August 15, 2004 09:46 PM
Bush gives us a prelude to what we might expect at the Kerry/Bush debates
Sound Clip O' Fun!
Yes, that is the audience laughing at Bush because...you decide: Bush On What Sovereignty Means
Archives for August, 2004
August 15, 2004 09:17 PM
Iraq: No Way Out
No Way Out
By Fred Kaplan
Is there any hope of avoiding catastrophe in Iraq?
This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster.
August 15, 2004 06:06 PM
Atlantic Monthly Online: Inside Al Qaeda's Hard Drive
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This is brilliant article appearing in the Atlantic Online
Edited excerpt: Inside Al-Qaeda’s Hard Drive by Alan Cullison My acquisition of the al-Qaeda computers was unique in the experience of journalists covering radical Islam. On the night before Kabul fell, Taliban officials were fleeing the city in trucks teetering with their personal effects. The looter who sold me the computers figured that al-Qaeda had fled as well, so he crawled over a brick wall surrounding the house that served as the group's office. On the door of the room, he said, was the name of Muhammad Atef—al-Qaeda's military commander and a key planner of 9/11. Each day, he said, Atef would walk into the office carrying the laptop in its black case. The looter knew he had something good. What emerged was an astonishing inside look at the day-to-day world of al-Qaeda, as managed by its top strategic planners—among them bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Atef, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, all of whom were intimately involved in the planning of 9/11, and some of whom (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri) are still at large. Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda's strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government; amid the group's penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries, which are manifest in vitriolic memos between Kabul and cells abroad. Al-Qaeda's leaders worried about a military response from the United States, but in such a response they spied opportunity: they had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and they fondly remembered that war as a galvanizing experience, an event that roused the indifferent of the Arab world to fight and win against a technologically superior Western infidel. The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent. Afghanistan would again become a slowly filling graveyard for the imperial ambitions of a superpower. |
4:57:02 |
August 15, 2004 02:45 PM
Kick Out The Republicans!
Listen to the new song by "The Politnics"
It premiered on the Randi Rhodes show last month!
"I can't stop singing it," Randi said, on her radio talk show which is heard on Air America.
August 15, 2004 12:26 PM
Neocons and the Iraq War
President Bush, responding in Columbus, Ohio, to questions Kerry has raised about his motivation in going to war against Iraq. Bush said his decision to strike there was a profoundly difficult and personal one. "Committing troops into harm's way is the most difficult decision a president can make," Bush told an audience of nearly 1,000. "That decision must always be last resort. That decision must be done when our vital interests are at stake, but after we've tried everything else. There must be a compelling national need to put our troops into harm's way. I felt that."
That "compelling national need" to go to war is a neoconservative view on foreign policy. A Washington-based organization known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), funded by three foundations closely tied to Persian Gulf oil and weapons and defense industries, drafted the war plan for U.S. global domination through military power. PNAC FULL DOCUMENT
In a report just before the 2000 election The PNAC spells out their plan.
On page 51: The process of transformation, the plan said, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.
The PNAC is part of the New Citizenship Project, whose chairman is also William Kristol, and is described as a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz signed a Statement of Principles of the PNAC on June 3, 1997, along with many of the other current members of Bush's war cabinet. Wolfowitz was one of the directors of PNAC until he joined the Bush administration.
August 15, 2004 09:07 AM
Ex-Navy chief: Kerry earned Nam medals
WASHINGTON - The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday that John Kerry "deserved" his combat medals for heroism in Vietnam, which some vets have disputed.
Sen. John Warner, an ex-Navy secretary under President Richard Nixon, particularly defended the process by which Kerry won his highest honor, the Silver Star.
"I'd stand by the process that awarded that medal, and I think we best acknowledge that his heroism did gain that recognition," Warner (R-Va.) told CNN's "Late Edition."
"We did extraordinary, careful checking on that type of medal [the Silver Star], a very high one, when it goes through the secretary," Warner said.
The ascendancy of "news" with an attitude - a spin, a bias - is undeniable. Whether it's Moore's determined effort to make Bush look dishonest and stupid; Brit Hume, Fox News Channel's chief Washington correspondent, looking as if he swigged sour milk when he mentions Democratic nominee John Kerry....read the rest of the article from NEWSDAY
Where those seeking their point of view go: Conservatives Liberals
- Local TV news . . . . . . . . . . 66% 54%
- Daily newspaper . . . . . . 61% 56%
- Network evening news 3 4% 36%
- Fox News Channel . . . . . . . 1% 2 9%
- CNN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . 24% 30%
- Morning news shows . . . . . 26% 28%
- Network news magazines . .23% 24%
- National Public Radio. . . . 13% 33%
- News pages of ISPs . . . . . . 12% 22%
- Weekly news magazines . ..12% 16%
- Network TV Web sites . . . .10% 16%
- Religious radio shows. . . . ..20% 7%
- "The O'Reilly Factor". . . . . . 21% 2%
- "Rush Limbaugh" . . . . . . . .. .20% 5%
- "The Daily Show". . . . . . . . . . 2% 14%
- Compiled from staff and wire reports.
SOURCE: Study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 2004
August 15, 2004 08:40 AM
Keeping an eye out on the Plame Game
In the Matt Cooper Case, Chilling Implications
Should Matt Cooper go to jail?
No one who knows the amiable Time correspondent, who doubles as an amateur stand-up comedian, would think so. Yet he faces imprisonment -- not for lying, cheating or committing journalistic fraud, but for refusing to testify about confidential sources.
Cooper didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA operative -- that was columnist Robert Novak, who refuses to say whether he has been subpoenaed by a special prosecutor investigating which senior Bush administration officials leaked the information. Cooper wrote a follow-up piece questioning whether the administration had "declared war" on Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. But a federal judge has held Cooper in contempt of court, and he faces an unspecified period behind bars if Time's appeal fails.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4038-2004Aug15.html
