Globe and Mail / Canada
Trust Clarke: He's Right about Bush
by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay

Two international relations experts claim that, two years after the worst terrorist attack in history, the President still does not understand the threat we confront. This is very stinging for the Bush administration and you're now seeing them lash back with vicious attacks upon the credibility and character of Mr. Clarke.

Regardless of the emphasis Clarke puts on his disappointment with the Bush administration's own failings and regardless of these attacks upon Mr. Clarke by the Bushites and all the pundits who love them, there are key facts that will steadily stand:

-- Clarke repeatedly warned the Bush Administration about attacks from al Qaeda, starting in the first days of Bush's term.

-- In face-to-face meetings, CIA Director George Tenet warned President Bush repeatedly in the months before 9/11 that an attack was coming.

-- On September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld pushed to bomb Iraq even though they knew that al Qaeda was in Afghanistan.

-- Also on September 12, 2001, President Bush personally pushed Clarke to find evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks.

-- The Bush Administration knew from the beginning that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, but created the misperception in order to push their policy goals.

-- The war on Iraq has increased the danger of terrorism.

From A Conversation between Bill Maher and Ralph Nader


LINK TO TRANSCRIPT HERE

BILL MAHER (to guest Ralph Nader): After three years of Bush.. I've got to say it, just now voting your conscience seems like a bratty indulgence to me. It really does.

RALPH NADER'S REPLY: let's not talk about 'spoiler.' We're supposed to have the right to run for political office. What about the 250,000 Democrats who voted for Bush in Florida? Democrats aren't worried about them?

-------------------------------

RALPH NADER (on the topic of MSNBC's Chris Matthews): Chris Matthews has turned into media staccato. He's turned from entertainment to caricature. I could hardly stop from laughing when I was on the show. I just couldn't believe it. What is this? No wonder he's parodied on 'Saturday Night Live.'

____________________


Common Dreams:
Senator Kerry: You Want My Vote?
Support My Positions!

...As recently as Thursday night at a Democratic funding raising dinner President Jimmy Carter said, in a statement directed at Ralph Nader, "Don't risk costing the Democrats the White House this year as you did four years ago." This type of scapegoat does not make me feel all warm and fuzzy about voting for John Kerry and the Democrats. Carter also said "I hope everyone here tonight will do your best to make sure Ralph Nader gets zero votes this year." There is a very simple way to insure that Ralph Nader gets zero votes this year: support his positions.

....I would doubt the majority of Americans know who Hugo Chavez is or care about America's relationship with him. If this speech is not earning Kerry points with the voters, why is he making it? It's a wink and a nod at the wealthy and the corporations who have business interests in Venezuela.

....Do you want my vote or do you want to continue courting corporations and the wealthy? Either way the Democratic Party ought to stop blaming Nader for their own failures.

See: Miami Herald article about Kerry's views on Chavez

Today in history..


"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
- Virginia Woolf, who died March 28,1941

1834- U.S. Senate Takes Jackson to Task over the Second Bank
1899- Brewing magnate August Anheuser Busch, Jr., was born
1939- Spanish Civil War ends
1969- Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower dies
1979- Nuclear Accident at Three Mile Island


1999-Concert in Belgrade at Air Raid Alert

1999- NATO broadened attacks on Yugoslavia targeting Serb forces in Kosovo in the fifth straight night of airstrikes, protest concert in Belgrade.
2003- American-led forces in Iraq dropped 1,000-pound bombs on Republican Guard units guarding the gates to Baghdad and battled for control of the strategic city of Nasiriya

Reflections on Bruce Lawrence's "Rethinking Islam in the West"-

Who are the Muslim Pluralists?

In his recent article No More Crusades at the Harvard International Review, Bruce Lawrence says:

We do need religious voices to speak to the current fault line between East and West, Islam and America, and it is Muslim pluralists who are the philosophers and religious thinkers with whom non-Muslim others can and should make common cause.

I decided to go on a search for those who might be considered Muslim pluralists. I wanted to find at least one and bring that one voice to the forefront this morning. If the pluralist voices could be raised over the din of the terror-talking media, people here in this country might begin to understand that the work to end terror will be as hard as any work we've ever had to do..and will not be solved by force. Real solutions will not come through war, force, occupation, and violence. It will need to come through our hearts.

A writing to which I refer you is a Jerusalem Post item titled Learning to love Islam from Yossi Klein Halevi, a religious Israeli Jew, correspondent for the New Republic and a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report. He is the author of the book "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land" The writing credits Muslim dissident Irshad Manji, for her wisdom. Irshad is a Toronto journalist whose Indian-born parents fled Uganda after Idi Amin's takeover. She calls herself a "Muslim Refusenik". She has recently published a book called The Trouble with Islam, which takes the form of an extended open letter to her fellow Muslims. Irshad has made observations such as:

I hear from a Saudi friend that his country's religious police arrest women for wearing red on Valentines Day, and I think, Since when does a merciful God outlaw joy--or fun? I read about victims of rape being stoned for "adultery" and I wonder how a critical mass of us can stay stone silent.

Concerning the found commonality at the heart of the Muslim and the Jew, Halevi proclaims:

Our critique of Islam requires a nuanced tone. We should offer Islam not just our criticism but our respect and, if possible, our love.

Love is always a swim upstream. The water is almost always tinted with the blood of those who refused to understand this: While we were stuck on this planet together, our children could have lived in peace.

We need now, more than ever, to create conversations where none existed before.

------------------------

*additional reference: LIBERAL ISLAM: PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES by Charles Kurzman

...liberal approaches to multi-religious co-existence have been stimulated by three historic shifts of the past quarter century: the rise of secular higher education in the Islamic world, which has broken the monopoly of the seminaries over religious discourse; the growth of international communications, which has made educated Muslims more aware than ever of the norms and institutions of the West; and the failure of Islamic regimes to deliver an attractive alternative. These liberal approaches face serious challenges, including accusations of treason and inauthenticity, and a Western ignorance about the existence and importance of this internal Islamic debate.

Frank Rich on faux journalism,
the White House's new ally


Excerpts:

American television is increasingly awash in fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news......The more real journalism declines, the easier it is for such government "infoganda" (as The Daily Show's Rob Corddry calls it) to fill the vacuum. President George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media as much as possible....

When the president made an exception last month and took questions from an actual frontline journalist, NBC television's Tim Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the experiment is unlikely to be repeated soon....
.....There is no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can make up your own story and make it stick. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture than the administration's account of its actions on Sept. 11. As The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page this week - just as the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel account - many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction. Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on television that morning. (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Bush flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington. Yet the fake narrative of Sept. 11 has been scrupulously maintained by the White House for more than two years.......

After Sept. 11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom."...... What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to www.reform.house.gov/min, where a searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq" made by Bush and members of his administration...

I like today's Thomas Friedman column

I've been hard on Mr. Friedman lately. I forget that he. too only desires to see out nation make some positive progress. In Awaking to a Dream, Mr. Friedman begins by saying: "Imagination is on my mind a lot these days, because it seems to me that the only people with imagination in the world right now are the bad guy...."

Also in today's NY Times, Bob Dole tells us "..President Bush has the facts on his side. His job now is simply to remind voters that America is safer and more prosperous than it was on the day he was sworn into office." As Bush did in the lead-up to the Iraq war, he's going to have to get out there and do some more misleading to make us believe we've come anywhere near tackling the terrorism problem and that we're safer for having made the pre-emptive attack which has become a quagmire. He'll have to do a misleading song and dance about those millions of lost and/or outsourced jobs, too.

Harvard International Review
No More Crusades
Rethinking Islam in the West
by Bruce B. Lawrence

"Since September 11, the "Clash of Civilizations" theory has dominated and incorporated all others. It seems to explain Muslim-Western hostility as both ancient and irreversible. It is neither. This enmity is made by humans and thus can be unmade by humans."

Points covered in the article:

..What is needed to advance beyond pseudo-dialectics and interminable warfare is a double critique-internal and external-that must begin with the symbolic event that haunts the memory of Christians and Muslims alike: the Crusades.

..Who are today's Crusaders? (Read and you may be surprised).

....Crusader logic is matched by Islamist, or Islamic extremist, rhetoric. Those [9-11] planes were meant not only to destroy buildings and to kill people, but also to send a message to the largest possible audience through modern media. The message was as stark as it was simple: the United States is the enemy of Islam, and the core of the United States is business that is privileged by the capitalist world system.

..We do need religious voices to speak to the current fault line between East and West, Islam and America, and it is Muslim pluralists who are the philosophers and religious thinkers with whom non-Muslim others can and should make common cause.

..To make a plural world safe both for democratic citizens and religious rivals demands nothing less than a hardy inter-faith coalition of good-willed Abrahamic advocates. The only victory that counts in the war on terror will come off the battlefield, in the minds and hearts of moral combatants who recognize their internal enemies as well as their external foes.

..Without attention to the fault lines of human caprice, including those within the churches, there can be neither peace nor its necessary concomitant, sustained Muslim-Christian cooperation, which also includes Jews and Buddhists along with others dedicated to pursuit of the collective good. It is a jihad, in the truest sense, a struggle against our own demons as well as others. It prohibits a Crusade. Indeed, it will only succeed when Crusades, Crusaders and Crusading have been understood for what they are: a bygone chapter of world history not to be repeated, except as a cautionary tale, for our own and for all future generations.

Questions about Iraq

There is excellent commentary about Iraq and the war on terror at Rodger A. Payne's blog this week.
On March 24th, Professor Payne said the real debate over Iraq remains, asking:

Can a nation like Iraq be democratized by toppling a despotic regime and "building" a new nation from the rubble?

Was military force the best way to do this?

-- Did the attack set a dangerous precedent and potentially legitimize similar uses of violence by other states that will make the world a much less safe place?

-- Will the use of military force without wide international support create so much backlash throughout the Islamic world that the forces of terror are substantially strengthened by this move?

How long will it take to democratize Iraq?

Can a democratic Iraq trigger a democratic domino effect throughout the region?

Why begin with Iraq? What if the US had put strong (non-violent) public pressure on other states -- like Saudi Arabia? Or Egypt?

Professor Payne also shares my fascination with the Republicans suddenly embracing transparency.

Harvard International Review
Religion and International Affairs

In the most current issue of the Harvard International Review, religion's role in international affairs is in focus.

From the Review:

Beginning with questions of religious radicalism, Karen Armstrong examines the forces behind the global surge in religious fundamentalism, while Mark Juergensmeyer describes religious violence against the secular state. Next, Symeon Giannakos provides a case study tracing the development of religious and statist identities in Southeast Europe. Keeping the pitfalls of civilizationalisms firmly in mind, Jonathan Fox draws on statistical evidence to show that religious factors are not the primary cause of ethnic conflict. Turning at last to ways in which religiosity can benefit the international order, David Smock evaluates the role of faith-based non-governmental organizations in peacemaking, and Robert Barro investigates the correlation between religion and economic growth.

Also, see No More Crusades- Rethinking Islam in the West by Bruce B. Lawrence.

Rep Nick Smith/House Ethics Probe Underway


On February 26th on Iddybud, I wrote:

I hear the investigation's really heating up on this Rep. Nick Smith-Medicare-House of Representatives bribery case. The House Ethics Committee may not be the only investigators...I hear there may also be an ongoing criminal investigation.

I see it's hitting the mainstream. It was the focus of ABC's Nightline last night. Yesterday, the House ethics committee named four lawmakers who will investigate whether Rep. Smith was offered the bribe to vote for the Medicare bill. A talk-radio host who helped expose the Medicare bribe has curiously lost his job. According to Roll Call, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the matter, too

Medicare Bribe Archive:
Feb. 26, 2004: "FBI Examines Medicare Bribe"
Feb. 4, 2004: "Brad's Little Problem"
Jan. 22, 2004: "Burying the Bribe"
Jan. 8, 2004: "Bob Novak Ate My Brain!"
Dec. 23, 2003: "Now It's a Scandal"
Dec. 8, 2003: "A Drug-Company Bribe?"
Dec. 6, 2003: "Why Smith Can't Recant"
Dec. 5, 2003: "Nick Smith Recants"
Dec. 1, 2003: "Who Tried To Bribe Rep. Smith?"

Eat your boogers
Forget an apple a day.
Go ye the green way.


Fake Boogers

Show your four-year-old how corn starch and water is sticky (especially as it dries out) and he will be looking at synthetic boogers!

The State of the Media 2003

Journalism.org:
2004 - the year of blogging?

The Web log culture is fascinating and still evolving.


From The State of the Media 2003 Report:

Web logs, or blogs, such as instapundit.com and kausfiles.com, are an exciting new prospect for the Web. And some of these bloggers are influential. For now, though, bloggers appear to command only a fraction of the online audience. During the first week of the Iraq war, for instance, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that only 4 percent of Internet users had visited a blog......

In some cases yesterday's influential print columnists are today's bloggers. Journalists like Mickey Kaus (formerly of The New Republic), Howard Kurtz (of The Washington Post), Virginia Postrel (former editor of Reason) and Rich Lowry (editor of National Review), are people whose blogs are often cited by the old media and thus whose influence reaches much farther than their direct audience. The Web log culture is fascinating and still evolving.

.....Whether it will become a serious online presence and influence on journalism remains unclear. Several panelists at the Online News Association's 2003 conference predicted that 2004 would be the year of blogging.18 At this point, though, the hard data suggest that its influence, like journals of opinion in print such as The Nation or The Weekly Standard, will be more intellectual than commercial. In 2003, many political analysts credited conservative blogs for playing a role in the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott when the mainstream press did not do much with the story of his comments in favor of past segregation. Whether blogs come to define the Internet or represent only a small but appealing aspect of it, is still a question.

WHAT AN AWFUL JOKE!

'Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere!'


Credit: AP photo

--President George W. Bush


"I'm appalled. I think it's in extremely poor taste. I think he owes an apology to those families who have lost loved ones there and those of us that are going through the dread every day having a son or daughter in Iraq. He pokes fun at the reason that he told us (soldiers) went over there. I think it's extremely callous."

--Larry Syverson of Richmond, Virginia, who has a son serving with the Army in Iraq and another who recently returned after serving in the Tikrit area.


"This is disgraceful. He doesn't think of all the families that are suffering. It's unbelievable, how this guy tries to run the country."

--George Medina, 43, of Orange County, who lost his 22-year-old son, Spec. Irving Medina, Nov. 14 in Baghdad.


"To be poking fun; it's just a travesty to the soldiers who lost their lives. I think it's disrespectful."

--Charles Celestin, 28, of Coral Springs, Fla., whose brother-in-law, Spec. Irving Medina, died Nov. 14 in Baghdad.


"That's supposed to be funny? Unfortunately for the president, this is not a joke. George Bush insulted me as a veteran and as a friend to many still serving in Iraq. President George Bush showed a stunningly cavalier attitude toward the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the administration's rush to war. If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought. Five-hundred eighty-five American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year; 3,354 have been wounded, and there's no end in sight. George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them, and now he thinks that's funny? George Bush didn't tell us the truth about the economy, about job loss, about the true cost of his deceptive prescription drug plan, or about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. There's nothing funny about that."

--Sen. John Kerry


"George Bush insulted me as a veteran and as a friend to many still serving in Iraq. This act lowers the dialogue about weapons of mass destruction. War is the single most serious event that a President or government can carry its people into. No weapons of mass destruction have been found and that is no joke - this is for real. This cheapens the sacrifice that American soldiers and their families are dealing with every single day."

--Brad Owens, Iraq war veteran


"It was one of the most despicable acts of a sitting president. That's not a joke to us, Mr. Bush. Five hundred soldiers lost their lives, looking for weapons that weren't there. Billions of taxpayer dollars were spent looking for weapons that weren't there. But guess what? You gonna look out that window in January and see a moving van to send you back to Texas."

--Rev. Al Sharpton


"They're not there [WMDs]. That is the issue. We should not take it to a new step to make fun of the situation. This is a very serious issue. We've lost hundreds of troops, as you know, over there. Let's not be laughing about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction."

--DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe



A little casual?! Why the hell did Nancy Pelosi laugh?

"I had thought that that was a little casual about a serious subject, but now the president has made it open season."

--Nancy Pelosi


"I wish I could report to you that the conflict is almost over. This I cannot do. We face more cost, more loss, and more agony. For the end is not yet."

--President Lyndon Johnson, 1967, who saw nothing humorous in the Vietnamese war - the conflict that George W. Bush managed to creatively avoid.



"The Democrats will go after anything.”

--Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie


"That WMD crack? And posing in advance for a stupid picture to go with your stupid, insensitive-to-soldiers'-families joke? Well. I'd say that should be worth at least another half-hour in front of the 9/11 Commission. But I don't get to make the rules."

--Value Judgement blog

Around the CNY Blogs

Although the warm Spring weather has arrived, it's still a rather somber day today in Syracuse. As NYCO points out, there is no joy in Mudville today. The Syracuse University men's basketball team is out of the NCAA Championships. NYCO also has provided astute commentary on the "unity" Democrat's dinner on Thursday:

About the unity dinner itself, I had surprisingly mixed feelings. I was channel-flipping between sports and politics, so I didn't see all of the Big Dog's speech (the C-SPAN video archives being like TiVo for Politics). But I did catch the bit where he was excoriating the GOP for its campaign tactics against McCain and Cleland, and when he got to the part about the Cleland-Osama ad, I just felt a real twinge, thinking about the Dean-Osama ad and how of course he wouldn't be mentioning that. And feeling that old anger about the Democratic establishment for a moment. I'm not sure I want to let go of that.
Lastly, dumb comment of the night goes to Jimmy Carter: "Ralph, go back to … examining the rear ends of automobiles and don't risk costing Democrats the White House this year, as you did four years ago." Yeah, that'll make people leaning Nader want to vote Democrat. Thanks.

Central New York readers will also be interested to read Nyco's comments on the strange passing-up of the Joanne Shenandoah documentary "Dancing on Mother Earth" by Public Television station WCNY in Syracuse.

If we can't see controversial programs about people and issues that actually concern CNY, what is the point of having public television in the first place?

"I got such a kick out of seeing the president huff and puff and get all indignant over the testimony of Richard Clarke this week. The real issue is this: Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life or a guy who served this country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"

--Howard Dean today at George Washington University, formally endorsing Senator John Kerry for President

Tough times for Bushites call for tough measures
AMAZING DEVELOPMENT!
Totally out of character for the rigidly secretive Bush administration, a strict White House rule is allowed to be broken and propaganda-tool is pulled out for use.
That propaganda tool is FOX News.

Shortly before the hearing, the White House violated its long-standing rules by authorizing Fox News to air remarks favorable to Bush that Clarke had made anonymously at an administration briefing in 2002. The White House press secretary read passages from the 2002 remarks at his televised briefing, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who has declined to give public testimony to the commission, called reporters into her office to highlight the discrepancy. "There are two very different stories here," she said. "These stories can't be reconciled."
Back at the hearing, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, a Republican member of the commission, took up the cause, waving the Fox News transcript with one hand and Clarke's critical book in the other. "Which is true?" Thompson demanded, folding his arms and glowering down at the witness.

The Bush administration must be feeling incredibly threatened. As they should.
I should include the next few lines for amusing closure:

Clarke, appearing unfazed by the apparent contradiction between his current criticism and previous praise, spoke to Thompson as if addressing a slow student. *[chortle]

"I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done, and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done," he explained. "I've done it for several presidents."

Two views on Iraq

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

--Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)


Here are two views on the war.

In the first, Denise Robertson lays out the guilt-carpet and asks how a woman (like me) could possibly protest a war that saves my "sisters". She says:

Of course, Iraq is still a dangerous place. I wouldn't like to live there with children but I like it a damn sight better now than it was two years ago, when Uday Hussein would routinely remove virgins from the country's schools in order to rape them.

It mystifies me that so many women have protested a war that freed their sisters from that kind of outrage.

I would ask Denise to consider the bitter truth about Iraq. Uday or no Uday. In the most recent edition of The New Yorker, journalist Jon Lee Anderson is seeing Baghdad firsthand while Denise frolics somewhere this day in the fairly secure UK.

Baghdad is a much more dangerous place than it was a year ago. A few days before the Mount Lebanon explosion, someone set off a bomb in front of a perfume shop in the same neighborhood—Al-Karrada, a predominantly Shiite section of the city. The target of the attack, who died, was the brotherin-law of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. Jaafari’s brother-in-law was not involved in politics, but he was presumably easier to get to than Jaafari, and killing him may have been worth it just to get a message across.

It is not only the wealthy who are targeted for robbery and extortion. As in countries like Colombia and Mexico, wives and children of schoolteachers and mechanics are kidnapped along with politicians and rich businessmen. A couple of months ago, the twelve-year-old son of an Iraqi friend of mine, a driver who lives in a working-class neighborhood, was kidnapped one morning while walking to school. My friend had recently bought a nice secondhand car, which he was very proud of and loved to show off. That was probably his big mistake. The kidnappers demanded fifty thousand dollars in ransom. He bargained them down to six thousand dollars, sold his new car, and paid up. Several hours later, the boy was released a few blocks from his home. Since then, my friend has not let his son out of the house, even to go to school.

I would remind Denise and other Iraq-cheerleaders that this is about far more than rape-rooms. The systemic crime dilemma in Iraq must be dealt with swiftly and it should never have been unilaterally up to the United States and the willing/bribed coalition members to take on by themselves. For all that is decent for my sisters, brothers, and the children of Iraq, we need to re-engage the world. We never should have disengaged to begin with. Thus far this lady doth protest, methinks........meknows.

March 25 News and Views



www.citypages.com

CityPages.com: Karl Rove's Moment-
How "Bush's Brain" hijacked Washington, D.C. and politics-as-usual.

The amazing thing about 2004 is not that a radical, reckless president has the chance to be reelected; the amazing thing is that, in the face of a political establishment and a news media that rarely said boo to George W. Bush, millions and millions of people have his number anyway. Where the people are concerned, therefore, Karl and W are forced to make a dicier bet--against public memory, decency, and self-interest. It isn't clear yet whether terror fears and "wedge" issues like gay marriage, guns, and religion will once again divert sufficient numbers of people from more pressing matters, such as their own livelihoods. Maybe not.

On the other hand, Karl Rove has yet to lose a race by underestimating the integrity and rationality of American electoral politics.

Guardian Unlimited - The battle of the airwaves in America:

Sarcastic, bilious and very rightwing, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has become one of the most powerful voices in American politics. Can a group of liberals really beat him at his own game?

Paul Krugman - Lifting the Shroud

Dan Frosch, AlterNet: The Burden of Conscience

TAP: President Bush says we're winning the war on terrorism. As with so many things, however, his math doesn't add up.

On March 18, President Bush declared that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have made "America more secure." There have been more al-Qaeda-linked attacks internationally since September 11 than in the eight years before it.

9-11 Commission

Yahoo: Families of 9/11 Victims Laud Clarke for Apology

Center for American Progress - 9/11: Internal Government Documents

NYT:Assessing the Blame for 9/11

The real impression gleaned from the hearings is not that the Bush administration was indifferent to the threat of terror, but that its officials had trouble fully understanding it.Their mind-set did not allow for the possibility of an extranational threat not orchestrated by any one particular government.

AlterNet - White House Tailspin

I saw 'Yellowcake' Hadley on 60 minutes last Sunday trying to lie his way out of admitting there was the alleged find-blame-on-Iraq meeting in the situation room with the President and Richard Clarke just after 9-11. I saw Leslie Stahl shoot ol' Yellowcake down with proof of there being at least two witnesses to the meeting. In this article, it says:

Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley – the same man who ignored CIA orders to remove false uranium claims from the President's pre-war State of the Union – defended the Administration by saying, "All the chatter [before 9/11] was of an attack, a potential Al Qaeda attack overseas." But according to page 204 of the bipartisan 9/11 congressional report, "In May 2001, the intelligence community obtained a report that Bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States" to "carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives."

Yellowcake Hadley is caught once again. Say, why hasn't anyone ever gotten around to firing this lying fellow? Some would tell me I should leave him alone. I guess he's only "representing"..his superior liars, that is.

Buzzflash.com editorial: Documentation of Plans to Crash Airplanes Into Buildings that Bush and Condi Claim They Knew Nothing About*

*I've read most of this evidence in the past. The sane person would ask herself, "Why do you feel you must keep repeating these truths?" My answer would be: "Yeah, it looks a little crazy, doesn't it? You'd think the public would get it by now. You'd think the media would get it by now. You'd think........" Anyhow, here we go again! White House con-men have big megaphones which never stop bleating, repeating the misleading. So call me competition, already.


Misleader: Bush Administration Resorts to Lies About 9/11

Washington Post: Transcript of Wednesday's 9/11 Commission Hearings

The Memory Hole: 5-Minute Video of George W. Bush on the Morning of 9/11



Kerry vs. Bush

NY Times - As Gasoline Hits Record Price, Bush, Kerry and Democrats Spar Over Policy and Next Move

National Review - SecDef McCain: Is John McCain auditioning for a non-veep Kerry admin spot? by Rich Lowry

The Miami Herald - Kerry says Bush is soft on Chávez
*Note: see Kerry's statement on Venezuela


Iraq

The Village Voice - Day by Day, Death by Death: A Chronology of U.S. Military Fatalities Since 'Mission Accomplished,' Part I

Yahoo! News - Bush Briefed on Al Qaeda Threat Before Taking Office

Newsday.com - Bush's 9/11 myths endanger U.S.

MSNBC- 11 Iraqi police killed in ambushes

TIME Magazine - How We Got Homeland Security Wrong

Guerrilla News Network - Secrecy: The Real Mother of Terror by Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)

Consortiumnews.com - Bush's Terror Hysteria


Political Comedy:

Fake Ad/Howard Stern.com: Bad American Presidents, We Salute You

Today's News and Views

Dotty Lynch: What Would Lee Atwater Do?

Self-Loathing Dept: Zell Miller loathes policies of majority of our nation's modern Democrats-hopes they lose

Niagara Falls Reporter: When ignorance becomes mendacity: George W. Bush's "war on terror"

GovExec.com: Groups call for the resignation of Sept. 11 commission director Philip Zelikow

Independent UK: September 11: the shocking evidence of secret deals, missed chances and fatal misjudgements

Robert Scheer: President Bush failed country in its hour of greatest need

Ellen Beck/UPI: Medicare solvency ticking away

Intervention Magazine: 9/11 Commission- why is Condoleezza Rice refusing? What is she hiding?

SF Gate: Hamas leader: Militants not targeting America

Guardian UK: Rising oil prices and a weak dollar could shatter the global economy

Fred Kaplan: Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth- Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism.

Entertainment news at Yahoo: Fred Rogers Being Honored for Music Work

David Kay at Harvard University:

"The cost of our mistakes with regard to the explanation of why we went to war in Iraq are far greater than Iraq itself. We are in grave danger of having destroyed our credibility internationally and domestically with regard to warning about future events. The answer is to admit you were wrong, and what I find most disturbing around Washington is the belief you can never admit you're wrong."

--David Kay 3-22-04 speech at Harvard University's
John F. Kennedy School of Government