November 2006: Week Three: This Far and No Further

Back to November 2006 | On to November 2006: Week Four

November 15: General John Abizaid faces contentious and angry questioning from both Senate and House lawmakers over the US policy in Iraq. Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, warns that the US only has "four to six months" to secure Iraq before the country slips into chaos, but rejects the need for more American troops to end the violence. "The sectarian violence, if not brought under control soon, can actually destroy our hope for a stable Iraq," he tells the House Armed Services Committee. "The situation could be bleak." Abizaid also warns that proposals for setting fixed timetables would be counterproductive. In the Senate, incoming Armed Service Committee chairman Carl Levin, a Democrat, says, "The American people do not want our troops caught in a crossfire between Iraqis if they insist on squandering that opportunity through civil war and sectarian strife." Abizaid tells senators that he had publicly hoped in January that US forces could be reduced from 140,000 to 100,000 by the end of 2006, but his optimism was misplaced. The sectarian bloodletting and insurgent attacks remain "unacceptably high," he says, particularly in Baghdad and Sunni-dominated areas such as al-Anbar province. "I would not say we've turned the corner." Asked by Democratic Senator Jack Reed to estimate how much time the US has to curb the violence in Iraq before it becomes uncontrollable, Abizaid responds, "Four to six months." He says that the key to success in Iraq is not to experiment with increased or decreased numbers of American troops, but instead to continue to focus on accelerating the training of Iraqi military forces and giving them the lead role within 12 months. "I believe more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, taking more responsibility for their future," says Abizaid. But he also recommends against troop withdrawals because that will embolden warring sects and al-Qaeda operatives, and signal a lack of US resolve.
Democrats and Republicans both oppose many of Abizaid's proposals. Democratic leaders have called for a phased withdrawal of US forces beginning within four months, while Republican senator John McCain favors sending an additional 20,000 troops to confront Iraq's illegal militias, a plan supported by George W. Bush.
Levin opens bluntly, "We are 3 1/2 years into a conflict which has already lasted longer than the Korean conflict and almost as long as World War II. ...We should put the responsibility for Iraq's future squarely where it belongs -- on the Iraqis. We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves. The only way for Iraqi leaders to squarely face that reality is for President Bush to tell them that the United States will begin a phased redeployment of our forces within four to six months." For himself, McCain accuses Abizaid of promoting a failed military plan that ignores the reality in Iraq. Current troop levels have failed to prevent increases in attacks against Americans, Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians, McCain says, and challenges Abizaid's statement about "encouraging" signs of progress in Iraq. "I'm of course disappointed that basically you're advocating the status quo here today, which I think the American people in the last election said is not an acceptable condition. ...Was it encouraging when in the broad daylight [Tuesday] or the day before that people dressed up in police uniforms are able to come in and kidnap 150 people? General, it's not encouraging to us. I regret deeply that you seem to think that the status quo and the rate of progress we're making is acceptable. I think most Americans do not." Abizaid says he is "optimistic" the security situation in Iraq will improve, contending the intensity of violence in Iraq is down from last summer. He does acknowledge that success hinges on the Iraqi government moving immediately to crack down on sectarian death squads in Baghdad, while also giving more power to Iraq's military. "That has yet to be demonstrated," Abizaid says, prompting a sharp retort from Democratic senator Hillary Clinton: "Hope is not a strategy. Hortatory talk about what the Iraqi government must do is getting old.... The brutal fact is, it is not happening." She says that the constant patter of encouraging talk about the situation is "getting tired. I have heard over and over again, 'the government must do this, the Iraqi army must do that.' Nobody disagrees with that. The brutal fact is, it is not happening."
American lawmakers are increasingly impatient with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has recently rejected a US-proposed timeline to disband Shi'ite militias headed by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Al Maliki, whose government relies on support from Shi'a parties loyal to al-Sadr, two weeks ago ordered American troops to end a blockade in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. "The Iraqi political leaders do not understand that there is a limit to the blood and treasure that Americans are willing to spend, given the unwillingness of the Iraqis themselves to put their political house in order," says Levin. Despite skepticism from senators, Abizaid says it is his "professional opinion" that Iraqis could restore calm if the US rapidly accelerates training of the country's military forces. "I have confidence that the Iraqi army is up to the job, providing the Iraqi government shows the confidence in its own army and gives support to its own army to take the lead the way that they should," Abizaid says. "Why aren't they doing it?" retorts Republican Senator Lindsey Graham; Abizaid responds, "I believe they are starting to do it." He does admit that "there is some infiltration" of Iraqi security forces by Shi'ite death squads.
Abizaid also acknowledges that the Pentagon erred by ignoring pre-war recommendations by Army head General Eric Shinseki that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed to secure Iraq. Shinseki was overruled by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and left the military shortly after the invasion. "Shinseki was right," Abizaid says. (Canada.com, Toronto Star)
November 15: The disputed House race in North Carolina's 8th District keeps going, with Republican incumbent Robin Hayes demanding that the various county boards not count hundreds of provisional votes cast in last week's election. The public documents filed on behalf of Hayes request the suppression of votes cast in Cabarrus, Cumberland, Stanly, Union, Scotland, Richmond and Hoke Counties for a variety of reasons, including registered North Carolina voters that didn't check a tiny box claiming US citizenship and completed forms not signed by precinct officials -- both examples of historically valid provisional ballots. Democratic challenger Larry Kissell writes, "My opponent continues to disappoint the folks that sent him to Washington in the first place. Mr. Hayes is running his legal challenge against voters like he ran his campaign -- scared, desperate and loose with the truth." Two days later, Hayes spokeswoman Carolyn Hern says of attempts to count the votes in and around Fort Bragg, the largest military base in North Carolina, "It's bizarre that the Kissell campaign is fighting for the votes of convicted felons and unregistered individuals." As recounting progresses, Kissell is steadily gaining ground; on November 17, the votes are so close that Kissell would have to gain merely 2 votes per precinct to defeat Hayes. "I'm completely frustrated," says Hayes; North Carolina Democratic Party chairman Jerry Meek retorts, "Robin Hayes doesn't know frustration. Losing a job, not having health care and struggling to make ends meet while your Congressman works overtime to deny your vote is cause for frustration." (Daily Kos, AP/WRAL-TV/Daily Kos)
November 15: Senate "Independent Democrat" Joseph Lieberman is showing signs of being as big a thorn in the sides of the Democratic leadership as many of his Democratic opponents have feared. Not only is Lieberman continuing to tease Senate leaders with the threat that he might consider caucusing with the Republicans -- thereby eliminating the Democrats' control of the Senate and causing a 50-50 split -- but he is virtually the only Democratic voice coming out in opposition to any withdrawal of any kind from Iraq. After steering General John Abizaid and Ambassador David Satterfield towards recommending against any withdrawals in today's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lieberman says, "Both General Abizaid and Ambassador Satterfield were quite clear and to me convincing, that for congress to order the beginning of a phased redeployment, a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq within the next 4 to 6 months would be a very serious mistake and would endanger ultimate the United States." Democratic senator Carl Levin, who is to become the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee when Democrats take control of the chamber in January, said on November 14 that a phased withdrawal is the only way Iraqi forces will take responsibility for their country. (CNN, Boston Globe)
November 15: Another example of the Bush administration's definition of bipartisanship comes from the White House, who resubmits six judicial nominees deemed by Democrats to be too extremist and radicially conservative for the federal bench. Five nominees were the subject of an angry exchange in August 2006, when Democrats said their selection was a sop to the president's conservative base. The White House submits Terrence Boyle of North Carolina and William Haynes of Virginia to the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia; Michael Wallace of Mississippi to the 5th Circuit in New Orleans; Peter Keisler of Maryland to the District of Columbia Circuit; and William Gerry Myers and Norman Smith, both of Idaho, for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. Everyone except Keisler has generated intense opposition from Democrats. "Democrats have asked the president to be bipartisan, but this is a clear slap in the face at our request," says Democratic senator Charles Schumer, a member of the Judiciary Committee. "For the sake of the country, we hope that this is an aberration because the president feels he must placate his hard-right base, rather than an indication of things to come." Republican senator Jon Cormyn, a vocal backer of many of Bush's judicial picks, says he thinks it will be "very tough" to get the nominees through the Senate during the lame-duck session. But, he added, "Hope springs eternal." Cormyn attempts to turn the renominations into a test of Democrats' bipartisanship, saying, "We'll see whether now that they're in majority status, if we're going to have ideological litmus tests for judges." Bush's picks for the federal bench, largely consisting of radical ideologues, have sparked angry debate in the Senate. The incoming majority leader, Harry Reid, once threatened to filibuster Boyle's nomination if it came to the full Senate. Haynes was an architect of the Bush administration's eventually abandoned policy on the treatment of terrorism detainees. He later told a Senate panel that reversing the policy was the "right thing to do."
Bush this week also has sent several nonjudicial nominees to the Senate. One was Kenneth Tomlinson, renominated as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that directs US overseas broadcasts. His nomination has bogged down because allegations of misconduct. A report released in August by the State Department's inspector general said Tomlinson misused government funds for two years as the board chairman. Tomlinson disputes the allegations. (National Examiner)
November 15: Lame-duck Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist reverses himself after years of insisting that "tremendous progress" is being made in Iraq, and now says that the US is "not winning in Iraq." In July 2006, Frist said the conservative national security message for 2006 was, "We're for staying the course in Iraq and the war on terror." And as recently as last month, Frist said, "I'm confident that we are making tremendous progress in hunting down and killing the murderers of Islamic fascism, in stabilizing the democratic governments of Afghanistan and Iraq and in winning the generational struggle that is the war on terror." Tonight he tells Fox News's Sean Hannity, when asked "[W]hat do you think happened a week ago?". "[C]learly, number one, the fact that we were not winning in Iraq dominated, and people just want change. And it will result in thoughtful consideration here [in Washington] over the next several days and weeks." (Fox News/Think Progress)
November 15: Incoming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell provides a priceless moment of what is apparently unintended irony when he declaims on right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt's show, talking about the Democrats' consideration of six right-wing extremists for federal judiciary positions. McConnell says of the Senate Democrats, "We expect from them the same level of cooperation we extended to President Clinton. We decided he'd been elected president, and we were not entitled to deny him all of his judges." McConnell declines to note that, after being fairly cooperative during Clinton's first term, Senate Republicans in 1996 decided to block one judicial appointee after another -- not by holding hearings and denying the nominees on the Senate floor, but by refusing to hold hearings at all. In 1999, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings for almost six months on any of 16 circuit-court and 31 district-court nominations Clinton had sent up. Three appeals-court nominees who did manage to obtain a hearing in Clinton's second term were denied a committee vote, including Allen Snyder, a distinguished Washington lawyer, Clinton White House aide, and former law clerk to right-wing Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist, who drew lavish praise at his hearing but never got a committee vote. Some 45 district-court nominees were also denied hearings, and two more were afforded hearings but not a committee vote. Even votes that did occur were often delayed for months and even years. In late 1999, New Hampshire Republican Bob Smith blocked a vote on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Richard Paez for months by putting an anonymous hold on the nomination. When Majority Leader Trent Lott could no longer preserve the hold, Smith and 13 other Republicans tried to mount a filibuster against the vote, but cloture was voted and Paez easily confirmed -- four years after his nomination. (Hugh Hewitt/Tristam Shandy)
November 15: Telemarketer Shaun Hansen of Spokane, Washington, pleads guilty to two federal counts of conspiracy to commit interstate telephone harassment, in a case stemming from the Election Day 2002 phone jamming by Republicans of get-out-the-vote and ride-to-the-polls phone lines run by New Hampshire Democrats and a nonpartisan firefighters union. The charges carry a total maximum sentence of seven years in prison and $500,000 fine. In 2002, Hansen was owner of Idaho-based Mylo Enterprises, a telemarketing company prosecutors say received $2,500 to place hundreds of hang-up telephone calls to Democratic ride-to-the-polls phone lines on Election Day 2002, the year of a hotly contested US senate race in which Republican John Sununu narrowly defeated Democratic governor Jeanne Shaheen. Three former Republican officials have already been convicted in the phone jamming plot. Former state Republican Committee Executive Director Chuck McGee served seven months in federal prison after admitting to devising the scheme, which tied up phone lines in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont for about two hours before it was called off. Allen Raymond, former president of the northern Virginia company GOP Marketplace LLC, pleaded guilty to executing the plan and served a three-month sentence. Prosecutors say it was Raymond who hired Hansen's company to make the calls. Raymond and McGee both testified against James Tobin, the former New England chairman of Bush's re-election campaign, who was convicted on telephone harassment charges last December and sentenced to 10 months in prison. Tobin remains free while his appeal is decided. (Boston Globe)
November 15: Outgoing Republican senator Conrad Burns shows his grace and self-control in the face of defeat when he begins hurling obscenities and invective against a reporter who asks him about the status of an Interior appropriations bill in the lame-duck session. "I'm not going to negotiate my problems with the g*ddamn press," Burns snarls. "Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye! ...You don't run this place. You think you do. But you don't." Burns currently chairs the Appropriations Interior Subcommittee, but will go home in January 2007 after being ousted by Democrat Jon Tester. A number of Montana news outlets reported similar incidents during the election campaign. For example, the senator was criticized at one point for telling a group of firefighters that they had "done a poor job" in combating a 92,000-acre fire in which several firefighters died. Burns later told a representative from the state's natural resource agency, "See that guy over there? He hasn't done a goddamned thing. They sit around.... It's wasteful." Burns later apologized for that remark. (Congressional Quarterly)

Iraq already engulfed in civil war; problem now is to keep war from involving other countries

November 16: It seems that only Bush officials and senior military commanders are still insisting that Iraq is not yet engulfed in civil war. Political and cultural experts, lawmakers, and ordinary citizens in Baghdad and throughout the Middle East say that just such a civil war is already well under way, and that the real worry is not stopping the war from taking place -- it already has begun -- but to keep the conflict from destroying the fragile Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries as well. No matter what the US does or does not do in Iraq, the prospect of leaving behind a country that does not threaten US interests or regional peace is unlikely at best. "We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, says Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group. "The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body." Nawaf Obaid, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an advisor to the Saudi government, said last week, "All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state." Between 2% and 5% of Iraq's 27 million people have been killed, wounded or uprooted since the Americans invaded in 2003, calculates Anthony Cordesman of the Center for International and Strategic Studies. "This is civil war," he says.
Perhaps the worst thing the US could do would be to oversee a partitioning of Iraq into three separate states, one each for Kurds, Shi'ites, and Sunnis. "To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said October 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited." In a recent statement to Germany's Der Spiegel, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said, "When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too. It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."
The prospect of several neighboring countries becoming yanked in to the Iraq war is likely. In an analysis published last month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Obaid said sectarian conflicts could make Iraq a battleground for the region. He described widespread interference by Iranian security forces within Iraq. He urged Saudi Arabia, which is building a 560-mile wall on its border with Iraq, to warn Iran "that if these activities are not checked," Saudi Arabia "will be forced to consider a similar overt and covert program of its own." A Syrian analyst close to the Assad government warns that other countries would intervene if Iraq descended into full-scale civil war. "Iran will get involved, Turkey will get involved, Saudi Arabia, Syria," he says. "Regional war is very much a possibility," says Hiltermann. Iraq's neighbors "are hysterical about Iranian strategic advances in the region." US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad last month ranked Syria and Iran with al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the country's principal Sunni Arab insurgent groups, in terms of destabilizing influences in Iraq. Despite that assessment, the United States has not held substantive talks with Syria regarding Iraq since 2004 or with Iran since the war began in 2003. Diplomats and analysts increasingly are urging the Bush administration to reach out to both countries as part of a regional approach to quelling Iraq's troubles. Former secretary of state James Baker, leader of the Iraq Study Group, which is preparing a set of policy recommendations for the Bush administration, has already endorsed the idea of seeking the help of Iran and Syria. "The thing is, because Iran and Syria both have spoiling power in Iraq, if you could neutralize them," it would ease some of the many pressures within Iraq, Hiltermann says. But he said the two countries may demand trade-offs that the Bush administration would resist: for Syria, US help with its biggest stated aim, winning back the Golan Heights from Israel; for Iran, US compromise over its nuclear program. Hiltermann acknowledges the difficulty. "I'm saying it's required," he says. "I'm not saying it's possible." (Washington Post)

Bush plans to increase US military presence in Iraq

November 16: Apparently "changing strategies" in Iraq means something else to George W. Bush than it does to the majority of Americans. Bush is telling senior advisors that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers. Bush's insistence on escalating hostilities and the US troop presence in Iraq may be dovetailing with the recommendations expected to be made by the Iraq Study Group, the 10-member committee chaired by Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James Baker. Although the panel's work is not complete, its recommendations are expected to be built around a four-point "victory strategy" developed by Pentagon officials advising the group. The strategy, along with other related proposals, is being circulated in draft form and has been discussed in separate closed sessions with Baker and vice-president Dick Cheney, an Iraq war hawk. Point one of the strategy calls for an increase rather than a decrease in overall US force levels inside Iraq, possibly by as many as 20,000 soldiers. This figure is far fewer than that called for by the Republican presidential hopeful, John McCain. But by raising troop levels, Bush will draw a line in the sand and defy Democratic pressure for a swift drawdown. The reinforcements will be used to secure Baghdad, scene of the worst sectarian and insurgent violence, and enable redeployments of US, coalition and Iraqi forces elsewhere in the country. Point two of the plan stresses the importance of regional cooperation to the successful rehabilitation of Iraq. Point three is an attempt to revive the reconciliation process between Sunni, Shia and other groups in Iraq. Point four involves asking Congress for more resources to train and equip Iraqi security forces.
Regional cooperation to help rehabilitate Iraq could involve the convening of an international conference of neighboring countries or more direct diplomatic, financial and economic involvement of US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. "The extent to which that [regional cooperation] will include talking to Iran and Syria is still up for debate," says Patrick Cronin of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "Externally, US policy is focused on what is achievable. Some quarters believe Syria in some ways could be helpful. There are more doubts about Iran but Iran holds more cards. Some think it's worth a try." A State Department official says that Bush officials are prepared, in principle, to discuss with Iran its activities in Iraq. To reconcile differences between Shi'a, Sunni, Kurdish, and other groups, the report will recommend the creation of a credible political framework that will help persuade Iraqis and neighboring countries alike that Iraq can become a fully functional state.
Initial post-invasion ideas about imposing Western democratic standards, a linchpin of neoconservative ideology concerning Iraq, is considered impossible, and will not be recommended. The report is also expected to warn that de facto tripartite partition within a loose federal system, as advocated by Democratic senator Joe Biden and others, would lead not to peaceful power-sharing but a large-scale humanitarian crisis.
Despite the November election returns and his own calls for bipartisanship and a change in direction in Iraq, Bush is unconvinced that his administration's policies in Iraq need to be changed. "You've got to remember, whatever the Democrats say, it's Bush still calling the shots," says a former senior administration official. "He believes it's a matter of political will. That's what [Henry] Kissinger told him. And he's going to stick with it. [Bush] is in a state of denial about Iraq. Nobody else is any more. But he is. But he knows he's got less than a year, maybe six months, to make it work. If it fails, I expect the withdrawal process to begin next fall." The "last push" strategy is also intended to give Bush and the Republicans "political time and space" to recover from their election drubbing and prepare for the 2008 presidential campaign, says the official. "The Iraq Study Group buys time for the president to have one last go," he says. "If the Democrats are smart, they'll play along, and I think they will. But forget about bipartisanship. It's all about who's going to be in best shape to win the White House. ...Bush has said 'no' to withdrawal, so what else do you have? The Baker report will be a set of ideas, more realistic than in the past, that can be used as political tools. What they're going to say is: lower the goals, forget about the democracy crap, put more resources in, do it." (Guardian)
November 16: Congressional Democrats vote unanimously for Nancy Pelosi to become Speaker of the House; Steny Hoyer is voted in as House Majority Leader, defeating opponent John Murtha by a 149-86 margin. Murtha was Pelosi's choice for majority leader, prompting the news media to cast the race for the position, and Pelosi's backing of Murtha, as evidence of a "deeply divided" Democratic Party. Some Hoyer supporters were not pleased with the pressure being brought to bear on them to vote for Murtha. "Steny was more where the mainstream of where the party was," says Barney Frank, the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. A similarly contentious race is brewing in the Republican Party, where John Boehner and Mike Pence are vying for the post of minority leader.
On the Republican side of the aisle, Senator Trent Lott, forced to step down as the Senate's majority leader in 2002 over racist remarks, won a 25-24 vote to become the minority whip, edging out Lamar Alexander. The Senate Republican leadership unanimously chooses Mitch McConnell to be minority leader. Lott won the vote by telling his colleagues that, in a split Senate, his expertise at dealmaking would be critical in getting legislation passed under the Democratic leadership. For the Democrats, minority leader Harry Reid and minority whip Dick Durbin will ascend to the same posts as majority leader and majority whip. House Republicans, in a closely divided and apparently contentious vote, pick John Boehner over the more extreme conservative Mike Pence to be House Minority Leader.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this story is the reaction of the media to the two parties' leadership races. The Democrats are almost uniformly portrayed as bitter, divisive, and contentious, with Pelosi slammed for trying to "railroad" Murtha, her "handpicked candidate," over the more popular Hoyer. On the other side of the aisle, the Republican race is downplayed, with media attention focusing on the "rehabilitation" of Lott from his former status as a disgraced ex-leader. Iconoclastic liberal blogger Arianna Huffington has a more realistic take on the Democrats' leadership competition, noting that, with his upcoming position on the House Armed Forces Committee, Murtha will still be the Democrats' most powerful voice on Iraq. As for Pelosi, Huffington writes, "Even though her guy lost, this was still a big win for her. A victory for taking a stand -- and for her leadership. Because that's what real leaders do, they take stands. They listen to their hearts and follow their gut. If you only jump into the fights you're sure you can win -- notches in the W column that will look good on your political resume -- you're a hack, not someone who can move the party and the country forward. It's not about trying to have a spotless record; it's about knowing which battles are worth fighting, whatever the outcome. It bodes well for Pelosi that she was willing to spend her political capital right off the bat -- especially on the issue that will define her time at the helm. Far too many modern politicians save their political capital until it's lost all its value."
Media watchdog group Media Matters notes the coverage of the two parties' leadership battles, and cites the New York Times and others as focusing on the "recriminations, finger-pointing and infighting" that have, in its words, "cast a cloud over the [Democratic] party's post-election celebration," but ignored the perhaps more contentious GOP contests. The Times trumpets the Murtha-Hoyer contest as an example of "the latest episode of that familiar Washington series, Democrats in Disarray." Meanwhile, closely contested and harshly disputed contests among Republican leaders are either ignored or downplayed. Indeed, the bitter battle for the position of House Majority Leader in early 2006 between Republicans John Boehner, Roy Blunt, and John Shadegg was likened to a "campaign for class president." In contrast, the race between Murtha and Hoyer was characterized by Times reporter Adam Nagourney as "a reminder of just how much Democrats like to rumble." Times reporter Carl Hulse reported that Democrats were "squabbling" and described Republicans as "enjoying the spectacle." A third Times article portrayed the race as a "bruising fight" that would require some "healing." While the Times depicted the Democratic contest for House majority leader as "bruising" and "bare-knuckle[d]," its coverage of the race between Boehner and Pence for the post of House minority leader included no similar characterizations. In fact, while Hulse noted in his November 15 article on the GOP leadership dispute that Republicans "may be divided and dispirited," he immediately emphasized that they agree on what they are looking for in their new leader and even described them as "soul-searching." A November 14 Los Angeles Times article was more evenhanded.
The media has reported heavily on the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, but has consistently downplayed the rancorous debate within the party over whether Rumsfeld should have been fired before the election, thereby possibly reducing the losses suffered on November 7. While other media outlets, most notably the Associated Press, released numerous reports on the fallout from the Rumsfeld firing, including one November 9 article headlined, "Bush Faces GOP Ire Over Rumsfeld Timing." the Times and other mainstream outlets downplayed the dispute, burying references to it deep in related articles. Similarly, while the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets reported on the divide in the Republican Party over the naming of Senator Mel Martinez to head the Republican National Committee, the New York Times failed to do so.
Progressive blogger Glenn Greenwald, one of the most thoughtful and well-considered voices on the Internet, gives an acerbic take on the entire media "tempest in a teapot" coverage of the Democrats' leadership contests, calling the media coverage "mindless group-think" and decrying its portrayal of Pelosi: "She's not even Speaker yet, and they've already pronounced her to be a b*tchy, vindictive shrew incapable of leading because she's consumed by petty personal bickering rather than serious and substantive considerations. And all of this is based on nothing." After citing one media maven after another in their criticism of Pelosi -- calling it a "towering defeat," "a real embarrassment," "a disaster for Pelosi all the way around," and even comparing her unfavorably to the bullying, bribing former Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, he dissects the coverage in far more detail that I will subject the reader to here. (Click the Unclaimed Territory link at the end of this post for Greenwald's entire diary.) The rancor from the Beltway insiders continues, with neoconservative Marty Peretz comparing Pelosi to, of all people, Bella Abzug, first mocking the late Abzug's weight problem and sartorial choices, and then saying that, like Abzug, Pelosi cannot "discern between a political difference and a personal war." Slate's Timothy Noah even warns Pelosi that House Democrats must now consider her "on probation. ...One more strike -- even a minor misstep -- and House Democrats will demonstrate that they, unlike Speaker-elect Pelosi and President Bush, know how to correct their mistakes." Greenwald notes, accurately, that Pelosi supported Murtha over Hoyer because she has a much better working relationship with Murtha than Hoyer. "Is that supposed to be unusual? That's how all of Washington works. It's how the world works." He notes that the infighting in the Republican Party over the succession of Mel Martinez to the chairmanship to the Republican National Committee over Michael Steele was for the plain fact that Martinez, unlike Steele, knows how to take orders, in this case from the White House.
Greenwald writes, "The Bush administration has spent six years completely obsessed with personal loyalty to the President and intolerant of the slightest independence. The entire Congress was kept strictly in line for the last five years. Every official who showed the slightest independence was replaced by obedient Bush loyalists. Yet Pelosi does nothing other than support an ally rather than an opponent for the position immediately underneath her, and that makes her some out-of-control egomaniac consumed by personal vanity and emotional impulses. And that's to say nothing of the fact that the Hoyer-Murtha race is being depicted as some sort of sign of hateful Democratic in-fighting that shows Pelosi has lost control, even though Republicans are mauling each other for every single House leadership position, all of which are hotly contested. Trent Lott beat Lamar Alexander by a vote of 25-24 in the Senate for the position of Minority Whip. There's nothing wrong with various factions competing for leadership positions. That's called an 'election,' and only those to whom Eric Alterman refers as the 'smart boys' at TNR and Slate would view a simple election for House Majority Leader as some apocalyptic sign that Democrats are lame, idiotic and hopelessly divided.
Greenwald is equally contemptuous of the media's breathless coverage of the struggle for the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. The media portrays Pelosi's opposition to Jane Harman for that position as a personal, vicious "cat fight," citing inane reasons like both wearing similar dresses to a Capital Hill event and Pelosi's supposed hatred of Harman as a result. Noah writes that the reasons for "Pelosi's animus are cloudy and in all likelihood personal." Those in the know believe that Pelosi opposes Harman's attempt to take the position because Harman, one of the more conservative Democrats on the Hill, aggressively supported both the war on Iraq and Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program. Harman is also under investigation for her work on behalf of the Israeli lobby AIPAC. Greenwald notes, "She has been far too sympathetic to the administration's excesses and far too eager to serve as a Democratic shield publicly defending the President." But the media prefers the gossipy, woman-bashing portrayal of the two women indulging in "cat fights." The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus notes that Pelosi thinks that Harman has been "insufficiently partisan on the committee." This is a solid reason for Pelosi to oppose Harman as chair of the committee, but, Greenwald notes, this rationale is being tossed aside; instead, the media "just make[s] things up in order to bolster their group-driven collective imagination, and then present their group gossip as authoritative and established insider wisdom. [Media pundits] are already out in force attacking Pelosi's character with petty and baseless chattering. This country has extremely serious issues facing it, and yet these self-styled 'serious' journalists are already trying to cripple Pelosi's ability to do anything before she has even begun, all based on giggly chit-chat and gossipy garbage that has no legitimacy other than the fact that they all repeat it in unison on television and in print. It's what these pundits and journalists do. They have pre-conceived, vapid notions about everything and everyone -- all driven by deep self-love for their own superior wisdom -- and they distort reality and crowd out sober analysis of everything that matters. Nancy Pelosi, and really everyone, would be well-advised not to listen to them and, above all, never adopt as a goal trying to please or satisfy them. They are frivolous and out of touch with everything that matters and should be treated as such."
Another progressive blogger, "Digby" of Hullabaloo, is even less forgiving. He focuses on what is apparently a b*tchfest on MSNBC, featuring Norah O'Donnell, Mary Ann Akers, Lawrence O'Donnell, all giggling and piling on about Pelosi's imminent downfall. Akers whispers, like a middle school girl passing on ugly gossip about a schoolmate, that her fellow reporters are "loving" this story. Digby channels their own spiteful immaturity, writing, "The DC press corps hates having to criticize Republicans. Republicans make them feel all icky and call them liberals (which they so, like, aren't!). I confess, however, that I'm a little bit awed by how smoothly they have transitioned back into their assigned roles. I thought there might be a moment or two of cognitive dissonance as they went from grim and serious reports about terrorism and war to shallow personality politics and tabloid character assassination. I assumed they would at least wait until the presidential campaign took off to contrast the manly Republican Alpha with the loser Omega Dem, but I guess I didn't realize how much they've missed their fast times at DC High. They were certainly enjoying themselves tonight. Rolling their eyes and laughing and even snorting a time or two at the completely absurd sight of Democrats in power. I expected to see Yoohoo spray out of Norah's nose at one point. It was just so, like, awesomely super-fun!" Digby calls it the return of the "Clinton Rules" for Democratic coverage -- citing the 1994 battle royale between Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich's handpicked choice for House Majority Leader among Republicans, a battle that went unremarked in the press, and comparing it to the immediate pile-on of the media against Bill Clinton when he took office in January 1993. Digby sums up: "There are no honeymoons for Democrats. Remember that. And 'moral authority' is about haircuts and Hollywood, not torture and illegal wars. It is not merely a fight against the Republicans or a fight over politics and policy. It is a non-stop battle with the press to cover events with seriousness and responsiblity. For some reason, when Democrats are in power the press corps immediately goes from being merely shallow to insufferable, sophomoric *ssholes." (AP/Yahoo! News, CNN, MediaMatters, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Unclaimed Territory, Hullabaloo)
November 16: Democratic incumbent John Barrow will take the House seat in Georgia's 12th District after Republican Max Burns says he will drop his request for a recount. Barrow won the seat by a slim 864 votes out of over 142,000 cast. Barrow was one of several Georgia Democrats facing tough re-election campaigns after Georgia's Republican-dominatd state legislature gerrymandered Georgia's House districts to favor GOP candidates in 2005. Before the districts were redrawn, Barrow defeated Burns handily in 2004. (Congressional Quarterly)
November 16: In the still-disputed FL-13 House race, governor Jeb Bush has appointed Alec Yasinsac, a Florida State University computer science professor, to carry out an inspection of the Sarasota County voting machines, manufactured by ES&S, that failed to register at least 18,400 votes for the race in that Democratic-leaning area. Yasinsac is a questionable choice at best to handle the investigation, according to lawyer Reggie Mitchell of the liberal civil rights organization People For the American Way, who says, "I know Alec Yasinsac well, and while he's a great guy, he's the wrong choice to lead an investigation into what went wrong in Sarasota County. We need an independent investigator, not someone whose partisan leanings have been clear since the 2000 voting fiasco. Alec is a strong advocate for electronic voting machines and a vociferous opponent of requiring a voter verifiable paper trail. In 2000, he wore a button reading 'Bush Won' while working against a recount in the presidential race. He clearly has preexisting biases. This situation requires a truly independent investigation that will get to the bottom of this problem in a nonpartisan fashion, and help to ensure that these problems never occur again. Sarasota County voters, Florida and the nation deserve no less." Yasinsac is a registered Republican who actively supported GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Gallagher this year and loudly protested Democratic tactics in the 2000 presidential recount. On December 3, 2000, while taking part in the Florida presidential recount, Yasinsac proclaimed, "'I'll never be a passive political participant again." The race, between incumbent Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings, is in recount. Buchanan at this point has a slender 373-vote lead. On November 13, Jennings's campaign filed a lawsuit aimed at making sure all of the voting systems and documents remain in their Election Day state.The congressional undervote rate in Sarasota was far higher than the rate in any other of the district's counties. It's also more than 10 times as high as the gubernatorial and Senate races that bookended it on the top of the ballot. A spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb says that her office hired Yasinsac because he was "based locally," has strong credentials, and approached the office to be a vendor. (Daily Kos, Miami Herald)
November 16: The public relations firm Lincoln Group wins another $20 million contract to "monitor" -- and to manipulate and shape -- the news media's coverage of the Iraq war. The effort to control the news about, and from, Iraq, begun long before the March 2003 invasion. "Embedded" journalists were used to tell stories of toppled statues and American heroism during the siege and investitute of Baghdad. Since then, the US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an assortment of media projects specifically designed to sell "good news" about the occupation, while administration officials played the other side of the card by consistently complaining about the lack of good news from Iraq reported in the media. Lincoln Group staffers and subcontractors have been in the thick of this propaganda effort, writing and translating stories for Iraqi publications, then paying local editors to run them. Sometimes the Lincoln staffers and subcontractors pretended to be freelance reporters or ad executives. The current deal with Lincoln was quietly done in September, but news of that contract is just now reaching the public. Lincoln is being paid to maintain a "unit of 12-18 communicators to support military PR efforts in Iraq and throughout the Middle East from media training to pitching stories and providing content for government-backed news sites." O'Dwyers PR Daily, a respected public relations industry publication, reports that "contract with the Multi-National Force-Iraq is valued at more than $6 million per year, although contracting documents indicated that additional efforts could be 'ordered' from the Pennsylvania Avenue firm for up to $20 million." The group calls itself a "strategic communications and public relations firm providing insight and influence in challenging and hostile environments."
Lincoln is a veteran of Defense Department contracts, having signed at least 20 contracts with the Pentagon over the last two years, the largest topping $100 million, as well as similar commercial and nonmilitary governmental deals. Lincoln is also working in Pakistan to promote "'investments in the country's textile, energy, technology and telecom" industries. The firm also wants to contract with the Pentagon to help the US Army Reserve create a promotional campaign for what it calls the Reserve's "vision of the future." In 2005, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the US military was "secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq." The stories were actually written, not by troops in the field, but by US military "information operations' troops" and "translated into Arabic and covertly placed in Baghdad newspapers." The Lincoln Group acted as an intermediary between the US military and the media outlets; company staff and subcontractors wrote and translated stories, then paid local editors varying amounts to run them, pretending to be freelance reporters, for example, or advertising executives. The Lincoln Group was formed in mid-2004, under the name Iraqex, specifically to provide services in Iraq, according to authors Sheldon Ramptom and John Stauber. (See earlier items in this site.) The two founders of the firm, former Marine intelligence officer Paige Craig and English businessman Christian Bailey, had no background in public relations or media when they formed their firm. According to Rampton and Stauber, "In its various [pre-war] incarnations, Iraqex/Lincoln dabbled in real estate, published a short-lived online business publication called the Iraq Business Journal, and tried its hand at exporting scrap metal, manufacturing construction materials, and providing logistics for US forces before finally striking gold with the Pentagon PR contract."
Lincoln originally worked with the well-established Rendon Group, a PR firm with close ties to the Republican Party which had played a major part in "selling" the Persian Gulf War to Americans, and worked closely with Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, the outfit that sent carefully coached Iraqi "defectors" to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House to feed false information to senior intelligence agents and Bush officials to sell the INC's hoped-for invasion of Iraq. The Lincoln Group managed to place more than 1,000 stories in the Iraqi and Arab press. In May 2006, a Defense Department investigation of Pentagon-financed propaganda efforts in Iraq warned that paying Iraqi journalists to produce positive stories could damage American credibility and called for an end to military payments to a group of Iraqi journalists in Baghdad. The report, authored by Rear Admiral Scott Van Buskirk, doesn't mention Lincoln by name, but found that the military should scrutinize contractors involved in the propaganda effort more closely to ensure proper oversight is in place. Van Buskirk also blamed the military for not investigating whether paying for placement for articles would undermine the concept of a free press in Iraq. The report, which was carefully scrubbed before its release, apparently found that, while disturbing, the military's propaganda efforts did not violate military regulations, but did raise questions about the military's truth and credibility that will prove to be difficult to deflect. "The war in Iraq has spawned a new industry in Washington that could be called Psy-ops Journalism," says Alvin Snyder, a former executive of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and a senior fellow at the USC Center for Public Diplomacy. "The new breed of journalists are following the money trail to the Pentagon." While such psy-ops campaigns are an accepted part of military operations in foreign countries, they are specifically prohibited from being carried out in a manner that might influence US news coverage.
That caveat, of course, is being honored in the breach. A Defense Department document titled "Information Operations Roundup," approved in 2003, acknowledged that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa. PSYOP messages disseminated to any audience...will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public." Snyder says, "Some $400 million in media consulting contracts has been awarded during the past few years by the Pentagon, for the purpose of helping 'to effectively communicate Iraqi government and Coalition goals with strategic audiences.' Thus far both the Pentagon and its contract psy-op journalists have experienced a painful learning curve, but the most recent contract award will show how much each has learned. The outlook is not promising. ...A practical question is whether psy-ops journalism can work at all. It is a cross between what is accepted as the mainstream journalism of print and TV (and many journalists now blog) and what is known as psy-ops, or psychological operations, those engaged in mind control warfare, to gain military advantage by fooling the enemy." Rampton and Stauber point out in their new book, The Best War Ever, that much of the endless stream of public relations propaganda flowing from the military into the US news media "is aimed not at tactical deception of enemy combatants but at influencing morale and support for the war in the United States." It has not always worked well.
But Lincoln is prospering. Its DC offices, once located on K Street, recently moved to larger quarters in the Pennsylvania Avenue building that once housed Jack Abramoff's famous restaurant, Signatures. (Media Transparency)
November 16: In an egregrious example of sugarcoating reality with marketing phrases, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) issues a report that does not mention "hungry" people in America. Instead, those people who consistently lack enough food for their needs are now labeled as experiencing "very low food security." USDA sociologist Mark Nord, who authored the report, says that the term "hunger" is an inaccurate and unscientific term. The number of chronically hungry Americans has topped out at 35 million, or 12% of the population, with 11 million more reporting that they lack enough food to eat on a periodic basis. The number of chronically hungry Americans has consistently risen for the last five years. Anti-hunger advocates say the new words sugarcoat a national shame. "The proposal to remove the word 'hunger' from our official reports is a huge disservice to the millions of Americans who struggle daily to feed themselves and their families," says David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, an anti-hunger advocacy group. "We...cannot hide the reality of hunger among our citizens." In assembling its report, the USDA divides Americans into groups with "food security" and those with "food insecurity," who cannot always afford to keep food on the table. Under the old lexicon, that group -- 11% of American households last year -- was categorized into "food insecurity without hunger," meaning people who ate, though sometimes not well, and "food insecurity with hunger," for those who sometimes had no food. That last group now forms the category "very low food security," described as experiencing "multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake." Slightly better-off people who aren't always sure where their next meal is coming from are labeled "low food security."
Many politicians have long ducked the issue of hunger in America. In 1999, Texas Governor George W. Bush, then running for president, said he thought the annual USDA report -- which consistently finds his home state one of the hungriest in the nation -- was fabricated. "I'm sure there are some people in my state who are hungry," Bush said. "I don't believe 5% are hungry." Bush said then that he believed that the statistics were aimed at his candidacy. "Yeah, I'm surprised a report floats out of Washington when I'm running a presidential campaign," he snapped. The agency usually releases the report in the fall, for reasons that "have nothing to do with politics," Nord said, but this year, the report was delayed from its usual October release until after the midterm elections. Democrats accused the Bush administration of delaying its release until after the elections. Nord denies the contention, saying, "This is a schedule that was set several months ago." (Washington Post)
November 16: Alleged Hamas operative Mohammed Salah, on trial in Chicago after being caught by Israeli authorities and accused of running money to high-level Palestinian militants, says the cash that he was caught with was intended for the legitimate, charitable arm of Hamas. He also says that much of the money actually came from "cronies of George Bush" in the Saudi royal family. Salah, who spent five years in an Israeli prison, is on trial in Chicago, facing terrorism charges related to his relationship with Hamas. In 1993, Salah and his wife deposited nearly a million dollars into a pair of Chicago bank accounts; much of the money was sent to Salah through accounts controlled by Mousa Abu Marzook, a longtime Hamas leader now living in Syria. A large amount of the money had earlier been wired to Marzook by a Geneva, Switzerland firm, Faisal Financial Services, according to bank records. "Are you aware that's an arm of the Saudi government, cronies of George Bush?" defense attorney Erica Thompson asks Justice Department investigator Thomas Moriarty during cross-examination. Moriarty testifies he didn't know who was behind the Swiss bank account, an unlikely story considering the fund was linked to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 2003 US congressional testimony. During his trip, Salah was able to access about $200,000 of the $985,000 placed in his accounts before he was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint. Shortly after the capture, his wife moved the leftover money into a new account and used some of it to pay off the mortgage on the couple's home. Thompson suggested that Azita Salah was simply trying to protect the money from Israeli seizure and safeguard her family's future. And she said the $985,000 was only a fraction of what was needed for humanitarian missions in the impoverished Occupied Territories. "Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a hospital?" Thompson asks Moriarty. "Do you have any idea how much it costs to run an orphanage?" (Daily Southtown)
November 16: Disgraced former Republican representative Mark Foley is now being investigated for possible criminal activities related to his Internet stalking of underage House pages by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The FDLE is assisting the FBI in its own probe of Foley, who continues to deny that he had any improper sexual relations with anyone under the age of consent. (CNN)
November 16: Columnist Sidney Blumenthal writes that, while many neoconservatives are ducking out of admitting any responsibility for the war in Iraq -- a war they planned for and advocated -- now that Bush "fixer" James Baker is heading the Iraq Study Group and preparing what Blumenthal calls "a whole new US foreign policy [and] trying to salvage whatever can be retrieved from the wreckage of Bush's presidency for its last two years [in an attempt to] prevent the Republican party, having lost the crown jewel of the Congress, from being permanently tainted," the selfsame neocons are planning to "confound Baker." ISG member Edwin Meese, according to ISG advisor Clifford May and the closest thing to a neocon on the committee, intends to oppose the group's recommendations. Blumenthal writes, "The neocon logic in favor of the Iraq war was that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad: an invasion would install an Iraqi democracy that would force the Palestinians to submit to the Israelis. Now near-unanimity exists on Baker's commission to reverse that formula. The central part of a new policy must be, they believe, that the road to Baghdad leads through Jerusalem." Former Bush I national security advisor and Baker confidante Brent Scowcroft has long advocated the position that security and stability in the region, including Iraq, can only be achieved by re-establishing the Middle East peace process. Scowcroft is echoing Baker's own views. Blumenthal writes, "On September 15, Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice's legal adviser and a former Scowcroft protege, echoed Scowcroft's ideas in a speech at Washington's Middle East Institute. Afterwards, Cheney pressured Rice and she rebuked her closest deputy, underlining her own weakness. Then the electoral catastrophe intervened, giving Baker leeway (and sidelining Rice). Baker even summoned Tony Blair to testify on Tuesday in order to support a restart of the Middle East peace process. If Baker were to propose that, he knows -- although he will not explicitly say so -- that its enactment would require the firing of neocons on the national security council and Cheney's staff, in particular Elliott Abrams, the NSC's near-east affairs director. If Baker actually advocates what he thinks, Bush will have to either admit the errors of his ways and the wisdom of his father and his father's men -- or cast them and caution aside once again." Recent history tells us which way Bush is likely to jump, and admitting error and submitting to his father's wisdom is not the direction he is likely to take. (Guardian)
November 16: CBS News producer Dick Meyers says that America should be relieved to lose so many of the 1994 "Contract with America" Republicans that came in to power in the House of Representatives under the tutelage of Newt Gingrich. Meyers writes, only somewhat facetiously, "The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do. I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99% of the population -- if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies -- would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections. I'm confident that if historians ever spend the time on it, they'll confirm my thesis. Same with forensic psychiatrists. I have discussed this with scores of politicians, staffers, consultants and reporters since 1994 and have found few dissenters."
Meyers says that, in general, American politicians are "like any high-achieving group in America, with roughly the same distribution of pathologies and virtues." But not the 1994 crowd. They "didn't fit the personality profile of American politicians, and they didn't deviate in a good way. It was the Chess Club on steroids. The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government. Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace. Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of '94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime."
Meyers singles out Gingrich for special treatment, writing that Gingrich "lived out a very special hypocrisy. In addition to the above biographical dissonance, Gingrich was one of the most sharp-tongued, articulate and persuasive attack dogs in modern politics. His favorite target was the supposed immorality and corruption of the Democratic Party. With soaring rhetoric, he condemned his opponents as anti-American and dangerous to our country's family values -- 'grotesque' was a favorite word. Yet this was a man who was divorced twice -- the first time when his wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment, the second time after an affair was revealed. Gingrich made his bones in the party by relentlessly attacking Democratic corruption, yet he was hounded from office because of a series of serious ethics questions. He posed as a reformer of the House, yet championed a series of deforms that made the legislative process more closed, more conducive to hiding special interest favors and less a forum for genuine debate. And he did it all with epic sanctimony."
Other Republicans not in the 1994 class were quick to embrace their warped ideology and hypocrisy. "Bill Clinton of Monica Lewinsky fame had no more zealous and moralistic critic than Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who ran a then-powerful committee," Meyers writes. "In the course of his crusade, Burton was forced to admit he had actually fathered a child in an extramarital affair. The man who led the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings with equal, if saner, bloodlust was Rep. Henry Hyde. In the midst of this, Hyde was forced to admit to a five-year affair. When Gingrich stepped down, Republicans turned to a master Louisiana pork-barreller, Robert Livingston. That lasted a day or so, until Livingston (you guessed it) admitted to having extramarital affairs. Livingston was succeeded by Dennis Hastert, perhaps the most, well, conventional of the GOP leaders of his era. Still, Hastert was a hawk with no military service and a defender of the rich with no money or experience in business."
Meyers is equally scathing in his treatment of the losers in the November midterms. "In this year's election cycle, House Republicans were justly vilified for their subservience to the corruptions of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay's entire K Street project. While extreme, there have been many other periods of extreme corruption in Congress. What marked this Republican cadre was not their corruption, but the chips on their shoulders. It was a localized condition. It didn't spread to the Senate. The Republican leaders there -- again, suspend your ideology and just look at biography -- were pretty typical American politicians. Bob Dole, Trent Lott and Bill Frist were not acting out in office. They were not ideologues and did not use the rhetoric of the righteous. The colleagues that wielded the most power -- like McCain, Simpson, Lugar, Specter, Stevens, Warner -- have had long runs of service in several arenas relatively free of public and private embarrassment and hypocrisy -- and even some substantial accomplishments pre-Senate. History reveals that great leaders and intellectuals often appear in clusters, inspiring and motivating each other to extraordinary achievement. American historians have focused on this in recent books looking at the 'founding brothers,' Lincoln's 'team of rivals,' the 19th-century pragmatist philosophers called 'the metaphysical club,' Roosevelt's New Dealers and Kennedy's 'best and the brightest.' The opposite is also true. What's next for the House is of course uncertain, but an undistinguished chapter has come to a close. Good riddance." (CBS News)
November 16: In yet another example of the mainstream media's "fair and balanced" coverage of the news, Fox News's Special Report features the executive editor of Roll Call, Morton Kondracke, calling incoming Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi "the Wicked Witch of the West." The next morning, New York Post Washington bureau chief Deborah Orin-Eilbeck twice calls Pelosi a "shrew." No similar insults can be located from mainstream sources about outgoing Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert, particularly any overtly sexist comments. In a discussion about Pelosi's handling of the Democratic leadership contest between representatives Steny Hoyer and John Murtha for House majority leader, in which Pelosi backed Murtha but Hoyer emerged victorious, Kondrake states: "[W]e had the 'Hammer' -- [former House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay -- and now, we have the 'Wicked Witch of the West'...Nancy Pelosi, who's twisting arms and...having her aides making threats." Not only is Kondracke overstating the case, the mainstream media has routintely played up disagreements among Congressional Democrats while refusing to report on similar divisions between Republicans. On November 17, the Post's Orin-Eilbeck publishes a column entitled "Call Her 'Nancy Shrew'?," also addressing Pelosi's handling of the Hoyer/Murtha contest. She writes, "Forget [the recently released film] The Devil Wears Prada, the hot show in Washington is 'The Shrew Adores Armani.' In just a few short days, House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi has turned into a caricature of the shrill, petty woman boss. ...The stereotype of the woman boss as a self-centered witch on wheels who'll run over anyone in her path has plenty of roots in American culture -- The Devil Wears Prada, zinging a fashion editor modeled on Vogue's [editor in chief] Anna Wintour, is just the latest incarnation. So if 'Nancy Shrew' becomes the image of the highest-ranking woman ever in American politics -- Pelosi will be second in line of succession to the presidency -- it'll be a problem for all women politicos, including 2008 prospect Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton."
Other media commentators have resorted to sexist commentary to characterize Pelosi, with MSNBC's Chris Matthews on November 13 asking a guest if Pelosi was "going to castrate Steny Hoyer" if Hoyer was elected House majority leader. A number of media mavens have attacked Pelosi over her appearance, accusing her of overdosong on Botox and facelift surgeries. And on October 26, Fox News contributor Dennis Miller called Pelosi a "nimrod" who "intellectually [is] not up to the task" Pelosi is, according to Miller, "a C-minus, D-plus applicant...who no doubt would have been drummed out of the Mary Kay corps after an initial four-week evaluation period." See earlier items for more information about the media onslaught against Pelosi. (MediaMatters)
November 16: What Fox News is to television news programming, NewsMax tries to be on the Internet -- a source of relentless right-wing propaganda and manipulation of the news to serve its conservative ideological interests. Indeed, NewsMax is funded by radical right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, best known for his covert funding of the "Arkansas Project" and other attempts to force Bill Clinton out of office. Recently NewsMax signed respected journalist Ronald Kessler to be its chief Washington correspondant. In return, Kessler has become, in columnist Terry Krepel's words, "a Bush hagiographer, penning two books singing the praises of the president and his wife...." Krepel writes that Kessler's main function at NewsMax is to "fluff the president and his advisers and to attack the administration's opponents, like John McCain and Democrats." None of this is particularly noteworthy in and of itself; the so-called "Mighty Wurlitzer" of the right-wing noise machine is well-documented, and there are far more influential news outlets out there than NewsMax. Still, Kessler's efforts during the election season are worth reporting, if for no other reason than to demonstrate just how far the right-wing media will go to achieve its aims. Truth, honesty, and journalistic integrity have been, of course, completely abandoned.
In July and August, Kessler provided a three-part series featuring former White House chief of staff Andrew Card. In the series, Kessler did his sycophantic best to fluff the Bush administration, by allowing Card to extoll the virtues of failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers; used Card to attack the supposed "liberal media" by suggesting to Card that the New York Times "jeopardized Americans' safety" by "publishing stories on how the government tracks terrorists;" and attacking one of his favorite Republican targets, John McCain, by quoting Card on McCain's "incidents of irrational behavior." Kessler's sycophancy reached new levels with an August feature on Bush staffer Clay Johnson, in which he quotes Johnson as saying Bush's "trademark smirk or half smile" is "a manifestation of Bush's inability to act or pretend." On August 17, Kessler profiles the new White House communications director, Kevin Sullivan, and quotes Sullivan as saying, "The president has such great humanity, and he's so good with people, and the public doesn't see that enough." On September 11, Frances Townsend, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, is quoted as saying, "The president, not just by his words but by his actions and his decisions, has made perfectly clear that first and foremost in his mind is personal commitment to protecting the American people -- even if it results in criticism of him personally." Kessler, abandoning any pretense of non-partisan journalistic restraint, adds, "In effect, Bush operates as the CEO of the war on terror, pushing countries to cooperate, keeping track of terrorists, asking tough questions, and guiding the agencies responsible for combating terrorism." Other articles, including a glowing report on Bush's faith-based funding initiatives, followed.
Kessler began working in high gear after the one-two punch of the Mark Foley scandal and the release of Bob Woodward's State of Denial. Handling Woodward was, for Kessler, relatively straightforward, countering Woodward's claims that Card and Laura Bush tried to get the president to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by repeating Card's evasive denials on the subject. Handling Foley was a different matter. Foley was the recipient of both cash donations and favorable press coverage from NewsMax CEO Christopher Ruddy, so the publication had its own personal axe to grind, and its own dirty laundry to conceal. Instead, Kessler lied in his reports about the scandal. On October 6, Kessler ran an interview with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, but Hastert's claims were not countered -- even though they were incomplete or contradicted elsewhere. For instance, Kessler repeated Hastert's claim that he couldn't succeed in his intention to name former FBI director Louis Freeh to investigate the Foley scandal because of resistance from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. But the same day, NewsMax itself reported that Freeh was widely viewed as a Republican ally by Pelosi and other Democrats, and that -- not just an obstinate refusal to cooperate with Hastert -- was the basis for Pelosi's resistance. Kessler took it much further in an October 11 article, blaming the pages themselves for being targeted by Foley. He reprinted a host of unconfirmed rumors about scandalous behavior among the pages from the 1970s -- 30 years before -- involving sex, drugs, skinny-dipping, females undressing in front of open windows for the benefit of ogling Capitol Police officers, and more. Kessler wrote that, in essence, it wasn't Foley's fault that he was enticed into bad behavior by the licentious pages because "there is no way ultimately to ensure that members of Congress will behave themselves with minors they encounter anywhere." (Imagine that claim being made on, for instance, schoolteachers or Democrats.)
As the midterm elections approached, and the prospects for Republicans to retain control of Congress looked increasingly unlikely, Kessler mounted more attacks. He reprinted RNC chairman Ken Mehlman's assertions that the GOP would retain control of both the House and Senate as undeniable fact. He also used an October 31 article to launch a barrage of lies intended to damage Democrats. He wrote that "This year alone, the Democrats overwhelmingly voted five times to kill the Patriot Act," when in reality, in the final vote on the reauthorization of the act in March, only nine Senate Democrats voted against it. He repeatedly portrayed Democrats as opposing the entire Patriot Act when, in fact, the vast majority opposed only specific provisions. As Democratic House member Jane Harman, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: "We must extend it, mend it, but not end it." Kessler suggested that one Patriot Act provision that Democrats opposed was removal of the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but he offers no examples of Democrats who specifically opposed that provision -- perhaps because there are none. In fact, senator Russ Feingold, the only senator who voted against the original Patriot Act law in 2001, has said, "Nobody wants to put the wall back up." Kessler added, "Under the Patriot Act, each roving wiretap, as they are called, has to be approved by a judge, so there is no question about infringing on civil liberties any more than when a judge approves a search of the house of a suspected child molester. Yet Democrats have portrayed the act as a monstrous invasion of rights." This, again, conflates questions about a specific provision to opposition to the entire Patriot Act. What Democrats actually opposed was a Bush administration proposal to make roving wiretaps permanent; the renewal put a four-year sunset provision on them.
In a November 2 article, he wrote unequivocally, "Democrats have sought to kill the USA Patriot Act, which FBI agents and CIA officers consider their single most important tool for hunting down terrorists and preventing another 9/11 attack." This is not true either of the Congressional Democrats or of the FBI and CIA. And in a November 6 article, his final screed before the elections, Kessler sank to a Rush Limbaugh-ish level of what Krepel calls "pure, fact-free scare tactics." Krepel condenses Kessler's rhetoric into the following: "If the Democrats win control of Congress and their rhetoric and votes are to be believed, they would adopt the Clinton administration's spineless approach to fighting terrorism. They would gut the USA Patriot Act. They would stop interception of calls from al-Qaeda to and from the US. They would end tracking of terrorists' financial transfers. They would bestow legal rights on al-Qaeda terrorists who are being interrogated about planned plots rights similar to those enjoyed by American citizens. Finally, they would cut off funds to support the war effort in Iraq, handing al-Qaeda a win in what the terrorists themselves have described as a crucial battleground in their effort to defeat America and impose their vision of radical Islam on the world."
The day after the elections, Kessler entered a new realm of sycophancy and damage control. His article for that day compared Bush to three iconic Americans, and took a pointless swipe at Democrats in the process. Read for yourself: "Like Warren Buffett, Bush keeps his eyes on the horizon. Buffett invests in companies he believes have long-term growth potential and holds on to those stocks regardless of short-term price fluctuations, negative media coverage, and downgrades by stock analysts. Today, Buffett is the second richest American with $40 billion in assets. Bush isn't particularly interested in his place in history, either. Like any good CEO, he simply wants results and views challenges as opportunities. But he is also aware of how transitory opinion polls can be. When Truman left office, his approval rating stood at 25 percent. Yet today, because of his firm approach to national security, Truman -- whom the press portrayed as a simpleton -- is viewed as one of the great presidents. Similarly, the media have portrayed Bush as a buffoon, a religious fanatic, or a monster with the temerity to topple a man who had killed 300,000 people, not to mention liberating 50 million people. In the same way, Democratic papers and critics disparaged Abraham Lincoln as a 'dictator, ridiculed him as a baboon, damned him as stupid and incompetent....' according to Stephen B. Oates' book, With Malice Toward None." Krepel concludes, "Note that Democrats get the blame for attacking Lincoln. But that's Ron Kessler for you -- defending Bush at all costs, attacking any perceived threat to Bush at all costs. Truth and honesty, however, make up a good chunk of that cost." (ConWebWatch)
November 16: Fox News political pundit Bill O'Reilly does his own whitewashing, this time on behalf of Fox News. Fox Broadcasting recently signed to air a primetime special about O.J. Simpson's new book, If I Did It, an extraordinarily heinous publication telling how -- hypothetically -- he killed his wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. Like many others, O'Reilly is disgusted by the entire idea of Simpson's book and with the media outlets promoting it, but O'Reilly attempts to distance Fox News from Fox Broadcasting. He says, "Here's a man many believe did kill those two Americans, Nicole Brown Simpson being mother of his two children. Yet Simpson is participating in a project that is exploiting the murders. Shamefully, the Fox Broadcasting Unit is set to carry the program, which is simply indefensible, and a low point in American culture. For the record, Fox Broadcasting has nothing to do with the Fox News Channel." Unfortunately, O'Reilly is dead wrong. Fox News chief Roger Ailes also chairs Fox Television Stations, the group behind the Simpson special. Both Fox News and Fox Broadcasting are owned by conservative Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. And Fox Broadcasting, which programs prime time for the Fox network, regularly airs Fox News-produced programming, including content from O'Reilly. The Internet entertainment publication Radar Online contacts both Fox News and Fox Broadcasting for comment; interestingly enough, both e-mails are answered by the same spokesman, Brian Lewis, who responds, "Roger [Ailes] has absolutely nothing to do with the programs Fox Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts" -- even though Ailes is responsible for programming on the Fox television stations. Additionally, HarperCollins, the publishing house that is paying Simpson a reported $3.5 million for the book, is also owned by Murdoch's News Corp. While O'Reilly excoriates Simpson's publisher on his show, he never mentions it by name, or points out that it's also owned by the people who cut his paychecks. The editor at HarperCollins who bought Simpson's book, and who will be conducting the interview with Simpson for the Fox program, also publishes books by Fox talk show host Sean Hannity. Regan also used to host a Fox News show, Judith Regan Tonight, under contract from Ailes. In other words, O'Reilly is a tremendous liar and hypocrite. Not that that's news. (Radar Online)
November 16: Columnist Mick Farren writes a punchy editorial titled "The Wailing of Whipped Weasels." After have some fun at the expense of media pundits like Rush Limbaugh, howling that he was through "carrying water for the Republicans," and sycophants like Tucker Carlson who denied that they had ever been Bush supporters and excuse-mongerers -- who, in Farren's words, "had been wired to the RNC and Karl Rove [and are now] no longer even Republicans, embracing some weird, amorphous 'libertarianism'" -- he notes a new and "pathetic spin, based in the fiction that the people still respond to Bush's supposed charisma: that to lay a Democrat glove-of-impeachment on the president would alienate the electorate big-time. We were being urged to forgive, forget, and all get along. As in forget the lies and the spies, the Constitution and Geneva Conventions, the war profiteering and the body count. Forget that New Orleans's 9th Ward is still in ruins, forget the inflated homophobia, the decimated middle class, for-profit health care, reproductive rights and embryonic stem cells, and all the small-time insanity, like the Terri Schiavo debacle. Forget 'My Pet Goat' and the War on Christmas? And the accusations of everything from treason to dementia leveled at most of my friends?" Farren has no intention of going along with the spin: "Believe me, I have no inclination to forget any single damned thing, or to make any attempt to get along. I want to see every dirty secret dragged out and exposed, until George W. Bush is doing the Nixon perp-walk to the helicopter." (LA City Beat)

Ex-spy claims US duped into war with Iraq by tortured al-Qaeda prisoner

November 17: A former double agent who passed intelligence to the US while working undercover in al-Qaeda says an al-Qaeda captive deliberately misled the US into attacking Iraq. The ex-spy, using the assumed name Omar Nasiri, tells the BBC, and writes in a new book, about his infiltration of terrorist organizations over a decade and what he learned about their strategies. The al-Qaeda captive, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, provided erroneous information after he was captured by American forces in late 2001 and sent to Egypt for interrogation and torture. Nasiri adds to the story with his contention that Libi intentionally lied to provoke the US to invade Iraq in hopes of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and establishing Iraq as the center of a massive jihad. The intelligence agencies that Nasiri claims to have worked for have so far refused to discuss his claims. But his credibility has been addressed positively by multiple media outlets covering his book and the interview, such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, CBS, Guardian, and the BBC. "I've never seen anything from that period that was so complete and rang so true," says Michael Scheuer, who used to run the CIA unit that focused on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. "It really tied together and resonated with the information we had in classified form." "[Libi] knew what his interrogators wanted, and he was happy to give it to them," Nasiri writes. "He wanted to see Saddam toppled even more than the Americans did." According to Nasiri, one of the most important parts of the training al-Qaeda recruits receive in training camps is how to supply false information during interrogation. So far the American media is refusing to cover Nasiri's claims. (BBC/Buzzflash)
November 17: In an interview with the Arab news channel al-Jazeera, British prime minister Tony Blair admits that the situation in Iraq is a "disaster." He does not blame US or British troops, or policies, but instead blames Iraqi insurgents. Challenged by veteran interviewer Sir David Frost that the Western invasion of Iraq has "so far been pretty much of a disaster," Blair says, "It has." Blair continues, "You see what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq? It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy -- al Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shi'a militias on the other -- to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war." However, Blair insists that British troops are not leaving. "We are not walking away from Iraq," he says. "We will stay for as long as the government needs us to stay. And the reason for that is that what is happening in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, as elsewhere in parts of the Middle East, is a struggle between the decent majority of people, who want to live in peace together, and those who have an extreme and perverted and warped view of Islam, who want to create war. In those circumstances, our task has got to be to stand up for the moderates and the democrats against the extremists and the sectarians. They are testing our will at the moment, and our will has not to be found wanting." He warns that Britain will be involved in the Middle East on a "generational" basis, though he stresses he does not expect British troops to remain in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan for a generation. He says long-term diplomatic, economic and political efforts would be required to support and empower the forces of moderate Islam in the region against extremists with a "warped and perverted" version of the religion. Of the possibility of negoatiations and improved relations with Iran, Blair says, speaking directly to the Iranian government, "If you reject the way forward that we are setting out, if instead of helping the region you support terrorism, you act in breach of your international obligations, then it is our part to stand up to you. On the other hand, if it is the case that you want to be part of a constructive solution in the Middle East, the door is open to you."
Downing Street tries to play down what they are calling a "slip," saying, "I think that's just the way in which he answers questions. His views on Iraq are documented in hundreds of places, and that [the belief that it is a disaster] is not one of them." However, Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Liberal Democrats, responds, "At long last, the enormity of the decision to take military action against Iraq is being accepted by the prime minister. Surely Parliament and the British people who were given a flawed prospectus are entitled to an apology?" (London Daily Mail, Guardian)
November 17: The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress for its largest expenditure yet for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- anywhere from $127 billion to $160 billion for the 2007 fiscal year. If approved, the budget request would make the conflict the most expensive since World War II. The request is an addition to the $70 billion already approved for 2007. Since 2001, Congress has approved $502 billion for the war on terror, roughly two-thirds for Iraq. The latest request, due to reach the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress next spring, would make the war on terror more expensive than the Vietnam War. Senator Kent Conrad, the Democrat who will chair the Senate Budget Committee next year, says the amount under consideration is "$127 billion and rising." He says the cost "is going to increasingly become an issue" because it could prevent Congress from addressing domestic priorities, such as expanding Medicare prescription drug coverage. Democratic House member Jim Cooper, who believes the request will top $160 billion, says even this huge increase "won't solve the problem" in Iraq. Before the Iraq war began in 2003, the Bush administration estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion, though White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey had suggested in 2002 that it could cost as much as $200 billion. Lindsey was fired shortly after making that prediction. Representative John Murtha, an early critic of the war, vows to use his clout as chairman of the House panel that reviews the Pentagon budget "to get these troops out of Iraq and get back on track and quit spending $8 billion a month." Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff and a member of a bipartisan panel studying recommendations on Iraq for Bush, says the Pentagon needs $50 billion to $60 billion to "restore the units that are being brought back here, to re-equip them and get them back to a combat-readiness status." (USA Today)
November 17: Democratic senator Max Baucus says that Republicans can forget about any continuing plans to privatize Social Security. Baucus, the incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, says that while he wants to hold hearings on looming insolvencies in the Medicare and Social Security programs, Bush's plan to privatize Social Security is dead. "Don't waste our time," he says. "It's off the table." Baucus wants to simplify Medicare prescription drug procedures, which right now are a morass of confusing, ever-changing options that frustrate Medicare recipients and steer tremendous profits -- in tax dollars -- to drug companies. Baucus, a conservative Democrat, says he has a close working relationship with the senior Republican on the committee, Charles Grassley, and will work in a bipartisan fashion to shore up the programs. So far, Baucus's proposals for his committee to address when the Democratically-led Congress begins meeting in January span the gamut of left and right. Democrats can be expected to support his plans to increase tax breaks for married couples and increase child tax credits, raise funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program, provide free college for math and science majors if they work and teach in their field for at least four years, and to permanently scale back the alternative minimum tax, a complicated portion of the tax code aimed to catch wealthy tax dodgers that affects middle class taxpayers. Republicans may well back Baucus's plans to raise the estate tax exemption to $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples, and to extend renewable electricity production credits and create $1 billion in tax credits for investments in clean coal facilities. (AP/Great Falls Tribune)
November 17: US ambassador to the UN John Bolton castigates the UN for the General Assembly's adoption of a resolution expressing the UN's regret over the deaths of 19 Palestinian civilians in an attack by the Israeli military in the town of Beit Hanoun last week. Even though the resolution was significantly watered down at the behest of the United States, and was passed 156-7, Bolton launches a blistering attack on the UN, and many of its members. "Many of the sponsors of that resolution are notorious abusers of human rights themselves, and were seeking to deflect criticism of their own policies," he thunders. "This type of resolution serves only to exacerbate tensions by serving the interests of elements hostile to Israel's inalienable and recognized right to exist. This deepens suspicions about the United Nations that will lead many to conclude that the organization is incapable of playing a helpful role in the region. ...In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is a little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States. ...The Human Rights Council has quickly fallen into the same trap and de-legitimized itself by focusing attention exclusively on Israel. Meanwhile, it has failed to address real human rights abuses in Burma, Darfur, the DPRK, and other countries. The problem of anti-Israel bias is not unique to the Human Rights Council. It is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies."
The seven nations voting against the resolution are Israel, the US, Australia, and four small Pacific island countries. All other countries, including Britain, voted for the resolution. The original version condemned Israel over the Beit Hanoun attack and its operations in Gaza, but the adopted resolution merely has the General Assembly expressing "regret." The resolution also carries a demand that the Palestinian Authority take action to stop rocket attacks on Israel. The resolution was taken to the General Assembly after the United States used its veto to squash a similar motion in the Security Council. It was the 31st time the US had used its veto at the UN to stop resolutions concerning Israel and the Palestinians. (AP/Calcutta News)
November 17: The human rights organization Amnesty International calls the Pentagon's plans to build a huge, sprawling legal compound at the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities a "white elephant." US executive director Larry Cox says, "Once again, the Defense Department seems to be operating in -- even constructing -- its own universe. The new rules for the proposed military commissions...have not been made public, and not a single charge has been filed under the new system. And yet the Pentagon wants to build a permanent homage to its failed experiment in second-class justice." The Defense Department is ready to seek bids for design and construction for a military commissions compound at the US Navy base in southeast Cuba, featuring two courtrooms, housing for up to 1200 US soldiers, lawyers, and members of the press and other visitors. It will have a 100-car motor pool, an 800-person dining facility, conference and closed-circuit television facilities, and a secure work space for classified material. The total cost will be between $75 and $125 million, and have a completion date of July 2007. The project is not yet funded; the Pentagon next plans to present the proposal to Congress, which must both authorize and fund it. Pentagon officials want to "fast-track" the proposal in the Republican-led "lame-duck" Congress, rather than wait and have the Democratically-led Congress consider the proposal in January. "Rather than wasting tons of money creating edifices that may prove to be a white elephant," Cox says, "the US government should use the sophisticated and fully adequate facilities already available to it to try terrorism suspects -- federal courts." The US Supreme Court in June halted an earlier version of the commissions, declaring the formula unconstitutional. The project represents the largest single expenditure at the Navy base since it began taking in suspected enemy combatants from Afghanistan in January 2002. (Miami Herald)
November 17: The national voting rights organization Election Defense Alliance (EDA) claims that it has clear evidence that a major effort to "undercount" Democratic votes and "overcount" Republican votes in key US House and Senate races across the country took place on November 7, judging from exit poll data. The efforts were largely unsuccessful because, if true, Republicans didn't take into account the hugeshift towards Democratic candidates in their calculations that took place in the last weeks before the elections. "We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape," says attorney Jonathan Simon, co-founder of EDA, "so 'the fix' turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances. When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure -- of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7." Sally Castleman, the national chair of EDA, adds, "The findings raise urgent questions about the electoral machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States. This is a nothing less than a national indictment of the vote counting process in the United States." She continues, "The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on, just not enough to overcome the size of the actual turnout. The tide turned so much in the last few weeks before the eleciton. It looks for all the world that they'd already figured out the percentage they needed to rig, when the programming of the vote rigging software was distributed weeks before the election, and it wasn't enough." When done properly, exit polls are one of the most reliable predictors of an election.
EDA data analysis team leader Bruce O'Dell, whose expertise is in the design of large-scale secure computer and auditing systems for major financial institutions, says, "The logistics of mass software distribution to tens or even hundreds of thousands of voting machines in the field would demand advance planningï -- at least several weeks -- for anyone attempting very large-scale, systematic e-voting fraud, particularly in those counties that allow election equipment to be taken home by poll workers prior to the election. The voting equpment seems to be designed to support two types of vote count manipulation -- techniques accessible to those with hands-on access to the machines in a county or jurisdiction, and wholesale vulnerabilities in the underlying behavior of the systems which are most readily available to the vendors themseleves. Malicious insiders at any of the vendors would be in a position to alter the behavior of literally thousands of machines by infecting or corrupting the master copy of the software that's cloned out to the machines in the field. And the groundwork could be laid well in advance. For this election, it appears that such changes would have to have been done by early October at the latest."
For part of EDA's data analysis, Simon used the unadjusted National Election Pool (NEP) data as posted on CNN's web site before it was later "adjusted" to match the actual vote counts. The exit poll data that is seen now on the CNN site has been adjusted already. But Simon, who is surprised that CNN ever posted the unadjusted results, points out that both adjusted and unadjusted data were instrumental to exposing the gross miscount. As the information was posted, Simon copied them before they could be adjusted, which took place throughout the evening of November 7 and into the next morning, as is standard procedure with NEP. Adjusting the exit poll data is, by itself, not a troublesome act. Simon explains. "Their advertised reason to do the exit polls is to enable analysis of the results by academic researchers -- they study the election dynamics and demographics so they can understand which demographic groups voted what ways," he says. "As an analytic tool, the exit poll is considered more serviceable if it matches the vote count. Since the vote count is assumed to be gospel, congruence with that count is therefore assumed to give the most accurate picture of the behavior of the electorate and its subgroups. In 2004 they had to weight it very heavily, to the point that the party turnout was 37% Democrat and 37% Republican, which has never been the case -- leading to the claim that [Karl] Rove turned out the Republican vote. This was nowhere witnessed, no lines in Republican voting places were reported. As ridiculous as that was, the distortion of actual turnout was even greater in 2006. The adjusted poll's sample, to match the vote count, had to consist of 49% 2004 Bush voters and only 43% 2004 Kerry voters, more than twice the actual margin of 2.8%. This may not seem like that much, but it translates into more than a 3,000,000 vote shift nationwide, which, depending on targeting, was enough to have altered the outcome of dozens of federal races. It should be very clear that weighting by a variety of carefully selected demographic categories, which yields the pre-adjustment exit polls, presents a truly representative electorate by every available standard except the vote count in the present election. So you have a choice: you can believe in an electorate composed of the correct proportions of men and women, young and old, rural and urban, ethnic and income groups, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- or you can believe the machines. ...These machines are completely and utterly black box. The idea that we have this enormous burden of proof that they are miscounting, and there's no burden of proof that they are counting accurately -- that, first and foremost, has to change."
According to the original, unadjusted Edison-Mitofsky exit polls, commissioned by a number of media organizations and released at 7:07 PM the evening of November 7, Democratic House candidates were favored by a 55-43.5 margin -- an 11.5% margin of victory. The election results themselves showed a much smaller margin of victory, 52.7% to 45.1% -- a 7.6% margin. The polls claim a 1% margin of error, so such a discrepancy has less than a 1-in-10,000 chance of occurring. The exit poll data was adjusted to match the official totals by the afternoon of November 8. EDA says the discrepancy is all too similar to the same discrepancies observed in the 2004 presidential elections, which then showed a 6% gap in what was originally reported and then what was officially recorded, a discrepancy that EDA calls "a clear distortion of the 2006 electorate." Simon says, "It required some incredible distortions of the demographic data within the poll to bring about the match with reported vote totals. It not only makes the adjusted Exit Poll inaccurate, it also reveals the corresponding inaccuracy of the reported election returns which it was forced to equal. The Democratic margin of victory in US House races was substantially larger than indicated by the election returns." O'Dell calls the adjusted figures "a statistical illusion." (Election Defense Alliance/OpEd News)
November 17: Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, may have disclosed conclusions from a highly classified government report on Iraq to journalists before the report was declassified by Bush, federal prosecutors say in a new court filing. Libby resigned as chief of staff to Cheney when he was indicted last year on obstruction of justice and perjury charges in connection with an investigation into the leak of the identity of a CIA official, Valerie Plame Wilson. The special prosecutor who oversaw the probe, Patrick Fitzgerald, has not yet charged Libby or anyone else for participating in the leak. It emerged recently that the first public account of Plame's employment, in a 2003 op-ed by conservative columnist Robert Novak, may have been triggered by comments from a State Department official, Richard Armitage. Attorneys for Libby have asked that the prosecution be precluded from arguing at trial that Libby acted improperly or illegally when he discussed a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq with the press. The issue ties into the criminal case because in some of the conversations about the estimate, Libby is alleged to have mentioned Plame or answered a question about her. Libby said in April that he disclosed the intelligence report on Iraq at the direction of Cheney, who said he had obtained the permission of Bush to release the findings of the closely held document. Fitzgerald says he will use the leak to attack Libby's credibility if Libby or his lawyers argue that all his disclosures from the Iraq report were clearly authorized by his superiors. According to Fitzgerald, Libby testified initially that he was told of the declassification just prior to a July 8, 2003, meeting he had with Judith Miller of the New York Times. However, Fitzgerald says Libby "was unsure" whether the declassification took place prior to meetings he had with a Washington Post reporter, Bob Woodward, on June 27 of that year, and with another Times journalist, David Sanger, on July 2. "Defendant testified that he recalled a 'go-stop-go' sequence in discussions concerning authorization to disclose the NIE, that is, he was authorized to disclose, then he was instructed to hold off, and then later told again to disclose," Fitzgerald writes. He also says Libby testified that he may have "slipped" in discussing with Sanger the report's conclusion that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium. "The government simply wishes to make clear that it cannot affirmatively agree that each time defendant disclosed the NIE, he was authorized to do so," Fitzgerald says. Libby's lawyers will argue that Libby has "misremembered" certain conversations amid the crush of national security concerns and terrorist threats he handled daily, and that much of the evidence Fitzgerald seeks to introduce must be suppressed out of concern for national security. Libby's trial begins in January.
Woodward himself admits to having learned of Plame's identity a month before the July 14 article by Novak, but says that his original source was not Libby. (He later admits that his source was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.) Woodward has recently provided a sworn deposition to Fitzgerald about the leak to him. The leak from Armitage came when Woodward was doing research for his book Plan of Attack. Woodward never wrote about Plame's identity as a CIA agent before Novak revealed her identity in his column. Woodward came perilously close to destroying his own integrity as a journalist when, in October 2005, he appeared on CNN's Larry King Live and, without revealing his own contacts with Libby or Armitage, savaged Fitzgerald for indicting Libby, saying the disclosure of Plame's identity had caused "quite minimal damage" at the CIA and calling Fitzgerald "a junkyard dog prosecutor." (New York Sun, CNN, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
November 17: Specialist James Barker is sentenced to 90 years in jail for conspiring to rape and kill a 14-year old Iraqi girl in the village of Mahmoudiya. Barker, one of four US soldiers and one former soldier accused in the March 12 rape and murders, says during his sentencing, "I do not ask anyone to forgive me today. I don't know how that would be possible after what I have done. I do ask the Iraqi people not to blame my brothers still fighting in Iraq." Barker has agreed to testify against the others in return for not being sentenced to death. Barker will be eligible for parole in 20 years. In his closing statement, Barker says stressful conditions in Iraq made him angry and violent: "To live there, to survive there, I became angry and mean. The mean part of me made me strong on patrols. It made me brave in fire fights. I loved my friends, my fellow soldiers and my leaders, but I began to hate everyone else in Iraq." Some of Barker's fellow soldiers testified on his behalf, describing weeks with little support and sleep while manning distant checkpoints. "The bottom line is they were not giving the soldiers the tools, were not giving the soldiers the combat stress treatment, were not giving them enough troops on the ground to fulfill their mission," defense attorney David Sheldon says after the sentencing. Lead prosecutor Captain William Fischbach told the court that such conditions were no excuse for Barker, who led the group to the family's house, and that no one deserved such unspeakable horrors. "This burned-out corpse that used to be a 14-year-old girl never fired bullets or lobbed mortars," Fischbach said as he held pictures of the crime scene. Barker and his cohorts are accused of raping and murdering the young girl, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, and then murdering her, her younger sister, and her parents. They then burned the bodies to conceal their crime. The other three soldiers, all still facing trial, are Sergeant Paul Cortez and Private First Class Bryan Howard, who have both deferred entering a plea; PFC Jesse Spielman, and former private Steven Green, who has pled not guilty to civilian charges including murder and assault. Cortez and Spielman could face the death penalty for their crimes. In his testimony, Barker named Cortez and Green, but not Spielman or Howard, as participants in the rape and murders, but says Spielman went along to the house knowing what the others intended. Prosecutors say Howard had been left behind at a checkpoint. (AP/New York Daily News)
November 17: Bush appoints Dr. Eric Keroack, medical director for the anti-abortion group A Woman's Concern, as head of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Keroack's organization has stated many times that the distribution of contraceptives is "demeaning to women." Keroack will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. He will not only advise DHHS secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy, but will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are "designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons." The appointment does not require Senate confirmation, but is drawing heavy fire from Democrats, who view the appointment of Keroack as provocative and emblematic of Bush's refusal to pay anything more than lip service to the idea of cooperating with Democrats. Keroack's organization supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and refuses to distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts. "A Woman's Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness," the group's Web site says. A Woman's Concern, the umbrella organization that supports the crisis-pregnancy clinics supervised by Keroack, is also the parent organization for Healthy Futures, the contractor that Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has selected to teach abstinence in the state's public schools. Keroack is also a favorite speaker for the National Right to Life Committee, a medical advisor to the extremist National Abstinence Clearinghouse (the purveyor of "purity balls" for young women), and strongly supported by James Dobson's Focus on the Family.
Marilyn Keefe, interim president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents 4,000 family-planning clinics, says Keroack's work "seems to really be geared toward furthering anti-choice, anti-contraception policies." She adds that despite the congressional election results, the appointment "goes to show you the importance of controlling the White House and how important federal agencies are in the delivery of health services." The federal family-planning program, created in 1970, supports a network of 4,600 family-planning clinics that provide information and counseling to 5 million people each year. Services include patient education and counseling, breast and pelvic exams, pregnancy diagnosis and counseling, and screenings for cervical cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, calls Keroack's appointment "striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation's priorities." And Dianne Luby, president of Massachusetts's Planned Parenthood League, says bluntly, "Putting Dr. Keroack in charge of our nation's largest family planning program is dangerous to women's health."
His backers say that he has been successful in using medical arguments to persuade pregnant women -- whom he calls "abortion-vulnerable" -- to carry their children to term, using ultrasound and other technologies to further his arguments and saying in 2001 that "Even Midas lets you look at your old muffler before they advise you to change it." Keroack has used what can only be called questionable science to further his views. In 2003, in a presentation to the International Abstinence Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Keroack wrote in a PowerPoint item that "PRE-MARITAL SEX is really MODERN GERM WARFARE." Keroack defended abstinence by claiming that sex causes people to go through oxytocin withdrawal which in turn prevents people from bonding in relationships. The presentation outlined a purported scientific basis for how premarital sex ruins later relationships that has virtually no basis in fact. Keroack said teenage sexual activity blunts the brain's ability to develop emotional relationships. Comparing sex to drug use, he said the hormone produced by the brain after orgasm, oxytocin , will eventually diminish a person's ability to form emotional attachments. Keroack said premarital sex can lead to overproduction of oxytocin. In a 2001 paper he coauthored for the Abstinence Medical Council, he and his coauthor, Dr. John Diggs, wrote, "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.... Just as in heroin addiction...the person involved will experience 'sex withdrawal' and will need to move on to a...new sex playmate." Keroack's statements are not supported by any serious scientific research; the sweeping statements he makes are based on a single study of oxytocin in prairie voles, a type of rodent. Sue Carter, a biologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, says that "extrapolating from an animal model to humans is a leap of faith."
Keroack is continuing his march away from solid science. In June 2006, he gave a similar presentation, using a similar Power Point presentation (see slide below) that helped him explain that love and sexual relationships are hormonally based, with oxytocin as the key factor. Oxytocin is a hormone whose actions are associated with pregnancy, breastfeeding, and maternal-infant bonding -- and, according to Keroack, it's the tie that binds in marriage, as well. People don't fall in love, Keroack avers, but into hormonal bondage. Therefore, the most important rationale for sexual abstinence isn't faith-based at all, but purely physiological. Unfaithful men and promiscuous women are created by misuse of what he calls the "emotional glue" of attraction, an abuse leading to a "perpetual cycle of misery." Keroack explained that oxytocin is released during positive social interaction, massage, hugs, "trust" encounters, and sexual intercourse. "It promotes bonding by reducing fear and anxiety in social settings, increasing trust and trustworthiness, reducing stress and pain, and decreasing social aggression." he said. In an unpublished article that has become an established text of the abstinence movement, he wrote, "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual," and calls oxytocin "God's superglue." In 2002, he compared sexual relationships to open warfare. "Sexual activity is a war zone," he said. "What we have is this ongoing war. So we're constantly coming up with better equipment," he said, referring to contraceptive strategies and abortions. "And the truth is that somewhere along the way people die in war." He acknowledged that deaths from abortion-related complications are rare, but

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

November 2006

Week Three

Iraq already engulfed in civil war; problem now is to keep war from involving other countries

Bush plans to increase US military presence in Iraq

Ex-spy claims US duped into war with Iraq by tortured al-Qaeda prisoner