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[However, Kennedy adjusted the numbers to account for undecided black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, and said the runoff election currently stands in Blanco's favor. With that adjustment, Blanco would get 53 percent of the vote, compared to Jindal's 47 percent]
Republican Primary Trial Heat (among Republican voters): Cecil Underwood 30% Robin Capehart 8% Sarah Minear 8% Dan Moore 3% Monty Warner 3% Doug McKinney 2% Other 3% Undecided 43%
Democratic Primary Trial Heat (among Democratic voters): Joe Manchin 46% Darrell McGraw 11% John Perdue 5% Jim Humphreys 4% Lloyd Jackson 3% Jim Lees 3% Spike Maynard 2% Robin Davis 2% Other 1% Undecided 25%
[The original article to which this post refers was originally published on November 29, 2000 in USA Today by Philip Meyer. When I did a search for the article on the www.usatoday.com website I came up with this page which clearly provides the details of the article and even offers a link to a free preview of the article. However, when you click on the link, it gives you a page void of the article. What happened to it? One can only speculate. Nevertheless, I have obtained the original article and am printing it here (below the post) in its entirety as a matter of public record.]
A remarkable exchange concerning Diebold's voting machines in Volusia County, Florida. On January 17, 2001, Lana Hines, a county elections official sends out an inquiry as to how Al Gore ended up with a vote-count of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022—which just happens also to have been the total number of votes cast for various independent and third-party candidates who also ran. (It was the largest number of such votes cast in Volusia County's history.)
Pay close attention to the final entry, from "Tab"—that is, Talbot Iredale, Vice President of Research & Development at Global/Diebold. The most troubling of his statement is in bold below. Iredale writes:
...the error could only occur in one of four ways:
1.Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely explaination for the problem but since I know nothing about the 'second' memory card I have no ability to confirm the probability of this.
2.Invalid read from good memory card. This is unlikely since the candidates['] results for the race are not all read at the same time and the corruption was limited to a single race.There is a possib[ili]ty that a section of the memory card was bad but since I do not know anything more about the 'second' memory card I cannot validate this.
3.Corruption of memory, whether on the host or Accu-Vote. Again this is unlikely due to the localization of the problem to a single race.
4.Invalid memory card (i.e. one that should not have been uploaded). There is always the possib[i]lity that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
When will this all-important story break out in the US mainstream press?
When will the Democrats confront the issue? What is at stake here is their future as a party—and ours as a democracy. - Source
*****
Original USA Today Article
Glitch Led to 'Bush Wins' Call By Philip Meyer
Democrats have been on the defensive ever since Fox News Channel declared George W. Bush the Florida ballot winner in the wee hours of Nov. 8 and the other networks fell into line like baby ducks, prompting Al Gore's premature concession.
From then on, nothing Democrats could do would overcome the appearance that they were trying to steal the election on technicalities. And nothing Republicans could say would overcome the suspicion that they had planned the whole thing. That a cousin of George W. Bush was working the Fox decision desk added fuel to the conspiracy theories.
But the fact is a computer glitch and a failure to get the word out in time are what caused the trouble.
Deanie Lowe, Volusia County elections supervisor, spotted the problem. In her county, an Accu-Vote system uses a scanner to read a voter's mark - made with a pen, not a punch - and advances a counter in an electronic storage device. Results are sent to county headquarters by modem.
Precinct 216 had modem trouble, so workers fed its memory card into the headquarters' central computer. "Gore just went backward," an election watcher said.
"You're tired," Lowe replied. "You must be seeing things." Then another observer chimed in: Gore's count had gone backward.
Lowe ordered all of the precincts reviewed. At 1:24 a.m., the review showed that 412 of 585 registered voters in Precinct 216 had cast ballots - but that they had given 2,813 votes to Bush! Gore had a negative vote: minus 16,022. Ralph Nader's negative vote was even greater. The problem was traced to an error in the memory card.
Bad information means bad call
Meanwhile, the decision desks of the five networks and The Associated Press, owners of Voter News Service (VNS), were looking at models that included the negative Gore count. "That contributed to a statewide number that made it look like Bush was more than 50,000 ahead of Gore, with 97% reported and about 180,000 votes still to be counted," recalls Warren Mitofsky, who headed the CNN/CBS decision desk. "You can't make up 50,000 out of 180,000. I would have made that call without hearing anybody else's call."
Mitofsky is the dean of election-night estimators. His moves are watched by the other decision desks. "Warren is just so knowledgeable, you do take that into consideration," says Paul J. Lavrakas, who has been an election consultant for VNS.
But what none of the decision-makers knew was that Bush's lead then really was closer to 30,000. The estimation model correctly was forecasting it would drop by 30,000, so the right number would have projected a tie - which in fact it did later in the morning after the Volusia error was fixed.
The real vote in Precinct 216 was 22 for Bush and 193 for Gore. Nader got one.
Not all made the call
The VNS side of this story has yet to be told. VNS' head, Murray Edelman, gave a previously scheduled talk after the election to the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, but would not discuss the case. That's a pity, because both VNS and the AP deserve credit for never jumping on that early morning Bush bandwagon. We'd all like to know what they saw that the networks missed.
When they created VNS, the networks intended it to do everyone's calls. But in 1994, the AP and ABC jumped ship, with each doing its own projecting from the pooled data. The others followed - at the cost of disconnecting analysts from their data.
Networks do check each other. But they all feel the same pressure: If viewers are scanning channels, who are they watching? The anchor with the winner's name or the one who admits he hasn't figured it out yet? With a system like that, we don't need a conspiracy theory.
Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, is a USA TODAY consultant and member of its board of contributors.
Clark, a retired Army general, garnered 49 percent support to Bush's 46 percent, which is essentially a tie given the poll's margin of error. The CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll was conducted Sept. 19-21, beginning two days after Clark announced he would become the 10th Democratic candidate for the party's nomination.
Several other Democrats who have been in the race for months also were close to Bush in direct matchups. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut also were tied with the president, while Bush held a slight lead over former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri.
In the head-to-head confrontations, it was Kerry at 48 percent to Bush's 47 percent; and Bush's 48 percent to Lieberman's 47 percent. Bush held a slight lead over Dean, 49-45 percent, and had a similar advantage over Gephardt.
Separately, Clark led all Democratic candidates in the survey released Monday that showed Bush far more vulnerable.
The president's job approval was 50 percent, with 47 percent disapproving. The public gave Bush high marks for having the personality and leadership qualities of a chief executive. But just over half, 51 percent, said they disagreed with the president on issues that matter most to them, while 46 percent agree.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff cautioned against making too much of Clark's early strength in a national poll taken so close to his well-publicized entry into the presidential race.
"There are plenty of examples where you get this enormous bounce and it usually settles quickly," said McInturff, citing Republican Sen. John McCain showing in a South Carolina poll taken after his victory in the 2000 New Hampshire primary in 2000.
Public opinion is extremely unpredictable early in the election cycle as voters have not focused on the race, according to McInturff, who noted that Republican Bob Dole was running ahead of President Clinton the year before the election. Clinton prevailed in 1996.
Still, Clark's strong showing in early polls — a Newsweek survey this past weekend showed Clark grouped among the leaders in the Democratic field and not far behind Bush in a head-to-head matchup — will impress Democratic donors, said Dane Strother, a Democratic strategist not aligned with any of the campaigns.
"If you're number one in the polls, I don't care when it happens," said Strother, who pointed out that Democratic activists also will be closely watching Clark, and "you only get one chance to make a good first impression."
The battle for the party nomination will be fought state by state, and Clark's strength in early-voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire will be crucial. National polls tend to reflect name recognition and aren't the most accurate indicator of a candidate's viability.
Among voters who are Democratic or lean Democratic, Clark led all Democratic candidates with 22 percent, Dean had 13 percent, Kerry and Gephardt 11 percent and Lieberman 10 percent. The remaining candidates were in the low single digits.
The poll of 1,003 adults, including 877 registered voters, had a margin of error of plus of minus 3 percentage points, 4 points for registered voters. - Source
September 11 is often said to be the defining moment in the Bush presidency, even of modern history. How strange, therefore, that Bush's behavior that morning--along with that of his Administration--is almost never examined in any detail. This is all the more incredible when one considers the fact that 9/11 is among the most exhaustively chronicled days in human history and Bush among its most heavily covered individuals. No less odd has been the media's willingness to let the many inconsistencies in White House stories pass unexamined. They seem content instead to let Showtime tell the story, Leni Riefenstahl-style.
That fateful morning, Bush was visiting the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota. The moment he learned of the attacks is a matter of deep dispute. CIA chief George Tenet was informed of the first crash almost immediately and is reported to have remarked to his breakfast companion, former Senator David Boren, "You know, this has bin Laden's fingerprints all over it." But the President's aides maintain that he was not told about the attack for more than fifteen minutes, well after viewers saw the first building engulfed in smoke on CNN, and even after he interrupted his schedule to take a call from Condoleezza Rice upon leaving his limousine, after the first crash took place.
The various accounts offered by the White House are almost all inconsistent with one another. On December 4, 2001, Bush was asked, "How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?" Bush replied, "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower--the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there. I didn't have much time to think about it." Bush repeated the same story on January 5, 2002, stating, "First of all, when we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on. And you know, I thought it was pilot error, and I was amazed that anybody could make such a terrible mistake...."
This is false. Nobody saw the jetliner crash into the first tower on television until a videotape surfaced a day later. What's more, Bush's memory not only contradicts every media report of that morning, it also contradicts what he said on the day of the attack. In his speech to the nation that evening, Bush said, "Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's emergency response plans." Again, this statement has never been satisfactorily explained. No one besides Bush has ever spoken of these "emergency plans," and the mere idea of their implementation is contradicted by Bush's claim that at the time, he believed the crash to have been a case of pilot error.
Other contradictions abound. Bush told an interviewer that Chief of Staff Andrew Card had been the first person to let him know of the crash. Card was saying, Bush explained, "'Here's what you're going to be doing: You're going to meet so-and-so, such-and-such.' Then Andy Card said, 'By the way, an aircraft flew into the World Trade Center.'" Ari Fleischer repeated this story, claiming that Card had told Bush about the crash "as the President finished shaking hands in a hallway of school officials." But other sources, including Bob Woodward's allegedly authoritative account, have Karl Rove telling Bush the news.
What we do know is that Bush continued to read to the children and pose for the cameras long after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Secret Service and Canada's Strategic Command were all aware that three jetliners had been hijacked. The President's entourage hung around a full fifty minutes after CNN broadcast the news of the first crash. Half an hour after the first plane hit, Bush told the children, "Hoo! These are great readers. Very impressive! Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills. I bet they practice, too. Don't you? Reading more than they watch TV? Anybody do that? Read more than you watch TV? [Hands go up] Oh that's great! Very good. Very important to practice! Thanks for having me. I'm very impressed."
White House staff members claimed that Bush remained with the children so as not to "upset" or "alarm" them. This is a truly bewildering excuse. If the country was under attack, Bush might be forgiven for upsetting a few schoolkids. If the President's life was in danger, then so was the life of every little child in that room. At the time, fighter jets had been dispatched to defend New York City. But according to one of the fighter pilots, it would have done no good to catch up to one of the hijacked planes before it landed in a murderous explosion at the next population center. The only person with the authority to order the plane to be shot down, noted the pilot, was the President, who was still reading to schoolchildren.
The panic motif runs through the rest of the President's actions that day. While the presidential motorcade did finally head for the airport, Bush is alleged to have spoken on the phone to Cheney and ordered all flights nationwide grounded. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has also tried to take credit for the order, but according to Slate, this too is false, though "FAA officials had begged [the reporter] to maintain the fiction." In fact, according to USA Today, it was FAA administrator Ben Sliney who issued the order. Amazingly, Air Force One took off with no military protection. It remained unprotected in the sky for more than an hour, though Florida is filled with Air Force bases just minutes away with planes that are supposed to be on twenty-four-hour alert.
Bush's aides later offered, and retracted, the excuse that he spent the day flying around the country because of threats to Air Force One believed to have been received at the White House. What nobody has ever explained is this: If you think Air Force One is to be attacked, why go up in Air Force One?
I don't have the answers to these questions. But why is no one asking them? - Source
Tony Blair has decisively lost the debate over Iraq with a clear majority of voters now saying that the war was unjustified, according to the results of this month's Guardian/ICM poll published today. The survey shows that British public opinion on Iraq has moved sharply over the summer in the face of the Hutton inquiry, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the continuing instability in Baghdad.
In the immediate aftermath of the war in April public support for the war peaked at 63%. By July it had slipped to 51% but a majority still said the war was justified. Now for the first time a clear majority are saying the war was unjustified (53%), and only 38% believe it was right to invade Iraq.
The survey also shows that the Brent East byelection has provided a dramatic boost to the Liberal Democrats, who are now only two points behind the Tories and enjoying a 28% share of the vote, their highest poll rating for 14 years.
The ICM poll shows Labour maintaining a five-point lead over the Conservatives but reveals serious erosion in the government's reputation for economic competence in the last six months.
On Iraq, the poll signals that the public is no longer giving Mr Blair the benefit of the doubt on the war.
The detailed results show some significant swings. Among men, the net justified/unjustified feeling about the war has moved from minus one in July to minus 29. Even Tory voters no longer support the war, moving from plus 20 in July to minus 12 now. Among Labour voters, sentiment is still pro-war but the gap has narrowed sharply from plus 30 to plus 16. Liberal Democrat voters are most hostile with a rating of minus 45 points.
The boost to the Lib Dems' poll position - up six points on the month to 28% - follows their byelection triumph but also reflects an underlying strengthening of their rating since the general election. It confirms that it has been Charles Kennedy's party rather than the Tories who are benefiting most from the government's troubles.
If the Liberal Democrats produced this kind of performance in the next general election they would have no trouble in achieving the 3.8% swing needed to implement their "decapitation strategy", which would see shadow cabinet members Oliver Letwin, Theresa May and David Davies losing their marginal seats.
The advance of the Liberal Democrats this month appears to have been at the equal expense of Labour and Tories. Labour's 35-point rating is its lowest on the Guardian/ICM poll for 11 years.
Mr Blair's failure to convince the public on Iraq may be one big factor in eroding Labour's poll rating but the September ICM survey also uncovers a more subterranean shift. The party's reputation for economic competence, which has been crucial to its landslide election successes since 1993, is showing signs of erosion.
In March this year 47% of voters named Labour as the party with the best policies for dealing with the economy. This month's ICM poll shows that has fallen to 29% of voters.
The Tories are doing no better: their economic competence rating has also fallen, from 28 to 18 points.
· ICM interviewed a random sample of 1,002 adults aged 18 and over by telephone from September 19-21. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results weighted to the profile of all adults. - Source
On "Meet the Press" recently, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "Since I left Halliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven't had now, for over three years."
That is the latest White House lie.
Within 48 hours, Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey pointed reporters toward Cheney's public financial disclosure sheets filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The sheets show that in 2002, Cheney received $162,392 in deferred salary from Halliburton, the oil and military contracting company he ran before running for vice president. In 2001, Cheney received $205,298 in deferred salary from Halliburton.
The 2001 salary was more than Cheney's vice presidential salary of $198,600. Cheney also is still holding 433,333 stock options.
Flushed into the open, Cheney spokeswoman Catherine Martin said the vice president will continue to receive about $150,000 a year from Halliburton in 2003, 2004, and 2005. If President Bush wins a second term, that means Cheney will make at least $800,000 from the company while sitting in office.
Martin said the payments did not represent a lie. She said Cheney had already earned that salary. She said Cheney took out an insurance policy that would guarantee the money would be paid to him no matter what happened to the company.
Five years ago, America was in a tizzy over President Bill Clinton's "That depends on what the meaning of is, is." That was over lying about sex. For that, Clinton was impeached. Now, we have a vice president who tells America he has severed his ties even as his umbilical cord doubles his salary. To him, it depends what the meaning of "i$, i$."
We know what the meaning of i$, i$ to Halliburton. It is by far the largest beneficiary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With no-bid, no-ceiling contracts, the company has already amassed $2 billion in work. It is doing everything from restoring oil facilities to providing toilets for troops. A year ago Halliburton was staring at nearly a half-billion dollars in losses. In the second quarter of 2003 it posted a profit of $26 million.
No conflict of interest has been proven between Cheney's salary and Halliburton's Iraq work, but even before the invasion and occupation, Cheney's concern about the public's perception led to years of deception.
In the summer of 2000, he told Larry King that quitting Halliburton for the vice presidency means "I take a bath." He gave up a $1.3 million annual salary, but most people would have settled for mere shower droplets of his $33 million "retirement" package. By strange coincidence, at the time of the Republican National Convention, Halliburton gave about $280,000 to Republican candidates for office in the first half of 2000. It gave less than $10,000 to Democrats.
At the time, Cheney said: "I will take whatever steps I have to take to avoid any conflict of interest. That is to say, by the time I'm sworn in on Jan. 20 [2000], I will have eliminated any possibility that I have a continuing financial interest in Halliburton stock or share price. ... I will do whatever I have to do to guarantee that there's no conflict."
Cheney has set up the 433,333 stock options in a charitable trust. But his whole vice presidency has been a general conflict of interest, symbolized by his secret industrial society known as the Energy Task Force. Cheney has resisted all efforts by the General Accounting Office and advocacy groups to provide documents that detail the proceedings of the task force. In the two and a half years since the task force was convened, the White House has been on a rampage to slash or gut environmental measures.
Cheney's latest attempt to play Americans for fools came in the very same interview during which he was forced to say "I did misspeak" about Saddam Hussein having nuclear weapons, a falsehood that whipped up support for the invasion. The question is how many more misspeaks and lies Americans will tolerate. Back when Clinton was in trouble, Cheney's wife, Lynne, said, "The Clintons are very good at defining and creating new realities that are based not on absolute truths, but on what they believe to be true at any given moment."
Clinton will be forever tarnished for "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Dick Cheney's continuing salary from the top profiteer of an invasion fueled by his sexed-up claims of Saddam Hussein's weapons is the creation of a new, mad reality. Cheney has said in so many words, "I did not have financial relations with Halliburton." Americans must determine whether that lie is as sexy as lies about sex. With nearly 300 American soldiers dead, one would hope so. - Source
Exactly one year ago, Tony Blair told Parliament: "Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing.
"The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down. It is up and running now."
Not only was every word of this false, it was part of a big lie invented in Washington within hours of the attacks of September 11 2001 and used to hoodwink the American public and distract the media from the real reason for attacking Iraq. "It was 95 per cent charade," a former senior CIA analyst told me.
An investigation of files and archive film for my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively disarmed.
Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.
In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.
Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of "containment" that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Blair said time and again. On May 15 2001, Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to "build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction" for "the last 10 years". America, he said, had been successful in keeping him "in a box".
Two months later, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenceless Iraq. "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country," she said. "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
So here were two of Bush's most important officials putting the lie to their own propaganda, and the Blair government's propaganda that subsequently provided the justification for an unprovoked, illegal attack on Iraq. The result was the deaths of what reliable studies now put at 50,000 people, civilians and mostly conscript Iraqi soldiers, as well as British and American troops. There is no estimate of the countless thousands of wounded.
In a torrent of propaganda seeking to justify this violence before and during the invasion, there were occasional truths that never made headlines. In April last year, Condoleezza Rice described September 11 2001 as an "enormous opportunity" and said America "must move to take advantage of these new opportunities."
Taking over Iraq, the world's second biggest oil producer, was the first such opportunity.
At 2.40pm on September 11, according to confidential notes taken by his aides, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, said he wanted to "hit" Iraq - even though not a shred of evidence existed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks on New York and Washington. "Go massive," the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Iraq was given a brief reprieve when it was decided instead to attack Afghanistan. This was the "softest option" and easiest to explain to the American people - even though not a single September 11 hijacker came from Afghanistan. In the meantime, securing the "big prize", Iraq, became an obsession in both Washington and London.
An Office of Special Plans was hurriedly set up in the Pentagon for the sole purpose of converting "loose" or unsubstantiated intelligence into US policy. This was a source from which Downing Street received much of the "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction we now know to be phoney.
CONTRARY to Blair's denials at the time, the decision to attack Iraq was set in motion on September 17 2001, just six days after the attacks on New York and Washington.
On that day, Bush signed a top- secret directive, ordering the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq. In July 2002, Condoleezza Rice told another Bush official who had voiced doubts about invading Iraq: "A decision has been made. Don't waste your breath."
The ultimate cynicism of this cover-up was expressed by Rumsfeld himself only last week. When asked why he thought most Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, he replied: "I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe I could say that."
It is this that makes the Hutton inquiry in London virtually a sham. By setting up an inquiry solely into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly, Blair has ensured there will be no official public investigation into the real reasons he and Bush attacked Iraq and into when exactly they made that decision. He has ensured there will be no headlines about disclosures in email traffic between Downing Street and the White House, only secretive tittle-tattle from Whitehall and the smearing of the messenger of Blair's misdeeds.
The sheer scale of this cover-up makes almost laughable the forensic cross-examination of the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan about "anomalies" in the notes of his interview with David Kelly - when the story Gilligan told of government hypocrisy and deception was basically true.
Those pontificating about Gilligan failed to ask one vital question - why has Lord Hutton not recalled Tony Blair for cross-examination? Why is Blair not being asked why British sovereignty has been handed over to a gang in Washington whose extremism is no longer doubted by even the most conservative observers? No one knows the Bush extremists better than Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer and personal friend of George Bush senior, the President's father. In Breaking The Silence, he tells me: "They were referred to in the circles in which I moved when I was briefing at the top policy levels as 'the crazies'."
"Who referred to them as 'the crazies'?" I asked.
"All of us... in policy circles as well as intelligence circles... There is plenty of documented evidence that they have been planning these attacks for a long time and that 9/11 accelerated their plan. (The weapons of mass destruction issue) was all contrived, so was the connection of Iraq with al Qaeda. It was all PR... Josef Goebbels had this dictum: If you say something often enough, the people will believe it." He added: "I think we ought to be all worried about fascism (in the United States)."
The "crazies" include John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who has made a personal mission of tearing up missile treaties with the Russians and threatening North Korea, and Douglas Feith, an Under Secretary of Defence, who ran a secret propaganda unit "reworking" intelligence about Iraq's weapons. I interviewed them both in Washington.
BOLTON boasted to me that the killing of as many as 10,000 Iraqi civilians in the invasion was "quite low if you look at the size of the military operation."
For raising the question of civilian casualties and asking which country America might attack next, I was told: "You must be a member of the Communist Party."
Over at the Pentagon, Feith, No 3 to Rumsfeld, spoke about the "precision" of American weapons and denied that many civilians had been killed. When I pressed him, an army colonel ordered my cameraman: "Stop the tape!" In Washington, the wholesale deaths of Iraqis is unmentionable. They are non-people; the more they resist the Anglo-American occupation, the more they are dismissed as "terrorists".
It is this slaughter in Iraq, a crime by any interpretation of an international law, that makes the Hutton inquiry absurd. While his lordship and the barristers play their semantic games, the spectre of thousands of dead human beings is never mentioned, and witnesses to this great crime are not called.
Jo Wilding, a young law graduate, is one such witness. She was one of a group of human rights observers in Baghdad during the bombing. She and the others lived with Iraqi families as the missiles and cluster bombs exploded around them. Where possible, they would follow the explosions to scenes of civilian casualties and trace the victims to hospitals and mortuaries, interviewing the eyewitnesses and doctors. She kept meticulous notes.
She saw children cut to pieces by shrapnel and screaming because there were no anaesthetics or painkillers. She saw Fatima, a mother stained with the blood of her eight children. She saw streets, mosques and farmhouses bombed by marauding aircraft. "Nothing could explain them," she told me, "other than that it was a deliberate attack on civilians."
As these atrocities were carried out in our name, why are we not hearing such crucial evidence? And why is Blair allowed to make yet more self-serving speeches, and none of them from the dock? - Source
Gen. Wesley K. Clark called today for "a new American patriotism" that would encourage broader public service, respect domestic dissent even in wartime and embrace international organizations like the United Nations.
General Clark, a former NATO commander and Army officer who last week announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused the Bush administration of neglecting economic problems and of pursuing a dangerous go-it-alone foreign policy.
But he also used the setting of the Citadel, the military college here, to appeal to about 150 cadets and civilians on the parade grounds to help restore something loftier, a sense of national spirit that he suggested that the administration's campaign against terror had corroded.
"We've got to have a new kind of patriotism that recognizes that in times of war or peace democracy requires dialogue, disagreement and the courage to speak out," General Clark said. "And those who do it should not be condemned, but be praised."
General Clark made it clear he believed that the administration had unfairly focused on whole classes of immigrants, for fear of a minority within them.
"Three million Muslims have come to this country from Asia and the Middle East," he said. "They didn't come because they were afraid of our values. They came because they wanted to live under them."
Today was Day 6 of the campaign, and General Clark's 20-minute stump speech at the hastily arranged event here had a few rough patches.
"Patriotism doesn't consist of following the orders, not, not not when you're not in the chain of command," the general said, stumbling over his words and catching himself before he inadvertently encouraged insubordination in the ranks.
Despite the stumbles, General Clark heard good news in a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll that showed he had jumped ahead of the other Democrats. The poll, conducted over the weekend, showed him tying President Bush head to head.
General Clark was invited to speak here by Philip Lader, a visiting professor of political science who is a close friend of former President Bill Clinton. Many former top Clinton aides have roles in his campaign.
General Clark directed his attacks against the administration, never mentioning the other nine Democratic hopefuls. He criticized the Bush team as doing little to stem the job losses and mounting deficits that have weighed on the economy since he retired from the Army in 2000.
"I'm running for president because I could not stand by and watch everything that we fought for, everything our nation had accomplished and become, unravel before our eyes," General Clark said.
He said the administration had failed to shore up health care and education, but he offered no detailed plans.
"One of the principles we learned in the United States armed forces was the principle of accountability," he said. "Americans today are asking, `Why did we lose three million jobs over the last three years?' "
He fired the other barrel of his attack at the handling of Iraq and at overall foreign policy, especially given that Mr. Bush is requesting $87 billion from Congress to finance reconstruction and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"What was the strategy?" he asked about Iraq. "What was the purpose? What is the success strategy? How are we going to finish the mission there?"
General Clark did not discuss what are apparently his reversals on the the war. Last October, he said that he would support the Congressional resolution that authorized the use of military force in Iraq and then spent months criticizing the execution of the war. On Thursday, the day after he announced his candidacy, he said, "I probably would have voted for" the resolution. On Friday, he backtracked, saying, "I never would have voted for war."
By coincidence, his aides said, General Clark spoke here nearly four years to the day after George W. Bush, then the governor of Texas, visited the Citadel to lay out his most explicit thinking on military policy.
General Clark did not delve into such detail, but said he would map out a foreign policy, drawing on his experience leading tens of thousands of troops and working at the highest levels of the government, first as a senior general in the Pentagon and later as NATO supreme commander in the 1999 war in Kosovo.
He said his approach was based on three basic pillars. First, his strategy would reach out more aggressively to allies. He said he would also work to improve relations with international organizations like the United Nations, which he said were created decades ago to "to distribute the burdens of leadership, to share the responsibilities and to share the benefits of security."
Finally, he said, he will always support a well-financed military, strong enough to deter or, if necessary, defeat any threat.
After his remarks, General Clark bounded into the audience, shaking hands, signing copies of his memoirs and getting a feel for what life is going to be like in the campaign.
Terry Tranen, 61, a retired aerospace engineer, said General Clark was the Democrat with the best chance of beating Mr. Bush.
"I think I might send him some money," Mr. Tranen said. "That's the real test, isn't it?" - Source
The folks at FAIR have put together a volume on Bill O’Reilly’s countless misstatements and distortions called "The Oh Really Factor," which I read last night. Wonderful ammo for your arguments with Fox fans, and for that matter, a wonderful present to give to the O’Reilly fan in your family. Some excerpts:
O'REILLY: Commenting on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that forcing students to say the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional: "The reason they're even sitting there is because they were appointed by liberal politicians. Conservative politicians would never appoint the pinheads sitting on the Ninth Circuit" (3/4/03). OH REALLY: The opinion in the Pledge of Allegiance case was drafted by Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, who was appointed by Richard Nixon.
* * *
O'REILLY: Explaining free speech rights to a high school student, who backed the establishment of a Satanic club at school: "They don't have any First Amendment rights. As soon as they walk in the door . . . Yes, they don't have any. Joe, do you realize that, as soon as you walk in the San Mateo High School door, you don't have any rights, that you have to do what the teachers tell you to do?" (10/2/02)
OH REALLY: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech . . . at the schoolhouse gates" (U.S. Supreme Court, Tinker v. Des Moines, 1969).
For the record, O'Reilly already knows this. When a high school student was suspended by his school for putting up pro-war flyers, he sued the school and won. O'Reilly had him on the show to cheer his legal victory: "A federal judge has ruled the school violated the boy's freedom of speech rights. The school administrators were ordered by the judge to undergo constitutional rights training, and the school board has been ordered to pay Aaron and his parents $3,000" (11/30/01). Maybe O'Reilly could get some of the same training.
* * *
O'REILLY: "The Founders were not concerned with the minority rights, they were concerned with everybody's rights."
OH REALLY: "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression" (Thomas Jefferson, "First Inaugural Address," March 4, 1801).
* * *
O'REILLY: "I never heard Mr. Clinton once say, come out and say, we need more discipline in the schools, we need tougher standards, we need alternative schools because we don't want the student body to be diverted by just a few. I never heard any of that" (3/27/01).
OH REALLY: "I have laid before the Congress a number of proposals that will make education our number-one priority and result in dramatic improvements of our schools: smaller classes, better teaching, higher standards, expanded choice, more discipline, greater accountability" (Bill Clinton, speech, 5/7/98).
* * *
O'REILLY: "On Tuesday, we presented a story that said Senator Hillary Clinton has not attended any of the funerals of everyday victims of 9/11. The critical mail poured in. 'You don't like Hillary,' they wailed, 'leave her alone.' Nobody challenged the accuracy of the story" (11/29/01).
OH REALLY: Clinton attended the funeral of Sonia Morales Puopolo, who died at the World Trade Center (Associated Press, 10/6/01), and a memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for seventy-nine workers missing from the Windows on the World restaurant (New York Daily News, 10/2/01).
* * *
O'REILLY: When Kathleen Willey came forward and accused Bill Clinton of having made an unwanted sexual advance towards her in 1993, O'Reilly suggested that the incident had led to her husband's suicide: "I believe Kathleen Willey when she says that private detectives hounded her, that they tried to break her, that they tried to threaten her, and her husband committed suicide. This is another example of all of it emanating from Bill Clinton" (1/15/01).
OH REALLY: Willey's husband killed himself the day that the alleged incident took place. According to Willey, an investigation suggesting that her husband had embezzled from clients at his law firm were what contributed to his suicide-not pressure from Clinton's "private detectives."
It’s full of this stuff, and these aren’t even necessarily the best examples, they’re just what I have available in electronic format from the publisher to cut and paste here. - Source
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