Espionage investigations

As we look forward to the debate Tuesday between John Edwards and Dick Cheney, master of secret government, it's worth updating where we are on a few espionage-related investigations.

There was really a lot coming on the Iranian and Israeli spy cases a month ago.  It really does look like a large part of the Bush foreign policy coming apart.

But, if you're wondering why you haven't heard much about these cases lately, you're not alone.  Juan Cole is asking, "Is Justice Being Delayed by Bush Administration Politics?"09/30/04.

The Jane's Information Group has publised an article on A Mole Called Mega 09/29/04, on the Franklin/AIPAC investigation.  (Excerpt; the full article is available only to subscribers of Jane's Foreign Report.)

Luara Rozen has been all over this story, both with blog comments and original reporting, including this article:

Mole Hunt by Jason Vest and Laura Rozen American Prospect online 09/03/04

And these blog posts:

A grand unifying theory 09/02/04
Just Out 09/03/04
FBI Update 09/05/04
The FBI Investigation 09/05/04
Untitled 09/05/07

Other blog posts with relatively recent information:

Josh Marshall 09/06/04
Josh Marshall 09/19/04

Juan Cole AIPAC Spy Case Update 09/04/04

I found this article (via the first Laura Rozen blog link above) to be especially interesting:

Alleged Pentagon leaks may be connected to battle over Iran policy by Warren Stroebel Knight-Ridder 09/02/04

Several U.S. officials and law enforcement sources said Thursday that the scope of the FBI probe of Pentagon intelligence activities appeared to go well beyond the Franklin matter.

FBI agents have briefed top White House, Pentagon and State Department officials on the probe in recent days. Based on those briefings, officials said, the bureau appears to be looking into other controversies that have roiled the Bush administration, some of which also touch Feith's office.

They include how the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group backed by the Pentagon, allegedly received highly classified U.S. intelligence on Iran; theleaking of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters; and the production of bogus documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger. Bush repeated the Niger claim in making the case for war against Iraq.

"The whole ball of wax" was how one U.S. official privy to the briefings described the inquiry.

We'll see what eventually happens.  But it does go along with my speculation here at Old Hickory's Weblog: The Bush unraveling? 08/31/04:

But what we're seeing come to light more and more is the extent to which Bush's entire foreign policy, or at least the central elements of it, have been run like a rogue intelligence operation.  Iran-Contra as a model for governing.

It's now to the point that investigations of one disaster soon bump up against another.  The story on the possible leak of classified information to the Israeli government involves threads that lead to Iran policy, Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans (OSP) that helped cook up the phony intelligence on Iraqi WMDs, the multi-faceted Ahmed Chalabi fiasco, possibly even to the Valerie Plame exposure.

The common thread is the Bush administration's model of governing by deception and secrecy. ...

What we may well be seeing nowis the collapse of the elaborate web of deceptions that this hyper-secretive administration has been spinning, not so much to deceive our enemies as to deceive the American voters.

Now here's a superficially bizarre twist, not directly related to the spy investigations: the New York Times has hired Ken Starr, former rogue special prosecutor, to defend them from government attempts to obtain records of the infamous Judith Miller and another reporter "in an FBI investigation into the source of an alleged leak in December 2001 of an impending search involving an Islamic charity in Illinois." (Starr Emerges as Key Lawyer for N.Y. Times New York Sun 09/30/04, via Atrios.)

And the investigation of an alleged leak of information to Taiwan has gotten seemingly very little attention.  This article deals with that case, as well as the Franklin/AIPAC one: When Allies Steal Secrets by J. Peter Scoblic Los Angeles Times 09/27/04.

Blogs and the "old media"

Billmon's Los Angeles Times article on blogging has, not surprisingly, attracted a bit of attention in the blogosphere.

But before I blog about blogs and the blogging bloggers who blog them, I want to mention two cartoons, one by August Pollak and one by Tom Tomorrow, poking fun at some of the hype over blogs in the form of "some guy with a Web site."  As the Steve Gilliard post below mentions, there is some reason to say at this point that politcal blogging at least is proportionately more of a "guy thing."

I've found Nick Confessore's comments on the whole blogging phenomenon to be consistently sensible, as in his take on Billmon: "They Were Really Cool Before They Sold Out, Man." 09/27/04

With some exceptions, the most widely read blogs resemble small online magazines or stand-alone op-ed pages more than the proverbial guy-sitting-in-his-living-room. (I would say Kos is the major exception -- his site has become something akin to a 527 with a blog attached.) Every political magazine now operating, for example, started in a manner very similar to how a blog gets started: Someone who had something to say and knew how to write a good sentence decided to get into the game. The major differences are that blogs have a drastically lower barrier to entry, which means more people who might balk at the requirements of starting a full-scale magazine and can get in the game by themselves; most have lower editorial standards (by which I mean, basically, that no one edits them for style, accuracy, and readability); and all have much more direct interaction with their readers. Another way to look at it, which I wouldn't be the first to note, is that blogging is in many ways a return to the early era of American opinion journalism, when newspapers were basically partisan pamphlets with low production values. The point is that blogs are in many respects a new and very interesting variation on an old theme rather than something entirely suigeneris.

Steve Gilliard challenges Billmon's premise that commercialized blogs are inherently deprived of oppositional potential (hey, Marcusean phrasing has something to be said for it!): The party's over 09/27/04.

I wish he wouldn't toss this [expletive deleted] about philosophy around when he should really say he can no longer hack it. Walking away is fine, [expletive deleted] excuses are an insult.

But my main disagreement is that he has confused the medium with the method. Blogs are a method, which can be used by anyone to say anything. There is no rule thatCBS can't useblogs to make their point.

There is no rule that says only men in their 20's and 30's get to run quirky, independent blogs and when other people join that the party is over. It's a tool, a method, not some kind of revolution. Anyone can use it. The revolution, such that it is, is in who gets to play.

It is a GOOD thing Kos can make money from his site. That he doesn't have a boss to pressure. And that his advertisers believe in him. That's a revolution on it's own, but so many people are caught up in this avant guarde, outsider [expletive deleted], that when someone makes money, they're "selling out". Which is the argument of the bitter and immature.

Here's a thought: in America, financial success equals freedom. This idea that only those who go broke are pure is a sad [expletive deleted] joke. I saw so much waste, so much sloppy work in the dotcom era, I would have thought people would have been estatic that a guy in a room can make enough from a blog to support his family, not this crap of some lost ideal of pure commentary.

I don't want to waste too much time on either the media navel-gazing over the CBS Killian documents flap, or on the narcissistic self-congratulations of the blogosphere over the same.

But it is rapidly turning into an iconic example of the media dysfunction that is literally crippling the functioning of democracy in the United States.

Consider this piece: The News Keeps Getting Worse for Embarrassed CBS by Elizabeth Jensen and James Rainey Los Angeles Times 09/22/04.  This really struck it home to me what a serious press dysfuntion we're experiencing in the US:

CBS television officials struggled Tuesday with revelations that the network's news programs not only failed to report thoroughly on memos involving President Bush's Vietnam-era military service, but then committed an apparent ethical lapse by helping a top advisor to Sen. John F. Kerry contact a source for that controversial report.

Several journalism analysts said CBS News producer Mary Mapes' phone call to Kerry senior advisor Joe Lockhart amounts to at least a potential conflict of interest — giving the appearance that the network had assisteda candidate in the presidential race.

I'll freely admit that when I first hear about this, I didn't think it was such a big deal.  Journalists and politicians talk to each other all the time, and it didn't strike me as anything that significant if Burkett had said to Mapes, "I'd really like to talk to someone from the Kerry campaign, who should I call?" and she responded by calling someone at the campaign and said, "Hey, I was just interviewing this guy Burkett for a story and he said he really wanted to talk to somebody at the campaign."

Now, it didn't take much reflection to realize that in traditional journalistic ethics, this was at best an action in the "gray area" of ethics; it will be interesting to see what results and conclusions CBS' promised independent investigation turns up. 

Both Nick Confessore and Kevin Drum recommend this take on the "Killian documents" incident: Breaking the News, Then Becoming It by Tina Brown Washington Post 09/23/04.

The New York Times betrayed the passive-aggressive guilt complex that lingers after the Jayson Blair fabrications by playing the CBS story above the fold on Tuesday's front page and the beheading of an American hostage in Baghdad below the fold, at the bottom. A Manhattan news factory screwed up big time -- and it wasn't us! Will Dan lose his job? That's the big news. An American hostage losing his life -- that's the small news.

Journalists the length and breadth of the land publicly beat up on Dan, but privately -- even in the capital of schadenfreude -- they were not as gleeful as you might expect. Every editor, producer and reporter knows that the warp speed of the news cycle means we are all only one step ahead of some career-ending debacle. But still the panic to beat the competition trumps every other concern. Reports this month that Fox News had surpassed the other networks' ratings with its GOP convention coverage only inflamed the terror of mounting obsolescence. ...

Fear of missing the bandwagon is behind all the hype about the brilliance of bloggers who blew the whistle. You'd think "Buckhead," who first spotted the flaws in the documents, is the cyberworld's Woodward and Bernstein. Now the conventional wisdom is that the media will be kept honest and decent by an army of incorruptible amateur gumshoes. In fact, cyberspace is populated by a coalition of political obsessives and pundits on speed who get it wrong as much as they get it right. It's just that they type so much they are bound to nail a story from time to time.

While there may be more than a hint of "old media" defensiveness in that, she's right about what happened in this case.  Spurred by partisan hints, conservative bloggers started tossing mud-balls about the dubious nature of the documents.  In one sense, some of it stuck.  But before this whole thing enters that nebulous statement where events are transsubstantiated into conventional wisdom, it's worth remembering that the hole in CBS' story, the place where they fell down in their professional reporting, was in accepting documents from a less-than-totally-solid source (Bill Burkett) and failing to establish a good provanance (chain of possession) for the documents.

Those were not the issues raised by the rightwing bloggers.  And the early amateur attempts at document-debunking in this case didn't stand up more than a day or two at a time: the "th"-superscript, the claim that the type face wasn't available in 1972, etc.

David Neiwert expands on that point at his blog: Consequences 10/03/04.

The blogosphere, really, has the potential to be a great innovation in American journalism. As I've argued previously, it represents in many ways the democratization of journalism, the ability of voices of all kinds to participate in the sharing and distribution of information that might otherwise be choked out by the bottleneck that mainstream media have become over the past decade and longer.

But there's an important caveat to all that: If bloggers want to act as journalists, they need to conform to basic journalistic standards. Or they will, in the end, pay for it.

Part of what Neiwert touches on here is the fact that political bloggers are a diverse group, and some are more careful than others.  In connection with that, we shouldn't forget that professional journalists do use their blogs to post interviews and sometimes information gathered from their reporting that may not be available elsewhere.  And blogs do have the ability to break stories that can have wider signficance.  See Steve Clemons' The Washington Note of 09/26/04 for an example.

Finally, Duncan Black (Atrios) has a particularly good comment responding to the Billmon piece in the Los Angeles Times: Blogging about Blogging 09/27/04.  He reminisces about the ancient history of blogging (2-3 years ago) when Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds was (Duncan's take) the arbiter of the political blogosphere and hadn't yet come out of the closet as such a Bush partisan.  He also includes this useful observation:

Popular bloggers either a) post a lot, b) have a unique/funny/interesting take on things, c) have been around awhile, d) a combination of a)-c) with a) being the most important. That's just the way it is. Figure out how you can fit into that. Most blogs don't derive their popularity from their "authority," and those that do usually are by people with some credentials. Simply expressing opinions without advancing any kind of new argument isn't a way to differentiate yourself. What I mean is that people may go to DeLong for economics (yes, I'm an economist, but I've never tried to establish myself as an authority here on the blog), and Volokh or Balkin for Law, but I don't think people come to this site for my opinion on issue "X." My take on it, yes, but not simply for "does Atrios think it is good or bad?" because my "authority" as an opinionshaper has any weight. If there's little reason for your opinion to carry some weight, then your opinion isn't going to be enough.

Debating the debate : Bush faces direct criticism

A press script about the 09/30 Kerry/Bush debate may be emerging.  E.J. Dionne, Jr. thinks so: Bush Scowls, Democrats Smile WorkingforChange.com 10/01/04.

But suddenly, when Bush was confronted for 90 minutes by an opponent willing to go straight at him, he fumbled, he hesitated and he scowled. The Bush Scowl is destined take its place with the Gore Sigh and the Dean Scream.

The "Bush Scowl."  Does it really matter whether Bush scowled?  If Bush's war in Iraq were going great, no one but partisan Democrats would care whether he scowled or not.  Is Kerry's approach to the Iraq War better because he didn't "scowl"?

Sure, having the media herd mutter for the next week about the "Bush Scowl" will be nice for Kerry.  It lets them off the hook of having to talk about boring, nerdy subjects like the Iraq War, the Afghan War, health care.  Inspecting cargo ships better?  Yawn!  But the Bush Scowl, now there's a decisive issue!

Take the chance, if you haven't already, to look at the Daily Howler's accounts of the "Dean Scream" and the "Gore Sigh."  I even had a few things to say about the "Dean Scream" here at Old Hickory's Weblog, e.g., 01/21/04.  As I said in a subsequent post:

It's beyond my imagination that this speech is being taken as some kind of a scandal.

For Democrats: if you think this is "over the top," get ready for Dubya as President until 2009.

Now, I'm happy from a partisan perspective that Bush is getting bad press over the debate.  He richly deserves it.  But this kind of frivolous, style-based approach to presidential campaigns by our Potemkin press corps is not a good thing.  David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour on 10/01 was floating the rather preposterous notion that Bush does much better in a "regular guy" setting, that he's just not much of an orator.

This is ridiculous, of course.  Bush is at his best when he has a carefully arranged setting where he can issue gradiloquent pronoucementsabout liberating the benighted natives in the Muslim lands in front of a cheering crowd with no fear of having anyone immediately challenge what he's saying.

But it won't surprise me at all if the "Bush Scowl" becomes the Big Pundits' excuse for lowering expectations for Bush's performance next Friday to near zero.  Then, when he shows up for the next debate and doesn't drool on himself, they will proclaim his Brilliant Comeback.  And they'll catch Kerry scratching his nose and declare it the Kerry Nose-Picking Incident.

Even when it momentarily helps the cause of good sense and good policy, our mainstream press corps is seriously dysfunctional.  Seriously, democracy-endangering dysfunctional.

That's not to say there's nothing worthwhile to be commented upon in Bush's performance.  He did seem stunned, though the "Bush Scowl" was only a minor part of it, meaningful only through the postmodern magic of our pundit corps making it into an historical pseudo-event deserving of Capital Letters.

The real problem, for those of us who actually care what happens in the Iraq War, the fight against terrorism, nuclear proliferation and other non-stylistic issues like that, is that he wasn't able to address the very real, very serious issues Kerry repeatedly raised in any manner that would reassure anyone not already a stark, raving Bush partisan.

Hesiod comments on Why Bush Looked Unprepared 10/01/04:

You see, except in a very few circumstances, Bush hasn't had to answer REALLY tough questions since he's been President. Very few press conferences. ZERO debates with tough opponents on tough issues.

And when he goes out on the campaign trail, he has a hand=picked gaggle of dyed-in-the-wool Bush supporters who literally have to sign loyalty oaths before they are allowed to ask him questions.

And, of course, the questions are either complete softballs, or are screened and rehearsed ahead of time so Bush has a specifically scripted answer.

And, even within the policy deliberations of his administration, Bush is probably only very rarely asked tough questions by his staff, and then asked to defend or support his positions to a skeptical audience. He's the boss. If he doesn't want to answer or even suffer a question, he doesn't have to. 

Amy Sullivan at the Political Animal blog speculates that the debate format worked so well for Kerry, it may have been a clever ploy on the part of Kerry's debate negotiators: No, Please, Anything But That 10/01/04.  But she also focuses on how Bush's relative isolation from dissenting or even dissonant views is now coming back to haunt him on the campaign trail:

[P]eople are all atwitter about Bush's twitchy and grouchy demeanor while he listened to Kerry. I didn't think it was all that surprising--it's the real George W. Bush. But I think his tendency to become annoyed when challenged has been made much much worse by the bubble he's been kept in for the past four years. No one on his staff talks to him like that. He's just not used to direct verbal pounding. Even his campaign appearances out among "real Americans" are so carefully controlled that if someone gets through the loyalty pledge to actually step up and challenge him, they're tackled and dragged away in a matter of seconds. Bill Clinton--who used to encounter all manner of hecklers on the campaign trail--was a master at sparring with protesters and putting them in their place while defending himself. Maybe that kind of practice would have been good for Bush.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., in the column linked above, also noticed that aspect of Bush's dilemma:

Bush clearly hopes that the flip-flop argument and his increasingly unreal claims that all is well in Iraq will be enough to allow him to hang on through Election Day. He's assuming that no one will ask hard questions about the narrative he's weaving.

But Kerry did, and the narrative began unraveling. That was the other striking and disturbing aspect of the debate: Bush fares very badly when he is forcefully challenged. It makes you worry about his strength in circumstances he does not completely control. Since 9/11, the president has received a remarkably free ride. He rarely faces the press. He speaks only to partisan crowds; critics risk arrest if they show up. There is little evidence that Bush is challenged by his staff or his Cabinet. He is most comfortable when he sticks to talking points.

It looks like I'm not the only one who was struck with Bush's emphaticrejection of the International Criminal Court Abject failure means never having to say you're sorry Jane Smiley Salon.com 10/01/04.

George W. Bush certainly doesn't want to be tried as a war criminal -- he made that clear when he abandoned the World Court on the war crime issue (a decision he proudly flaunted onstage Thursday night). Pundits around the world disapproved for this abstract reason and that, but what seems clear now is that, since Bush already knew that he was going to invade Iraq, he wanted to cover his rear, and didn't fancy seeing himself hauled to The Hague like Slobodan Milosevic. But he and Karl Rove seem to have taken a leaf out of Milosevic's defense manual -- don't admit you did anything wrong (to do so would be sending "a mixed message"), blame your enemies, and be as aggressive as possible in claiming the moral high ground. In fact, at this point, some illusionary moral high ground is the only defense Bush and Blair have, as Blair showed when he delved into his "reasons" for invading Iraq on Tuesday. Bush, in the debate, sounded as if he's been warned by his lawyer that to acknowledge mistakes is to lay himself open to a product liability lawsuit.

Smiley is mistaken in calling it the "World Court."  That was the name of a similar institution under the League of Nations.  It's also not to be confused with the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

This is a pretty good backgrounder on some of the issues from Thursday's debate:  The first presidential debate: Foreign policy and homeland security by Carolyn Lochhead San Francisco Chronicle 10/01/04.

Finally, Joe Conason cautions the Democrats about being overconfident after the strong Kerry performance at the debate and the (initially) favorable press coverage:  After the euphoria Salon.com 10/02/04. (Gosh, Joe, can't we have at least a couple of days euphoria?)

Finally, and most importantly, Kerry should pay close attention to the impact of his own debating points. His victory was possible not only because of his innate capacities and "hard work" but also because at last he had an opportunity to present his views directly to the American people, including millions who didn't watch the Democratic Convention. Now he needs to study which arguments worked and which need revision.

Thanks to Republican opinion specialist Frank Luntz, the Democrats can examine some fresh evidence about what will cut against Bush during the campaign's closing weeks. A Florida focus group run by Luntz scored the debate heavily in Kerry's favor -- and provided point-by-point data explaining why he won.

"Kerry's power punch came within the first few minutes, as he criticized Bush for not sending U.S. Special Forces into the mountains of Tora Bora in favor of native troops: 'He outsourced that job, too,'" wrote a New York Post reporter, who watched and listened as Luntz's sophisticated machinery measured the responses of 18 undecided voters.

Luntz confirmed the Post's assessment that the debate was "over in the first ten minutes," after Kerry brought up Osama bin Laden's escape from Afghanistan.

Debating the debate: conventional wisdom takes shape

John Kenneth Galbraith, among his many other distinctions, is credited with making the phrase "conventional wisdom" a common part of the American vocabulary, thanks to his book The Affluent Society.

He reflects on the concept of conventional wisdom a bit in his latest book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004).  Referring in the opening paragraph of the introduction to his 70-year career as teacher, activist and public servant, he says:

During that time I have learned that to be right and useful, one must accept a continuing divergence between approved belief - what I have elsewhere called conventional wisdom - and the reality.  And in the end, not surprisingly, it is the reality that counts.  ... [I]t is my conclusion that reality is more obscured by social or habitual preference and persona or group pecuniary advantage in economics and politics than in any other subject.

The incomparable Daily Howler has been faithfully chronicling the ways in which our Potemkin press corps creates, disseminates and perpetuates conventional wisdom about matters political.  Not surprisingly, those press corps truisms more often than not provide support to the views of the Republican Party, the party which is dedicated heart and soul to comforting the comfortable.

But sometimes the comfortable scripts of the press corps benefit the Democrats in the short run.  One developing theme out of the debate could become one of those.  This excerpt is from the generally liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. Bush Scowls, Democrats Smile WorkingforChange.com 10/01/04.

“It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong,” Kerry said. “It's another thing to be certain and be right, or to be certain and be moving in the right direction, or be certain about a principle and then learn new facts and put them to use in order to change and get your policy right.” Bush's core claim that he sticks to his guns is the flip side of one of his core weaknesses: that once he decides something, he never, ever, rethinks or challenges himself, no matter what the evidence says. [my emphasis]

Now, Dionne's column on the debates is decent, by Big Pundit standards, at least.  And, of course, Kerry is happy to stress the point that Bush is bull-headed and unwilling to re-examine assumptions that turn out to be wrong.

But before this version crystallizes into conventional wisdom, it's worth thinking about in just what sense this may be true.  Because, as Juan Cole noted in his blog post I linked earlier, Bush in fact has changed directions in Iraq in important ways.

The real problem with Bush's dogmatism, stubbornness, excessive "certainty," however we characterize it, is summed up well in the closing paragraphs of Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command (2004):

As he campaigned, in the summer of 2004, George Bush repeatedly reassured audiences that his policies had made America safer.  "We've turned the corner," was the refrain in his stump speech.  "We're moving America forward by extending freedom and peace around the world." Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, "are now governed by strong leaders.  They're on the path to free elections."  America, he added, would engage its enemies around the world "so we do not have to face them here at home." The President did not mention the missing weapons of mass destruction, the growing G.I. death toll, the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the adverse Supreme Court decisions in June of 2004 that challenged the legal basis of his postware prison system, and told him that foreigners, as well as American citizens, were entitled to due process even in a time of war.  And he did not discuss growing alienation and bitterness as Americans, already torn by racial and religious differences, became increasingly politically and economically divided in the past four years.

We have a President who spent months terrorizing the nation with dire warnings about mushroom clouds emanating from Saddam Hussein's arsenal and then could say, as he did in a campaign speech in August of 2004, that it didn't matter.  "We may still find weapons," Bush said.  "We haven't found them yet. ... Let me just say this to you: knowing what I know today, we still would have gone into Iraq."  We have a President who can stand aside as the dogs of war are turned loose on prisoners and then declare, as he did in June 2004, that "America stands against and will not tolerate torture.  We will investigate and prosecute all acts of torture and undertake to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment in all territory under our jurisdiction" and that "freedom from torture is an inalienable human right."  There are many who believe George Bush is a liar, a President who knowingly and deliberately twists facts for political gain.  But lying would indicate an understanding of what is desired, what is possible, and how best to get there.  A more plausible explanation is that words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real.  It is a terrifying possibility. [my emphasis]

In other words, Bush's stubbornness problem is not that he doesn't change course.  It's that he refuses to recognize important realities that contradict his desired picture of how the world should be.

CBS makes mistakes; Fox News just makes it up

Caught Red-Handed? by Josh Marshall 10/01/04.

I don't know if Josh Marshall was the first to discover it.  But what happened was, according to his account, that Fox News put an odd-sounding story, one unflattering to John Kerry, up on its Web site.  It was a bogus story.  Not a hacker attacks.  A bogus story.

Read about it at that post of Marshall's and the ones that follow.

Fox posted a brief acknowledgement of the story being phony here.  They gave Marshall this explanation:

Late this afternoon I spoke to Fox spokesman Paul Schur who told me the following ...

“Carl [Cameron] made a stupid mistake which he regrets. And he has been reprimanded for his lapse in judgment. It was a poor attempt at humor.”

So the Fox reporter covering the Kerry campaign puts together this Kerry-bashing parody right out of the RNC playbook with phony quotes intended to peg him as [a] girlish fool and somehow it found its way on the Fox website as a news item.

Imagine that.

And we wonder why so many people show up in polls as believing completely bogus things, like the idea that WMDs were found in Iraq, or that Saddam's Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Steve Soto says of this episode (Will Fox Formally Retract Its Fabricated Story On Kerry This Morning? 10/01/04):

Wasn't it just last week that the Mighty Wurlitzer [Soto's term for the Republican echo chamber] demanded that heads roll at CBS for their use of questionable documents? Well, will Fox News fire anyone or at least issue a formal retraction for the fabricated story they filed this morning about a Kerry campaign appearance in Florida? ...

Is the Wurlitzer getting so desperate today after Skippy's tank job last night that they are resorting to phony stories?

Debating the debate

 

The San Francisco Chronicle has been doing a surprisingly decent job on occasion reported national news over the last couple of years.  This was a good post-debate summary, on the whole:  Bush, Kerry clash over wisdom of Iraq invasion by Marc Sandalow San Francisco Chronicle 10/01/04

This is the same Marc Sandalow that went completely off the reservation last week by doing some serious fact-checking on Bush's campaign claims about Kerry "flip-flopping" on the Iraq War.  It's a shame the press corps has fallen so low that a reporter researching public statements of a major party presidential nominee today looks like aggressive investigative reporting:

Flip-flopping charge unsupported by facts: Kerry always pushed global cooperation, war as last resort by Marc Sandalow San Francisco Chronicle 09/23/04

He also did a follow-up this week:

Record shows Bush shifting on Iraq war: President's rationale for the invasion continues to evolve by Marc Sandalow San Francisco Chronicle 09/29/04

Polling the debate

The following three articles give different perspectives on what is apparently the same poll of the immediate results of the debate among viewers.  It's important to keep in mind that the debate is an event that includes the 90 minutes of the candidates talking as well as the discussion and reporting on the debate in the following few days.  It will be very interesting to see if these numbers shift noticeably over the next few days.

Debating the first debate CNN.com 10/01/04: In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey of 615 registered voters who watched the debate, most said Kerry did the better job and almost half said the debate made them think more favorably of Kerry.

USA Today gives some details of presumably the same poll: Kerry holds edge over Bush following first debate 09/30/04.

And here's Gallup's take on presumably the same: Kerry Wins Debate by Daniel Moore Gallup.com 10/01/04.  Not that Gallup has been criticized - justifiably, it seems to me - for using samples this year that had a much heavier selection of Republicans than voter registration and experience in previous elections would justify.  That's why Gallup's polls this year have seemed to give Bush a substantially larger lead over Kerry than many others, which show the race essentially tied.  In the past, viewing audiences for presidential debates have been disproportionately Republican.

Blogging the debate

Here's some blog comments that struck me:

Steve Gilliard: Nightmare in Coral Gables 10/01/04.

Why was it bad [for Bush]?

Bush looked angry from the first question and kept repeating his talking points while Kerry seemed to actually understand the issues. And his talking points hammered on the man who must not be named. Bush simply had no answer for the charges of "outsourcing" the capture of Osama Bin Laden to Afghan warlords.

But the Bush campaign couldn't have predicted such a total collapse in such an important setting. Bush was unprepared, unable to answer questions coherently and think on his feet. Unless you're a total ideologue, it was clear someone came off way second best.

I was just stunned by how the gaps in his answers didn't seem like he was thinking,but that he was poleaxed. In any other campaign, Karl Rove would be looking for work. I was astonished at how poorly prepared Bush was, and Kerry held back and Jim Lehrer took pity on him. Which was the worst thing possible.

Bush, allegedly, is tough. Instead of being tough, he looked weak and small compared to the Presidential-looking Kerry. And that isn't just spin, Kerry seemed to gain in stature as Bush lost his. If the situations were reversed, and Bush was the challenger, his campaign would be all over but the voting.

I've got to add the word "poleaxed" to my regular vocabulary.  I don't even know exactly what it means, besides "clobbered."  But it's too good a word not to used.

Hesiod has some thoughts on The Great Debate Debate 10/01/04:

I think I finally realized what Bush's major character flaw is derived from.

He's never really had to deal with the potentially harsh consequences of his own mistakes.

That creates a sense that he can do no wrong. Or that no matter what he does, someone somewhere will fix the problem or mess he creates.

There are two ways you can gain confidence in yourself. One is to take risks, and have those risks pay off and be successful.

The other is to never really feel the sting of failure because you are pampered and protected.

So, Bush is simply doing what he always does. Stick to his guns, until someone saves his butt.

Unfortunately for Bush (and more especially for the American people and the people of Iraq) when you are President of the United States, Mighty Mouse is not going to come save the day. The Buck stops with YOU. And if YOU can't solve the problem on your own, it doesn't get solved.

Juan Cole thinks Kerry could have been a little harder on Bush about his own "mixed signals" (formerly known as "flip-flops") on the Iraq War: Debate and Chalabi 10/01/04.

I wonder if more could not have been made about Bush's constant zigzags on Iraq policy. First he was going to send Jay Garner. Then he suddenly switched off and sent Paul Bremer. First Bremer was going to be proconsul for years. Then he suddenly was going to hand off power to a new government elected through caucases in May 2004. Then Sistani asked for open and free elections, and they were postponed until January 2005 and power was handed to an appointed caretaker government.

Moreover, some of this zigzagging reflected very poorly on Bush's judgment. I have it from insiders that in April, 2003, Jay Garner let it slip to some of his staff that his charge was to turn Iraq over to Ahmad Chalabi within six months. The staffers were shocked and some contacted the State Department to see if this was known there. It was not. So they blew the whistle on Bush with Colin Powell. I was told that Powell then made a coalition with Tony Blair and that the two of them went to Bush and got him to change his mind.

The plan to put Chalabi in charge of Iraq was frankly idiotic. Chalabi had no grass roots. He was the one who had the bright idea to throw thousands of ex-Baathists into unemployment (which encouraged them to join the guerrilla resistance). It later came out that some of the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon had let it slip to him that the US had broken the Iranian diplomatic codes. Chalabi is chummy with Tehran and let his friends among the Ayatollahs know this tidbit. As a result, the US can no longer closely track the Iranian nuclear program.

This is the man to whom Bush-- and I underline Bush-- was planning originally just to hand Iraq over. An Iranian asset. This was why, as Kerry noted on Thursday night, Bush had done no real planning for the period after the war. He thought he had everything sewn up because Chalabi would handle it.

The Bush campaign spin

Possibly the grimmest commentary on Bush's performance in its own way was the talking points that Ken Mehlman, the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign manager sent out, giving the correct position forthe faithful to promote about Bush's success in the debates.  It's really pretty think gruel:

* The President spoke candidly.
* John Kerry failed to close his own credibility gap.
* Truth and optimism are not competing ideals.

"Truth and optimisim are not competing ideals"?  The Bush campaign must be freaking out if they're resorting to a line like this.  Just because I'm optimistic doesn't mean I'm lying?!?  Wow.

Bush busts the A.Q. Khan network

Bush's mention of the A.Q. Khan network during the debate caught my attention. From the Washington Post version:

My administration started what's called the Proliferation Security Initiative. Over 60 nations involved with disrupting the trans-shipment of information and/or weapons of mass destruction materials. 

And we've been effective. We busted the A.Q. Khan network. This was a proliferator out of Pakistan that was selling secrets to places like North Korea and Libya. 

That would be Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, or the "Islamic bomb."  Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh devotes a chapter of his Chain of Command (2004) to Pakistan, "A Most Dangerous Friend."  Some of Hersh's reporting on the subject from the New Yorker include:

The Cold Test: What the Administration knew about Pakistan and the North Korean nuclear program  New Yorker 01/20/03

The Deal: Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers? New Yorker 03/01/04

In the January 2003 article, Hersh describes Pakistan's role in spreading nukes to North Korea.  An important fact about this is that Pakistan was a key ally then in helping the American promote jihad - against the Soviets in Afghanistan.  And part of what that meant in practice was going easy on Pakistan's proliferations activities in the 1980s:

An American intelligence official I spoke with called Pakistan's behavior the "worst nightmare" of the international arms-control community: a Third World country becoming an instrument of proliferation. "The West's primary control of nuclear proliferation was based on technology denial and diplomacy," the official said. "Our fear was, first, that a Third World country would develop nuclear weapons indigenously; and, second, that it would then provide the technology to other countries. This is profound. It changes the world." Pakistan's nuclear program flourished inthe nineteen-eighties, at a time when its military and intelligence forces were working closely with the United States to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The official said, "The transfer of enrichment technology by Pakistan is a direct outgrowth of the failure of the United States to deal with the Pakistani program when we could have done so. We've lost control." [my emphasis]

We thought we were buying big trouble for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan on the cheap by supporting the jihadists in Afghanistan and helping the Saudis develop a worldwide network to finance them.  We're still paying, because that Frankenstein's monster long ago slipped out of its creators' control.

Hersh wrote in that article:

Over the years, there have been sporadic reports of North Korea's contacts with Pakistan, most of them concerning missile sales. Much less has been known about nuclear ties. In the past decade, American intelligence tracked at least thirteen visits to North Korea made by A. Q. Khan, who was then the director of a Pakistani weapons-research laboratory, and who is known as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. This October [2002], after news of the uranium program came out, the Times ran a story suggesting that Pakistan was a possible supplier of centrifuges to North Korea. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's leader, attacked the account as "absolutely baseless," and added, "There is no such thing as collaboration with North Korea in the nuclear area." The White House appeared to take the Musharraf statement at face value. In November, Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters he had been assured by Musharraf that Pakistan was not currently engaging in any nuclear transactions with North Korea. "I have made clear to him that any . . . contact between Pakistan and North Korea we believe would be improper, inappropriate, and would have consequences," Powell said. "President Musharraf understands the seriousness of the issue." After that, Pakistan quickly faded from press coverage of the North Korea story.  [my emphasis]

The 2004 article linked above describes what Bush on Thursday called the bust of the AQ Khan network.  Here's what the "bust" earlier this year looked like:

On February 4th, Dr. Abdul QadeerKhan, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, appeared on a state-run television network in Islamabad and confessed that he had been solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials. His confession was accepted by a stony-faced Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s President, who is a former Army general, and who dressed for the occasion in commando fatigues. The next day, on television again, Musharraf, who claimed to be shocked by Khan’s misdeeds, nonetheless pardoned him, citing his service to Pakistan (he called Khan “my hero”). Musharraf told the Times that he had received a specific accounting of Khan’s activities in Iran, North Korea, and Malaysia from the United States only last October. “If they knew earlier, they should have told us,” he said. “Maybe a lot of things would not have happened.”

It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital. In interviews last month in Islamabad, a planned city built four decades ago, politicians, diplomats, and nuclear experts dismissed the Khan confession and the Musharraf pardon with expressions of scorn and disbelief. For two decades, journalists and American and European intelligence agencies have linked Khan and the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I. (Inter-Service Intelligence), to nuclear-technology transfers, and it was hard to credit the idea that the government Khan served had been oblivious. “It is state propaganda,” Samina Ahmed, the director of the Islamabad office of the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that studies conflict resolution, told me. “The deal is that Khan doesn’t tell what he knows. Everybody is lying. The tragedy of this whole affair is that it doesn’t serve anybody’s needs.” Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who is a member of the Pakistani senate, said with a laugh, “America needed an offering to the gods—blood on the floor. Musharraf told A.Q., ‘Bend over for a spanking.’”

The Bush administration, in a characteristic image-is-everything ploy, needed Pakistani cooperation in the "war on terrorism" and, in particular, with the war in Afghanistan.  So they agreed to this charade, where everyone pretended that Khan was just a rogue operator, when of course the thing was a government operation.  Pakistan has been the world's worst nuclear proliferator in recent times.  But the Bush administration couldn't confront them as such, because of the diplomatic needs of its own approach to the "war on terror."

According to past and present military and intelligence officials, however, Washington’s support for the pardon of Khan was predicated on what Musharraf has agreed to do next: look the other way as the U.S. hunts for Osama bin Laden in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan dominated by the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range, where he is believed to be operating.

Hersh writes in Chain of Command, updating his reporting in the 2004 article linked above:

The American [military] task force did come to Pakistan in the spring of 2004, as I wrote, but very secretly - and only after Musharraf staged a puzzling offensive of his own in the Hundu [sic] Kush.  In mid-March, the Pakistani government announced that hundreds of its troops were engaged in a bitter battle against Al Qaeda forces and other terrorists.  ...

Over the next two weeks, the Pakistani army fought a series of battles against what were said to be hundreds of militants, with heavy casualties on both sides.  In the end, no senior Al Qaeda were captured and, despite much speculation in the international press, it wasn't clear who was fighting who, or why.  As the New York Times put it, "What exactly had happened in the isolated corner of Pakistan where the battle had raged was a riddle" and that "the pivotal question centered on Pakistan's army: Just how hard was it really trying to capture and kill terrorists?"  One possibility, of course, was that the always-carefu Musharraf was putting up a smokescreen to mask the American Special Forces that were to come.  Those commandos, members of Admiral McRaven's Task Force 121, remained on the hunt inside the Pakistani border for bin Laden throughout the spring and summer of 2004, while Musharraf was able to survive political pressure from the Army and the intelligence service [opposing the American presence].  As the months passed, however, and the American presidential elections grew closer, the crucial question remained: wher was Osama bin Laden?

So, what the United States really got for its agreement to go easy on Pakistan for its proliferation activities is pretty questionable.  Laura Rozen asked in a 09/04/04 look at Dismantling A.Q. Khan's Nuclear Bazaar:

Conventional wisdom has it that Libya's decision to abandon its WMD program and reveal its suppliers led US, UK and IAEA investigators to move to shut down the AQ Khan nuclear network. But I wonder if it didn't go the other way round -- a break in the Khan network gave UK and US officials the evidence on Libya. Whatever the case, why the Bush administration has permitted Pakistan to completely obstruct US and IAEA investigation of Khan's full role is simply inexplicable. Especially considering Khan's assistance not only to Libya, but to the nuclear programs of ticking time bombs, North Korea and Iran.

Daily Kos carried a post about the Bush administration's claims on its brilliant "bust" of Khan's network on 08/14/04:

First, Pakistan gatekeeping information. I've been worried about this since the Asst. Sec. State testified before Congress and admitted that we have never spoken to AQ Khan directly. Consider the implications of this. BushCo has crowed about how much information they've gotten from AQ Khan, the "father of the Pakistan nuclear program." But most of that information was information that we already knew--that Pakistan was trading technologies with North Korea, that Pakistan was dealing nuclear materials to Iran; or it was information that was no longer pressing--we found out AQ Khan dealt to Libya after Libya gave up their nuclear ambitions. But we didn't find out anything that would really have changed the state of Mideast relations.

This is a huge problem because all of our information is coming through Pakistan's intelligence services, the ISI. And the ISI is riddled with people who are more sympathetic to Al Qaeda than they are to the US. So the fact that we're not getting information directly raises the real possibility that we're not learning the most important stuff about AQ Khan's little nuclear convenience store. For example, there was a rumor some time ago that Pakistan had delivered a bomb to Saudi Arabia. I'd love to ask AQ Khan that question directly (as I'm sure our intelligence services would), but no dice. So it's possible that a regime that is even more volatile than Pakistan's also has some nuclear capability--and we don't know for sure.

This article from the Pakistani Daily Times (via Daily Kos 08/03/04) reports on Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca's testimony (the Daily Times article was apparently from 08/03 or 08/02; the date at the Web site comes up as the current date):

Congressman Ackerman asked if the US government or the IAEA had been given “direct access of Dr A.Q. Khan or any of his associates and if not how could it be proved that the information being filtered through the Pakistan government was authentic. Ms Rocca answered, “I can only answer in very abbreviated form in this forum. As you know, it’s an extremely sensitive matter. To my knowledge, we have not had access to A.Q. Khan. And I do not know whether the IAEA has done so, but I do not believe they have.” She said congressional leadership and certain members had been briefed on this issue. She added that some of the information being provided by Pakistan was “being borne out by some of the investigations that we’re seeing elsewhere in the world as well.” She said the US was working “very, very closely” with Pakistan on the A.Q. Khan investigation. Asked about the democratisation of Pakistan, she replied, “Well, I think we’re on track there. The President (Bush) has said that President Musharraf has said he will take off his uniform in the fall. We have a working parliament. There are steps that have been taken, and we’re continuing to work with them on that.” She said she could not say what would happen at the end of the year.

Congressman Gary Ackerman has been outspoken in criticizing the administration's reactions to the AQ Khan revelations about the extent of Pakitan's nuclear proliferation.  In this press release of 06/24/04, he said:

Ackerman said that since President Bush proposed more aid, “the media has been filled with reports of A.Q. Khan’s nuclear network, where it turns out, 2/3 of the axis of evil got their nuclear technology andthat Khan’s agents tried to sell it the other 1/3.” He added that there have been recent reports of uneven cooperation from Pakistan with regard to terrorism generally and al Qaeda particularly and noted that these “reports reach to the very heart of the Administration’s justification for supporting Pakistan.

"I don't think anyone can credibly say that the referendum on General Musharraf's rule, or the parliamentary elections held last year, were either free or fair" Ackerman noted.  "Real democratization in Pakistan just doesn't seem to be high on General Musharraf's list.  We must do more than pretend that it's high on our list."

"The Administration has said repeatedly that weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that they may be acquired by terrorists, is the single biggest threat facing the United States" Ackerman concluded.  "In Pakistan you have the epicenter of both of those threats."