spending most of its time on the Benoit autopsy report before I had to get to work.
Every story with a political angle had a decidedly - almost in your face - “GOP positive” slant. In almost every instance, where I caught a glimpse of a story about the Senate sleepover, the stories were disparaging of the Democrats, nearly implying that the GOP Senators were being held hostage. The primary talking point this morning was the very shallow, “Why? What’s the point? The Dems are going to lose the vote anyway.”
It’s been awhile since I watched the morning news shows, and I had no idea that there was such an extreme ideological slant in the morning to all three networks. I believe that, even with my own political leanings, I can make a fairly objective assessment of “slant”. This morning, all three channels were so far tilted to the right as to be objectionable to anyone but the most die hard 26%-er.
My assessment: broadcast news and cable are going the same direction as the dodo bird and rigid newspaper empires - irrelevancy and extinction. Maybe not today or tomorrow or even the next few years, but the news networks can see the handwriting on the wall. And in their quest to keep the advertisers coming in, they’re targeting (particularly) their morning news shows at the “stay-at-home” crowd.
Yeah, ok, the politically oriented shows later in the day will spend some time during the evening hours focusing on the battle royale in the Senate. But I’d wager that most of the people watching Hardball, Situation Room, Countdown, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc. are mostly political junkies. There aren’t a lot of “undecideds” watching these shows. From a purely political (and ideological) standpoint, it’s the morning shows that have a particular degree of importance in influencing general public opinion on political issues.
So where is this all going? Just by the fact that you’re reading this, I think you know. The world wide web is quickly changing the face of all broadcast news gathering organizations, and it’s happening so quickly that they’re evolving into “mediatainment” outfits rather than true journalistic endeavors. The cutting edge of broadcast (and text-based) journalism is right where you’re at - the internet.
There are several startups in the works. One is The Real News, and it looks very promising, even though their business model seems a bit pollyanna-ish. Perhaps that’s just the long time internet community cynic in me. The quality of the broadcasts and global reach of the startup appears solid, even if their on-air talent lineup seems a bit thin at the moment. At TPM Media, Josh Marshall is already playing with the broadcast technology a bit, as well - in fact, if I were an angel investor, TPM Media would be getting a very hard look from me right now, because Josh has positioned his company on the bleeding edge of a true revolution in news delivery. The partnerships that Marshall is forming are quite impressive.
The day is going to come, sooner than later, that broadcast and cable news are going to have to change dramatically to maintain an audience. Howard Rheingold, Ester Dyson, and other internet / web / guru’s and futurists foresaw this change several years ago.
To answer my original question: Are broadcast and cable news dying? Not yet - but both are like a chronically ill patient, trying to extend the inevitable as long as possible. Until the advertisers and eyeballs actually start a shift (which may begin to happen as soon as the 2008 election season gets in full swing), we’re left hurling rotten tomatoes at our TV screens.
http://allspinzone.com/wp/2007/07/18/why-broadcast-and-cable-news-are-dying/
The day is coming that TV news is going to have to change dramatically to maintain an audience. Howard Rheingold, Ester Dyson, and other tech futurists foresaw this need several years ago. Still, until the advertisers and eyeballs actually start a shift (which may begin to happen soon), we’re stuck with what we’ve got. And it ain’t pretty news.
Commentary By: Richard Blair
When I woke up this morning, I turned on CNN while I was dressing and having a cup of coffee. My expectation was that two stories would be dominating the news: 1) The Brazilian airliner crash, and 2) the Senate “all-nighter”. Unfortunately, I was wrong on both accounts. This morning, all cable news channels (CNN, Headline News, MS-NBC, and Fox) were focused on the murder / suicide case of WWE wrestler Chris Benoit. Every single channel was leading with it.
CNN’s American Morning host John Roberts then had an interview with Sen. John Edwards. Was the focus on Edwards’ “Road to One America” campaign tour? No. Roberts focused on the haircut controversy and the purchase of Edwards’ expensive home. MS-NBC’s “Cup of Joe” (Joe Scarborough) was locked in like a laser beam on the latest NEI report, and stoking the al-Qaida and terror fires. Fox was spending most of its time on the Benoit autopsy report before I had to get to work.
Every story with a political angle had a decidedly - almost in your face - “GOP positive” slant. In almost every instance, where I caught a glimpse of a story about the Senate sleepover, the stories were disparaging of the Democrats, nearly implying that the GOP Senators were being held hostage. The primary talking point this morning was the very shallow, “Why? What’s the point? The Dems are going to lose the vote anyway.”
It’s been awhile since I watched the morning news shows, and I had no idea that there was such an extreme ideological slant in the morning to all three networks. I believe that, even with my own political leanings, I can make a fairly objective assessment of “slant”. This morning, all three channels were so far tilted to the right as to be objectionable to anyone but the most die hard 26%-er.
My assessment: broadcast news and cable are going the same direction as the dodo bird and rigid newspaper empires - irrelevancy and extinction. Maybe not today or tomorrow or even the next few years, but the news networks can see the handwriting on the wall. And in their quest to keep the advertisers coming in, they’re targeting (particularly) their morning news shows at the “stay-at-home” crowd.
Yeah, ok, the politically oriented shows later in the day will spend some time during the evening hours focusing on the battle royale in the Senate. But I’d wager that most of the people watching Hardball, Situation Room, Countdown, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc. are mostly political junkies. There aren’t a lot of “undecideds” watching these shows. From a purely political (and ideological) standpoint, it’s the morning shows that have a particular degree of importance in influencing general public opinion on political issues.
So where is this all going? Just by the fact that you’re reading this, I think you know. The world wide web is quickly changing the face of all broadcast news gathering organizations, and it’s happening so quickly that they’re evolving into “mediatainment” outfits rather than true journalistic endeavors. The cutting edge of broadcast (and text-based) journalism is right where you’re at - the internet.
There are several startups in the works. One is The Real News, and it looks very promising, even though their business model seems a bit pollyanna-ish. Perhaps that’s just the long time internet community cynic in me. The quality of the broadcasts and global reach of the startup appears solid, even if their on-air talent lineup seems a bit thin at the moment. At TPM Media, Josh Marshall is already playing with the broadcast technology a bit, as well - in fact, if I were an angel investor, TPM Media would be getting a very hard look from me right now, because Josh has positioned his company on the bleeding edge of a true revolution in news delivery. The partnerships that Marshall is forming are quite impressive.
The day is going to come, sooner than later, that broadcast and cable news are going to have to change dramatically to maintain an audience. Howard Rheingold, Ester Dyson, and other internet / web / guru’s and futurists foresaw this change several years ago.
To answer my original question: Are broadcast and cable news dying? Not yet - but both are like a chronically ill patient, trying to extend the inevitable as long as possible. Until the advertisers and eyeballs actually start a shift (which may begin to happen as soon as the 2008 election season gets in full swing), we’re left hurling rotten tomatoes at our TV screens.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Media Whores IGNORE Republican candidates SNUBBING NAACP....
U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Col., is the sole Republican candidate to address the NAACP convention. He was flanked by lecterns with placards for nine other GOP candidates -- all no-shows.
The Picture The GOP Wants To Hide
Jeffrey Feldman
Posted July 13, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-feldman/the-picture-the-gop-wants_b_56152.html
The one photo the GOP does not want anyone to see was snapped at yesterday's NAACP GOP Presidential Candidate Forum. The NAACP invited all the Republican candidates to the forum, put out 9 podiums, but only one Republican showed up: Tom Tancredo. All the Democratic Presidential hopefuls showed up for their forum.
The excuses given by the Republican campaigns mostly had to do with scheduling conflicts--just too busy to make it.
The resulting photo of Tancredo--standing on a stage of empty podiums sums up the Republican party's commitment to civil rights in America: the only Republican interested is the guy running to deny immigrant workers their rights.
One has to wonder why this photo was not the lead on every morning show and on the front pages of every morning newspaper in America.
The reason, most likely, is a coordinated effort by Republicans to pressure news agencies to downplay the obvious implications of having all but one of their Presidential candidates as "no shows" for a debate at the NAACP.
What is keeping the picture and story about Republicans and racism out of today's front pages? The arrival of David Beckham and Posh Spice to Hollywood (with lots of pics).
This is an ideal moment to stand up and demand the kind of news coverage we want in America. Contact your local TV stations and newspapers. Ask them to run this photo and to write an article about Republicans, civil rights and racism.
Friday, July 13, 2007
AL QAIDA GETTING STRONGER under the DISMAL, CORRUPT, atrocious 'leadership' of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush....
WHAT does America have to show for the six years since two elections were stolen by the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney/Karl Rove administration?
- a LOOTED US treasury, New Orleans only one-half step away from the antebellum slave-plantation mid-19th century status, the New York skyline STILL devoid of anything where the World Trade towers once stood.... and after spending BILLIONS and BILLIONS and BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars (much less the blood and guts of American soldiers spilled in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan)in the "War on Terror" - AL QAIDA HAS REGAINED STRENGTH TO where it was BEFORE 9-11.... with thousands upon (potentially) MILLIONS of Muslim men and women either sympathetic to the resistance in Iraq, if not outright supporting Al Qaida through donations or by volunteering... including presumably comfortably paid expatriot (Muslim) doctors in England creating their own terror cells to target British citizens and international tourists at UK airports, as an expression of outrage for the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq...
===================================
Return of Al Qaeda
A new National Intelligence Estimate raises concerns that the terrorist group is growing stronger.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek, July 12, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19717961/site/newsweek/page/0/
July 11, 2007 - A new National Intelligence Estimate presents a sobering analysis of terrorism threats to the United States, concluding that Al Qaeda has reconstituted its core structure along the Pakistani border and may now be a stronger and more resilient organization today than it appeared a year ago, according to three U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the draft document.
The officials, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters, said the still-classified document reflects growing jitters among U.S. counterterrorism officials, even while those officials stressed there is “no credible, specific” intelligence on any imminent threat to the homeland. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff underscored the concerns this week when he told the Chicago Tribune that he had a “gut feeling” that the country was entering a new period of increased risk this summer.
Video: Michael Isikoff talks about the return of Al Qaeda on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe'.
In fact, the activities of Al Qaeda’s leadership along the Afghan-Pakistani border are only one component of an overall threat environment that is worrying officials both in the United States and Europe. The stepped-up movement of suspected Islamic militants between Iraq and Europe has proven so troubling that the German government recently set up a special interagency team to track the flow of suspected jihadi recruits to and from that war-torn country, two German sources told NEWSWEEK.
Over the past few months, U.S. officials said, the U.S. Embassy in Berlin has issued a number of warnings that Islamic militants associated with Al Qaeda may be plotting an attack on U.S. military facilities and personnel in Germany. The suspected plots are believed to be linked to an obscure terrorist network known as the Islamic Jihad Union. The group originated in Uzbekistan, but its German network has recently attracted recruits of other nationalities. Investigators also suspect it may have established contact with Al Qaeda’s high command.
A wealth of new evidence from recent overseas developments, including the investigation into the foiled bombing attacks in the United Kingdom, has prompted the FBI to mobilize teams of agents to track down leads and potential witnesses in the United States, a law-enforcement official confirmed today. The official said that recent assignments, first reported on the ABC News online column The Blotter, were part of a "stepped up" effort over the next few weeks in light of the disturbing current threat picture.
Assessing the precise nature of terror threats has proven a notoriously unreliable exercise for the U.S. intelligence community. In the first few years after the September 11 attacks, for example, nervous U.S. officials repeatedly announced warnings of increased risk—in some cases issuing Orange alerts, the second highest level—sometimes based on what turned out to be faulty or exaggerated intelligence reports. U.S. officials are fearful of again being perceived as “crying wolf” or scaring the public—one reason they have for the time being decided not to raise the alert level this summer.
The NIE reflects the consensus judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies and is prepared by the National Intelligence Council. A version of the new report, due to be released later this summer, is especially striking because it contrasts in some respects with previous analyses by the U.S. intelligence community. An NIE on “Trends in Global Terrorism”—portions of which were declassified last September—concluded that U.S. counterterrorism efforts “have seriously damaged the leadership of Al Qaeda and disrupted its operations.”
At the same time, however, last year’s NIE also warned that Al Qaeda had spawned a jihadi movement that had metastasized, and that radical jihadis were “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.” One cause, the analysis concluded, was the U.S. invasion of Iraq—which intelligence officials said had become a “cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”
But the new NIE’s conclusions about Al Qaeda activities in Pakistan, along with the increasing signs of jihadi militants flowing out of Iraq, suggest that the U.S. counterterrorism community may now be facing the worst of both worlds: a reconstituted Al Qaeda leadership coupled with a growing and dispersed worldwide army of angry jihadis inflamed by the U.S. presence in Iraq. The new document’s conclusions also could make it more difficult for the White House to argue, as it frequently has in the past, that President Bush’s post-9/11 efforts have made the country “safer.”
The signs that Al Qaeda leaders have regrouped and reconstituted themselves have been evident in increased intelligence reporting about plots against U.S. interests emanating from the Pakistani border, along with what one official called an unsually “robust” Al Qaeda public-affairs campaign. The organization has released audio, video and Internet messages on average once a week. (In just the last week, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has released two messages—one audio and one video—in which he rails against U.S. policies. He also threatened to attack Britain in response to the granting of a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie.)
The primary development that has allowed all this to happen, U.S. officials say, was the peace agreement signed last year between the Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf and pro-Taliban tribal leaders in the remote region of North Waziristan. The withdrawal of Pakistani troops under that agreement gave Al Qaeda leaders new freedom to operate with relative impunity, officials said. "Clearly, they are resurgent,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official about Al Qaeda. (The official, who is familiar with the NIE’s findings, asked not to be identified because the document remains classified.)
The NIE was described by officials as a broad look at potential terrorist threats to the homeland, and includes discussion of a number of worrisome trends, including the rise of so-called "homegrown” jihadis inside the United States who are not necessarily connected to Al Qaeda but inspired by its message. Although a draft of the document is circulating among U.S. security agencies, it is not yet in final form and has not yet been briefed to congressional intelligence committees. But officials said that its conclusions about the renewed strength of bin Laden’s terror organization are not likely to come as a surprise; they are consistent with briefings the panels have been receiving for some time. European officials contacted by NEWSWEEK affirm that recent intelligence they have gathered substantiates the notion that Al Qaeda’s high command was regaining strength.
The news of the German effort to track the movements of suspected Islamic militants to and from Iraq follows disclosures of possible connections between Al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate—known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI—and one or more suspects in the recent attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow.
One of the British suspects who is believed to have built and planted the London bombs and then ridden in a booby-trapped Jeep driven into a Glasgow Airport terminal was Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi doctor working near Glasgow for Britain's National Health Service. Authorities charged Abdullah last weekend with conspiracy to cause explosions. A second man in the Glasgow airport Jeep, Kafeel Ahmed, an aeronautical engineer, was severely burned after setting himself on fire during the airport incident and may not survive his injuries.
Two officials close to the British investigation say that some intelligence has already been collected indicating that one or more of the suspects in the London/Glasgow plots had been in contact with AQI, and possibly with AQI leaders. (One of the officials said there is no indication that the plotters were in direct contact with AQI's notorious founder Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty Jordanian-born jihadi who was killed in U.S. airstrike last year.)
A similar concern about possible threats from Iraqi jihadis seems to have prompted the recent decision by the German government's Joint Counterterrorism Center (known in Germany as GTAZ) to set up an "Iraq travel movement project."
German sources, who agreed to discuss the matter in exchange for anonymity, said the number of suspects whose movements are being tracked by the project is classified; that figure is also the subject of some debate in government circles. But it is "more than a handful," according to one source. Another source said German authorities know "for sure" that there have been movements from their country to areas in Iraq where jihadi groups like AQI are believed to hold sway. "A number" of jihadi suspects who have returned to Germany after spending some time in Iraq are on the travel project's radar screen, the source says.
The sources said the project coordinates the activities of several German agencies. They include the Federal Criminal Police (Germany's FBI); the Federal Border Police; spy units like the Federal Intelligence Service (Germany's CIA), and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the equivalent of Britain's M.I.5). The object is to monitor "quite closely" the movements of German-based suspects to and from Iraq and nearby countries.
German government experts believe that the war in Iraq is already providing potential "motivation" for suspected terrorist plotters, whose plans are periodically uncovered by German authorities. These include plots by self-recruiting cells of disgruntled Islamic militants who might have little obvious previous contact with known terror networks.
Some suspects known to the project who have visited Iraq are believed to have "got a very good education" in jihadi ideology and tactics while there, one of the German sources said. Still, German authorities do not believe that jihadis returning from Iraq pose immediate attack threats. At the moment, said one source, known Iraq returnees appear to be "very calm."
But German authorities are taking few chances. Over the last few weeks, they have issued a series of increasingly anxious public warnings about growing intelligence indicating possible Islamic terror attacks inside Germany. At a press conference last month, August Hanning, a deputy Interior minister who previously headed the Federal Intelligence Service, said that the intelligence picture German agencies were seeing was reminiscent of what intelligence agencies saw in the months before 9/11.
- a LOOTED US treasury, New Orleans only one-half step away from the antebellum slave-plantation mid-19th century status, the New York skyline STILL devoid of anything where the World Trade towers once stood.... and after spending BILLIONS and BILLIONS and BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars (much less the blood and guts of American soldiers spilled in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan)in the "War on Terror" - AL QAIDA HAS REGAINED STRENGTH TO where it was BEFORE 9-11.... with thousands upon (potentially) MILLIONS of Muslim men and women either sympathetic to the resistance in Iraq, if not outright supporting Al Qaida through donations or by volunteering... including presumably comfortably paid expatriot (Muslim) doctors in England creating their own terror cells to target British citizens and international tourists at UK airports, as an expression of outrage for the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq...
===================================
Return of Al Qaeda
A new National Intelligence Estimate raises concerns that the terrorist group is growing stronger.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek, July 12, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19717961/site/newsweek/page/0/
July 11, 2007 - A new National Intelligence Estimate presents a sobering analysis of terrorism threats to the United States, concluding that Al Qaeda has reconstituted its core structure along the Pakistani border and may now be a stronger and more resilient organization today than it appeared a year ago, according to three U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the draft document.
The officials, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters, said the still-classified document reflects growing jitters among U.S. counterterrorism officials, even while those officials stressed there is “no credible, specific” intelligence on any imminent threat to the homeland. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff underscored the concerns this week when he told the Chicago Tribune that he had a “gut feeling” that the country was entering a new period of increased risk this summer.
Video: Michael Isikoff talks about the return of Al Qaeda on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe'.
In fact, the activities of Al Qaeda’s leadership along the Afghan-Pakistani border are only one component of an overall threat environment that is worrying officials both in the United States and Europe. The stepped-up movement of suspected Islamic militants between Iraq and Europe has proven so troubling that the German government recently set up a special interagency team to track the flow of suspected jihadi recruits to and from that war-torn country, two German sources told NEWSWEEK.
Over the past few months, U.S. officials said, the U.S. Embassy in Berlin has issued a number of warnings that Islamic militants associated with Al Qaeda may be plotting an attack on U.S. military facilities and personnel in Germany. The suspected plots are believed to be linked to an obscure terrorist network known as the Islamic Jihad Union. The group originated in Uzbekistan, but its German network has recently attracted recruits of other nationalities. Investigators also suspect it may have established contact with Al Qaeda’s high command.
A wealth of new evidence from recent overseas developments, including the investigation into the foiled bombing attacks in the United Kingdom, has prompted the FBI to mobilize teams of agents to track down leads and potential witnesses in the United States, a law-enforcement official confirmed today. The official said that recent assignments, first reported on the ABC News online column The Blotter, were part of a "stepped up" effort over the next few weeks in light of the disturbing current threat picture.
Assessing the precise nature of terror threats has proven a notoriously unreliable exercise for the U.S. intelligence community. In the first few years after the September 11 attacks, for example, nervous U.S. officials repeatedly announced warnings of increased risk—in some cases issuing Orange alerts, the second highest level—sometimes based on what turned out to be faulty or exaggerated intelligence reports. U.S. officials are fearful of again being perceived as “crying wolf” or scaring the public—one reason they have for the time being decided not to raise the alert level this summer.
The NIE reflects the consensus judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies and is prepared by the National Intelligence Council. A version of the new report, due to be released later this summer, is especially striking because it contrasts in some respects with previous analyses by the U.S. intelligence community. An NIE on “Trends in Global Terrorism”—portions of which were declassified last September—concluded that U.S. counterterrorism efforts “have seriously damaged the leadership of Al Qaeda and disrupted its operations.”
At the same time, however, last year’s NIE also warned that Al Qaeda had spawned a jihadi movement that had metastasized, and that radical jihadis were “increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.” One cause, the analysis concluded, was the U.S. invasion of Iraq—which intelligence officials said had become a “cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”
But the new NIE’s conclusions about Al Qaeda activities in Pakistan, along with the increasing signs of jihadi militants flowing out of Iraq, suggest that the U.S. counterterrorism community may now be facing the worst of both worlds: a reconstituted Al Qaeda leadership coupled with a growing and dispersed worldwide army of angry jihadis inflamed by the U.S. presence in Iraq. The new document’s conclusions also could make it more difficult for the White House to argue, as it frequently has in the past, that President Bush’s post-9/11 efforts have made the country “safer.”
The signs that Al Qaeda leaders have regrouped and reconstituted themselves have been evident in increased intelligence reporting about plots against U.S. interests emanating from the Pakistani border, along with what one official called an unsually “robust” Al Qaeda public-affairs campaign. The organization has released audio, video and Internet messages on average once a week. (In just the last week, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has released two messages—one audio and one video—in which he rails against U.S. policies. He also threatened to attack Britain in response to the granting of a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie.)
The primary development that has allowed all this to happen, U.S. officials say, was the peace agreement signed last year between the Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf and pro-Taliban tribal leaders in the remote region of North Waziristan. The withdrawal of Pakistani troops under that agreement gave Al Qaeda leaders new freedom to operate with relative impunity, officials said. "Clearly, they are resurgent,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official about Al Qaeda. (The official, who is familiar with the NIE’s findings, asked not to be identified because the document remains classified.)
The NIE was described by officials as a broad look at potential terrorist threats to the homeland, and includes discussion of a number of worrisome trends, including the rise of so-called "homegrown” jihadis inside the United States who are not necessarily connected to Al Qaeda but inspired by its message. Although a draft of the document is circulating among U.S. security agencies, it is not yet in final form and has not yet been briefed to congressional intelligence committees. But officials said that its conclusions about the renewed strength of bin Laden’s terror organization are not likely to come as a surprise; they are consistent with briefings the panels have been receiving for some time. European officials contacted by NEWSWEEK affirm that recent intelligence they have gathered substantiates the notion that Al Qaeda’s high command was regaining strength.
The news of the German effort to track the movements of suspected Islamic militants to and from Iraq follows disclosures of possible connections between Al Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate—known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI—and one or more suspects in the recent attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow.
One of the British suspects who is believed to have built and planted the London bombs and then ridden in a booby-trapped Jeep driven into a Glasgow Airport terminal was Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi doctor working near Glasgow for Britain's National Health Service. Authorities charged Abdullah last weekend with conspiracy to cause explosions. A second man in the Glasgow airport Jeep, Kafeel Ahmed, an aeronautical engineer, was severely burned after setting himself on fire during the airport incident and may not survive his injuries.
Two officials close to the British investigation say that some intelligence has already been collected indicating that one or more of the suspects in the London/Glasgow plots had been in contact with AQI, and possibly with AQI leaders. (One of the officials said there is no indication that the plotters were in direct contact with AQI's notorious founder Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty Jordanian-born jihadi who was killed in U.S. airstrike last year.)
A similar concern about possible threats from Iraqi jihadis seems to have prompted the recent decision by the German government's Joint Counterterrorism Center (known in Germany as GTAZ) to set up an "Iraq travel movement project."
German sources, who agreed to discuss the matter in exchange for anonymity, said the number of suspects whose movements are being tracked by the project is classified; that figure is also the subject of some debate in government circles. But it is "more than a handful," according to one source. Another source said German authorities know "for sure" that there have been movements from their country to areas in Iraq where jihadi groups like AQI are believed to hold sway. "A number" of jihadi suspects who have returned to Germany after spending some time in Iraq are on the travel project's radar screen, the source says.
The sources said the project coordinates the activities of several German agencies. They include the Federal Criminal Police (Germany's FBI); the Federal Border Police; spy units like the Federal Intelligence Service (Germany's CIA), and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the equivalent of Britain's M.I.5). The object is to monitor "quite closely" the movements of German-based suspects to and from Iraq and nearby countries.
German government experts believe that the war in Iraq is already providing potential "motivation" for suspected terrorist plotters, whose plans are periodically uncovered by German authorities. These include plots by self-recruiting cells of disgruntled Islamic militants who might have little obvious previous contact with known terror networks.
Some suspects known to the project who have visited Iraq are believed to have "got a very good education" in jihadi ideology and tactics while there, one of the German sources said. Still, German authorities do not believe that jihadis returning from Iraq pose immediate attack threats. At the moment, said one source, known Iraq returnees appear to be "very calm."
But German authorities are taking few chances. Over the last few weeks, they have issued a series of increasingly anxious public warnings about growing intelligence indicating possible Islamic terror attacks inside Germany. At a press conference last month, August Hanning, a deputy Interior minister who previously headed the Federal Intelligence Service, said that the intelligence picture German agencies were seeing was reminiscent of what intelligence agencies saw in the months before 9/11.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Media Whore NBC, CBS _IGNORE_ Senator Vitter's DC-call girls scandal.... from the networks that FEASTED on Monica scandal....
NBC Nightly News and CBS Evening News both ignored Vitter's connection to DC Madam
by MediaMatters.com
10 July 2007
http://mediamatters.org/items/200707110005?f=h_topic
During their July 10 broadcasts, neither NBC's Nightly News nor CBS' Evening News with Katie Couric reported on the disclosure that Sen. David Vitter's (R-LA) phone number was among the phone records of alleged "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey. As Media Matters for America has previously noted, Palfrey was indicted on racketeering charges stemming from allegations that she ran a prostitution ring, and is reportedly planning on calling Vitter as a witness to her defense. By contrast, during the July 10 edition of ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, ABC News senior political correspondent Jake Tapper reported on the story, noting that Vitter "is a self-proclaimed defender of family values," and was a "conservative rising star, and led a charge against same-sex marriage." Tapper reported that Vitter recently sent a "letter to senators, urging them to support abstinence education, to teach teenagers, quote, 'that saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness.' " Tapper further noted that presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) recently tapped Vitter "to be his campaign's regional Southern chairman."
Palfrey has denied the government's allegation that she was running a prostitution ring. As ABC News reported, she has maintained that "she ran a legal 'sexual fantasy service' and that women who worked for her agreed not to engage in illegal sexual activity with clients, intercourse or oral sex." Palfrey kept a list of her alleged clients' phone numbers, which were released following a July 5 order by U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler. ABC News Investigative Unit producer Justin Rood reported that "[a]ccording to Palfrey's lawyer, Vitter's number appeared on a February 2001 phone record." On July 9, Vitter apologized for "a very serious sin in my past," about which he claimed he had "received forgiveness from God and my wife." Rood added that Hustler magazine "may have prompted" Vitter's apology, reporting that "Vitter's office released its statement" soon after "a Hustler editor contacted Vitter's office to ask his connection to Palfrey's service." According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Palfrey's attorneys have stated that "investigators working for Palfrey plan to contact Vitter and ask him to be a defense witness when she goes to trial."
From the July 10 edition of ABC News' World News with Charles Gibson:
CHARLES GIBSON (anchor): One other piece of political news, one of the most conservative members of Congress has become involved in the D.C. Madam scandal. We have reported that Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman accused of running a Washington prostitution ring had a list of client phone numbers. Well, today, Louisiana's junior Senator David Vitter said his number is on it. Here's our senior political correspondent, Jake Tapper.
TAPPER: Republican Senator David Vitter is a self-proclaimed defender of family values as evidenced by this video on this website.
VITTER [video clip]: We focus here in the Senate on nurturing, upholding, preserving, protecting, such a fundamental social institution as traditional marriage.
TAPPER: Last night, Vitter apologized for sinning, after his number appeared on phone records of the alleged D.C. Madam. The married father of four said in a statement, quote, "Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling." Vitter's actions got more attention because he's a conservative rising star and led the charge against same-sex marriage.
VITTER [video clip]: It's often said, but it's very, very true, and it is worth repeating: Marriage is truly the most fundamental social institution in human history.
TAPPER: And just days ago, Vitter sent this letter to senators, urging them to support abstinence education, to teach teenagers quote "that saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness." Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani appointed Vitter from Louisiana to be his campaign's regional Southern chairman, to vouch for him with wary conservative voters.
VITTER [video clip]: He's not running for president to advance any liberal social agenda.
TAPPER: Giuliani today kept his comments about Vitter brief.
GIULIANI [video clip]: Some people disappoint you.
JOHN DICKERSON (Slate.com chief political correspondent): Some voters are generous with politicians and their peccadilloes, but what voters hate is hypocrisy.
TAPPER: Tonight, it's unclear how understanding the voters of Louisiana will be, or his wife. Jake Tapper, ABC News, New York.
by MediaMatters.com
10 July 2007
http://mediamatters.org/items/200707110005?f=h_topic
During their July 10 broadcasts, neither NBC's Nightly News nor CBS' Evening News with Katie Couric reported on the disclosure that Sen. David Vitter's (R-LA) phone number was among the phone records of alleged "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey. As Media Matters for America has previously noted, Palfrey was indicted on racketeering charges stemming from allegations that she ran a prostitution ring, and is reportedly planning on calling Vitter as a witness to her defense. By contrast, during the July 10 edition of ABC's World News with Charles Gibson, ABC News senior political correspondent Jake Tapper reported on the story, noting that Vitter "is a self-proclaimed defender of family values," and was a "conservative rising star, and led a charge against same-sex marriage." Tapper reported that Vitter recently sent a "letter to senators, urging them to support abstinence education, to teach teenagers, quote, 'that saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness.' " Tapper further noted that presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) recently tapped Vitter "to be his campaign's regional Southern chairman."
Palfrey has denied the government's allegation that she was running a prostitution ring. As ABC News reported, she has maintained that "she ran a legal 'sexual fantasy service' and that women who worked for her agreed not to engage in illegal sexual activity with clients, intercourse or oral sex." Palfrey kept a list of her alleged clients' phone numbers, which were released following a July 5 order by U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler. ABC News Investigative Unit producer Justin Rood reported that "[a]ccording to Palfrey's lawyer, Vitter's number appeared on a February 2001 phone record." On July 9, Vitter apologized for "a very serious sin in my past," about which he claimed he had "received forgiveness from God and my wife." Rood added that Hustler magazine "may have prompted" Vitter's apology, reporting that "Vitter's office released its statement" soon after "a Hustler editor contacted Vitter's office to ask his connection to Palfrey's service." According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Palfrey's attorneys have stated that "investigators working for Palfrey plan to contact Vitter and ask him to be a defense witness when she goes to trial."
From the July 10 edition of ABC News' World News with Charles Gibson:
CHARLES GIBSON (anchor): One other piece of political news, one of the most conservative members of Congress has become involved in the D.C. Madam scandal. We have reported that Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman accused of running a Washington prostitution ring had a list of client phone numbers. Well, today, Louisiana's junior Senator David Vitter said his number is on it. Here's our senior political correspondent, Jake Tapper.
TAPPER: Republican Senator David Vitter is a self-proclaimed defender of family values as evidenced by this video on this website.
VITTER [video clip]: We focus here in the Senate on nurturing, upholding, preserving, protecting, such a fundamental social institution as traditional marriage.
TAPPER: Last night, Vitter apologized for sinning, after his number appeared on phone records of the alleged D.C. Madam. The married father of four said in a statement, quote, "Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling." Vitter's actions got more attention because he's a conservative rising star and led the charge against same-sex marriage.
VITTER [video clip]: It's often said, but it's very, very true, and it is worth repeating: Marriage is truly the most fundamental social institution in human history.
TAPPER: And just days ago, Vitter sent this letter to senators, urging them to support abstinence education, to teach teenagers quote "that saving sex until marriage and remaining faithful afterwards is the best choice for health and happiness." Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani appointed Vitter from Louisiana to be his campaign's regional Southern chairman, to vouch for him with wary conservative voters.
VITTER [video clip]: He's not running for president to advance any liberal social agenda.
TAPPER: Giuliani today kept his comments about Vitter brief.
GIULIANI [video clip]: Some people disappoint you.
JOHN DICKERSON (Slate.com chief political correspondent): Some voters are generous with politicians and their peccadilloes, but what voters hate is hypocrisy.
TAPPER: Tonight, it's unclear how understanding the voters of Louisiana will be, or his wife. Jake Tapper, ABC News, New York.
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