Anonymous Sources

Worth reading:

Who killed Nick Berg?
May 29, 2004

Conspiracy theories about how the kidnapped American died in Iraq are flying around the world. Richard Neville explores the explanations.

Iraq in flames, Washington an object of disgust. What to do? At this pivotal moment, CNN and Fox News are tipped off to a clip of an American citizen being beheaded. The victim is a 26-year-old idealist from Pennsylvania, Nick Berg. Despite the perpetrators being masked, the vile deed is deemed the work of al-Qaeda.

The clip was first "discovered" on an Islamic website in Malaysia. Its Arabic title reads "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American". al-Zarqawi is a 38-year-old Jordanian militant who fled to Iraq in 2001 after reportedly losing a leg in a US missile strike. al-Zarqawi's face is widely known and he credits himself with the deed, so why a mask?

The timing of the video was brilliant for the West. Media pundits judged the crime a deeper evil than the systemic torture of innocent Iraqis. But some people sensed a rat. But if it was not al-Qaeda, who? Surely not Uncle Sam. That's too dark, even for the CIA.

While this video shows a human body having its head chopped off, it does not necessarily portray an act of murder. Berg's headless body was found dumped on a Baghdad roadside on Saturday, May 8.

Three days later, the "live beheading" clip was uploaded from London to the Malaysian website http://www.al-ansar.biz. The statement in the video is signed with al-Zarqawi's name, dated May 11. After Fox News and CNN had downloaded the video, it disappeared from the site.

As no autopsy is available, little is known about the state of the body. No time of death, no forensic analysis. On April 6, a month before the discovery of the corpse, Berg had been released from custody. But whose custody?

Dan Senor, adviser to the US Presidential Envoy in Iraq, has said Berg was never held by the Americans. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the Coalition's deputy head of operations, claimed he was in the custody of Iraqi police from March 24 to April 6. However, the Iraqi police chief, Major-General Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi, told Associated Press "the Iraqi police never arrested the slain American".

Berg's family are certain his jailers were the US military. His father, Michael, had been told so by the FBI. He has produced an email from a US consular official in Baghdad, Beth Payne, confirming that his son was in the hands of the US. (Later, another official said this was an error.) On April 5 in the Philadelphia office of the US Supreme Court, the Berg family had launched an action against the US military for false imprisonment. The following day, Berg was released.

The issue of custody is significant; in his final moments on screen Berg is wearing an orange jumpsuit of the kind familiar from Guantanamo Bay. The official reasons for Berg's arrest were "lack of documentation" and "suspicious activities". He carried sensitive electronic equipment for which he lacked documents. In custody, he was visited three times by the FBI. Such interviews are bound to have been recorded but no transcripts have been produced.

After his release, Berg travelled to Baghdad and the $30-a-night Al-Fanar Hotel. A fellow hotel guest told Newsday that Berg recounted how Iraqi police had quickly handed him to US authorities in Mosul and that he had been held the entire time in a jail where his guards were US soldiers.

Berg was in Baghdad to win contracts for his family firm, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, a provider of communications facilities. He often "worked at night on a tower in the neighbourhood of Abu Ghraib", according to The New York Times.

The family last heard from him on April 9, when he said he was planning to leave Iraq via Kuwait as soon as it was safe. Berg was last seen walking with his bags the following day, apparently hoping to find his way through the turmoil engulfing the city and make it to the border.

On March 7, 2004, two weeks before his arrest in Mosul, an "enemies list" had been posted on a conservative website, FreeRepublic.com. The list was compiled from signatories to an anti-war petition, and its implied purpose was to encourage readers to harass those it named.

Berg's father was on that list, as was the family firm, Prometheus. This information may well have triggered the arrest of Berg in Iraq.

Berg's politics are not clear. His father, Michael, has described his son as a "staunch supporter" of US President George Bush. Friends said Nick believed he could help rebuild Iraq "one radio tower at a time". According to The New York Times, he was attracted to the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam - healing the world through social action.

The first few seconds of the video shows Berg sitting on a white plastic chair in an orange jumpsuit. He speaks directly to the camera in a relaxed way: "My name is Nick Berg ... I have a brother and sister, David and Sara. I live in Philadelphia." His white chair is identical to those in the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, but such chairs are probably common in Iraq. It is highly likely that this segment is edited from the interrogation of Berg during his 13 days of custody.

In the next scene, Berg is sitting on the floor with five masked figures standing behind him. We do not see the figures enter. Berg looks lifeless, though his body appears to make slight movements. A man reads a lengthy Arabic statement in a passionless monotone. He is identified as "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi", a Jordanian associate of Osama bin Laden who is tied to dozens of terrorist acts.

Yet a leaflet recently circulated in Falluja, by no means a reliable source, claims that al-Zarqawi was killed in the Sulaimaniya mountains of northern Iraq during a US bombing. A US military report last month has claimed al-Zarqawi was killed in the bombing of Falluja.

Also, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has said that al-Zarqawi was fitted with a prosthetic leg in a Baghdad hospital, yet the tape shows no evidence of a limp. CNN staff familiar with al-Zarqawi's voice have been quoted as saying the voice does not sound like his.

Among the many curiosities raised on the web about the fanatical five are:

· They are well-fed, fidgety, and reveal glimpses of white skin.

· Their Arabic is heavily accented (Russian, Jordanian, Egyptian).

· An aside in Russian had been translated as "do it quickly".

· One character wears wears bulky white tennis shoes.

· The man on the far left stands in the familiar "at ease" military posture.

· The men's scarves are worn and tied by people who "haven't a clue", says conspiracy theorist Hector Carreon, like actors in Hollywood movies.

· There is even a voice at the end that seems to ask in English, "How will it be done?" [http://www.aztlan.net/nick_berg_how_done.htm]

None of this proves a grand conspiracy, but it does raise questions. In the final segment of the tape, Berg is thrown to the ground, but doesn't move. During the decapitation, starting at the front of the throat, there is little sign of blood. The scream is wildly out of sync, sounds female, and is obviously dubbed.

Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, told Ritt Goldstein of the Asia Times, "I would have thought that all the people in the vicinity would have been covered in blood, in a matter of seconds ... if it [the video] was genuine".

Simpson agrees with other experts who find it highly probable that Berg had died before his decapitation.

But there is still the problem of Berg's slight body movements while sitting on the floor, before the beheading. According to a blogger (internet diarist), Nick Possum, "this footage was subsequently modified frame by frame to make Berg's body move very occasionally". Apparently, this can be achieved with "commonly available software". [http://www.brushtail.com.au/nick_berg_hypothesis.html]

Possum believes "the available evidence surrounding the case suggests that it was a 'black operation' by US psychological warfare specialists ... to provide the media with a moral relativity argument to counter the adverse publicity over torture at Abu Ghraib". The use of FBI footage in the opening sequence, if confirmed, suggests the involvement of high-level US Government operatives.

I do not know who killed Nick Berg, or how he died. But there's something fishy about this video.

In the end, the question is: who killed Nick Berg, and why?

"You have the riiiiight . . . to free speeeeech . . .

As long as you're not dumb enough . . . to actually TRY* it!"

--Joe Strummer

[* SF Woman Attacked For Her Artwork]

Clearly, a failure:

An analysis of recently released figures from Arbitron, the radio ratings service, showed that in New York Air America beat Rush Limbaugh's station among 25-to-54-year-olds during the period that Limbaugh and Al Franken, the host of the flagship show "The O'Franken Factor," go head-to-head.

Who'll be Kerry's Vice President? This article throws out 29 names.

Apparently, the geniuses at Slate actually imagine that anybody outside Washington remembers, or will care when "reminded," that a security mess-up led a cadre of beltwayers to declare Bill Richardson's Energy Department stint a "disaster." (Note: it was one of the few references linked in the article . . . I think somebody has a little career-cred investment in this idea . . .). Kerry would be very, very stupid to listen to these wonks. Clearly, something about the guy strikes the Corps(e) as not "insider" enough -- exactly what Kerry needs.

Kerry/Richardson 2004

Guess what? NPR is NOT liberal.

Gee . . . what a surprise. Usually I believe every unsupported truism I hear en masse from the right.

Judith Miller . . . would you marry me?

The Times . . . wow . . . What can you say?

How about, "That silver bullet turned out to be a blank." (PBS's The News Hour.)

Tom Tomorrow puts it well:

It's what a lot of us wacko lefties have been saying since way before anyone ever heard the word "blog": in order to preserve their precious access to power, the Times, and papers like it, too often serve as stenographers to said power. Doing so this time has left them with serious blood on their hands, and I hope they are deeply ashamed.

November 2004 watch:

Numbers don't lie; or, if they do, Siebold and the Supreme Court are probably involved.

49 percent of registered voters now say they would vote for Kerry, 41 percent for Bush

41 percent approve of the job he is doing as President, while 52 percent disapprove -- the lowest overall job rating of his presidency.

61 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, while just 34 percent approve

65 percent now say the country is on the wrong track -- matching the highest number ever recorded in CBS News Polls since the question was first asked in the mid-1980’s

Just 37 percent -- the lowest number in his presidency -- now approve of Bush’s handling of foreign policy, while 56 percent disapprove

WAS IRAQ WAR WORTH COSTS? -- 33% YES -- 60% NO

Check out Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies!

Check out McCarthyism Watch from The Progressive!

Check out Spin of the Day from PR Watch.org!

Check out Disinfopedia!

Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State is:

the latest book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy. The bestselling authors of Weapons of Mass Deception lay bare how the "right-wing conspiracy," as represented by the national GOP and its functionaries in the media, lobbying establishment and electoral system, is undermining dissent and squelching pluralistic politics in America.

For the first time since 1932, the Republican Party controls every major institution of the federal government: the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate and the House of Representatives - not to mention the "fourth branch of government," the mass media. How did this come to pass? Banana Republicans reveals how the GOP leadership maintains its hold on power through the systemic manipulation of the electoral system, the media, the lobbying establishment, and the political culture at large. The book examines:

The legacy of the 2000 Florida ballot scandal, and how it has continued to play out in a nationwide effort at racial gerrymandering and redistricting schemes.

How a GOP echo chamber methodically spreads its views through conservative media giants and highly placed columnists, journalists, and opinion makers.

How, even within its own environs, the national Republican Party has squelched disagreement and moderation, stripping traditional oversight agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, of mission and influence.

How GOP leaders have strong-armed powerful lobbying firms into exclusively hiring Republicans, so that even K Street is political, rather than merely opportunistic.

How corporate-funded think tanks and Republican Party pundits have equated disagreement with treason, and the government has used its power to punish dissent.

[more:]
Notwithstanding their stated aversion to 'big government,' now that they have become the government [right wing Republicans] have not hesitated to expand its powers in precisely those areas that are most threatening to individual freedoms ... . The likelihood that those powers will be abused has increased, moreover, as the conservative movement accuses its ideological adversaries of 'treason,' 'terrorism' and 'un-Americanism;' threatening long-standing traditions of tolerance and diversity. ... In sum, the direction in which forces in the GOP are moving looks - at times absurdly, at times ominously - similar to the 'banana republics' of Latin America: nations dominated by narrow corporate elites, which use the pretext of national security to violate the rights of their citizens."

I love this blog entry from The Poor Man, which I repeat in its entirety:

Put On A Happy Face Most days, I'm pretty sure that the stupidest person in the world is Fred Barnes. But some days, I think it's Mort "Moor-Tahn" Kondracke. Like today, for example:

[Mort:]The American establishment, led by the media and politicians, is in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq. And the results would be catastrophic.
The media - unperturbed by mistakenly likening both the Afghan war and last year's invasion of Iraq to Vietnam - focuses overwhelmingly on the bad news coming out of Iraq. There is plenty of bad news - but there is also much good, and it is being almost completely ignored.
Some Members of Congress - either out of a passion to defeat President Bush, pique at not being listened to by the Bush administration, or simply a need to hear their own voices - are declaring the war "unwinnable" or "a quagmire," or are demanding an "exit strategy."
[End Mort]

Not bad, Mort, but you forgot to blame the failed policies of appeasement practiced by the Clinton administration. Here. Study your flash cards and try again.

Of course, there's no pro-Bush argument too stupid for the true belivers. Matt Yglasias proposed that if a hard-core Republican Congressman were to stand up and say that things were really going badly in Iraq, and that it was the result of policy choices made by the people in charge, everyone would come together and we'd be able to turn a corner. Little does Yglasias appreciate the corrupting influence of The Precious. Anyone who brings bad news is the real problem. The outrage is the real outrage. Liberals are bad is the real story. They will never give up The Precious.

What is needed is for these people to go, all of them. Congressmen who don't have the integrity to say the truth that everybody already knows need to be driven out of office. Pundits who continue to shill for these liars and fools need to be marginalized, ridiculed, and fired. People who refuse to deal with reality need to be outnumbered and outworked. If Jeff Sessions (or whoever) wants to be a grown-up, that's great. Welcome aboard. But it's not going to change anyone's mind. They've got too much invested in their mythology about evils of the French, liberals, the UN, the NY Times, and whoever quit the Administration in disgust this week. They're never going to be able to go back on this stuff, not ever.

We are in a bad situation in Iraq, and elsewhere, and we need to have people in charge who don't think the newspaper is engaged in a vast conspiracy to destroy America. We need grown ups, we need sanity, we need reality. People who can not handle reality can continue to hold onto their fantasies about the tricksy and false media, and how the President bears no responsibility for the execution of his own policies. But they need to be kept away from power.

Thanks for all of the above to The Poor Man (none written by Anonymous Sources).

Talkin'-points and koolaid-drinkin': What the right-wing blogs are desperately saying to avoid the Bush Disaster (and just ignore the pictures):

GregNews

... the death of journalism. Isn't it interesting that the media establishment provides Hersh with a trust that they refuse to provide the US military? Were a military spokesperson ever to convene a press conference and make comments based on so many anonymous sources they'd be laughed out of the room. And it's not like Hersh hasn't previously earned a reputation for exaggerating. It was Hersh who helped force the Abu Ghraib prison scandal out in the open. While "60 Minutes II" beat him by a hair, the CBS program ...

Right Wing News

Journalists Stoop To Deliberately Misleading Their Readers In Order To Keep The Abu Ghraib Story Going ... Take left-wing hack, Seymour Hersh's latest, oft quoted, column that attempts to tie Donald Rumsfeld directly to what happened at Abu Ghraib. Hersh's piece is almost entirely based on the comments of a large variety of anonymous sources. That alone should be enough to make anyone question the veracity of what they're reading given how spectacularly wrong Hersh's "anonymous sources" have been in the past. That's assuming that all those "anonymous sources" actually exist in the first ...

The Smoking Room

another blogger reminds us that Hersh has been spectacularly wrong before -- about a year ago, when the war had just started and Hersh was predicting that it would bog down before it even reached Baghdad. The problem with stories that rely so heavily on anonymous sources, as Hersh's does, is that they are hard to either corroborate or falsify. I'm hoping for an analysis of this story by Slate media critic Jack Shafer, whose favorite pastime is eviscerating journos who over-anonymize.

GregNews

SEYMOUR SQUIRM In an earlier post I remarked how Seymour Hersh's latest report relied on just two anonymous sources, a reliable sign that the report is more exaggeration than fact. Already Hersh is backpedeling. Perhaps he didn't expect the Pentagon's full frontal assault. "This is the most hysterical piece of journalist malpractice I have ever observed," said ...

chiefsblog

... this article will look ridiculous? It has happened before, when after one week into the Iraq War, Hersh claimed that US forces were bogged down and just hanging on for reinforcements that weren't due for months. Unfortunately for Hersh and the his anonymous sources, the troops that were hanging on for dear life toppled Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad days later. Now Hersh has found another "source" with an obvious axe to grind. This senior CIA official goes after Rumsfeld. The article is littered with stupid ...

Mark A. Kilmer's Political Annotation

... wild story. This is from today's Rightsided Newsletter: Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) is a member of both the Senate Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committees. He told LE host Wolfgang Blitzer that the Hersch piece relied on "anonymous sources," thus its credibility could be doubted. He added that it "flies in the face" of what Army Specialist Jeremy Sivits is pleading for his court martial trial, at which he will plead guilty and cooperate.

From get donkey!: "Chicago Tribune public editor, Don Wycliff pens a piece about how the press protects President Bush."

Why is the Democrat-loving, Republican-hating, pond scum-swilling, lower-than-the-rug-on-the-floor, biased, liberal [curl upper lip when pronouncing] press protecting George W. Bush?

You don't believe it's happening? Well, then, tell me about the furor over W's speech last week [this post published April 30] to a joint meeting in Washington of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Newspaper Association of America.

You didn't hear about it?

That's the proof.

If the press were not protecting Bush, you'd have read in your Chicago Tribune--or Washington Post or New York Times or Wall Street Journal or USA Today--that he delivered one of the most confusing, inarticulate public addresses since ... well, some people would say since his press conference a week earlier.

As it was, those hopelessly biased reporters who cover Bush overlooked the mangled syntax, penetrated the rhetorical fog and extracted some usable lines from the dross and manufactured stories that had the president sounding, if not quite statesmanlike, then at least intelligible.

The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller led with Bush's response to a poll that showed the majority of Americans expect another terrorist attack in the U.S. before the November election. "Well, I understand why they think they're going to get hit again," Bush was quoted as saying. "This is a hard country to defend."

The Washington Post focused on his remarks about Iran's effort to acquire nukes. "The Iranians need to feel the pressure from the world that any nuclear weapons program will be uniformly condemned--it's essential that they hear that message," the president was quoted.

Neither The Wall Street Journal nor the Tribune carried a story about the speech per se, although the Tribune carried an Associated Press story that wove one quote from the speech into a story on the unexpectedly high costs of the Iraqi excursion. "The Iraqi people are looking at Americans and saying, `Are we going to cut and run again?'" the quote ran. "And we're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office."

Roger Ailes (the blog, not the scumbag) asks:

Will Pumpkinhead Russert put this 1998 Chalabi quote (from Senate testimony) up on the screen tomorrow morning?

"Give the Iraqi National Congress a base protected from Saddam's tanks, give us the temporary support we need to feed and house and care for the liberated population, and we will give you a free Iraq, an Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction, and a free-market Iraq. Best of all, the INC will do this all for free."
(Quote from "The Rollback Fantasy," by Daniel Byman, Kenneth Pollack, and Gideon Rose, January/February 1999 Foreign Affairs, behind the money wall.)

Leave it to the a-holes at Associated Press:

Some critics speculated that if "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top prize, it would be more for the film's politics than its cinematic value.

Hey AP a-holes! Thanks for including this irrelevant information! ("some critics speculated that . . . Einstein's true objective in formulating E equals MC squared was to increase the number of E's, M's, and C's in the world" . . . fill in the blank with your own irrelevant info).

For similar a-hole-dom, check out Publisher Weekly's and Library Journal's "reviews" (read: right wing s**t fits) of Gore Vidal's recent books.

Yet more from the May 31 Nation:

There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have.

Can you say SARTRE? Well, no -- the author (Paul Savoy) unfortunately cites the vastly overpraised Nozick and somewhat overpraised Camus.

The Nation hits hard this week (see post below, too). Jonathan Schell:

At one point, Justice John Paul Stevens asked Clement what assurances he could give that the citizens detained under his doctrine of unfettered executive discretion were not being tortured. Clement answered that the courts and the country must simply have confidence that the executive, in obedience to its treaty obligations, would never do such a thing.

Robert Jay Lifton

To attribute the scandal at Abu Ghraib to "a few bad apples" or to "individual failures" is poor psychology and self-serving pseudomorality. To be sure, individual soldiers and civilians who participated in it are accountable for their behavior, even under such pressured conditions. But the greater responsibility lies with those who planned and executed the war on Iraq and the "war on terrorism" of which it is a part, and who created, in policy and attitude, the accompanying denial of rights of captives and suspects.

Psychologically and ethically, responsibility for the crimes at Abu Ghraib extends to the Defense Secretary, the Attorney General and the White House. Those crimes are a direct expression of the kind of war we are waging in Iraq.

According to The Hill:

Cheney Won't Run

Paul Krugman:

It turns out that America's love affair with gas guzzlers, shortsighted as it is, is not the main culprit: the big increases in demand have come from booming developing countries. China, in particular, still consumes only 8 percent of the world's oil — but it accounted for 37 percent of the growth in world oil consumption over the last four years.

U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft singing "Let the Eagle Soar," a song of his own composing, unedited clips of the president that the networks have never shown us, as well as candidate Bush meeting Moore on the campaign trail and saying, "Behave yourself, will you? Go find real work."

This guy is going to be on the Supreme Court after Bush gets re-elected. And no, he won't be Borked: he's Latino (I don't mean that in a racist way -- it's politics).

When Kurt Vonnegut speaks, Anonymous Sources gotta listen.

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

Highly recommended:

What is Retro Poll?

Do you have a suspicion that public opinion polls you read and hear about in the corporate media may be done mainly to support the views of those commissioning the polls? Perhaps you think that polls mold public opinion as much as they ascertain the public's will? If you do, then you should be a Retro Poll supporter. Retro Poll's starting point is that potential and real bias by corporate media, the two major political parties and government in survey research are a danger to the free and open discourse of ideas in a democracy.

Retro Poll was established in 2002 to investigate, expose, and challenge bias in corporate media polling. Retro Poll moves beyond critical analysis of poll methodology to re-work poll questions, background information, and methods and then actually perform new polls on the same issues. We do not claim the capability of pure objectivity.

Please, please, please -- if you never take Anonymous Sources' advice, do so NOW and watch this Mark Fiore cartoon (requires watching an ad for a day pass to Salon).

June 30th: The Day Sovereignty Is (n't) Handed Over (from the Commies at the Wall Street Journal):

[quote:]
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Behind the Scenes, U.S. Tightens Grip On Iraq's Future:
Hand-Picked Proxies, Advisers Will Be Given Key Roles In Interim Government By YOCHI J. DREAZEN and CHRISTOPHER COOPER

Haider al-Abadi runs Iraq's Ministry of Communications, but he no longer calls the shots there.
Instead, the authority to license Iraq's television stations, sanction newspapers and regulate cellphone companies was recently transferred to a commission whose members were selected by Washington. The commissioners' five-year terms stretch far beyond the planned 18-month tenure of the interim Iraqi government that will assume sovereignty on June 30.
The transfer surprised Mr. Abadi, a British-trained engineer who spent nearly two decades in exile before returning to Iraq last year. He found out the commission had been formally signed into law only when a reporter asked him for comment about it. "No one from the U.S. even found time to call and tell me themselves," he says.
As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.
In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover.
In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the plan.
. . .
Nechirvan Barzani, who controls the western half of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, warns that the U.S. presence in the country will continue to spark criticism and violence until Iraqis really believe they run their own country. For his part, Mr. Abadi, the communications minister, says that installing a government that can't make important decisions essentially "freezes the country in place." He adds, "If it's a sovereign Iraqi government that can't change laws or make decisions, we haven't gained anything."
. . .
It's unclear what powers the interim government, which will be set up by United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, will have. It will not control Iraq's security forces or military. In theory, it will have the ability to enforce and interpret laws on its own, though it will as of now lack the ability to write new ones or make large changes to them.
One thing is clear: The government's actions are likely to be heavily influenced by dozens of U.S. and Iraqi appointees at virtually all levels.
In March, for instance, Mr. Bremer issued a lengthy edict consolidating control of all Iraqi troops and security forces under the Ministry of Defense and its head, Ali Allawi. But buried in the document is a one-paragraph "emergency" decree ceding "operational control" of all Iraqi forces to senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq.
. . .
Meanwhile, the media and telecom commission Mr. Bremer created will be able to collect media licensing fees, regulate television and telephone companies, shut down news agencies, extract written apologies from newspapers and seize publishing and broadcast equipment.
. . .
The other watchdog, the Board of Supreme Audit, will oversee a battery of other inspectors with wide-ranging authority to review government contracts and investigate any agency that uses public money. Mr. Bremer will appoint the board president and his two deputies. They can't be removed without a two-thirds vote of Iraq's parliament, which isn't slated to come into existence until sometime next year.
Few of the positions have been filled so far, but officials at the CPA and the Governing Council say they expect to name the new officials within weeks. The advisers inside the ministries are likely to be almost exclusively American, while the inspectors and members of the various new commissions will all be Iraqi.
. . .
The nerve center of the U.S. presence in Iraq will be a massive new embassy.
. . .
The U.S. plans to convert a nearby building into the formal embassy that incoming U.S. ambassador John Negroponte can use for ceremonial functions.
. . .
The U.S. push to continue guiding events in Iraq has been led by the State Department
. . .
The Bush administration also felt Iraq's Sunni minority, which had controlled Iraq under Mr. Hussein, had been neutralized by the disbanding of the army and the firing of tens of thousands of government officials. Iraq's Shiite majority was seemingly unified behind Mr. Sistani, who counseled his followers to cooperate with the coalition. And Iraq's ethnic Kurds, who controlled the country's north, had moderated their long-held demands for full independence.
Many of those assumptions haven't yet panned out. Sunnis angry over their forced disenfranchisement have put up a stiff resistance to the U.S. occupation in cities like Fallujah, and Iraq's fledgling security forces have been unable or unwilling to help fight them. Thousands of Shiites have taken up arms against the U.S. under the flag of Muqtada al Sadr, an anti-American cleric once dismissed by Washington as a bit player in Iraq.
The Kurds, meanwhile, remain deeply wary of joining up with the rest of the country. With the violence surging in recent weeks, the State Department official with knowledge of the administration's plans says the U.S. "realized that what we put on the table in November wasn't flying."
U.S. officials settled on making an array of appointments intended to allow them to influence the interim government.
. . .
But many Iraqis and Americans concede that friction is all but inevitable. If recent events are any indication, the most serious disagreements between the U.S. and the new government could arise over the best strategy for fighting the ongoing insurgency. When fighting flared in Fallujah and Najaf, U.S. commanders ordered newly trained Iraqi units into combat alongside American forces, but the Iraqis proved largely ineffective. Many units deserted entirely, while others joined the insurgents.
It's also unclear if Iraqi political leaders will want local units to fight -- especially if the enemy is other Iraqis. The U.S. decision to use heavy weaponry like helicopter gunships against targets in Fallujah caused the resignations of two Iraqi political leaders who had been appointed by the U.S. almost a year earlier, and sparked searing denunciations of the coalition by numerous other Iraqi officials. The Iraqis insisted on a nonviolent solution to the dispute and accused the U.S. of acting with a heavy hand and causing needless civilian casualties.
xxxxxxxxx
[end-quote]

Today is May 17, 2004. I say that in order to glorify myself, because I am about to be right, long before anyone else:

Bill Richardson is going to be Kerry's running-mate.

Governor
Latino
battleground state
Nobel prize nominee
cabinet member under St. Clinton
representative

This guy's got it all -- he da man. The only thing stopping Kerry right now is the fear of racism. But this guy can get him Florida. End of story.

Boy, the librul media sure was all over the big scandal about privatizing (unwillingly) the National Guard

"Missouri's governor and National Guard leader raised concerns Tuesday that some soldiers in Iraq are improperly being used as drivers for civilian supply contractors.

In a letter to President Bush, Democratic Gov. Bob Holden complained that members of the Guard's 1221st Transportation Company were being directed to drive vehicles for contractors of Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.

Holden asked Bush to look into the matter, saying the soldiers lives were being put at risk."
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From The Top Ten Conservative Idiots (No. 156)

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May 17, 2004

Inhofe's Enough Edition

Last week's news was particularly sickening all round - from further revelations in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to the abhorrent execution of Nicholas Berg. But there were plenty of conservative idiots ready to take this news and run with it: James Inhofe (1) was outraged that anyone was outraged about torture and Right-Wing Execution Enthusiasts (2) were keen to exploit Berg's beheading. Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfailed (3) suddenly became very concerned about the Geneva Convention and Dick Cheney (4) suddenly decided that Rumsfailed is the best defense secretary the world has ever seen. Elsewhere, the Appleton Post-Crescent (6) is having difficulty maintaining its balance, George W. Bush (8) is keeping cool, and the Republican Party (10) really needs to take a look in the mirror. Enjoy, and as usual, don't forget the key!

James Inhofe
If there was one idiot who summed up the complete and utter shamelessness of the American right-wing last week, it was Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). At a Senate hearing on the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, Inhofe stated that torture tactics are A-okay in his book. "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," said he. You know, he's probably right - there was probably at least one other Republican at the hearing who's as big a scumbag as Inhofe. But never mind that. "These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals." Well, maybe - except for the fact that the Red Cross estimates that 70-90% of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib had been "arrested by mistake," and General Taguba's report indicates that the guards weren't even keeping track of which prisoners were in which cells. So were they in there for traffic violations? Who knows. Ah, what the hell, let's stick bags over their heads and sodomize them anyway. (This actually kinda reminds me of Rush Limbaugh's theory that the death penalty is never meted out incorrectly, because if you end up on death row, hey, you must have done something.) But one of the strangest things to come out of this whole affair is the new-found moral relativism on display by the right-wing. Conservatives have always derided liberals for this "failing" - as far as they're concerned, all that exists is good versus evil. Except suddenly it's okay for America to torture prisoners of war - because even if we're forcing them to masturbate, stuffing things up their rectums, and beating them to death, at least we're not drilling holes through their skulls. So meet the new conservative moral relativism - say goodbye to good versus evil, say hello to not-quite-as-evil-as-evil, uh, versus evil.


Right-Wing Execution Enthusiasts
They've spent the last several months complaining that there hasn't been enough good news coming out of Iraq, but you wouldn't know it from last week's performance. The right-wing were suddenly overjoyed when an American civilian was beheaded by alleged al-Qaeda terrorists, because Nick Berg's terrible misfortune was a boon for conservatives who had spent the week busily defending the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. The brutal beheading was captured on videotape and posted to an Islamic militant website, where it was promptly downloaded by several news organizations before disappearing as suddenly as it had arrived. Sean Hannity and Michael Savage played audio of Berg's murder on their radio shows, and many prominent conservatives took to the airwaves and pontificated about how the video was a reminder of why we need to torture random brown people. Uh, I mean, a reminder of "what we're fighting against." Odd. I mean, they may need a reminder, but I don't know anyone who's forgotten what happened on September 11, 2001, nor do I know anyone who's forgotten why it's imperative that we track down and destroy terrorist scum. What I'm not entirely sure about is what any of that has to do with occupying Iraq and committing mass violations of the Geneva Convention.


Donald Rumsfailed
Speaking of the Geneva Convention - you know, that treaty we signed which says we're not allowed to torture prisoners of war - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfailed came up with his own interesting insights into what it all means last week. According to Don, we're not allowed to see any more pictures of the Geneva Convention violations which took place inside Abu Ghraib, because displaying such pictures would, uh, violate the Geneva Convention. Well, shit. We wouldn't want to violate the Geneva Convention, would we? But wait - according to the defense secretary, what happened in Abu Ghraib doesn't violate the Geneva Convention anyway. Riiiiiiight. Fair enough though - personally I've pretty much seen enough to know what went on in there, and the reports coming from our elected representatives who saw a further 1800 pictures on Capitol Hill last week were plenty graphic. But it is certainly curious that Don is so concerned about the Geneva Convention all of a sudden - or should I say, selectively concerned. I mean, he didn't seem that bothered about it in January (which is when he claims he first knew of the torture at Abu Ghraib). But when several American POW's were captured near the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he said, "You know, under the Geneva Convention, it's illegal to do things with prisoners of war that are humiliating to those individuals." Hmm. Geneva Convention. Prisoners of war. Humiliating. Shouldn't that have rung some bells for Rumsfailed?


Dick Cheney
All this seems to have gone right over Vice President Crashcart's head though, because according to him, Rumsfailed is "the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had" (even better than George H. W. Bush's secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993, uh, Dick Cheney). Mind you, this is the same guy who was banging on about weapons of mass destruction waaaay after everyone else had realized that that dog wasn't just not going to hunt anymore, it had gone rabid and had to be put down (see Idiots 141). Cheney also told the world to "get off [Rumsfailed's] case and let him do his job," last week. Yeah! Get off his case! These bloody great groups of congresspeople who keep getting together and looking at hundreds and hundreds of photos of acts of torture committed by American troops are just getting in his way. Show Don some respect fer crying out loud.


Media Whores
Gallup, Pew, the American Research Group, Zogby and others had some devastating new poll results for the Chimp in Charge last week - not that you'd know it from the newsroom spin. The Media Whores are still desperately stuck trying to paint the race as a neck-and-neck nailbiter and John Kerry as a boring candidate who's going nowhere. Unfortunately for Bush, the evidence suggests that if he doesn't do something to stop his ratings slide, he could be screwed. According to Gallup, "no incumbent president in the post-war era won re-election after falling below 50 percent approval at this point in an election year." (Bush is currently at 44%.) In addition, every incumbent who has won re-election has had a double-digit lead over their opponent at this stage in the campaign. That's right - John Kerry is 11 points stronger against George W. Bush at this point than Bill Clinton was against Bush's father in 1992. Heard about that on Fox News lately? Nope - but you may have heard the Media Whores spreading stories about Democrats wanting to ditch Kerry. After all, when the party's nominee is doing better than any challenger in recent memory, it's always a good idea to, uh, get rid of him and find someone else. At least, the Republicans would certainly appreciate it if that could be arranged.


The Appleton Post-Crescent
If polls aren't your thing and you prefer more anecdotal evidence that Bush isn't doing as well as he should be, check out this plea from the Post-Crescent of Appleton, Wisconsin. Last week the daily newspaper asked its readers to submit more pro-Bush letters to the editor, because they want to "balance things out." That's right. In a notice to their readers, the editors of the Post-Crescent wrote, "We've been getting more letters critical of President Bush than those that support him. We're not sure why, nor do we want to guess. But in today's increasingly polarized political environment, we would prefer our offering to put forward a better sense of balance... Since we depend upon you, our readers, to supply our letters, that goal can be difficult. We can't run letters that we don't have. If you would like to help us 'balance' things out, send us a letter, make a call or punch out an e-mail... We'd love to hear from you." So let me get this straight... The Post-Crescent takes it for granted that the country is "polarized" - split down the middle between conservatives and liberals. They are then faced with strong evidence to the contrary in the form of increasing numbers of letters critical of George W. Bush. So what's a good newspaper to do? Run the letters as they come in? Note that the increase in anti-Bush letters may indicate a drop in support for Our Great Leader? Nope - they ask for readers to send in more pro-Bush letters to "balance things out." After all, their job isn't to to "guess" why this might be happening, is it? No - their job is to simply parrot conventional wisdom. And if reality happens to indicate that conventional wisdom may be false, what else is a good newspaper to do but manufacture evidence to the contrary? Thank goodness for the fourth estate.


Paul Bremer
Back to the Middle East for a moment... According to the Associated Press, current King of Iraq Paul Bremer announced last week that "the United States would leave Iraq if requested to do so by the new Iraqi government." Said Bremer, "I don't think that will happen, but obviously we don't stay in countries where we're not welcome." Hmmm... let's see here. So they've killed almost 800 of our soldiers in the last year or so, we've killed 10,000 or so of them, 80 percent of Iraqis now want us out of the country... but hey, we wouldn't want to be anywhere we're not welcome. Strangely enough, this news came hot on the heels of an announcement by Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who told reporters that U.S. forces "would not leave if asked by the interim government." But it's okay, because that announcement came hot on the heels of Grossman's appearance before the House International Relations Committee where he was asked, "If they ask us to leave, we will leave, will we not?" and he answered, "Yes." So I'm glad our policy in Iraq is now perfectly clear to everybody.

George W. Bush
Iraq and the economy aren't looking too good for Bush at the moment, so he's falling back on his third-string campaign issue, education. Bush's massively underfunded No Child Left Behind act is driving up education costs everywhere as schools try to conform to rigid standards, and it's certainly having an effect on Parkersburg South High School in West Virginia. When Bush made a campaign stop - sorry, my bad, a "presidential visit" (that means the taxpayer gets to pay for it) - there last week, the school was a little sweaty - except George lucked out as usual. "We've got 1,200 students sitting over there in an un-air conditioned auditorium watching this (on television) with fans blowing on them to keep cool," said Parkersburg South librarian Brenda Brum. "Here, we've pumped in air conditioning for the President. I resent that." Ah, Brenda, at least you didn't have to lay down asphalt for him to walk on (see Idiots 147). Now shut up and go resuscitate that student. I think he's come down with heatstroke.


Dorothy Rabinowitz
How dumb can you get? Last month Wall Street Journal pundit Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote a scathing indictment of Kristen Breitweister and the 9/11 widows which was published as an op-ed. This month, Breitweiser wrote an op-ed of her own and submitted it for publication in the Journal. Rabinowitz got wind of the op-ed and dashed off an email to deputy editorial page editor Tunku Varadaraja asking him not to publish it. She called Breitweiser's article "total and complete - not to mention repetitive - nonsense from people given endless media access to repeat the very same stupid charges." But that's not all... "My thoughts - we don't publish nonsensical contentions that offer no news, no insight - solely on the grounds that those who feel attacked get a chance to defend their views. For that we have the letters column." Wow. But wait a second, you're asking yourself, how do I know what was in the email? Simple - instead of sending it to Tunku Varadaraja, Rabinowitz accidentally sent it to Kristen Breitweiser. Shortly afterwards she sent another one: "Rabinowitz, Dorothy would like to recall the message, '9/11 Widows' Response - the 'jersey girls.'" Like I said: how dumb can you get?


The Republican Party
And finally, thanks to the great DailyKos.com for tipping us off to this one... An alert Kos reader realized that parts of the Republican Party Platform at the 2000 GOP Convention reads like an exact indictment of everything Bush has done since coming to power - check it out: "The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the [Clinton] administration's diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries" ... "Gerrymandered congressional districts are an affront to democracy and an insult to the voters. We oppose that and any other attempt to rig the electoral process" ... "Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments. A Republican administration working with the Congress will respect the needs and quiet sacrifices of these public servants as it strengthens America's intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities and reorients them toward the dangers of the future." Can you believe it?
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[end-quote]

Blogarama

From a Constitutional Law professor at UNC (IsThatLegal):

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Did the Justice Department Lie to the Supreme Court?
Back on April 28, at oral arguments in the Supreme Court in the Hamdi and Padilla cases, Justice Ginsburg had this exchange with Paul Clement, the Deputy Solicitor General:

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: But if the law is what the executive says it is, whatever is "necessary and appropriate'' in the executive's judgment, as the resolution you gave us that Congress passed, it leads you up to the executive, unchecked by the judiciary. So what is it that would be a check against torture?

A. Well, first of all, there are treaty obligations. But the primary check is that just as in every other war, if a U.S. military person commits a war crime by creating some atrocity on a harmless, you know, detained enemy combatant or a prisoner of war, that violates our own conception of what's a war crime. And we'll put that U.S. military officer on trial in a court martial. So I think there are plenty of internal reasons --

Q. Suppose the executive says, "Mild torture, we think, will help get this information?" It's not a soldier who does something against the code of military justice, but it's an executive command. Some systems do that to get information.

A. Well, our executive doesn't, and I think - I mean.

It turned out that people within the military had known for at least four months at that point that methods involving torture and humiliation had been practiced in Iraq.

There was no clear reason, at that point, to suspect that the Justice Department knew of US government agents' use of (in Justice Ginsburg's words) "mild torture."

Today, however, we learn that, in the cases of certain top al Qaeda detainees, the CIA has "used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as 'water boarding,' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown." And most importantly, we read this:

"These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees."

So we now know that the Justice Department has been involved in reviewing and approving methods of interrogation that have been used in at least some post-9/11 cases.

Given that, I think it now fair to inquire--and I hope a relevant congressional committee will do so--whether the Solicitor General's office knew, or could have known through the exercise of ordinary diligence, that our executive was using techniques of "mild torture" in interrogating prisoners of war and enemy combatants. Did Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement make a knowingly or recklessly false assertion to the United States Supreme Court in order to bolster the government's legal position?

Unthinkable, you wonder? Hardly. That's precisely what the Solicitor General's Office did sixty years ago in its brief in Korematsu v. United States. The Solicitor General directed the removal from the brief of a footnote that called into question the accuracy of the military's representation that Japanese Americans had engaged in espionage and subversion. In 1984, federal district judge Marilyn Hall Patel overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction for resisting exclusion from the West Coast, noting in her opinion that "there is substantial support in the record that the government deliberately omitted relevant information and provided misleading information in papers before the court." (Korematsu v. United States, 584 F. Supp. 1406, 1420 (N.D. Cal. 1984))

I think there's now more than enough in the public record to support -- indeed, necessitate -- an inquiry into whether the Justice Department made knowing or reckless misrepresentations to the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdi and Padilla.

UPDATE: The very knowledgeable Marty Lederman wrote me the following:

[quote-within-quote]: I'm fairly confident that Paul Clement and the SG, throughout their participation in the Padilla and Hamdi cases, were well aware of the Administration's interrogation practices. (See the remarkable Jacoby Declaration in Padilla.) However, having worked with Paul, I can attest that he is a straight shooter who takes very seriously his obligation of candor to the Court, and I'm confident that he was not saying anything to the Court that he did not believe to be true.

The problem is that the OLC opinions in question undoubtedly conclude that the approved "stress and duress" techniques are not "torture," for purposes of both the Torture Convention and the federal criminal statute that implements that Convention, 18 USC 2340.

The U.S.'s understanding of "torture" -- and, for that matter, of "inhuman and degrading" practices, which the Convention also prohibits -- is far narrower than a layperson's understanding, and far narrower than what presumably is the general international understanding. See, most importantly, the Senate's "reservations" upon ratifying the Convention, printed at 136 Cong. Rec. S17904 (Oct. 27, 1990). See also 8 CFR 208.18.

It's very hard to imagine how some of these "stress and duress" techniques wouldn't violate even the U.S.'s grudging conceptions of "torture" and "degrading" practices; but I'm sure that that's somehow the conclusion that OLC has reached. I imagine we'll be seeing those opinions sometime soon, if there's any serious congressional inquiry (as there ought to be).

What's most disturbing, perhaps, is our practice of "rendering" suspects to other nations with the expectation that even more aggressive techniques will be used. My understanding is that the Torture Convention prohibits the transfer of any person to another State "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to terror." The NYT article today sure suggests that we're violating that prohibition, if nothing else. [end-quote-within-quote]

FURTHER UPDATE: Unfogged notes some additional excerpts from argument before the Court in Hamdi and Padilla that are troubling. In these, Deputy Solicitor General twice suggests (maybe "implies" would be the better word) that the executive's practices do not include anything like torture defined broadly (as opposed to torture defined in a narrow and technical way).
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From David Brock's new book The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy (requires watching an ad for a day-pass):

[What the media did to Gore:]

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In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a "skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy" was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said -- most infamously, that he "invented" the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true.

The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. "Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar," William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "... Gore lies because he can't help himself," neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. "LIAR, LIAR," screamed Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore's "serial mendacity" and warned that he is a "dangerous man." "Gore may be quietly going nuts," National Review's Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusion' thusly: 'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present ... a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'"


This impugning of Gore's character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined "Tendency to embellish fact snags Gore," while the Boston Globe weighed in with "Gore seen as 'misleading.'" On ABC's "This Week," former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore's "Pinocchio problem." For National Journal's Stuart Taylor, the issue was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain." Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore "could comprehend reality," while MSNBC's Chris Matthews compared Gore to "Zelig" and insisted, "Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"

The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: . . . by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked "honest/trustworthy" first -- and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said "Gore would say anything," while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore's "untruthfulness" was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason.
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[What Gore said in response:]

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Two years after the election, . . . Gore said:

"The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective as stated by the news media as a whole....

Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they all start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist...."
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[And what the media said in response to Gore's response:]

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True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is -- I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I'm a psychiatrist. I don't usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there's a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help." "It could be he's just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore's issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know." "He [Gore] said it's a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN's "Crossfire." "I actually think he's coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS.
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[Brock's intelligent summation:]

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[U]nchecked right-wing media power means that in the United States today, no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided. If California voters recall their governor in the belief that the state budget deficit is four times higher than it actually is, if Americans think Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 before hearing any evidence, if 19 percent of the public thinks it is in the top 1 percent tax bracket, if Americans view criticism of the government's national security policies as tantamount to treason -- thank the right-wing media and those who abet it.
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A hopelessly biased account, but nevertheless instructive -- what Aljazeera thinks of the Berg video.

The author is one Lawrence Smallman -- probably a pseudonym (or flesh and blood "front") for whomever happens to be filing under that name that day.

I don't subscribe to the article's theory. Again, though, it is interesting for about as many reasons as you can think of.

Did al Qaeda kill Berg? Or maybe it was Al Kaline (former first baseman for the Detroit Tigers . . . I mean, first qaedaman . . . or first sittingdowndoingnothingman . . .)

Two days in a row, thanks to Corrente:

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CNN - LIVE FROM:
O'BRIEN: Interesting. All right, now one final thought here. You did a very careful translation of your own, of the statement. And in it, you see no reference to al Qaeda. And yet the official U.S. government translation does. Explain how that happened.

NASR: Oh, I find it very interesting, because out of the blue, there is a mention of al Qaeda on the U.S. government translation. It says: "Does al Qaeda need any further excuses?" Any speaker of the Arabic language is going to notice a difference between the word al Qaeda, which means "the base," and al qaed, which means "the one sitting, doing nothing."

My translation says: "Is there any excuse for the one who sits down and does nothing?" Basically they're telling people, you have no excuse for not doing anything, for not acting and defending Islam and so forth. Whereas the U.S. government translation has this factual error, I'm sure it's an honest mistake, but basically it sort of adds al Qaeda to the statement, which is not on the statement.

O'BRIEN: All right, Octavia Nasr, we don't know exactly how that got in there. We'll try to get more on that. We appreciate you bringing that all to light and appreciate your insights, of course.

NASR: You bet.
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Why we love the Drug Companies:

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"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pfizer Inc. agreed to pay $430 million and plead guilty to criminal charges for illegally marketing an epilepsy drug for unapproved uses such as migraines and pain, U.S. prosecutors said Thursday.

The company's Warner-Lambert division promoted the drug, Neurontin, for uses it had no scientific evidence to support, and even in cases where the drug was shown to be ineffective, prosecutors said.

For example, the company promoted Neurontin for treating bipolar disease, even though a study showed a placebo worked as well or better than the drug for manic depression."
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Can you beLIEVE these scumbags?

Think about it: somebody has bipolar disorder; it's ruining his life; thanks to Warner-Lambert, the guy gets prescribed this NON-medication; and he just gets worse when he could be getting better.

$430 million is a joke. These ass****s should be put in jail.

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"[Prosecutor] Franklin accused Warner-Lambert of hiring an outside firm to write at least 20 articles for medical journals that extolled unauthorized uses of Neurontin and then paid doctors for use of their names as authors of the reports, according to court documents."
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But remember: their exorbitant profit margins are necessary to pay all the costs associated with research and development . . . such as paying doctors to have their names put on phony articles they didn't write.

And here I thought there was a WAR ON DRUGS . . .

Again: put these scumbags in jail.

Our enlightened, objective, and (of course) librul media:

[quote from
Timothy Noah of Slate:]
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The rapidly emerging conservative line on Abu Ghraib is that Congress and the news media are exploiting the story in order to discredit the Bush administration. "Clearly, the images are serving the political agenda of many newspapers," sniffed Col Allen, editor-in-chief of the New York Post, to the New York Times. Until this past Saturday Abu Ghraib was kept off Page One of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Post, proving that the Post's loyalty to right-wing politics is greater than its not-inconsiderable loyalty to Fleet Street-style tabloid journalism. Murdoch publications have downplayed Abu Ghraib even more than the rest of the conservative press. The Weekly Standard's Web site had nothing to say until yesterday, and the Times piece quotes Fox News executive producer Bill Shine saying he's "dialing back" on use of the photographs.

But other conservative commentators, while less skittish about discussing Abu Ghraib, have adopted more or less the same argument. Torture is bad; liberal outrage against torture is worse. "Like reporters at a free buffet," intoned the Wall Street Journal editorial board on May 6, "Members of Congress are swarming to the TV cameras to declare their outrage and demand someone's head, usually Donald Rumsfeld's." Shame on Congress for wanting to hold the defense secretary responsible for losing control of the troops he sent to Baghdad! It's an "ersatz scandal," Midge Decter, author of a hagiographic Rumsfeld biography, pronounced in the May 7 Los Angeles Times. In an editorial headlined "A Few Bad Men," the Weekly Standard, which turned against Rumsfeld months ago for messing up its pretty war, has now come to his defense. The idea that anyone in addition to the prison guards currently facing court martial should bear any responsibility for the mayhem at Abu Ghraib is, the Weekly Standard says, a con perpetrated by defense lawyers.
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[end-quote]

"An email to Pentagon staff marked "URGENT IT (Information Technology) BULLETIN: Taguba Report" orders employees not to read or download the Taguba report at Fox News, on the grounds that the document is classified. It also orders them not to discuss the matter with friends or family members."

From USNews.com/Washington Whispers:
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The Google Terrrorist
It was the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. "Stand down," came the order from embarrassed national security types.
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Mission Accomplished.

"The highest figure ever recorded, 64 percent, say the result of the war in Iraq has not been worth the cost in lives or money. Only 29 percent, the lowest figure yet, believe the war has been worth it. And just 31 percent of Americans now say the United States is winning the war."

Courtesy of Corrente


The Daily Show, 5/11/04:

Jon Stewart: Stephen, what do you think about this idea that we are hearing from Rumsfeld, and now Sen. Inhofe, that the press was somehow irresponsible for releasing these photos of abuse?

Stephen Colbert: Jon, I agree entirely with Secy Rumsfeld that the release of these photos was deplorable, but these actions of a few rogue journalists do not represent the vast majority of the American media.

Stewart: The journalists did something wrong?

Colbert: I'm just saying those journalists don't represent the journalists I know. The journalists I know love America, but now all anybody wants to talk about is the bad journalists--the journalists that hurt America.

But what they don't talk about is all the amazingly damaging things we haven't reported on. Who didn't uncover the flaws in our pre-war intelligence? Who gave a free pass on the Saddam-al Queda connection? Who dropped Aghanistan from the headlines at the first whiff of this Iraqi snipehunt? The United States press corps, that's who. Heck, we didn't even put this story on the front page. We tried to bury it on "60 Minutes II." Who's on that--Charlie Rose and Anglela Lansbury?

Stewart: Stephen, what do you think is at play here?

Colbert: Politics, Jon, that's what. Pure and simple. I think it's pretty suspicious that these tortures took place during a Presidential campaign. This is a clear cut case of partisan sadism. You know, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those Iraqi prisoners want Bush out of office too. You know I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a pile of hooded, naked Iraqis has a job waiting for them in the Kerry Administration.

Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

Nick Berg video
nick berg
berg beheading
beheading video
nick berg beheading video
nick berg beheading
berg video
berg beheading video
"nick berg"
video nick berg

Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

and while we're at it

Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

American Cannibalism

Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

ABC News is reporting

Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

Da Vinci Code

Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

survivor kate beckinsale brad pitt friends amber brkich lynndie england cicada kentucky derby mean girls melania knauss lindsay lohan lil kim michael jackson american idol jessica dee camel spider snakehead fish iraq india haiti china martha stewart george w bush john kerry howard stern Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com kobe bryant american idol walmart home depot best buy target circuit city sears lowes costco ikea office depot hotels bikini spring break hawaii mexico american idol grand theft auto san andreas online games william hung wwe dictionary yellow pages mortgage calculator consumer reports currency converter southwest airlines american airlines united airlines continental airlines delta airlines prom dresses hairstyles south park pokemon the simpsons winnie the pooh spongebob blink 182 linkin park metallica Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com evanescence black eyed peas leprechaun ostern shamrock st patricks day easter bunny simpsons eastenders charmed top of the pops sex in the city britney spears christina aguilera paris hilton beyonce pamela anderson britney spears hilary duff christina aguilera 50 cent metallica hilary duff inuyasha future shop nhl ferrari american idol elisha cuthbert mls revenue canada johnny depp 50 cent eminem william hung orlando bloom routenplaner telefonbuch wetter big brother paris hilton songtexte arbeitsamt aldi tatoo ostern bmw ferrari mercedes porsche vw david bisbal fernando alonso orlando bloom ronaldinho fernando torres el pais el mundo atentado madrid cadena ser telecinco renfe david bisbal aznar madrid Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com fernando alonso beyonce chenoa angelina jolie hilary duff jennifer lopez britney spears lorie pamela anderson christina aguilera jennifer lopez pages jaunes anpe fnac ebay meteo humour britney spears manga lorie impots le monde tf1 skyrock m6 le parisien ferrari ryanair alitalia nokia ikea grande fratello trenitalia titanium card repubblica ferrari manga ryanair valentino rossi inter vasco rossi inter calciomercato gazzetta dello sport snai wrestling marokko egypte Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com turkije nederland spanje idols britney spears hilary duff christina aguilera orlando bloom voetbal ajax usher 2pac black eyed peas spongebob nemo shin chan Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com winnie the pooh bart simpson qantas orlando bloom virgin blue finding nemo eminem baggy green finding nemo lord of the rings pirates of the carribbean passion of the christ 2 fast 2 furious 桜 (cherry blossoms) 確定申告 (final income tax return) いかりや長介 (chosuke ikariya) 又野誠治 (seiji matano) 六本木ヒルズ (roppongi hills) 地図 (map) 阿部瑠理子 (ruriko abe) Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com winny 壁紙 (wallpaper) 上戸　彩 (aya ueto) 翻訳 (translation) au 小倉優子 (yuko ogura) 吉岡美穂 (miho yoshioka) モンスターハンター(monster hunter) 白い巨塔 (white large tower) 牡丹と薔薇 (botan to bara) 砂の器 (sand vessel) 冬のソナタ (fuyu no sonata) プライド (pride) Slashdot: Plastic: Act Like Nothing's Wrong SuicideGirls > News > All Davenetics* Pop + Media + Web Fotolog.net Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things Instapundit.com Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com DrudgeReport ScottWater fark ---->بالماسکه<---- ModBlog - Rogue Town Penny - Arcade Talking Points Memo www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish (In)formação e (In)utilidade Scripting News: // ModBlog - anyway Eschaton Metafilter | Community Weblog WIL WHEATON dot NET Common Dreams Bryan Bell: Mainly Design News art the friday five Bravejournal.com Rum and Monkey : Satire, personality tests and web toys Fairvue Central SuicideGirls > Girls > Zui The Smoking Gun Modern World lgf: democracy, whisky, sexy! kottke.org :: home of fine hypertext products The Doc Searls Weblog : Thursday, May , Harvard We: We at the Harvard Law School Megatokyo afterall I was the best I ever had SuicideGirls > Girls > Aiki Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal SuicideGirls > Girls > Mle Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate SuicideGirls > Girls > Claudia ModBlog - sam i am Pitchfork Media Calpundit The Volokh Conspiracy :: John Kerry for President - Welcome to JohnKerry.com! :: something awful USS clueless ModBlog - blogtastic! SuicideGirls > Girls > Cerah A Small Victory: The Dude Abides dive into mark Lileks A List Apart Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger The Lair of the Crab of Ineffable Wisdom - a load of stuff by Joel Veitch that will probably crush your will to live SuicideGirls > Girls > Frenchie Dean for America SuicideGirls > Girls > Apnea Gawker Dave Barry's Blog Joi Ito's Web www.Maziar.ir weblog GeorgeWBush.com :: The Official Re-election Site for President George W. Bush Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com Dooce Jon's Radio Belle de Jour BuzzMachine ... by Jeff Jarvis Baghdad Burning The Truth Laid Bear The Web Standards Project Joel on Software memepool.com Television Without Pity Samizdata.net help.twoday.net geek and proud RollingStone.com Brunching Shuttlecocks Calpundit SuicideGirls > Girls > Katie VodkaPundit - Chill Before Serving Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (): a Weblog Chris Pirillo ~ Getting Screwed While Everybody Else is Getting Laid ScrappleFace BTA : WE LOVE THE WEB ABRUPTO Crooked Timber Editor: Myself (Persian) RonOnline Canada : Canada's Blog Site Neil Gaiman Matthew Yglesias evhead TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime Billmon The Morning News Wonkette

Anonymous Sources www.anonymoussources.blogspot.com

So sue me

Is it possible? No, no -- it can't be . . . But, yet . . . there it is. At long last, for the first time (seriously -- check your memory), mainstream American media points out that Rush Limbaugh is scum.

Correspondent Unknown points out:

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Only Losers Use Drugs

[Former Bill's Running Back Thurman] Thomas was charged with second-degree possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor indicating the drug is for personal use...

Thomas ran for 12,074 yards in 13 seasons with the Bills and Dolphins. He played in four straight Super Bowls with Buffalo from 1991-94.

Thomas was picked for five Pro Bowls and was league MVP in 1991. He was a star at Oklahoma State before his pro career.
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[end of Unknown's post]

From Correspondent Unknown:

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Laura Gets 'The Vapahs' From Torture Photos, She Does Declare

"This is the really good news about the United States of America, though. That is the pictures came to light. People will be prosecuted. Unlike under Saddam Hussein, where there were torture rooms and no one knew about them and didn't come to light," the US first lady said.

No one knew about them? They didn't come to light? People will be prosecuted? Saddam is gonna be prosecuted -- his sons were KILLED. What the hell is she talking about?

This ridiculous, harebrained (though common) distinction between U.S. and Saddam-era torture is driving me crazy. And it isn't even true! U.S. torturers will get LESS severe penalties and they have MORE apologists.

Lets just try some rephrasing of this argument to highlight the ridiculousness.
-- "We do it out of Love"
-- "U.S. torture -- at least we're honest about it when we are forced to be"
-- "U.S. Liberation -- Arguably less and perhaps more infrequent torture of people convicted of nothing"
-- "It hurts us more than them"

Along with this argument is the (also desperate) claim that, well, Saddam did it officially. The U.S. doesn't officially torture. Well, that's just . . . that's great -- and wrong, naive, borderline delusional . . .

And poor Bush had NO IDEA. Rumsfeld should be fired for not telling the President about the torture. He knows full well Bush doesn't read the paper and therefore would never have seen the Department of Defense press release in January -- or the Red Cross's repeated admonitions -- or Amnesty International's -- or the stories from the prisoners in Gitmo -- or . . . I don't know, there's probably a Military Intelligence directive somewhere out there.
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[end of Unknown's post]

Regarding the following chain-e-mail published by blogger "The Religious Right" (blog name NOT ironic):

xxxxxxxxx
"Dear God: Why didn't you save the school children at Columbine?
Sincerely, Concerned Student

Dear Concerned Student: I am not allowed in schools.
Sincerely, God"
xxxxxxxxxxxx

Correspondent Unknown responded via e-mail to the God-representing blog itself ("Itself"?):

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Don't you think it is blasphemous to purport to speak for God? Yes, it
is. And of course God is allowed in schools. What is not allowed is
using school time and money to promote a particular religion. And that
is all right with me.

Sincerely,
God
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

To which enlightened Religious Right responded (unedited):

xxxxxxxxxxxxx
You're a real freak, aren't you? Ah well, God loves nutcases like you,
too....
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Note The Religious Right's notion of who is a "real freak" and "nutcase": someone who a) correctly observes that speaking for God is generally considered a blasphemous act (and jokingly does so to make a point); and b) points out that there's something called the First Amendment.

What a REAL FREAK!! What a NUTCASE!!

Eat your heart out!

If you had just invested all your money in a Dow Jones index fund on March 18, 1999 . . .

And then sold your shares today, May 10, 2004, a mere 5 years 1.7 months later . . .

You would have earned . . .

ZERO PERCENT!!!

No, no, wait -- we've got to account for inflation . . .

That 61.7-month investment would have earned you an inflation-adjusted . . .

MINUS FOURTEEN PERCENT!!!

Way to go Bu**sh** economy!

From Salon (you have to watch an ad for a one-day pass):

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The private contractor-GOP gravy train

From Blackwater to CACI, mercenary companies in Iraq have a warm and cozy relationship with the Republican politicians who are employing them.

By Robert Schlesinger

May 11, 2004

Private armies have become ubiquitous in Iraq, supplying everything from support services to mercenary soldiers to interrogators. . . .

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report about practices at the prison contained information that two CACI employees "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." Contractors from Titan International were also present during the abuses. . . .

A decade ago, mercenary soldiering was less the stuff of corporate America than the inspiration for Soldier of Fortune fantasies. Now . . . the industry generates over $100 billion annually worldwide.

As little known as these companies are to the general public, they are only too familiar in Washington, where they have deployed a different kind of mercenary force -- phalanxes of lobbyists -- along with the ammunition of modern political warfare, campaign contributions. And they have found eager friends, particularly among Republican leaders in and out of Congress. ....

For more than four years, CACI has employed the Livingston Group . . .

The Livingston who gave the firm its name is former House Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican designated as Newt Gingrich's successor to the speaker's gavel in 1998. . . . "Livingston is the only former chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee now in private practice," reads a bio on his firm's Web site.

Livingston's former top staffers, who have joined him in the private sector, also work on the CACI account, according to lobbying filings with the House and Senate. In addition, the two firms employ former legislative liaisons (bureaucratese for lobbyists) from the Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard -- all registered to lobby for CACI.

More than 92 percent of CACI's $843 million in revenues last year came from the federal government -- 63 percent from the Pentagon alone. . . .

Titan's lineup of lobbyists is even broader. . . .

All told, Titan has spent $1.29 million since 2000 on Washington lobbying. . . . And its lobbying has paid off. Last year, the company had revenues of $1.8 billion, according to its annual report: "Our revenues from U.S. government business represented approximately 96% of our total revenues for the year ended December 31, 2003."
This revolving door between congressional staffers or retired military personnel and lobbying firms is not circumscribed by the requirements of the House and Senate lobby registration. Most of the private contractors operating in Iraq have high-ranking retired brass in their executive suites. . . .

Not surprisingly, these companies have been very generous to the Republican Party. Titan's PAC, for example, has contributed a dozen times more money to Republicans than to Democrats during this election cycle: It kicked in $182,000 to Republican committees and candidates, including $10,000 apiece to the leadership PACs of Lewis, Cunningham, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. (whose leadership group is called Peace Through Strength PAC). Titan's PAC also gave the maximum $10,000 to the campaign committees of Cunningham, Lewis and Hunter. Democrats have received a mere $15,000 from Titan.

In addition, top executives with Titan have contributed in excess of $58,000 to political candidates and committees since 2000, more than $49,000 of that amount going to Republicans. Ray alone gave $28,000, the bulk of it to Republicans. Reps. Cunningham and Hunter each got from Titan executives at least $10,000 (not including the $3,000 given to Hunter's Peace Through Strength PAC). The Democrat who has received the most money from Titan executives is Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee.

CACI executives gave a total of $29,250 over the same time period, $25,750 of it to Republican interests. J.P. "Jack" London, CACI's CEO, alone gave $10,000, all to Republicans. . . .

While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has now testified on Iraqi prisoner abuse -- some of it carried out by workers employed by private firms -- no hearings have yet been scheduled on the widespread use of mercenaries to fill jobs once performed by U.S. soldiers. And deployment of such workers is unlikely to decrease as election year contributions grow: The number of hired mercenaries is expected to double after the June 30 hand-over of "limited sovereignty" to an Iraqi government.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[end-quote]

Correspondent Unknown points out:

xxxxxxxxxxxxx
You know you f***ed up when...

"Since Pvt. Lynndie England appeared in the now-infamous photos, her picture has been removed from the Wall of Honor at Wal-Mart."

JESUS F***ING CHRIST!! Did you know that Lewis Black is FIFTY-FIVE FREAKIN' YEARS OLD??!!

Get it straight, lying LOCAL corporate media:
WE HATE YOU. WE KNOW YOU LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING.

From the May 5 "Richard Prince's Journal-Isms":
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cincinnati Residents Set TV Van on Fire

A television van was set on fire and another's windshield was cracked by a rock in racially tense Cincinnati Monday night after a police suspect shot himself. Angry neighbors reacted to rumors that the suspect had instead been shot by police, according to Cincinnati news media.

The van set afire belonged to WCPO-TV and the rock-damaged van to WXIX-TV, Tom McKee reported on WCPO-TV.

"Officers pulled over Antwand Yett, 19, of the Kings Run apartment complex, around 9 p.m. Monday," McKee reported.

"Immediately after being pulled over, police said Yett fatally shot himself; however, people in the community became angry, thinking instead that police had shot the man.

"The death prompted violence and unrest on the streets of Winton Terrace Monday night. Hundreds of angry people demonstrated in the street and at least four shots were fired at police on the scene.

The Cincinnati Enquirer quoted the Rev. Damon Lynch III, a founder of the Peace Down the Way Coalition, a group that started calling for an end to street violence in 2002, as saying that young black men told him Monday night "they feel the police are harassing them and they are killing each other and there is just no hope."
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[end-quote -- thanks, Richard]

The profound, undeniable effect of the librul media on American opinion:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
WASHINGTON : Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation in the wake of a scandal sparked by charges that Iraqi prisoners had been brutally abused in Iraq, according to a new opinion poll made public.

Only 20 percent of those surveyed by The Washington Post and ABC News said the defense secretary should step down, while 69 percent said he should retain his position. . . .

As for President George W. Bush, 48 percent of those polled approved of his handling of the scandal, while 35 percent disapproved and 17 percent expressed no opinion.

By a wide margin -- 62 percent against 31 percent -- the American public believed the apparent abuse represented "a few isolated incidents" rather than something more widespread, the poll showed.

The survey of 802 had a 3.5-point margin of error.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx