Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Leaks of classified information are bad things, and we've had too many lately in Washington. We've had leaks from the executive branch and leaks from the legislative branch. I want to know who the leakers are. – Bush
Wilson/Plamegate- Rove?
Julian Borger of the Guardian claims that several journalists have privately told him that Rove phoned the journalists with the ‘leak’ re Valerie Plame. He adds that the White House is “safe” for now, as journalists cannot reveal sources, so we await the full investigation that is to be conducted by Ashcroft! We certainly trust that he will do a bang-up job investigating his superiors. The investigation got off to a start of sorts, warning the White House folk on Monday night that it’ll all begin on Tuesday, i.e. check your shredders.
Back to Bush’s words, above: Notice that he’s not about to address the charges at hand. The statement he read is part of the effort to change the subject. His words are blurring the leak into the general problem of leaking of classified information. Unlike Bush, press secretary Scott McClellan has to answer questions, but being fact-poor, he gets trapped and can merely repeat the refrain of “America is safer, the world is better, the world is safer because Saddam…” Or, when reminded by reporters that the White House statement denying the need for a special prosecutor is practically verbatim what the Clinton White House said about employing a Special Prosecutor with the Whitewater nonsense, McClellan rejoined, “I just reject that comparison”. This provoked some notable guffaws from the attending press.
As to the reporters, while understandable, it’s too bad that one of the six notable reporters didn’t do an ‘Ellsberg’ and reveal this instead of sitting on it since July 14.
What’s Happening, Iraq:
U.S. going it alone; Nothing new, just well stated by LeFigaro, via Truthout (Luc de Barochez)
No country asked has offered to send troops or contribute financially to the country’s reconstruction. Neither money nor men: at the end of a decisive week at the UN, American president George W. Bush measures the failure of his attempted return to the international organization. “The Iraqi nation needs our help”, he pleaded Tuesday before the General Assembly in New York. Two days later, not one of the 191 countries represented there had responded to his appeal for help with a concrete promise, whether in the form of a financial contribution or by placing troop contingents at his disposition. The UN even decided yesterday to withdraw part of their expatriate personnel in Iraq, undermining American normalization efforts a little more...
Vulnerable Soldiers…bits:
Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor focuses on the 8 American soldiers that are wounded each day. Jonathan Turley of the LA Times notes that our soldiers are so ill-equipped that parents are shopping for body armor to ship to their soldier-children. Apparently the Army issues flak jackets out of the Vietnam war era which are inadequate to deal with modern weaponry.
Suzanne Werfelman is a mother and a teacher who has been shopping for individual body armor. This is not in response to threats from her elementary-class students in Sciota, Pa.; it's a desperate attempt to protect her son in Iraq.
Cheney as Inveterate Liar
Even though others of the Administration are trying to undo a few of the chronic misrepresentations, Cheney persists. The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler noted in their page 1 article that Cheney is still pushing the Iraq-9/11 connection. As they summarize,
Cheney described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Neither the CIA nor the congressional joint inquiry that investigated the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon found any evidence linking Iraq to the hijackers or the attacks. President Bush corrected Cheney's statement several days later.
Frank Rich had his rich take on Cheney in Sunday’s NY Times. Capturing the V.P.’s t.v. talk show appearance, Rich noted that
Mr. Cheney, a master of the above-reproach dead pan, just kept going, effortlessly mowing right through any objections by the host. The vice president was banking… on a cultural environment in which fiction and nonfiction have become so scrambled — and can be so easily manipulated by politicians and show-biz impresarios alike — that credibility itself has become a devalued, if not archaic, news value. This is why the big national mystery of the moment — why do almost 70 percent of Americans believe in Mr. Cheney's fictional insinuation that Saddam Hussein had some hand in 9/11? — is not so hard to crack. As low as the administration's credibility may be, it is still trusted more than the media trying to correct the fictions the White House plants in the national consciousness.
"Tonight we congratulate television news on becoming us — mindless ratings whores," said the comic Jon Stewart, host of the faux-news "Daily Show," after unreeling a montage of particularly ludicrous excerpts from this year's actual news shows on last Sunday's Emmy broadcast. It would have been even funnier if the story being covered hadn't been an actual war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/arts/television/28RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The awakening media correcting those “misrepresentations”
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post deals with some b.s. spun by the Administration that attempts to portray the Iraqis as overly thrilled with our invasion.
Top Bush administration officials in the past weeks have been citing a pair of public opinion polls to demonstrate that Iraqis have a positive view of the U.S. occupation. But an examination of those polls indicates Iraqis have a less enthusiastic view than the administration has portrayed.
For example, in testimony before Congress, L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz both cited a recent Gallup Poll that found that almost two-thirds of those polled in Baghdad said it was worth the hardships suffered since the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein. Bremer also told Congress that 67 percent thought that in five years they would be better off, and only 11 percent thought they would be worse off.
That same poll, however, found that, countrywide, only 33 percent thought they were better off than they were before the invasion and 47 percent said they were worse off. And 94 percent said that Baghdad was a more dangerous place for them to live, a finding the administration officials did not discuss.
National (Airport) Liberation Front: Some of us become agitated when the flight attendant announces that “Welcome to Ronald Reagan National Airport”. I salute Jordan Barab, of http://spewingforth.blogspot.com, who has founded the above “organization.”
Colombia: Lest we forget: Three American military contractors have been hostages for 7 months, held by the “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”. The trio survived while another American and the Colombian pilot were executed after the plane went down. Colombian and U.S. forces have apparently been unable to discern their location.
-R
Wilson/Plamegate- Rove?
Julian Borger of the Guardian claims that several journalists have privately told him that Rove phoned the journalists with the ‘leak’ re Valerie Plame. He adds that the White House is “safe” for now, as journalists cannot reveal sources, so we await the full investigation that is to be conducted by Ashcroft! We certainly trust that he will do a bang-up job investigating his superiors. The investigation got off to a start of sorts, warning the White House folk on Monday night that it’ll all begin on Tuesday, i.e. check your shredders.
Back to Bush’s words, above: Notice that he’s not about to address the charges at hand. The statement he read is part of the effort to change the subject. His words are blurring the leak into the general problem of leaking of classified information. Unlike Bush, press secretary Scott McClellan has to answer questions, but being fact-poor, he gets trapped and can merely repeat the refrain of “America is safer, the world is better, the world is safer because Saddam…” Or, when reminded by reporters that the White House statement denying the need for a special prosecutor is practically verbatim what the Clinton White House said about employing a Special Prosecutor with the Whitewater nonsense, McClellan rejoined, “I just reject that comparison”. This provoked some notable guffaws from the attending press.
As to the reporters, while understandable, it’s too bad that one of the six notable reporters didn’t do an ‘Ellsberg’ and reveal this instead of sitting on it since July 14.
What’s Happening, Iraq:
U.S. going it alone; Nothing new, just well stated by LeFigaro, via Truthout (Luc de Barochez)
No country asked has offered to send troops or contribute financially to the country’s reconstruction. Neither money nor men: at the end of a decisive week at the UN, American president George W. Bush measures the failure of his attempted return to the international organization. “The Iraqi nation needs our help”, he pleaded Tuesday before the General Assembly in New York. Two days later, not one of the 191 countries represented there had responded to his appeal for help with a concrete promise, whether in the form of a financial contribution or by placing troop contingents at his disposition. The UN even decided yesterday to withdraw part of their expatriate personnel in Iraq, undermining American normalization efforts a little more...
Vulnerable Soldiers…bits:
Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor focuses on the 8 American soldiers that are wounded each day. Jonathan Turley of the LA Times notes that our soldiers are so ill-equipped that parents are shopping for body armor to ship to their soldier-children. Apparently the Army issues flak jackets out of the Vietnam war era which are inadequate to deal with modern weaponry.
Suzanne Werfelman is a mother and a teacher who has been shopping for individual body armor. This is not in response to threats from her elementary-class students in Sciota, Pa.; it's a desperate attempt to protect her son in Iraq.
Cheney as Inveterate Liar
Even though others of the Administration are trying to undo a few of the chronic misrepresentations, Cheney persists. The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler noted in their page 1 article that Cheney is still pushing the Iraq-9/11 connection. As they summarize,
Cheney described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Neither the CIA nor the congressional joint inquiry that investigated the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon found any evidence linking Iraq to the hijackers or the attacks. President Bush corrected Cheney's statement several days later.
Frank Rich had his rich take on Cheney in Sunday’s NY Times. Capturing the V.P.’s t.v. talk show appearance, Rich noted that
Mr. Cheney, a master of the above-reproach dead pan, just kept going, effortlessly mowing right through any objections by the host. The vice president was banking… on a cultural environment in which fiction and nonfiction have become so scrambled — and can be so easily manipulated by politicians and show-biz impresarios alike — that credibility itself has become a devalued, if not archaic, news value. This is why the big national mystery of the moment — why do almost 70 percent of Americans believe in Mr. Cheney's fictional insinuation that Saddam Hussein had some hand in 9/11? — is not so hard to crack. As low as the administration's credibility may be, it is still trusted more than the media trying to correct the fictions the White House plants in the national consciousness.
"Tonight we congratulate television news on becoming us — mindless ratings whores," said the comic Jon Stewart, host of the faux-news "Daily Show," after unreeling a montage of particularly ludicrous excerpts from this year's actual news shows on last Sunday's Emmy broadcast. It would have been even funnier if the story being covered hadn't been an actual war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/arts/television/28RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The awakening media correcting those “misrepresentations”
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post deals with some b.s. spun by the Administration that attempts to portray the Iraqis as overly thrilled with our invasion.
Top Bush administration officials in the past weeks have been citing a pair of public opinion polls to demonstrate that Iraqis have a positive view of the U.S. occupation. But an examination of those polls indicates Iraqis have a less enthusiastic view than the administration has portrayed.
For example, in testimony before Congress, L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz both cited a recent Gallup Poll that found that almost two-thirds of those polled in Baghdad said it was worth the hardships suffered since the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein. Bremer also told Congress that 67 percent thought that in five years they would be better off, and only 11 percent thought they would be worse off.
That same poll, however, found that, countrywide, only 33 percent thought they were better off than they were before the invasion and 47 percent said they were worse off. And 94 percent said that Baghdad was a more dangerous place for them to live, a finding the administration officials did not discuss.
National (Airport) Liberation Front: Some of us become agitated when the flight attendant announces that “Welcome to Ronald Reagan National Airport”. I salute Jordan Barab, of http://spewingforth.blogspot.com, who has founded the above “organization.”
Colombia: Lest we forget: Three American military contractors have been hostages for 7 months, held by the “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”. The trio survived while another American and the Colombian pilot were executed after the plane went down. Colombian and U.S. forces have apparently been unable to discern their location.
-R
