October 2006: Week Two: This Far and No Further

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

GOP congressman admits knowing about Foley e-mails in 2000

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

North Korea test-fires nuclear missile

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

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

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

October 10: Battered by accusations of allowing North Korea to develop nuclear weapons without effective US intervention, Bush administration spokesmen are telling the press that the recent North Korean nuclear test is less significant than the media is reporting. Officials say that, two days after the test, they can't even be sure that North Korea actually detonated an actual nuclear weapon, given the relatively small yield of the underground blast. Press secretary Tony Snow says it will take more time, possibly days, to come to a conclusion, and that there is a "remote possibility that we'll never know." Snow also casts doubts on the ability of the North Koreans to have developed a bomb in the two years since Pyongyang expelled UN inspectors. "What's interesting here is that if there was a nuclear test, ask yourself: They just unlocked Pyongyang a couple of years ago. You seriously believe that they have actually done everything within two years? You could have something that is very old and off the shelf here as well," he says. But asked if he considered the reported test a big deal, Snow replies, "No, I think it's an important deal...there are a lot of ifs, aren't there?" Democrats have sought to use the reported nuclear test to blame Bush for a failure of international diplomacy. They are calling for a shift in strategy to include direct engagement with North Korea, which the White House has ruled out. (Reuters)
October 10: Former Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham will tell the House Ethics Committee that several years ago, he was told by then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl that a drunken Mark Foley tried to enter the House pages' dormitory sometime in 2003. Fordham will tell the committee that this is the event that convinced both him and Trandahl to warn Dennis Hastert's office, with Fordham designated to speak to Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer. Fordham had already spoken with Foley about the impropriety of his actions after he and Trandahl had observed Foley's behavior with pages. According to ABC's inside source, Fordham will tell the committee that he told Palmer of Foley's pattern of inappropriate behavior towards the pages. Palmer denies being told anything, saying, "What Kirk Fordham said did not happen."
Now another representative, Republican Ginny Brown-Waite, has revealed that she was told about the dormitory incident from first-hand sources last month. After reading about the inappropriate e-mail exchanges between Foley and underaged pages, Brown-Waite alerted GOP leaders about the dormitory incident as well as about pages who felt uncomfortable with Foley's advances. Brown-Waite's warnings came hours before the news of the scandal erupted. As for Hastert, he still insists that he knew nothing until it was revealed in the news, and adds that he knows nothing of any dormitory incident.
Senator John McCain, an ostensibly independent Republican, has broken from the Republican party line and begun calling for an independent investigation. "We cannot tolerate the intolerable," he says, and adds that congressional leadership should have called for an outside group of highly respected former congressmen to get to the bottom of inappropriate contact Foley may have had with pages and whether anyone in the House leadership erred by not doing something sooner about the problem. Such a group will need to be selected and "look at this quickly and assign responsibility and recommend measures that need to be taken," McCain says. An independent investigation would restore "credibility" to the leadership, he says, because after all, "there's conflicting stories as we all know as to who knew what and when." Evoking the Watergate scandal, McCain says the scandal invokes the words of former Republican senator "Howard Baker's famous comment: 'What did they know and when did they know it?'" (ABC News)
October 10: Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe is contradicting his own spokeswoman over his version of events surrounding his revelation that he was told about the Mark Foley e-mail exchanges with underage House pages in either 2000 or 2001. Kolbe's spokeswoman, Korenna Kline, told the Washington Post that he had personally confronted Foley about his inappropriate exchanges. Kolbe now says he merely "recommended" that the page's complaint "be passed along to Rep. Foley's office and the Clerk who supervised the Page program." Kline also told the Post that the page had showed the offending messages to Kolbe. In his statement, Kolbe denies ever seeing the messages. According to a Post source, the messages, which have not been released, were "sexually explicit." Kolbe gives no explanation as to why his version of events contradicts that of his spokeswoman. Kolbe also implies now that this really wasn't his problem, since "the young man was no longer a Page and not subject to the jurisdiction of the program." Interestingly, in the Post's own story about Kolbe's contradictory statement, it fails to report that his statement is in direct contrast to Kline's. AmericaBlog's John Aravosis writes, "[T]omorrow's Post article doesn't tell you all of that. Why not? Who knows. They just reprint Kolbe's statement when they know he's just contradicted his own spokeswoman and a second source. i.e., the Washington Post pretty much knows Kolbe is lying, but they reprint what he says anyway, with no additional information."
Kolbe says, "I have been contacted by news organizations about former Rep. Foley's e-mail contacts with former pages. This is my best recollection of the single incident I was made aware of. Some time after leaving the Page program, an individual I had appointed as a Page contacted my office to say he had received e-mails from Rep. Foley that made him uncomfortable. I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit. It was my recommendation that this complaint be passed along to Rep. Foley's office and the Clerk who supervised the Page program. This was done promptly. I did not have a personal conversation with Mr. Foley about the matter. I assume e-mail contact ceased since the former Page never raised the issue again with my office. I believed then, and believe now, that this was the appropriate way to handle this incident given the information I had and the fact that the young man was no longer a Page and not subject to the jurisdiction of the program. I began my own political career as a Page for Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1958. As a result, I have a special empathy for the program and have always sought to make the experience a meaningful one for them. I visit with the Pages at the back of the chamber to explain politics and parliamentary procedures on the House Floor. I have written college and graduate school recommendations for scores of the young men and women, and I have always participated in various official page activities when asked to do so by the program, such as speaking at their graduation." (Washington Post/TPM Muckraker, AmericaBlog)
October 10: Incumbent Republican congressman Richard Pombo, running for reelection in California, has insisted that he was never lobbied by disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Records show Abramoff billed a client for at least two contacts with Pombo a decade ago. The lobbying records released by the Northern Mariana Islands show that Abramoff billed once for calls to Pombo, chairman of the House Resources Committee, and a second time for a discussion with him, while lobbying in 1996. On more than two dozen other occasions from 1996 through 2001, Abramoff associates called or met with members of Pombo's staff, including his chief of staff, the records indicate. As the contacts picked up, Pombo voted Abramoff's way on a bill important to Abramoff's clients. Pombo's campaign calls the records lies and say the recorded contacts are "greatly inflated." The records put in question Pombo's campaign-trail assertions that he barely knew Abramoff and was never lobbied by him. Pombo is running against Democrat Jerry McNerney and is favored to win an eighth term representing California's Central Valley, though the race is tightening. Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to tax evasion and wire fraud and is cooperating in a wide-ranging federal bribery investigation that has already led to guilty pleas from GOP representative Bob Ney and several congressional aides. Recently, an aide to presidential strategist Karl Rove resigned after a congressional report showed she had extensive contacts with Abramoff. "I met the guy two or three times in my whole life -- he never once lobbied me on anything," Pombo said of Abramoff last week in a debate against McNerney. Pombo's spokesman Brian Kennedy says that the documented meetings simply "never happened," that the staff-level contacts were "greatly inflated," and that Abramoff is "an admitted felon" who can't be trusted.
Records show that Pombo is lying. The Northern Mariana Islands, a chain of 14 islands near Guam, became a US commonwealth in 1986. Residents have nonvoting citizenship but the islands are exempt from many federal labor laws. Democrats, comp

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

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

Written and Compiled by Black Max

October 2006:

Week Two

GOP congressman admits knowing about Foley e-mails in 2000

North Korea test-fires nuclear missile