Blog For America, the official Howard Dean campaign blog, has a link to articles that say the Bush Administration is rewriting press releases and articles on whitehouse.gov that proclaimed the "end of combat operations" in Iraq. [link] Apparently, the word "major" has been inserted at the beginning of "combat operation". Unfortunately for the White House, the evidence here is pretty irrefutable. [link] That, in and of itself, is enough to make me think it's time to pull out my copy of 1984 and start cataloging the similarities.

But while we're on the subject, I want to set the record straight on something that is, in comparison to the major news noted above, relatively minor. But still, I think it's worth mentioning.

The blogs that I surveyed on the subject are saying that this isn't the first time the Bush Administration and the Republican Party have done this. Remember last spring, they say, when the Republicans announced the date of the 2004 convention? According to a report in the New York Times on April 22, 2003, "advisors" to Mr. Bush said that the convention, to begin August 30, 2004, was timed to blend into the third anniversary of 9/11. [link] But wait, the bloggers say -- a month later, in May 2003, the Republicans changed their story because of public outcry and said the schedule was chosen only to avoid conflicting with the Summer Olympics in Athens, which take place in the middle of August:

Sadly, this isn't the first time this week the Bushites have engaged in such historical revisionism. A couple days ago, I posted about how their rationale for having the Republican Convention so close to the September 11th commemerations has apparently changed from taking advantage of the commemeration (as stated in April) to "only" trying to avoid a conflict with the 2004 Summer Olympics (as stated in May). [link]

Now, is the White House changing stories and altering headlines? Maybe, but I'm not sure that the Republican Convention angle fits the pattern. Here's why: Adam Nagourney's article in the Times (also reprinted elsewhere) does report that "advisors" to the President said that they chose the date to flow into the commemoration of 9/11. [link*] Certainly, that's one piece of the puzzle. But the next piece -- that the Republicans belatedly attempted to rewrite the facts -- doesn't fit. In fact, there's a story in the Guardian (UK) on April 23, 2003 (the next day) interviewing Republicans by name (rather than anonymous "advisors") who refute the 9/11 connection and, indeed, cite the conflict with the Olympics and the fact that a late convention tolls the clock on public financing spending limits (which kick in only after a party has selected its nominee). [link] Now, the Guardian casts a skeptical eye on the assertions that there is no connection to 9/11, but it's hard to say that the Republicans waited and then tried to revise the story -- it seems that they did it in real time.

Anyway, it's a minor point, but we shouldn't ruin a good story by arguing that the conspiracy is broader than it really is. The truth is bad enough.

*The Times article is archived on the Times's website, but for a fee. This link is to the reprint of the article in the Charlotte Observer (free registration required).

What does it say about the current state of politics that the most scathing criticism of the Washington press corps that I have seen in a while comes from the New York Times' theater critic? [link]

Frank Rich's critique is generally unflinching. He calls the White House press corp "obsequious" and marvels that at the President's March 6, 2003 press conference, "the one that Mr. Bush himself called 'scripted'", not one reporter challenged the President during the eight different instances in which he implied that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. On the subject of the President "going over the heads of the filter" and being interviewed by regional media anchors, Rich observed, "Dana Milbank, The Washington Post's White House reporter, said on CNN's "Reliable Sources" that the local anchors "were asking tougher questions than we were." I want to believe that Mr. Milbank was just being polite, because if he's right, the bar for covering this White House has fallen below sea level. The local anchors rarely followed up any more than Brit Hume did. They produced less news than Oprah."

Ouch.

Rich also points out another disturbing item, albeit only in passing: the Washington Post censors its comics. Observes Rich, "The Washington Post, which killed a week of "Boondocks" comic strips mocking Ms. Rice a few days before her Oprah appearance, relented and ran one anyway last weekend on its letters page, alongside the protests of its readers."

That's outrageous. First of all, Boondocks is among the best political comic out there today -- although Doonesbury still has bite, Boondocks seems fresher. Second of all, what is the basis for censoring comics that criticize the Bush administration? The Post wasn't saying, except to say that "The Boondocks strips in question commented on the private life of the national security adviser and its relationship to her official duties in ways that violated our standards for taste, fairness and invasion of privacy." [link]

Right. Look, if those are the criteria, then I call on the Post to discontinue publishing its Names and Faces gossip column. Today, for example, Names and Faces reports on the betrayal of Princess Diana by her butler; the identity, age, citizenship, hair color and college major of the woman who allegedly broke up Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman's marriage; the fact that allegedly, Uma wanted out of the marriage before Ethan hooked up with this woman; the fact that Time Out New York named Liza Minelli and her estranged husband as among New York's "creepiest people"; and Courtney Love's custody battle over her 11 year old daughter. [link] Yeah, none of that invades these people's privacy.

Now, I have to say that I saw the strips in question in the New York Daily News, and frankly, didn't find them to be that offensive. As a public service, here they are, minus the first one, which isn't available online. Generally, the set-up is that in order to protect the world from Condoleeza Rice, all the characters need to do is to find her a good man. As Caeser, one of the characters, observes, "Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleeza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it." As for the notion that the idea is sexist or chauvanistic, well, the strip addresses that, too (though, lest we forget, this is satire, after all, and deserves a break).

[link1]
[link2]
[link3]
[link4]
[link5]
[link6]

The hotel where Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary, was staying was hit by rockets over the weekend. The New York Times quotes an unidentified source who says that there was "specific intelligence" that a rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad (a "highly protected target", according to the Times) was imminent. Nevertheless, no specific precautions were taken. [link]

The Times' reporting leads to many questions. Among them are these: if you have "specific intelligence" that an attack is imminent, why do you do nothing about it? Worse, if you know an attack is imminent and the Deputy Defense Secretary is checking into the hotel, how do you not warn him or move him to another location?

Another series of interesting question comes from the location of the homemade rocket launcher. According to the Times, the launcher, which was on a trailer made to look like a portable generator, was left at a cloverleaf interchange that had been closed by American forces. How was a car able to stop and unhitch a trailer on a closed interchange? Meanwhile, some of the rockets in the launcher were "new" French-made missles, that were likely purchased after the arms-embargo had been imposed on Iraq. Where did these missles come from? Since some of them were unfired (due to electrical malfunctions), they should be traceable -- will there be any prosecutions of the arms dealers? And are there more missles out there?

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that there was an intelligence failure of massive proportions here, which means that the attacks can't be dismissed as merely the vicissitudes of war (sometimes, you know an attack is imminent, but can't do anything about it except brace for impact. That doesn't seem to be the case here). Can we expect any kind of investigation? Unfortunately, the Bush administration's track record on investigating intelligence failures is, shall we say, sketchy at best. Doesn't give you a lot of confidence, does it?

The Patriot Act contains a provision that allows the FBI to review what any of us are purchasing in bookstores and borrowing from libraries. Civil libertarians have denounced the provision, and the ACLU and others have challenged it in court.

The problem with protesting this provision is how to do it -- I don't own a bookstore and I'm not a librarian, so effective civil disobedience isn't really an option. I suppose I could limit my bookstore purchases to cash, thereby eliminating any paper trail, but that makes it seem like I have something to hide, and besides, it's not a very public form of protest.

So instead, I have decided to beat the Bush administration at its own game: I will voluntarily reveal all of the subversive books that I have purchased or read recently (in no particular order):

The Prize, by Daniel Yergen
The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance, by Nat Hentoff
Dude, Where's My Country, by Michael Moore
Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by Al Franken
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, by Paul Krugman
Thinking it Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, by Kwame Anthony Appiah
September 11: An Oral History, by Dean E. Murphy
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling
Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., by Ron Chernow (still working on it)
It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, by Lance Armstrong
Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron, by Robert Bryce
Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not, by Robert T. Kiyosaki (with Sharon L. Lechter, CPA)
The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, Edited by George Packer
A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin

Remember me after I'm arrested.

People have asked me why I blog, since my blog is not, ahem, the most trafficked of weblogs out there. For an answer, I turn to a quote from George Orwell that I stumbled upon recently:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps towards it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it."

For what it's worth, this is why I continue to blog.

The Florida legislature passed a special law, and Governor Bush signed it, aimed at keeping a woman alive despite her persistent vegatative state and a court order that her husband could remove a feeding tube that has been keeping her alive since 1990. Two hours after the bill had passed, Governor Jeb Bush used the authority that had been newly granted to him to order a feeding tube reinserted into the woman's stomach. [link]

I'm confused. Isn't the Republican party supposed to be the party that favors less government?

A quick hit tonight.

Jonathan Yardley reviews "Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care" by John McWhorter at washingtonpost.com. [link] McWhorter's point, in brief, is that, much to his lament, modern formal writing and oratory have lost their eloquence and power.

In the review, Yardley quotes an amusing (and trenchant) observation from McWhorter's book, which made me laugh out loud at the same time that it made me feel profoundly sad that oratory skill is no longer required in our leaders:

Here would seem to be the place where I am supposed to launch into a fulmination about how inarticulate George W. Bush is. Many have rued that Bush's almost bizarre clumsiness with the English language ('I know what it's like to put food on my family,' etc.) comes off as folksy and accessible to voters, which would underscore my point about our devaluation of articulateness. But Bush's malaprops go far beyond the rustic or relaxed, and from what I see, Americans of all political stripes see high comedy in Bushspeak. It is more to the point that the way he talks has not prevented him from becoming President. Candidates bite the dust for being untelegenic, dour, visible present-day philanderers, too strident, or looking silly posing in a tank -- but both Bushes show that having trouble rubbing a noun and a verb together is not considered a mark against one in applying for the leadership of the land.

I think McWhorter has hit upon something here that goes to the point I made last week about failures to lead. A leader who cannot inspire others can't possibly be said to be leading, can he? People seem to think that oratorical skill is not valuable -- think about the relative esteem in which football teams and debate clubs are held in high schools across America. And yet, forceful oratory is one of the most potent forces that we can muster. If our President can't, as McWhorter put it, successfully rub a noun and a verb together, how can he lead us?

This is what puzzles me.

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at the National Review, had an article in The New Republic (how novel -- a liberal magazine hosting a conservative opinion, in the name of robust national debate) about why the Democrats' hatred of President Bush is irrational and could be counterproductive. [link] There's a lot to criticize (Ponuru comes across as something of an apologist for Bush), but one paragraph stuck out at me:

For some people, the dislike is personal. It's not the unearned privilege Bush was born into (his detractors don't have anything against the Kennedys). It's that Bush seems to lack the kind of extemporaneous verbal intelligence that is rated highly by people who possess it. (Even his staunchest defenders must admit that it would be nice if Bush spoke in complete sentences.) And it's maddening to his opponents that Bush seems to want to win political victories without winning arguments with his critics and to shift course without ever explaining his thinking.

The last sentence is, to me, telling: it's not just "maddening" when a President "wants to win political victories without winning arguments with his critics" or when he wants "to shift course without ever explaining his thinking." It's also a legitimate target of criticism. The fact is, those are straight-up failures to lead, which is the essence of leadership. The fact that conservatives refuse to acknowledge that -- to the contrary, they extol President Bush's "leadership" -- is simply inexplicable.

Being President is all about leading the country, not ignoring half of it and pushing your own agenda. The thing that conservatives consistently fail to explain is exactly how Bush is being a leader if he changes position without explaining what he's doing or why he's doing it? That's not leading, that's dictating. And what about winning without feeling the need to answer his critics? Isn' that just another way of saying "l'etat, c'est moi"? If you ask me, the thing that infuriates liberals -- which, admittedly, may be poorly articulated -- is not that he does those things, it's that by doing those things, he's telegraphing to liberals that he doesn't care about half the country or what it thinks. He may as well just give us all the finger and be done with it.

As for the 2000 election (which Ponuru discusses elsewhere in his article), I think the liberal criticism is not that he was illegitimately elected -- that ship sailed when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bush v. Gore -- but rather that a victory in the Electoral College is not the same thing as winning a referendum on your agenda. I'll defend to the limits of my ability that President Bush was legitimately (if unusually) elected to the office of President. But you won't convince me, and it wouldn't be intellectually honest to even argue, that he won a popular mandate for his brand of conservatism. At best, the electorate was evenly split, and when that happens, it seems to me that the only honest agenda would be a moderate one. Instead, President Bush has nominated numerous divisive right-wing figures to vacant court seats, and has allowed John Ashcroft to run one of the most right-wing Justice Departments in decades, not to mention gutting environmental laws, the Fourth Amendment, and any number of other laws, all while clothing it in dishonest rhetoric ("Clear Skies" for eliminating pollution controls, "Healthy Forests" for relaxing logging restrictions, "Leave No Child Behind" for passing on huge unfunded mandates to states and localities and "tax reform" for tax cuts).

And he has pursued a ruthlessly partisan agenda in the name of "patriotism" -- to name just one example, he opposed the Democratic plan to create a Homeland Security department until it was clear that the public supported the idea. Then, he proposed a similar idea, but with an unnecessary poison pill for Democrats (blocking department employees from unionizing). When the Democrats balked at this partisan maneuver, President Bush and the Republicans branded them as unpatriotic. In fact, they did so gleefully, to the point of making it a factor in the 2002 elections. One Democrat -- Max Cleland, the senator from Georgia -- lost his seat in the Senate after he was vilified in an attack ad as comparable to Osama bin Laden. All because he voted to preserve union protections for federal employees. The alternative, by the way, was for President Bush to achieve the same goal (the creation of a Homeland Security department), but by embracing bipartisan politics. Imagine how statesman-like he would have appeared, much to the chagrin of the Democrats!

[For the record, Senator Cleland is so unpatriotic that he was drafted and fought in Vietnam, and left three of his limbs there. By comparison, President Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard, and then went AWOL for more than a year. Yet the President stood by silently as his party smeared Cleland's patriotism for partisan advantage in the Senate. I guess if you had to pick one "irrational" reason why I hate President Bush (as opposed to the "rational" reason that he has failed to lead), it would be that while all hypocrisy stinks, that hypocrisy was particularly disgusting.]

***

For more on the rationality of Bush hatred, check out Jonathon Chait's companion article in TNR. [link]

Two thoughts on the quality of information coming out of Iraq:

First, it turns out it's 500 form letters (not 11) that were sent to hometown newspapers of soldiers in the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, and that the project was apparently the brainchild of the lieutenant colonel in command of the regiment. [link]

Hey, at least someone is taking responsibility for the project.

Second, the Bush administration has lately been pedalling the story that there's good news out of Iraq, but that the media isn't reporting it. Turns out this may not be the case.

The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon-funded military newspaper, Stars & Stripes, did an unscientific survey that found that more than one-third of the soldiers surveyed reported their own morale as "low" and that a substantial percentages reported that they would not reenlist, that they were not properly trained for their current mission, and that they did not feel that their missions were clearly defined. [link] [link to Stars & Stripes series]

"Unscientific", by the way, refers to the fact that the survey used a "convenience" sample (polling people at specific bases who were available and willing to talk), rather than a "random" sample. This means that the results may not be representative of the soldiers in Iraq as a whole. Still, the results are startling, and give the lie to the Bush administration's latest rhetoric.

Andrew Sullivan seems confused by Michael Moore's appearance on Crossfire last week. In it, Moore asked a rhetorical question about whether it's believable that a terrorist could go to a rinky-dink flight school and learn to steer a jumbo-jet traveling at 500 miles per hour into a target that is only five stories tall. Sullivan seems to think that Moore is positing some crackpot "conspiracy theory" in which the 9/11 attacks were a (presumably US) military attack. But Sullivan's got it all wrong.

Here's the quote from Sullivan's website (quoting the CNN transcript) [link to Sullivan's blog]:

[Sullivan's commentary] MOORE WATCH: He seems to be leaning toward the notion that 9/11 was a government conspiracy:

[Quote from Moore] MOORE: I'd like to ask the question whether September 11 was a terrorist attack, or was it a military attack? We call it a terrorist attack. We keep calling it a terrorist attack. But it sure has the markings of a military attack. And I'd like to know whose military was involved in this precision, perfectly planned operation. I'm sorry, but my common sense has never allowed me to believe since that day that you can learn how to fly a plane at 500 miles per hour. And you know, when you go up 500 miles an hour, if you're off by this much, you're in the Potomac. You don't hit a five-store building like that.

[Sullivan's commentary] What on earth is he getting at?

I actually have the answer to that, since I took the time to read Moore's new book, "Dude, Where's My Country?". Here's Moore's point:

"George, apparently you were a pilot once -- how hard is it to hit a five-story building at more than 500 miles an hour? The Pentagon is only five stories high. At 500 miles an hour, had the pilots been off by just a hair, they'd have been in the river. You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone's air force.

The Saudi Air Force?

What if these weren't wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? The house of Saud, according to Robert Baer's book, is full of them, and the royal family -- and the country -- is in terrible turmoil. There is much dissension over how things are being run, and with the king incapacitated by a stroke he suffered in 1995, his brothers and numerous sons have been in a serious power struggle. Some favor cutting off all ties to the West. Some want the country to go the more fundamentalist route. After all, this was Osama's originally stated goal. His first beef wasn't with America, it was with the way Saudi Arabia was being run -- by Muslims who weren't true Muslims.

. . .

So did certain factions with the Saudi royal family execute the attack on September 11? Were these pilots trained by the Saudis? One thing we do know: Nearly all the hijackers were Saudis...

***

So there you have it. Moore is posing a theory, namely that someone with connections to the Saudi military and an axe to grind against the Saudi government may have planned 9/11 to drive a wedge into the Saudi relationship with the US.

Is it a conspiracy theory? Maybe, but it's one that has some serious geopolitical thinking behind it. Before you dismiss it, consider that the Bush family has historically had a close relationship with the governing members of the Saudi royal family and, more importantly, that the health of the Saudi government is strategically important to the US, both because of Saudi oil and Saudi investment in the US.

Given this, it's not inconceivable that a dissident faction of the Saudi royal family might think that the attacks would destablize the Saudi government either because the US would blame Saudi Arabia or (more likely) because the attacks would force the US to withdraw support from the governing faction because of public outcry.

Is it farfetched to think that dissident Saudis were behind the attacks? It's not such a stretch. Consider, for example, that two previous terrorist attacks connected to Al Qaeda (the bombings of the Khobar Towers, an American and ex-pat compound in Saudia Arabia, and the U.S.S. Cole, at port in Yemen, on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula) took place in and around Saudi Arabia and were both aimed at forcing the US to leave the Arabian peninsula.

In the circumstances, it's at least plausible that dissidents (perhaps even in collusion with Osama bin Laden) provided the manpower for 9/11. And it's also plausible that the Bush administration knows this, but for national security reasons can't finger Saudi Arabian royal family members as the principal perpetrators. Certainly, that would explain why the Bush administration censured 28 pages of the Congressional report on 9/11.

And it would partially explain one other curious fact -- that the Bush administration allowed members of the bin Laden family in the US to fly to a common gathering point and leave the country right after 9/11, when the rest of the country was prohibited from flying. The stated reason for this is that the US feared that they could be subjected to American reprisals.

The bin Laden family is a huge, and hugely influential, family in Saudi Arabia, having built most of the roads and large construction projects there. If there were concerns that a dissident faction was acting in the US to destabilize the American relationship with Saudi Arabia, and that that dissident faction was acting in apparent collusion with Osama bin Laden, the Saudi government might fear for what other members of the bin Laden family might be plotting, and want to have them under the government's watchful eye.

Can I prove any of this? No. It's just some food for thought...

Okay, this story was reported earlier this week in USA Today, but I haven't been able to find a link to it. In its place, I offer another version of the same Gannett News Service copy from the Great Falls (Montana) Tribune. [link]

Here's the gist: at least 11, and possibly more, identical letters to the editor were published in the hometown newspapers of soldiers in the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment. The letters, supposedly written by the soldiers, were meant to deliver the good news that, they contended, was rarely reported about US accomplishments in Iraq. While many of the soldiers who signed the letters agreed with their thrust, they acknowledged that they didn't write the letter themselves; in fact, one soldier claims that he didn't even sign it.

Predictably, no one is taking credit for writing the letter. One sergeant says that his platoon sergeant distributed the letters and asked people to sign them if they agreed with it. He also reportedly asked for the names of the soldiers' hometown newspapers.

A spokesman for the 503rd says that he was told that a soldier had written the letter, and that the public affairs division was not involved. He said "Someone, somewhere along the way, took it upon themselves to mail it to the various editors of newspapers across the country."

But, as Gannett reports, at least one soldier did talk to a public affairs officer: "Sgt. Shawn Grueser of Poca, W.Va., said he spoke to a military public affairs officer whose name he couldn't remember about his accomplishments in Iraq for what he thought was a news release to be sent to his hometown paper in Charleston, W.Va. But the 2nd Battalion soldier said he did not sign any letter." Nevertheless, a letter with his signature appeared in the Charleston newspaper.

I have no beef at all with the guys in the 503rd. Most, if not all, of them believe in the sentiments expressed in the form letter, and some willingly signed their names to it. But someone, somewhere, organized this campaign. And that's the part of this that's wrong. It's one thing if soldiers write letters to the editors back home that talk about the real facts of their deployment (both the good and the bad). It's another thing altogether for someone in the Army to organize a coordinated campaign. That's called propoganda, and it stinks. Basically, it seems to me that someone used these soldiers to promote an agenda, wasn't straight with them about what was going on, and then refused to take responsibility when the form letters are exposed as form letters.

[Interestingly, the New York Times reported the story today (10/14) with much less detail. Click here]

Herewith, my cross-examination of David Kay, head of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), which is searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:

Q: Mr. Kay, isn't it true that Iraq did not have a chemical weapons (CW) program in 2002?

A: Multiple sources with varied access and reliability have told ISG that Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW program after 1991.

Q: And that's because the US and other nations destroyed Iraq's CW capability, isn't that true?

A: Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced - if not entirely destroyed - during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections.

Q: Earlier in this trial, Tony Blair told the jury that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed against "coalition" troops within 45 minutes. That statement wasn't true, was it?

A: We have also acquired information related to Iraq's CW doctrine and Iraq's war plans for OIF, but we have not yet found evidence to confirm pre-war reporting that Iraqi military units were prepared to use CW against Coalition forces.

Q: I noticed that you hedged just there, and said that "we have not yet found evidence to confirm pre-war" reports. Have you found any chemical-equipped munitions?

A: We have multiple reports that Iraq retained CW munitions made prior to 1991, possibly including mustard - a long-lasting chemical agent - but we have to date been unable to locate any such munitions.

Q: Iraqis you interviewed gave a significantly longer time frame than 45 minutes, isn't that true?

A: When Saddam had asked a senior military official in either 2001 or 2002 how long it would take to produce new chemical agent and weapons, he told ISG that after he consulted with CW experts in OMI he responded it would take six months for mustard. Another senior Iraqi chemical weapons expert in responding to a request in mid-2002 from Uday Husayn for CW for the Fedayeen Saddam estimated that it would take two months to produce mustard and two years for Sarin.

Q: Let's turn to biological weapons for a minute. Any luck finding biological weapons (BW)?

A: We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort.

Q: And the two trailers you found can't be conclusively linked to biological weapons, can they?

A: Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant, and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers.

Q: How about nuclear weapons? Did you find any nuclear weapons?

A: Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.

Q: So claims that Iraq posed an "imminent threat" were exaggerated, isn't that true?

A: [W]hatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence.

All questions are mine. All answers are David Kay's, drawn from his October 2, 2003 prepared statement to the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. [link] I have tried to quote fairly so as not to distort the meaning of Kay's statement. Having said that, of course, this is cross-examination, so a little latitude is proper...

On the one hand, those of us who believe fervently in democracy should be cheering the process that resulted in Arnold Scharzenegger becoming the next governor of California. After all, there's a law providing for a recall. There have been 60-odd attempts to recall governors since the provision was added to the state's constitution before one that was successful, which suggests that the threat to orderly democracy is rather low. And an unusually large percentage of voters of California went to the polls and democratically determined that Gray was out and Arnold was in. To his credit, Davis didn't fight the inevitable, but called on all sides to start working together again. In short, it was a triumph of peaceful democratic action. Wars have started over lesser things.

So why can't I shake the feeling that there was something terribly wrong about the whole thing?

For one thing, it's the way that the recall feels like it was bought by Darryl Issa, originally for Darryl Issa -- although he was later thwarted by Schwarzenegger's unexpected entry into the race, Issa intended to run for governor himself. There's just something unseemly about a sitting Republican congressman who had aspirations of becoming the governor himself funding a recall of the Democratic governor.

For another, it's the fact that the recall came 11 months after Davis was reelected. Of course, that number -- 11 months -- obscures the fact that the recall was begun within months of the last election. This suggests that it wasn't a populist uprising that brought about the recall petition, since it seems unlikely that popular sentiment would have changed so much in just a few short months. And if it wasn't a populist uprising, then what was it? Call it "faux populism", orchestrated by a core of hard-right wing conservatives who don't like or trust the electorate, and will use whatever mechanisms they can to consolidate power in Republican hands. The "faux" is because this core is always careful to couch its activism behind the mantle of "the people" even if they have to manufacture "the people".

For example, in Florida in 2000, Republican operatives staged an "angry mob" to storm the election offices in Miami-Dade county that consisted not of angry Floridians, but Republican staffers bussed in for the event (and, according to IRS and FEC documents, paid for by the Bush campaign). [link] [link] The canvassing board canceled its recount of votes.

In Texas, Republican congressman Tom DeLay pushed the state government to re-redistrict two years after the last redistricting, and cited not popular outrage at the current district lines, but rather that fundamental fairness required it; because Republicans are supposedly the majority party in the state, he and others claimed that the court-ordered redistricting plan imposed in 2001 was defective because it preserved a Democratic majority in the state's congressional delegation. Never mind that five Democrats in the Texas delegation were elected from districts in which Democrats are the minority party.

There's more on this theme here, in case you're interested.

In the end, I'd like to take solace in the fact that the democratic process worked, but somehow, I just can't seem to. For now, I wish Ah-nold luck, and take small solace in either of two scenarios: Either he'll prove his detractors wrong, fix California, show the national Republican party that there is a place for social moderates in the big tent, and thereby begin reversing the polarizing influence of the DeLays and Issas; or he'll prove to be an even bigger disaster than Gray Davis, and hopefully, demonstrate to Republican party that right-wing zealotry ultimately causes them to lose, not gain, influence.

Lemonade, anyone?

A study conducted out of the University of Maryland reports that 80% of viewers who rely on Fox News as their sole source of news hold "demonstrably untrue" beliefs about the US action in Iraq. [link] By comparison, on 23% of viewers who rely on PBS or NPR as their sole source of news hold those beliefs.

At first glance, this merely reconfirms that Fox News is about as fair and balanced as an elephant and a flea on a see-saw. And while it's interesting to confirm what you already suspect, the problem with this study is this: I don't imagine many Fox viewers reading the study and the smacking themselves on the forehead saying "Well gosh, now that you have a study that proves it, I see that Fox was spouting propoganda at me all this time!" If anything, Fox viewers are likely to dismiss the study as more liberal claptrap.

And frankly, they'd have a modest point. First, the survey limited itself to people who rely on one news source, presumably to the exclusion of all others. This can't be a large sample, nor can it possibly be representative.

Second, the study found that people who relied on any of the major broadcast networks or CNN for their news were all more likely than not to hold the "demonstrably untrue" beliefs. In one case, CBS News, the rate of belief was nearly as high (seventy-odd percent) as the rate of belief among Fox viewers. And it may be that it's not the tenor of the broadcast that's the problem, but rather the headline-focused format of most television news programs: according to the study, other than the aforementioned NPR and PBS viewers, the only group in which the rate of belief was less than fifty percent was people whose primary news sources were newspapers. Now, I'm no expert, but one of the things that those three outlets have in common is a format that allows for reporting in greater depth than a twenty-two minute news broadcast (30 minutes each for the major network news shows, minus 8 minutes for commercials).

Third, the study posited the following three "demonstrably false" propositions, and measured whether viewers of the various news sources believe or disbelieve the propositions:

1. Saddam Hussein has been directly linked with 9/11
2. Weapons of mass destruction have already been found in Iraq
3. World opinion favored the US-led invasion of Iraq

The study determined that based on government reports and accepted public opinion, each of those statements is false. But are they?

The first is the most obviously false; even President Bush now admits that there is no evidence of such a link. So okay, maybe that's one, though even there, Czech intelligence has waffled on whether Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, met with Iraqi officials in Prague.

The second is a harder question. True, no operational weapons have been found, so the statement is literally false. But now a question that isn't answered by the proffered statement: what is a WMD? As 9/11 taught us, WMDs come in the unlikeliest of packages (box cutters and Boeings, to name two). So what exactly is the "demonstrably untrue" statement talking about? Does it refer to nukes? Or chemical-equipped missles? How about artillery tipped with nerve gas? Stocks of biological agents that haven't yet been "weaponized"? Or the means to process and create chemical and biological agents? And what about factories that make legitimate commercial products, but that could be converted to make chemical or biological agents?

My point is not that Iraq had any of these things, only that there may in fact be a fuzzy line between WMDs and other bad stuff, which would make the question not "demonstrably untrue". Colin Powell showed slides of two trucks that might (or might not) have been mobile laboratories for manufacturing chemicals. There have been reports of a number of "dual use" facilities that could be innocuous or could be used to manufacture bad things. If the media reports that we have found these things, is it "demonstrably untrue" to the average survey respondent that we have not found WMDs? I'm not so sure, and unless the study defined "weapon of mass destruction" in its "demonstrably untrue" statements, I can't evaluate the truth or falsity of the statement.

The third question is also squishy. True, the United Nations Security Council failed to pass a resolution regarding the use of force in Iraq, but the heads-of-state in Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic signed on to an open letter of support for American action, and the US did manage to assemble a coalition (if somewhat ragtag) of nations who committed troops (most notably, Britain and Poland, but also Australia, Denmark and Spain, among others).

So is it "demonstrably untrue" that world opinion favored the US-led invasion of Iraq? I can't say definitively if it is. Certainly, large numbers of people demonstrated against it, and a number of large nations who have been American allies in the past criticized the US this time around. But there are 6 billion people on the planet, and many of them haven't weighed in one way or the other. To say, therefore, that world opinion disfavored the invasion is, to me, as "demonstrably untrue" as the converse.

The Nation has a very interesting article on the lies told by President Bush and his White House staff. It's worth reading in part for the substance, but also for the tone of the conclusion, which is not shrill or hysterical, even as it is clearly conveys outrage. It is all the more devastating precisely because of that tone. [link]