Dick Did Not

A very detailed NYTimes article describes how senior Bush Administration officials -- Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and George W. Bush himself -- pushed the aluminum tubes as definitive proof that nuclear centerfuges, and so a nuclear program "related activities", were active in Iraq prior to our invasion.

In order to do so, they ignored the evaluation of those tubes by senior American nuclear physicists, which said "Can't be for a nuclear program -- mebbe small rockets."

An exhaustive review of the evidence, known at the time showed the "centerfuge tubes" were too narrow, too thick, too shiny and too long to be centerfuge tubes. But first, a junior CIA analyst's ("Joe") assessment of the tubes went to the White House on April 10 2001, saying they have "little use other than for a uranium enrichment program" -- a quote directly used later (Sept 8 2002) by Condi Rice on a CNN program, where she famously said the tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs..... We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The DOE, however, enlisted senior American nuclear physicists, who immediately recognized the tubes as unsuited to uranium enrichment, and published this assessment on May 9 2001 in the Daily Intelligence Highlight -- a month after "Joe's" assesment -- as well as pointing out the new tubes were exactly the same materials and dimensions as tubes used by Iraq for rockets (81mm diameter, walls 3.3mm thick, 900 mm long).

However, it was Dick Cheney who made the announcement -- on "Meet the Press" in Sept 2002 -- that, based on the aluminum tubes, he knew "for sure" and "in fact" and "with absolute certainty" that Hussein was buying equipment for a nuclear weapon -- a level of certitude absent even from the most optimistic CIA assessments. "He has reconstituted his nuclear program", Cheney said.

Cheney started the ball rolling. It rolled further when, on Sept 11 2002, the admin asked the CIA to vet a speech, which included the line: "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." Such vettings are routine, and are done so the CIA can keep the administration from making factual misstatments. In this case, the CIA failed to raise any concern about the statment, and it was included President Bush's speech the next day in front of the UN General Assembly.

Read the article. One can only conclude from its contents that the administration, led by Dick Cheney, was willfully blind to the obvious --- and not even in retrospect obvious, but at the time obvious -- evidence the tubes were not for a nuclear program.

Can't you hear Lynn now? "And when others saw that the tubes were the exact same dimensions of rocket tubes, and professional senior American scientists concluded they were unsuited to a nuclear weapons program, Dick did not."

The Shift Begins.

WaPost Reports a Newsweek poll shows a shift in the results -- Kerry leading Bush 49 to 46. (Within margin of error, but very different from pre-debate polls of 52-43 Bush.)

And I don't think the shift is done yet. The digestion continues, and by the end of the weekend, it will be widely understood that Kerry won the debate.

Meet the Iggeniuses

2004 edition. Something for everyone in this crowd, but you've got to be particularly happy about the inventor of Karaoke finally getting his due.

A Nation Divided

Watching last night's presidential debates, we surely appear to be a nation divided. One party believes the US should stand alone, operating under the personality of the President, the other that we should lead the world on renewed credibility, rebuilding our alliances.

Not surpsingly, this "two nations" theme is playing out elsewhere in our national life.

Such as the East Coast/West Coast split between Big Foot Hunters. [WaPost].

First Post-Debate Wager

Bob thinks Bush flubbed. He's predicting Kerry ahead by 5 points or more in major national poll by the end of next week. I say no. Stakes, the usual, 1 luxury caffeinated beverage.

Post-Debate Free Association

Instanalysis:

• In the absence of major blunders or drawn blood, Kerry wins just by being on the same stage as Bush. Thank goodness.
• Bush by contrast gets points for competence on foreign policy.
• Biggest single missed opportunity for Kerry: "If you don't want Allawi to be seen as a puppet of the US, here's a suggestion: Don't have your campaign staff write his speeches."
• Second-biggest missed opportunity for Kerry: "I don't have to think Iraq was the right war. I didn't make the decision to invade without getting a real coalition together. I'm not the one who failed to send enough troops to secure the whole country. I'm not the one who failed to plan for the occupation afterwards. And I'm not the one who has no plan for pacifying the country and getting our troops home."
• Bush and team have a good line about not "holding against" Kerry the fact that he thought Saddam was a threat. I don't think he managed to draw blood with that, but it's something to watch out for.
• Bush got Kerry good on the Iran sanctions point, and I think he also had the stronger position on North Korea. As Newsweek editor Zakaria said on ABC, who knew we would be watching a series of exchanges on bilateral vs. multilateral talks with North Korea tonight?

Crawfordians for Kerry

George W.'s hometown newspaper has endorsed the Kerry ticket. Seriously, who would know him better than his home town?

Dick Cheney on Iraq

It appears that our current Veep made a number of prescient points about the invasion and occupation of Iraq in advance of the March 2003 invasion:

[T]he question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many....

All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques....

Once we have rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place?... [Y]ou then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq. Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi'ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition... so crucial to our operations over there.

The catch (you knew there was going to be a catch)? All of this is from a speech Cheney delivered in August 1992. Here's the Seattle Post-Intelligencer story.

Strange How This Stuff Doesn't Translate

Tony Blair's going in for a heart procedure tommorrow.

Strange how it seems unlikely to divert press attention from Bush's debate loss tonight -- as Clinton's did from the pummelling of Kerry at the RNC.

We're getting all whooped up for the debates here in the North!

Meet the Geniuses

2004 edition. Note that the MacArthur grants are now a cool $0.5m.

3 For Bush.

On the NyTimes OpEd are pieces on what questions to put to Bush tonight in his debate with John Kerry, by Madeline Albright , Richard Clarke , and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. .

Looks like W hit the Trifecta

Even His Neighbors Don't Like Him

Bush's Hometown Newspaper Endorses Kerry.

Florida needs election handholding like a 3rd world country

Jimmy Carter is facing a lot of flak for his declaration that in the Florida elections "some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing". This is a disturbing trend of our political system, which is sliding ever closer to a closed system with our electronic voting systems that are considered "proprietary", and have proven to be extremely unreliable. What does the opposition fear from this Nobel Prize winner other than a scathing review, or the implication that Florida has less fair elections than the one that elected Hugo Chavez (also monitored by Carter)?

Jeb Bush's most insulting remark:"Without talking to a single person, without getting any information, he joins up with the MoveOn.org crowd and I cannot tell you how disappointed I am,"

In other news, which is gold for the Kerry camp, Nader is off the ballot in OhioSomehow, this guy continually ends up with thousands of fraudulent signatures. Also, the order from Republican Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell that all voter registration form need to be on 80lb stock has been rescinded. This was a big scare because Democrats are said to be leading the drive to register new voters in a BIG way, and were about to lose most of them.

Pentagon Papers leaker Ellsberg Pleads to DoD Officials: Leak, Now.

The New York Times > Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1969, pushing forward a chain of events which lead to the end of the Vietnam war, made a personal plea to administration officials in the DoD: Leak, please. Rumsfeld is covering up, he says, but a greater public good must be served. Ellsberg points out, too, that had he had the conscience to leak in 1964 instead of 1969, there would have been 50,000 lives fewer lost.

Robert Novak in Thumb Screws: Protection for Confidential Journalistic Sources Should Change In the Age of Blogs.

Many folks are wringing their hands over the Plame case. The question which rests before courts is: should a special protection in the 1st Amendment exist protecting the confidentiality of journalistic sources?

Bob says -- why are these sources protected? One reason used to be that journalism was extremely special. Not everyone had a newspaper, with a million readers, which served as a platform for dissemination of the bleaching sunlight of truth. If this protection hadn't existed in the 1960's, the Pentagon papers would never have been published, and Americans would never have known what a mess the Administrations had descended us into.

However, in the age of the internet, blogs, and widespread publication -- **anyone** can disseminate information widely. Newspapers act only as particularly popular information gathering squares. The thinking used to be, threaten the protections, and those few gathering squares would close, and there would be no more recourse for those wishing to out egregious violations of the public trust. However, the gathering squares are no longer few.

Is there any good reason remaining to protect journalistic sources with special rights? In fact, yes, there is. It just may be that the violation of the secrecy law -- in this case, a felonious revelation of secret information critical to the national defense -- serves a public good. In the same way there is a "self-defense" protection for violence, there should be an exception for protection of those confidential sources when their revelations of secret information serve a public good.

After a half-century in which newspapers have enjoyed broad protections for their confidential sources, that protection should be maintained, but only when newspapers can argue that the revelation of the information served a public good. If no public good is served -- and it's probable, but not certain, in the Plame case that no public good was served by outing her CIA connection -- the courts should recognize no protection for the sources.

Besides, who doesn't want to see Robert Novak sporting thumb-screws?

Summary of current events in the destablization of the Korean Peninsula

Bob had mentioned earlier this month that we should be keeping a close watch on our government and news reports generated from the ever escalating North Korean threat. Here's what has happened in just a few weeks:

North Korea's chief delegate to the UN declared today to the UN that the danger of war on the Korean peninsula is "snowballing", and also reiterated that they have weaponized the fuel from 8,000 spend fuel rods, and accused the US of helping South Korea conduct unauthorized nuclear experiments in 1982 and 2000.

North Korea has threatened to turn Japan into a "nuclear sea of fire" in retaliation for the US launching attacks within North Korea. In response, Japan has sent surveillance aircraft and an Aegis equipped destroyer to watch North Korea.

North Korea also may be preparing a missile launch to test out a short range missile

Also, the US will be deploying Destroyers in the Sea of Japan in an effort to "deploy ballistic missile defenses.

But, to keep this all in perspectve, North Korea is infamous for speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. They have also refused to participate in the 6-way talks with the US until after the November elections because we've eliminated any reason whey they should talk to us.

God has sided with the terrorists

I concur, but doesn't that mean that God has sided with the terrorists? He is obviously not "with us". Action needs to be taken, and we can't be soft on these terrorists. It is also obvious that He has weapons of mass destruction, and is just crazy enough to use them, wiping out thousands of people with one wave of His hand. This brutal despot has been in charge TOO long, and needs to be taken down a peg. I also hear that He's been collaborating with Al-Qaeda, and looking for yellowcake.


Let's roll.

"Why Does God Hate Us?"

Florida has been hit with four hurricanes in a month; on the TV news, I've just seen, a police officer asking rhetorically, "Why Does God Hate Us So Much?"

Isn't it obvious why? It's because state officials stole the 2000 election. God's sending the hurricanes now because, as you know, the next election is coming soon. These hurricanes are just God's warning -- if the state succeeds in stealing the election yet again, Florida will see even worse punishment. Famine. Fire.

Dahlia on Hamdi

Dahlia Lithwick, everyone's favorite Slate legal analyst, has issued her opinion on the Hamdi debacle.

She covers some of the same territory as my post, and comes to a similar conculsion (not a great day for civil libertarians) but includes some choice tidbits from the Government's earlier testimony along the way.

Deadly danger or not - No rights

Yaser Esam Hamdi, with Jose Padilla one of two citizens held as "enemy combatants" and - until the Supreme Court ruling this spring - refused legal counsel or rights of habeas corpus by the Bush Administration - has now been released and will be deported to Saudi Arabia. Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan, where he is alleged to have been fighting for the Taliban.

Explaining the decision to release Hamdi, Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said, "As we have repeatedly stated, the United States has no interest in detaining enemy combatants beyond the point that they pose a threat to the U.S. and our allies."

One could not ask for a balder statement of this Administration's claims. Namely: If we judge you to be a threat, we will hold you (and, perhaps, "vigorously interrogate" you). When we no longer deem you to be a threat, you will be released. Nowhere in that statement - or in any statement by any member of this Administration - is there any acknowledgement that there might be greater principles, or a higher law, at stake. (One is left to hope that if or when they attempt more serious transgressions, they will be proven wrong on this point. So far they have not been.)

Even the release of Hamdi, a US citizen who has not been indicted of any crime by any court, is thus the occasion for further chilling revelations. For example: Hamdi will be forced to "renounce" his US citizenship, and will be forbidden from returning to the US in the future, or traveling to any of Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

On what grounds is he denied these privileges? Raw power. If he had not agreed to these conditions, he would not have been released. It's that simple.