Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Bin Laden, on Tape, Reveals Sept. 11 Motive: "'We haven't seen much of him,' Cheney said on Oct. 22. 'You'll notice there haven't been any Bin Laden tapes running on the air where he's out broadcasting messages, frankly, because we think he's probably in a deep hole someplace, in hiding.' "
Even Republicans Fear Bush: "'For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction. If we are indeed the party of Lincoln (I paraphrase his words), a president who deems to have the right to declare war at will without the consent of the Congress is a president who far exceeds his power under our Constitution. I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right path.' "
Saturday, October 30, 2004
Kerry lashes Bush over bin Laden furore: "Bush, in his own rally in Wisconsin, presented the election as a test of who would make America safe.
'In less than 72 hours, the American people will be voting, and the decision comes down to: Who do you trust?' he said.
'I offer leadership and results, in a time of threat and a time of challenge.' "
Bush doesn't try to claim good results. He just says results. That's putting the bar low enough to crawl over.
Group Says It Warned U.S. About Explosives: "An official with the group Human Rights Watch said Saturday he alerted the U.S. military in May 2003 to a cache of hundreds of warheads in Iraq (news - web sites) containing high explosives but that the weapons still hadn't been secured when he left the area 10 days later.
Peter Bouckaert, who heads the New York-based group's international emergency team, told The Associated Press he was shown a room 'stacked to the roof' with surface-to-surface warheads on May 9, 2003, on the grounds of the 2nd Military College in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.
Bouckaert said he gave U.S. officials the exact location of the warheads, but that by the time he left the area on May 19, 2003, he had seen no U.S. forces at the site, which he said was being looted daily by armed men. "
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Two Years Before 9/11, Bush was Already Talking About Attacking Iraq: "Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.
'He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,' said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz."
Missing Explosives: Video Shows G.I.'s at Weapon Cache: "videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
... In disputing claims by Mr. Kerry that the Americans had lost the explosives, a senior administration official said Thursday, "We don't know all the facts and no one should be jumping to conclusions." Al Qaqaa, the official said, "was not controlled for three weeks after the I.A.E.A. left," and added "there are a lot of dots we have to connect."
... "The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."
One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."
... Yesterday Mohamed al-Sharaa, director of the national monitoring directorate at the Iraq Ministry of Science and Technology, explained for the first time why Iraqi officials had specified in their letter to the United Nations agency that the explosives had been looted after April 9, 2003. "We have some witnesses," Mr. Sharaa said outside his office at the ministry. "They say that the materials," he added, were "in this site after April 9.""
FBI Investigating Halliburton Contracts: "FBI agents this week sought permission to interview Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer who went public last weekend with allegations that her agency unfairly awarded KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars for work in Iraq, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. "
Americans fear an attack on Falluja will drive insurgents to flee to Ramadi: "guerrillas have been streaming in since the marines stepped up airstrikes against the mujahedeen in Falluja, Marine officials say.
'We hit the deck one and a half months ago, and the area has changed for the downhill very quickly,' said Staff Sgt. James Keefer, one of six civil affairs officers attached to the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, which arrived here in early September. 'We used to go to civilian areas in one or two Humvees to look at hospitals and other places. Now it's too dangerous, and we need four Humvees for a convoy, and we don't have the resources.'
The power vacuum here also muddies plans for an invasion of Falluja, which has about 300,000 people, because Ramadi could well become a haven for retreating guerrillas. Marines here say they have found it impossible to seal off either the highway or the desert smuggling routes between the two cities. Indeed, Marine officials say there is a high level of coordination between insurgent groups in the two cities, with the suspected guerrilla leader in Ramadi, Muhammad Daham, working closely with counterparts in Falluja."
Provincial Capital Near Falluja Is Rapidly Slipping Into Chaos: "The American military and the interim Iraqi government are quickly losing control of [Ramadi, the] provincial capital, which is larger and strategically more important than its sister city of Falluja, say local officials, clerics, tribal sheiks and officers with the United States Marines."
Missing Explosives: 4 Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site in '03: "the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it."
Bush, Kerry Spar Over Missing Explosives: "'A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief,' Bush told supporters Wednesday. "
Exactly. As is so often the case, Bush's statements are more true about himself than they are about the person or people or thing he is talking about.
Bush, Kerry Spar Over Missing Explosives: "'A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief,' Bush told supporters Wednesday. "
Exactly. As is so often the case, Bush's statements are more true about himself than they are about the person or people or thing he is talking about.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Amnesty: US 'War on Terror' Mentality Leads to Torture: "The United States is more concerned with getting around international laws which prohibit torture than with safeguarding human rights as it wages its 'war on terror', Amnesty International said in a report.
The report, a 200-page analysis of the practices and decisions that led to torture in Iraq, and alleged abuse in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, argues that Washington's 'war mentality' led it down a slippery slope toward disregard for the rule of law.
'It is tragic that in the 'war on terror', the USA has itself undermined the rule of law. Its selective disregard for the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law has contributed to torture and ill-treatment,' it wrote."
Clueless People Love Bush: "In further unhappy evidence of how ill-informed the American people are (blame the media), the Program on International Policy Attitudes found Bush supporters consistently ill-informed about Bush's stands on the issues (Kerry-ans, by contrast, are overwhelmingly right about his positions). Eighty-seven percent of Bush supporters think he favors putting labor and environmental standards into international trade agreements. Eighty percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning landmines. Seventy-six percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. Sixty-two percent believe Bush would participate in the International Criminal Court. Sixty-one percent believe Bush wants to participate in the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. Fifty-three percent does not believe Bush is building a missile defense system, a.k.a. 'Star Wars.' "
Clueless People Love Bush: "the majority of Bush supporters, according to recent polls, still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and even to 9-11, and that the United States found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many of you are asking how that could possibly be, since everybody knows...
But everybody doesn't know. There it is. And if you are wondering why everybody doesn't know, you can either blame it on the media, always a shrewd move, or take notice that the administration is STILL spreading this same misinformation.
Both Donald Rumsfeld and Bush have publicly acknowledged there is no evidence of any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, as Dick Cheney campaigns, a standard part of his stump speech is the accusation that Saddam Hussein 'had a relationship' with Al Qaeda or 'has long-established ties to Al Qaeda.' He makes this claim up to the present day.
... Normally, when you get a situation like that -- where people are simply not acknowledging reality -- it is considered a cult, a form of groupthink based on irrational beliefs propagated by what is normally a charismatic leader. So those Kerry volunteers earnestly engaging Bush supporters on the latest outrage are way off base. They need to go all the way back to the Two Great Lies that got us into this: Many American soldiers marching into Iraq believed it was 'payback for 9-11.'
A third slightly blinding fact (to me) is that more people now think Kerry behaved shamefully in regards to Vietnam than did W. Bush. Incredible what brazen lying will do, isn't it? "
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
A Gaddafi Cover-Up (washingtonpost.com): "in November 2003, at the very time that top Libyan officials were negotiating with U.S. and British diplomats the details of a supposed renunciation of terrorism, Libyan operatives were recruiting a hit team to kill Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and destabilize the oil-rich kingdom. Had the plot succeeded, it might have had a disastrous impact on the global economy.
'The administration is engaging in a cover-up here,' argues G. Henry M. Schuler, a Libya expert who has been studying that country for more than 30 years. He contends that the comments by Bush and Cheney are a continuation of the confusing signals that have encouraged Libyan terrorism for decades. "
A Gaddafi Cover-Up (washingtonpost.com): "in November 2003, at the very time that top Libyan officials were negotiating with U.S. and British diplomats the details of a supposed renunciation of terrorism, Libyan operatives were recruiting a hit team to kill Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and destabilize the oil-rich kingdom. Had the plot succeeded, it might have had a disastrous impact on the global economy.
'The administration is engaging in a cover-up here,' argues G. Henry M. Schuler, a Libya expert who has been studying that country for more than 30 years. He contends that the comments by Bush and Cheney are a continuation of the confusing signals that have encouraged Libyan terrorism for decades. "
The CIA's Disappeared (washingtonpost.com): "the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA have fought to preserve the exceptional and sometimes secret policies that allow U.S. personnel to violate the Geneva Conventions and other laws governing the handling and interrogation of foreign detainees. Under those policies, practices at odds with basic American values continue -- even if there are no sensational photos to document them.
The latest example concerns 'ghost prisoners,' suspects captured in Iraq and Afghanistan who are interrogated by the CIA in secret locations, sometimes outside those countries, and whose identities and locations are withheld from relatives, the International Red Cross and even Congress. For all practical purposes, they have 'disappeared,' like the domestic detainees of some notorious dictatorships. The first official Army investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib called this practice 'deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law.' Yet, according to reporting by The Post's Dana Priest, the CIA subsequently transported as many as a dozen more 'ghost detainees' out of Iraq to interrogate them in its secret prisons."
Bush let Abu Musab al-Zarqawi get away: "An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on an 'NBC Nightly News' report from March that asserted that before the Iraq war, administration officials called off a planned attack that might have killed Mr. Zarqawi, the terrorist now blamed for much of the mayhem in that country, in his camp.
Citing 'military officials,' the original NBC report explained that the failure to go after Mr. Zarqawi was based on domestic politics: 'the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq' - a part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam Hussein - 'could undermine its case for war against Saddam.' The Journal doesn't comment on this explanation, but it does say that when NBC reported, correctly, that Mr. Zarqawi had been targeted before the war, administration officials denied it."
What the Terrorists Have in Mind: "an article in the most recent issue of Al Qaeda's Voice of Jihad - an online magazine that comes out every two weeks - makes the case that the United States has a greater strategic mess on its hands in Afghanistan and Iraq than the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan in the 1980's. As translated by the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group that monitors terrorists, the author describes how the United States has stumbled badly by getting itself mired in two guerrilla wars at once, and that United States forces are now 'merely trying to 'prove their presence' - for all practical purposes, they have left the war.'
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist now wreaking havoc in Iraq, sees things in a similar way. 'There is no doubt that the Americans' losses are very heavy because they are deployed across a wide area and among the people and because it is easy to procure weapons,' he wrote in a recent communiqu� to his followers that was posted on several radical Web sites. 'All of which makes them easy and mouthwatering targets for the believers.'
Clearly, the president's oft-repeated claim that American efforts are paying off because 'more than three-quarters of Al Qaeda's key members and associates have been killed, captured or detained' - a questionable claim in itself - means little to jihadists. What matters to them that the invasion of Iraq paved the way for the emergence of a movement of radical Sunni Iraqis who share much of the Qaeda ideology.
Among the recurrent motifs on the Web are that America has blundered in Iraq the same way the Soviet Union did in the 1980's in Afghanistan, and that it will soon be leaving in defeat. 'We believe these infidels have lost their minds,' was the analysis on a site called Jamaat "
NASA: Bush Stifles Global Warming Evidence: "IOWA CITY, Iowa - The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed, a NASA scientist said Tuesday night.
'In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now,' James E. Hansen told a University of Iowa audience.
Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and has twice briefed a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) on global warming.
Hansen said the administration wants to hear only scientific results that 'fit predetermined, inflexible positions.' Evidence that would raise concerns about the dangers of climate change is often dismissed as not being of sufficient interest to the public.
'This, I believe, is a recipe for environmental disaster.'
Hansen said the scientific community generally agrees that temperatures on Earth are rising because of the greenhouse effect � emissions of carbon dioxide and other materials into the atmosphere that trap heat.
These rising temperatures, scientists believe, could cause sea levels to rise and trigger severe environmental consequences, he said.
Hansen said such warnings are consistently suppressed, while studies that cast doubt on such interpretations receive favorable treatment from the administration.
He also said reports that outline potential dangers of global warming are edited to make the problem appear less serious. 'This process is in direct opposition to the most fundamental precepts of science,' he said."
Monday, October 25, 2004
U.S. Ruling Drops Rights of Some Captured in Iraq: "A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, administration officials said Monday.
The opinion, reached in recent months, establishes an important exception to public assertions by the Bush administration since March 2003 that the Geneva Conventions applied comprehensively to prisoners taken in the conflict in Iraq, the officials said.
... The officials outlined the opinion on Monday in response to a report in The Washington Post over the weekend that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly transferred a dozen non-Iraqi prisoners out of Iraq in the past 18 months, despite a provision in the conventions that bars civilians protected under the accords from being deported from occupied territories.
... As recently as May 2004, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reiterated in public testimony the administration's view that "everyone in Iraq who was a military person" as well as "the civilians or criminal elements" who were detained by the American authorities would be "treated subject to the Geneva Conventions." "
Setback for Bush as he fails to win backing of Florida newspapers: "The Orlando Sentinel, which has not endorsed a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson, opted for John Kerry.
'This president has utterly failed to fulfil our expectations,' an editorial said.
'We turn now to his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, with the belief that he is more likely to meet the hopes we once held for Mr Bush.'
Another Florida newspaper, the Tampa Tribune, chose not to endorse either candidate. It is the first time since 1952 that the paper has not backed the Republican candidate for the presidency."
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Ambush Kills 50 Iraq Soldiers Execution Style: "The ambush, extraordinarily ambitious in scope and violence, showed a high level of organization, and the insurgents probably had inside information on the travel plans of the soldiers, who were members of the nascent Iraqi National Guard, officials said.
The mass killing deals a severe blow to the American military and the interim Iraqi government at a time when top officials say Iraqi forces are being quickly trained to take over policing duties from the 138,000 American troops here and to help maintain security for general elections scheduled in January.
On Sunday night, a group called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the new name of the militant band led by Jordanian fighter Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility in an Internet posting."
Slow Pace of Pentagon's Courts Set Off Friction at White House: "many of the detainees sent to Guantanamo turned out to be low-level militants, Taliban fighters and men simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Pentagon's efforts to gather intelligence from more valuable prisoners were also deeply flawed, military intelligence officers said, complicating the prosecution of some detainees and nearly paralyzing efforts to release others.
Interviews with dozens of officials show that the myriad problems ignited an often fierce behind-the-scenes struggle that set the Pentagon and its allies in the White House against adversaries at the National Security Council, the State Department and Justice Department. The friction among officials like Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and Mr. Ashcroft sheds new light on the internal dynamics of an administration that has shown a remarkably united public front.
In many cases, officials said, the battles were fueled by the discontent of military, foreign-policy and other officials who had been excluded from a role in shaping the policy after Sept. 11. "
Tracking the Weapons: Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq: "The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.
The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program '60 Minutes.'"
Carter Says Bush Exploited Sept. 11 Attacks: "President Bush has exploited the Sept. 11 attacks for political gain, former president Jimmy Carter said in an interview published on Monday.
... our country suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack ... and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander-in-chief, fighting a global threat against America."
"He's repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated," he added."
How They Skewed The Intelligence: "Carl Levin of Michigan, shows that on the question of an Iraqi-Qaeda axis, Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others offered an indictment that was essentially fabricated in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy.
Mr. Levin's report does not prove that President Bush knew that the Hussein-bin Laden alliance was fiction. But officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - as well as Mr. Cheney's chief of staff and the deputy national security adviser - knew that Mr. Feith's tailored conclusions were contrary to the views of the entire intelligence community. Mr. Cheney presented them to the public as confirmed truth about Iraq and Al Qaeda"
How They Skewed The Intelligence: "Carl Levin of Michigan, shows that on the question of an Iraqi-Qaeda axis, Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others offered an indictment that was essentially fabricated in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy.
Mr. Levin's report does not prove that President Bush knew that the Hussein-bin Laden alliance was fiction. But officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - as well as Mr. Cheney's chief of staff and the deputy national security adviser - knew that Mr. Feith's tailored conclusions were contrary to the views of the entire intelligence community. Mr. Cheney presented them to the public as confirmed truth about Iraq and Al Qaeda"
Saturday, October 23, 2004
A Former Republican Senator: 'Frightened to Death' of Bush: "as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction."
Three Guantanamo 'Judges' Removed Due to Pentagon Bias: "Earlier this summer the US Supreme Court ruled that all of the prisoners had the right to challenge their incarceration in the US courts: the Bush administration has so far refused to grant them that access."
Secret Rewriting of Military Law Yields Zero Prosecutions, Weird Distortions of Our Society: "In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.
Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.
The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.
White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. 'We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve,' said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.
But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send hom"
Friday, October 22, 2004
Myers Denies Doubts on War Plans for Afghanistan (washingtonpost.com): "The Washington Post reported yesterday that Myers, in his first days as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Franks to open a southern front in Afghanistan to block al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as they fled Kabul. The article said that Franks did not do so and that many of the enemy fighters escaped unscathed in November 2001. "
No Direct Evidence of Plot To Attack Around Elections (washingtonpost.com): "after hundreds of interviews, scores of immigration arrests and other preventive measures, law enforcement officials say they have been unable to detect signs of an ongoing plot in the United States, nor have they identified specific targets, dates or methods that might be used in one.
'We've not unearthed anything that would add any credence to talk of an election-related attack,' said one senior FBI counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because authorities have been instructed not to talk publicly about the issue before the elections. 'You can never say there is not a threat, but we have not found specific evidence of one."
Yahoo! News - Three of Four Bush Supporters Still Believe in Iraqi WMD, al Qaeda Ties: "Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq (news - web sites) had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them and that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein provided 'substantial support' to al Qaeda
... 56 percent of Bush supporters said they believed that most experts currently believe that Iraq had actual WMD, and 57 percent said they thought that the Duelfer Report had itself concluded that Iraq either had WMD (19 percent) or a major WMD program (38 percent).
Only 26 percent of Kerry supporters, by contrast, said they believed that pre-war Iraq had either actual WMD or a WMD program, and only 18 percent said they believed that “most experts” agreed."
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Tallying the Dead: How Many Iraqis Are Dying? By One Count, 208 in a Week: "From Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, an estimated 208 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents, significantly higher than the average week; 23 members of the United States military died over the same period.
And today, violence claimed more Iraqi lives when four were killed and at least 80 were wounded in a mortar attack on an Iraqi National Guard base north of Baghdad, the American military said in a statement.
The deaths of Iraqis, particularly those of civilians, has become an increasingly delicate topic. Early this month, the Health Ministry, which had routinely provided casualty figures to journalists, stopped releasing them. Under a new policy that the government said would streamline the release of the figures � which were clearly an embarrassment to the government as well as to the Americans � only the Secretariat of the Council of Ministers is now allowed to do so.
'It's a political issue,' a senior Health Ministry official said last week."
Estimates by U.S. See More Rebels With More Funds: "Senior American officials are beginning to assemble a new portrait of the insurgency that has continued to inflict casualties on American and Iraqi forces, showing that it has significantly more fighters and far greater financial resources than had been estimated.
When foreign fighters and the network of a Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are counted with home-grown insurgents, the hard-core resistance numbers between 8,000 and 12,000 people, a tally that swells to more than 20,000 when active sympathizers or covert accomplices are included, according to the American officials.
These estimates contrast sharply with earlier intelligence reports, in which the number of insurgents has varied from as few as 2,000 to a maximum of 7,000. The revised estimate is influencing the military campaign in Iraq, but has not prompted a wholesale review of the strategy, officials said.
... This week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, in releasing its annual global military survey, said perhaps 1,000 Islamic jihadists have entered Iraq to join the fight, and it estimated that it would take five years for the American military to prepare Iraqi forces to take over fully from the forces of the United States and its allies."
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Has Bush lost his reason?: "A senior Republican, experienced and wise in the ways of Washington, told me last Friday that he does not necessarily accept that Bush is unstable, but what is clear, he added, is that he is now manifestly unfit to be President. "
Has Bush lost his reason?: "the momentous decision awaiting Americans is not whether they return to power a President who is uniquely qualified to protect the US against terrorism, as Cheney et al would have us believe. It is whether they re-elect a man who, it is now clear, has become palpably unstable.
The evidence has been before our eyes for some time, but only during the course of this election campaign has it crystallised - just in time, possibly, for the 2 November election. The 43rd US President has always had a much-publicised knack for mangled syntax, but now George Bush often searches an agonisingly long time, sometimes in vain, for the right words. His mind simply blanks out at crucial times. He is prone, I am told, to foul-mouthed temper tantrums in the White House. His handlers now rarely allow him to speak an unscripted word in public. "
America's hidden vote: "Passing almost without notice earlier this month, the public release of The Civil Rights Record of the George W Bush Administration - the official staff report prepared by the US Civil Rights Commission - whose submission is required by federal law, was blocked by the Republican commissioners. None the less, it was posted on the commission's website: 'This report finds that President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words.'
Bush has held the Civil Rights Commission in contempt since its June 2001 report on Election Practices in Florida During the 2000 Campaign. Then it concluded: 'The commission's findings make one thing clear: widespread voter disenfranchisement - not the dead-heat contest - was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election ... The disenfranchisement of Florida's voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters.' "
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Feeling the Draft: "Bush's claim that we don't need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine - the 'Bush doctrine' of pre-emptive war - would require much larger military forces than we now have.
This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft."
Ministers accused of misleading Parliament on Iraq: "The manner in which the issue has been handled will add to the growing anger in Whitehall over how Mr Blair is prepared to make a decision and then expects civil servants, intelligence officers or military officers to produce the evidence to support it.
'We've seen this happen with MI6 over the intelligence on WMD and now it's happening with the military,' one Whitehall source said."
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
U.S. Stymies Detainee Access Despite Ruling, Lawyers Say (washingtonpost.com): "More than three months after the Supreme Court declared that hundreds of detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts, none has appeared in a courtroom.
... the detainees remain largely precluded from receiving legal help because of protracted negotiations with the Justice Department over lawyers' security clearances, the government's insistence on monitoring attorney-client conversations and the number of visits lawyers will be allowed, defense attorneys told a U.S. District Court judge yesterday.
Less than half the detainees with lawyers have been given the government's reason for holding them; the government has broken a court-ordered Sept. 30 deadline to justify most of those detentions, the lawyers said. For the 28 detainees who have been informed, the reason is typically that a recent military review -- conducted without an attorney or witnesses -- has concluded that they are enemy combatants with links to the Taliban or al Qaeda. "
The New York Times > Business > How Tax Bill Gave Business More and More: "the need to solve a narrow tax problem in 2002 gave birth to the biggest free-for-all in corporate lobbying that Congress has experienced in nearly 20 years.
The story began nearly three years ago, with an initial impetus simply to replace a $5 billion annual tax break for American exporters that the World Trade Organization had ruled was illegal. It ended this week with a 633-page behemoth that offers new tax giveaways to everyone from corporate titans like Boeing and Hewlett-Packard to an array of oil and gas producers, shopping mall developers, wine distributors, even restaurants. Many companies, like General Electric and Dell, are likely to end up with far more tax relief under the new bill than they had ever received from the old tax break. Some, like Exxon Mobil, never qualified for the old tax break at all but will enjoy tax savings now.
Even the 'losers' came away with something. Movie executives are complaining that they were punished at the last minute, when House Republicans stripped out about $1 billion worth of tax credits, in part because the industry is closely identified with the Democratic Party. But they still held on to $336 million in tax breaks for movies made in areas with high unemployment.
Similarly, the final bill would also raise more than $60 billion by cracking down on major tax shelters and punishing companies that try to avoid American taxes by moving their headquarters outside the country. But in a gesture of mercy to a handful of oil service companies from Texas, House Republicans gave a green light to companies that moved offshore before March 4, 2003. The beneficiaries of that decision include the Noble Corporation, Weatherford International, Cooper Industries and Nabors Industries - all in or near the district of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader."
The source Duelfer didn't quote: "it is now clear that Iraq had in fact disarmed in compliance with security council resolutions. One of the tragic ironies of the decision to invade Iraq is that the Iraqi WMD declaration required by security council resolution 1441, submitted by Iraq in December 2002, and summarily rejected by Bush and Blair as repackaged falsehoods, now stands as the most accurate compilation of data yet assembled regarding Iraq's WMD programmes (more so than even Duelfer's ISG report, which contains much unsubstantiated speculation). Saddam Hussein has yet to be contradicted on a single point of substantive fact. Iraq had disarmed; no one wanted to accept that conclusion.
Charles Duelfer has to date provided no documentation to back up his assertion regarding Saddam's 'intent'. Nor has he produced any confession from Saddam Hussein or any senior Iraqi official regarding the same."
Security Scholars Say Iraq War Most Misguided Policy Since Vietnam: "The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been the "most misguided" policy since the Vietnam War, according to an open letter signed by some 500 U.S. national-security specialists.
The letter, released Tuesday by a Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy (S3FP), said that the current situation in Iraq could have been much better had the Bush administration heeded the advice of some of its most experienced career military and foreign service officers.
But the administration�s failure to do so has actually fueled �the violent opposition to the U.S. military presence,� as well as the intervention of terrorists from outside Iraq.
�The results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests,� according to the group which called for a �fundamental reassessment� in both the U.S. strategy in Iraq and its implementation.
�We�re advising the administration, which is already in a deep hole, to stop digging,� said Prof. Barry Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) (MIT), one of the organizers of S3FP which includes some of the most eminent U.S. experts on both national-security policy and on the Middle East and the Arab world.
Among the signers are six of the last seven presidents of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and professors teach in more than 150 colleges and universities in 40 states. "
Friday, October 08, 2004
Economy, Iraq War Frame Bush-Kerry Debate: "New unemployment figures, the last before the election, showed Bush as the first president since the Depression to have the nation lose jobs during his term. Bush focused on the positive in a new television ad boasting that nearly 2 million jobs had been added in the past year. Overall there are 821,000 fewer nonfarm jobs in the country than when Bush took office in January 2001. "
The Tax-Cut Pendulum and the Pit (washingtonpost.com): "When Bush took office in January 2001, the government was forecasting a $5.6 trillion budget surplus between then and 2011. Instead, it is now expecting to accumulate an extra $3 trillion in debt -- including a record $415 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The government has to borrow an average of more than $1.1 billion a day to pay its bills, and it spends more on interest payments on the federal debt each year -- about $159 billion -- than it does on education, homeland security, justice and law enforcement, veterans, international aid, and space exploration combined. "
Bush ignores the central point of the CIA report on Iraq: "Bush commented on the CIA report on Iraq's weapons capability yesterday, largely ignoring its central point: That Bush's central rationales for going to war in Iraq (the original ones, that is) have been proven to be wrong.
Matea Gold and Maura Reynolds write in the Los Angeles Times: 'The Bush administration cited the existence of the weapons as the central rationale for going to war in March 2003. Responding to the CIA report Thursday morning, Bush did not mention the lack of their existence. Instead, he spoke as though the CIA report contained evidence justifying the war.'
Dan Balz writes in The Washington Post: 'Bush said the report by chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer, while concluding that Hussein possessed no such weapons at the time of the war, revealed that the former Iraqi leader hoped to manipulate the international community into ending sanctions with the intent of restarting his weapons programs.'
Kerry responded by saying 'the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq.' "
U.S. Added 96,000 Jobs in September, Fewer Than Expected: "'This is a weak number, no matter how you cut it,' said the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, Stephen S. Roach, adding that private sector jobs are up 'an average of only 65,000' over the past three months. 'That's a pathetic pace of job creation by corporate America.'
He added: 'If you look at jobs growth over the 34 months of this recovery, then private payroll growth is up about four-tenths of 1 percent over the entire span of this recovery. Normally, the gains are closer to 8 percent, so there is a profound disconnect between this jobless recovery and anything we have ever seen before in post-World War II history in a U.S. business cycle.'
Mr. Kerry was quick to respond to the figures today, saying in a statement: 'With 1.6 million private sector jobs lost during his term, President Bush will be the first president in 72 years to face the electorate with an economy that has lost jobs under his watch. Indeed, job creation is now 7 million jobs behind where the administration projected in February 2002 our economy would now be if we followed the president's economic plan.'"
Ignorance Isn't Strength: "President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have an unparalleled ability to insulate themselves from inconvenient facts. They lead a party that controls all three branches of government, and face news media that in some cases are partisan supporters, and in other cases are reluctant to state plainly that officials aren't telling the truth. They also still enjoy the residue of the faith placed in them after 9/11.
This has allowed them to engage in what Orwell called 'reality control.' In the world according to the Bush administration, our leaders are infallible, and their policies always succeed. If the facts don't fit that assumption, they just deny the facts. "
In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts: "Bush asserted that under Mr. Kerry, the nation would have to 'wait for a grade from other nations and leaders'' before acting to protect itself. Mr. Kerry has repeatedly said that he would not give up the right to act pre-emptively 'in any way necessary to protect the United States,'' but has suggested that any president would need to demonstrate legitimate reasons for such an action.
To laughter, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry would impose 'Hillary care'' on America, a huge national health care program that would impose increased federal control over the health care decisions of citizens. Mr. Kerry's health care plan is significantly larger than the one Mr. Bush has offered, and it includes increased reliance on Medicaid and state health insurance programs for the poor. But unlike what Mrs. Clinton proposed in 1993, it would not create any big new federal bureaucracy and would retain the current employer-based system, and Mr. Kerry said he was averse to any kind of national health care plan.
To boos, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry had set 'artificial timetables'' for pulling troops out of Iraq, which the president warned would embolden the enemy and endanger the troops. In fact, Mr. Kerry said that he could envision beginning to withdraw troops in as little as six months, but only if he succeeded in moving Iraq toward stability, and has decline repeatedly to set a timeline....
analysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.
'So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context,' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. 'It's a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it's hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.''"
Cheney Once Pushed to Lift Iran Sanctions: "Vice President Dick Cheney, who has called Iran 'the world's leading exporter of terror,' pushed to lift U.S. trade sanctions against Tehran while chairman of Halliburton Co. in the 1990s. And his company's offshore subsidiaries also expanded business in Iran. "
Bush's Isolation From Reporters Could Be Hindrance: "Bush's campaign has taken unprecedented steps to shield him from dissenters and even from curious, undecided voters. On the way to the forum outside Cleveland, the media buses that went ahead of Bush were temporarily marooned in a church parking lot because police had been told to divert all buses since they could contain demonstrators.
Bush's handlers have pulled the presidential bubble especially tight during the campaign, but he often has kept his distance from the public and the media throughout his term. He rarely plays tourist on trips, and has held the fewest solo news conferences of any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Bush has held 15 solo news conferences since taking office. At the same point in their presidencies, according to research by Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University in Maryland, Bill Clinton had held 42; George H.W. Bush, 83; Ronald Reagan, 26 in his first term; Jimmy Carter, 59; Gerald R. Ford, 39; Richard M. Nixon, 29 in his first term; Lyndon B. Johnson, 88; John F. Kennedy, 65; and Eisenhower, 94."
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Congressional Analysts See $415B Deficit: "The 2004 federal deficit will hit a record $415 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday in an informal estimate likely to cause barely a blip in the presidential and congressional campaigns. "
Bush's Retreat into a substitute reality: "Every time he was confronted with ambivalence, his impulse was to sweep it aside. He claimed he must be followed because he is the leader. Fate, in the form of September 11, had placed authority in his hands as a man of destiny. Scepticism, pragmatism and empiricism are enemies. Absolute faith prevails over open-ended reason, subjectivity over fact. Belief in belief is the ultimate sacrament of his political legitimacy.
In the split TV screen, how Bush felt was written all over his face. His grimaces exposed his irritation and anger at being challenged. Lacking intellectual stamina and repeating points as though on a feedback loop, he tried to close argument by assertion."
Bush is dead wrong: "the average American family is worse off than it was three-and-a-half years ago. Median income has fallen by over $1,500 in real terms, with families being squeezed as wages lag behind inflation. In short, all that growth benefited only those at the top of the income distribution, the same group that had done so well over the previous 30 years and benefited most from Bush's tax cut.
For example, some 45 million Americans have no health insurance, up by 5.2 million from 2000. Families lucky enough to have health insurance face annual premiums that have nearly doubled, to $7,500. Families also face increasing job insecurity. This is the first time since the early 1930s that there has been a net loss of jobs over the span of a presidential administration.
Bush supporters ask: is Bush really to blame for this? Wasn't the recession already beginning when he took office?
The resounding answer is that Bush is to blame. Every president inherits a legacy. The economy was entering a downturn when Bush took office, but Clinton also left a huge budget surplus - 2% of GDP - a pot of money with which to finance a robust recovery. But Bush squandered that surplus, converting it into a deficit of 5% of GDP through tax cuts for the rich. "
The day that Dick Cheney was silenced: "Cheney made no effort to hide his sense of unaccountability. Facts that did not serve him were treated like unruly underlings. His self-assurance in lying even when politically unnecessary revealed why he is the power in the vacuum. He could only exist with a chief executive self-absorbed in his resentments and narrow in experience and intellectual scope, who does not hold his vice-president accountable; a national security adviser incompetent in her eagerness to please; and a secretary of state who accepts his internal defeats, always playing the good soldier. "
White House Silent on Bremer Troop Request: "``The single most important change - the one thing that would have improved the situation - would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout'' the occupation, Bremer said,"
War's Rationales Are Undermined One More Time (washingtonpost.com): "One by one, official reports by government investigators, statements by former administration officials and internal CIA analyses have combined to undermine many of the central rationales of the administration's case for war with Iraq -- and its handling of the post-invasion occupation. "
Bush: Kerry Would 'Weaken' U.S. (washingtonpost.com): "Bush ignored the report released on Wednesday showing that Iraq possessed neither stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons nor an active program to produce nuclear weapons at the time of the invasion. Instead, he sharply criticized Kerry as a decades-long opponent of forceful U.S military action who lacks the will to finish the job in Iraq and to destroy al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. "
Edwards' Wife Delivers Tough Security Talk: "Quoting a phrase that President Bush used frequently in the first presidential debate, she said, ''The world has changed since 9/11.''
'Well, duh. The world has changed, and you need to do something about it,' she said. "
Report May Undercut Bush's Iraq Rationale: "'The report will continue to show that he was a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction,' McClellan said.
Compare that to the words of Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech on Aug. 26, 2002, 6 1/2 months before the invasion:
'Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,' he said. 'There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.'
The president made similar charges, laying out in an Oct. 7, 2002, speech what he described as Iraq's threat:
_'It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.'
_'We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.'
_'Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles � far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations � in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. ' "
Report May Undercut Bush's Iraq Rationale: "The final report of the chief U.S. arms inspector for Iraq is expected to undercut a principal Bush administration rationale for removing Saddam Hussein; that Saddam's Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction. Weapons hunter Charles Duelfer will provide his findings Wednesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
... Duelfer concluded Saddam's Iraq had no stockpiles of the banned weapons but said he found signs of idle programs that Saddam could have revived once international attention waned."
Monday, October 04, 2004
The Falling Scales: "According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, Mr. Bush's tax cuts, with their strong tilt toward the wealthy, are responsible for more than $270 billion of the 2004 budget deficit. Increased spending on homeland security accounts for only $20 billion. That shows the true priorities of the self-proclaimed 'war president.' "
Rumsfeld Sees Lack of Proof for Qaeda-Hussein Link: "Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he had seen no 'strong, hard evidence' linking Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda
... "I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way," Mr. Rumsfeld said when asked about ties between Mr. Hussein and the terror network run by Osama bin Laden. Senior administration officials cited the existence of ties between them as a rationale for war on Iraq."
Bremer Criticizes Troop Levels (washingtonpost.com): "The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.
'We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,' he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. 'We never had enough troops on the ground.' "
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | Bush lashes out after debate loss: "Bush has also hit the campaign trail with an all-time high level of hostility. In New Hampshire he slammed Kerry on Iraq and said the Democrat would end up letting America's national security decisions be vetoed 'by countries like France'. He also lampooned Kerry as a man who loved to talk but never made decisions."
Fox News apologises for Kerry fabrication: "Fox News, the influential rightwing US television network, said yesterday it had 'reprimanded' its chief political correspondent after its website carried fabricated quotes attributed to John Kerry
... The network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, apologised for the article in which the Democratic challenger was quoted telling a rally in Florida: "Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Comparing himself to the president, Mr Kerry was supposed to have said: "I'm metrosexual - he's a cowboy." Women voters, he purportedly added, "should like me! I do manicures." "
Unanswered War Questions (washingtonpost.com): "The president sounded occasionally as if he were caught in a pre-invasion time warp, repeating the idealistic rhetoric that led the United States to war in Iraq without thinking through a pragmatic postwar strategy. 'A free Iraq will set a powerful example in the part of the world that is desperate for freedom,' he proclaimed. But that kind of talk just doesn't match a real-world situation in which the secretary of state says the Iraqi insurgency is becoming worse and the CIA warns that the country could be slip- ping toward civil war. "
Rice Defends Going to War Despite Dispute About Iraqi Weapons: "Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, on Sunday defended the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein even while intelligence analysts disputed an important piece of evidence behind a rationale for the war, namely, that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program.
'Whatever the case there, ' Ms. Rice said on the ABC News program 'This Week' with George Stephanopoulos, referring to a debate in 2002 over whether Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes were related to nuclear weapons, 'I stand by the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein and remove this threat to American security.'
Ms. Rice also said she was aware of the dispute in September 2002, when she stated in a television interview that the tubes 'are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.' But, she said Sunday, it was not until after that television appearance that she learned 'the nature of the dispute.' "
Rice: Iraqi Nuclear Plans Unclear (washingtonpost.com): "In 2002, Rice had said that the tubes were 'only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,' adding that 'we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.'
But, as reported by The Washington Post more than a year ago, the internal debate among intelligence analysts was intense, with the experts at the Department of Energy who specialize in uranium enrichment adamant that the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear program.
... In July, a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that reviewed all of the intelligence on the tubes said that information available to intelligence analysts "indicated that these tubes were intended to be used for an Iraqi conventional rocket program and not a nuclear program." The report also said that assertions that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program "was not supported by the intelligence." "
Saturday, October 02, 2004
The New York Times > Washington > Disarray Thwarts Terrorist List, Inquiry Finds: "Efforts to create a master terrorist 'watch list,' a priority for the Bush administration, are lagging badly because of a lack of leadership at the Department of Homeland Security and other bureaucratic problems, the department's inspector general said in a report released Friday.
The highly critical report found that the effort, which seeks to combine 10 watch lists now in use by agencies across the federal government, suffers from poor coordination, staffing problems and technical hurdles. The problems reflect a 'pattern of ad hoc approaches to counterterrorism' throughout the government, it said.
It was the second government report in less than a week that found serious cracks in what are seen as cornerstones in the administration's efforts to bolster counterterrorism operations and domestic defense.
In a separate report issued on Monday, the Justice Department's inspector general faulted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for continuing problems in its ability to translate terrorism-related material, with a backlog of more than 120,000 hours of audio material. Computer storage problems may have also led the F.B.I. to systematically erase some recordings in investigating Al Qaeda, the department said. "
Skewed Intelligence Data in March to War in Iraq: "In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb 'fairly soon.' The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had 'irrefutable evidence' - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States."
...[BUT] experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets.
But Ms. Rice, and other senior administration officials, embraced a disputed theory about the tubes first championed in April 2001 by a new analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Senior scientists considered the theory implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as an administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government."
Friday, October 01, 2004
Wired News: Diebold Rep Now Runs Elections: "An influential employee of voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems left the company recently to take a job as elections manager for a California county.
Deborah Seiler, a sales representative for the beleaguered voting company, was hired a week ago and started Monday in Solano County, northeast of San Francisco in California's wine country. The position puts her second in command of elections in the county, under the registrar of voters."
Trucker Details Vote Machine Delivery Woes: "A driver who delivered voting machines for the city's primary election described a litany of logistical problems Friday, including dropping off machines in empty, unlocked buildings and handing them over to unauthorized people who refused to sign for them.
Driver Paul Washington spoke before members of a joint legislative government affairs committee investigating the Sept. 18 election, when voting machines showed up late to 53 city polling places, possibly disenfranchising thousands of voters and spawning several lawsuits. "
