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Volume 1 Issue 181        Today’s News and Views     Tuesday, June 27, 2006

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O'Reilly also called Wycliff a "coward" for declining to debate O'Reilly on the Factor after attacking him, a tactic O'Reilly frequently employs. In fact, O'Reilly has created a "cowards list," which he described as "people who will not stand up and answer questions about their bomb-throwing statements." O'Reilly's "coward" list includes Cindy Sheehan, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Jane Fonda, and former President Bill Clinton, among others. O'Reilly has said, "If you attack someone publicly ... you have an obligation to face the person you are smearing. If you don't, you are a coward." In December 2004, Media Matters President and CEO David Brock sent O'Reilly a letter asking to appear on the Factor to address O'Reilly's attacks against Media Matters. We never received a response.

Wycliff, now the associate vice president of news and information at Notre Dame University, criticized O'Reilly for engaging in "intellectual dishonesty" by linking the ACLU, Air America Radio, and other organizations to the recent murder of two U.S. soldiers in Iraq. As Media Matters previously noted, during the June 20 O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly declared that the ACLU, the BBC, and Air America Radio "are helping the terrorists" and offered that a way to help control the chaos in Iraq would be if the Bush administration began "challenging those who are helping the enemy," such as the media and the ACLU. Wycliff wrote:

O'Reilly wasn't just mad about what had happened to these two young Americans; he wanted something done about it. We've got to get tougher and more aggressive, he opined. Outfits like the American Civil Liberties Union and Air America need to be "exposed," and all those who inadvertently help the enemy -- like ministers who sign petitions against torture -- should mind their p's and q's. And the Iraqi government ought to declare martial law in some parts of Iraq that O'Reilly considers in particular need of iron-fist treatment.

After O'Reilly finished his rant, he brought on two retired generals who apparently serve as regular expert commentators on Fox. For several minutes Wild Bill and this posse took out after the murderous barbarians in Iraq, as well as the "liberals" and dupes here in the U.S. who insist on hobbling the war effort by exercising their rights to think and speak freely.

While debating Page, O'Reilly accused Wycliff and the Chicago Tribune of "irresponsibility" and of publishing "lie[s]." Misrepresenting Wycliff's argument, O'Reilly asserted that Wylciff blamed the United States government "for the brutal mutilation and murders" of the two soldiers. O'Reilly later added: "[T]he difference between me and this Wycliff is that I want the USA to win and I don't believe there is a moral equivalency with what we do with what the terrorists do, and he does."

Yet, in his column, Wycliff alleged no such "moral equivalency." Rather, Wycliff argued that O'Reilly may be better served directing his criticism of how the Iraq war is being run at the people who are actually running the war, not news outlets and organizations that have been critical of the effort. Wycliff chastised O'Reilly for "peddling the notion that Bush is hamstrung in fighting the Iraq war because of domestic doubt and opposition from the left," noting:

Less than two years ago, George W. Bush won a second term in office with the biggest popular vote in American history. His party controls both houses of Congress. The ACLU is preoccupied with controlling the speech of its board of directors. The New York Times, which also came in for some of Bill's dishonorable mention, has not endorsed the winner in the last two presidential elections.

[...]

Bill, does the name Eric Shinseki mean anything to you? On the assumption that it doesn't, let me explain that he was the Army chief of staff who was shown the door by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after Shinseki had the audacity to tell members of Congress that we would need "several hundred thousand soldiers" to control Iraq after an invasion.

Wycliff argued: "[I]t wasn't the press or the Democrats or the ACLU or Air America that sent our soldiers to Iraq in numbers that evidently are too small to control the place. It was Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz who did that." Wycliff concluded that he understood O'Reilly's "dilemma," that O'Reilly "want[ed] to blame somebody for outrages like the murders of" the soldiers "but if you put the blame where it really belongs, you have to say bad things about some people for whom you have been a cheerleader."

When Page echoed Wycliff's assertion, stating that that O'Reilly has "cheerleaded" the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War, O'Reilly interrupted Page and shouted "Bull!" at least eight times, because, according to O'Reilly, "I have been very critical of the way they've waged the war."

Disagreeing with Page's assertion that O'Reilly "praised the way Saddam Hussein ran the country over there," O'Reilly retorted: "I never praised Saddam Hussein once. I said he ran the country in a totalitarian way, and he didn't have an insurgency because he ran it that way. ... That's exactly what I said. It's a statement of fact." In fact, O'Reilly has suggested that both the U.S. military and the Iraqi government should employ Saddam's methods in Iraq, as Media Matters has previously noted:

• On the June 19 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, O'Reilly declared that if he were the president of Iraq, he would run the country "just like Saddam ran it," by establishing curfews and shooting violators "right between the eyes."
• On the June 20 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly again suggested that Iraq should be run as it was under Saddam Hussein, stating: "Saddam was able to control Iraq, as you know, and defeat insurgencies against him. The new Iraqi government can do the same, but it needs to get much tougher." In particular, O'Reilly suggested the Iraqi government "declare martial law in areas controlled by insurgents" and repeated his suggestion that Iraq should establish a policy of "shoot-on-sight curfews."

From the June 22 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: And, of course, I am the topic of discussion because I want a tougher approach in Iraq. A teacher at Notre Dame University, Don Wycliff, wrote this today in the Chicago Tribune.

Quote, "If intellectual dishonesty could be said to have a face, I saw it Tuesday evening as I watched Bill O'Reilly's program on Fox News. ... O'Reilly was burned up about the mutilation and murders of those two American soldiers. ... He wanted something done about it. We've got to get tougher and more aggressive, he opined. Outfits like the American Civil Liberties Union and Air America need to be 'exposed,' and all those who inadvertently help the enemy -- like ministers who sign petitions against torture -- should mind their p's and q's. And the Iraqi government ought to declare martial law in some parts of Iraq that O'Reilly considers in particular need of iron-fist treatment. ... Bill, that is so-o-o-o Saddam of you ... [but] I understand your dilemma. You want to blame somebody for outrages like the murders of [Pfc. Kristian] Menchaca and [Pfc. Thomas] Tucker, but if you put the blame where it really belongs, you have to say bad things about some people for whom you've been a cheerleader. It's OK, Bill, nobody" cares -- "nobody who cares about the truth takes you seriously, anyway." Unquote.

Nice, right? Well, we asked Don Wycliff, who teaches media criticism at Notre Dame, to appear this evening. He agreed, but then he canceled one hour before air time. So much for the Fighting Irish. Wycliff is one of the hiding Irish. If you're going to launch a personal attack, sir, at least have the courage to back them up. Cowardice is not becoming.

[...]

O'REILLY: All right. Let's deal with the irresponsible position first. If you are going to say the blame for the brutal mutilation and murders lies with the American government, which this man did, Wycliff, that's what he said, it's in print. If you're going to say that, I believe that is grossly irresponsible. The terrorists did this. The savages who killed Menchaca and Tucker are terrorists. He blames -- Wycliff blames the American government. Now, that is the irresponsibility. It's very clear to me.

PAGE: Well, follow the logic, Bill. Look at your own commentaries over the last week. You praised the way Saddam Hussein ran the country over there, said that we ought to have martial law, we ought to have the kind of crackdowns that Saddam had. The fact is you can't have martial law if you have inadequate police force, an inadequate army, and our American troops are inadequate. Enough troops were not sent over there in the beginning. That is a widely agreed-upon fact now. And that's what Don is talking about. We put --

O'REILLY: No. Don is talking about --

PAGE: -- our people in harm's way.

O'REILLY: -- his opinion is that the war hasn't been waged properly. Valid opinion.

PAGE: That's your opinion, too, right? You want to get tougher, right?

O'REILLY: You bet. And I have said that --

PAGE: Well, I'll say. You're entitled to your opinion, he's entitled to his.

O'REILLY: Hold it. Number one, I didn't praise Saddam Hussein. That is a lie and a distortion. I did not do that.

PAGE: You did praise his tactics.

O'REILLY: No, I did not. I said he controlled the country by a totalitarian method. That's not praise, that's fact.

PAGE: Everyone can see the commentaries on your website --

O'REILLY: Wait, wait, wait, Clarence --

PAGE: -- I don't need to quote the whole thing, but the fact is --

O'REILLY: There's a difference -- There is a difference between -

PAGE: -- that you did praise the way he ran it and the current government needs to run it the same way.

O'REILLY: That is not true. There is a difference between --

PAGE: You don't think they need to run it the same way. You don't think they need the kind of police-state tactics that Saddam used in a totalitarian state?

O'REILLY: Clarence, take a deep breath. I never praised Saddam Hussein once. I said he ran the country in a totalitarian way and he didn't have an insurgency because he ran it that way. Then I said --

PAGE: You're spinning, Bill.

O'REILLY: No, I'm not spinning at all. That's exactly what I said --

PAGE: You're spinning, Bill, because when you say people ought to run --

O'REILLY: It's on my website. There isn't any praise involved. It's a statement of fact. You are spinning by saying it's praise. That's bull.

PAGE: The record speaks for itself.

O'REILLY: Yeah, it does. Anybody can read it. The second thing is, this despicable Wycliff, who did run the editorial page at the Chicago Tribune before he took to Notre Dame --

PAGE: That's right.

O'REILLY: -- this despicable man is saying that the United States government bears more responsibility for their horrendous deaths of the two privates than the terrorists. That's despicable. It is beneath contempt, and the Chicago Tribune should be ashamed of itself for running something like that without something right next to it -- and my column in the Chicago Sun-Times will counter that.

PAGE: You're entitled to reply in the Tribune, I'm sure, Bill --

O'REILLY: Absolutely. It's despicable to say that the American government, to draw a moral equivalency between the American government's waging of the war and the deaths of these men. The terrorists are responsible --

PAGE: You're reading into his comments --

O'REILLY: -- all right, now here's the lie --

PAGE: I've got to object, Bill. I know it's your show, I've got to object, though, because you are reading into Don's comments. He is a true patriot --

O'REILLY: He said flat-out, if you put the blame where it really belongs --

PAGE: Just let me finish the statement, and then you can respond, Bill.

O'REILLY: No! No! "If you put the blame where it really belongs"! There are the words!

PAGE: Bill, it's your show. You've got the whole hour. Just give me 30 seconds to respond.

The fact of the matter is, you're trying to pick out people and say certain people are helping the enemy and other people aren't. I mean, you are sounding like one of those editors of those Arab governments -- or those Arab newspapers that are censoring Muhammad cartoons.

O'REILLY: Clarence, I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, let's address --

PAGE: Don is entitled to give his opinion --

O'REILLY: He's entitled to his opinion --

PAGE: -- he's not telling Fox News that they shouldn't run your opinion. You shouldn't be telling other people not to run somebody else's --

O'REILLY: Don Wycliff is a coward, and he is not a man of his word. He backed out at the last minute --

PAGE: That's OK, he's got me.

O'REILLY: -- he is entitled to his opinion no matter how despicable it is, and now here's the lie. OK? Here's what he says, quote, "You have to say bad -- O'Reilly" --

PAGE: Don is a gentleman and a scholar and too nice to engage in these kind of combative --

O'REILLY: No, he -- bull! It's bull! He's a coward.

PAGE: I'm entitled to --

O'REILLY: He's a coward! He takes cheap shots, personal attacks at me and won't stand up. He's a coward. He says, O'Reilly "would have to criticize some people for whom you have been a cheerleader."

I've not been a cheerleader for anybody, Clarence. You know it and I know it. OK? Here's what I said May 6, 2004: "We will remind you three weeks ago we reported Donald Rumsfeld lost control of the Iraqi occupation, his mistakes were endangering U.S. troops." I haven't cheerleaded anyone. This guy lies about me in the Chicago Trib, which prints the lie! Explain.

PAGE: There are occasions when you have cheerleaded --

O'REILLY: Bull! Bull!

PAGE: -- and the administration's side. Now, you know --

O'REILLY: Bull!

PAGE: -- sometimes you do criticize, and that's OK. But the fact of the matter is it's a well-known -- very well-known that the -- I'm sorry, I hear the music coming. Am I going to be cut off?

O'REILLY: No! Cut off the music! It's very well-known what?

PAGE: No, it's very well known that you have been defending the administration's side in this war --

O'REILLY: That's bull! I have been very critical of the way they have way they waged the war.

PAGE: You have been criticizing those who criticize --

O'REILLY: I've been very critical of the way they've waged the war.

PAGE: -- any kind of question --

O'REILLY: Hey, Clarence, let me make this --

PAGE: -- on human rights.

O'REILLY: That's not true. Period. I've been very critical of the way the war has been waged.

PAGE: You criticized -- you said people who signed an anti-torture petition were helping the enemy.

O'REILLY: No!

PAGE: That's McCarthyism. That's demagoguery.

O'REILLY: Bullsh--! Bull.

PAGE: That's beneath you.

O'REILLY: It's bull! The truth is, I've reported this accurately. I've said when we've made mistakes -- we, the United States government.

But the difference between me and this Wycliff is that I want the USA to win, and I don't believe there's a moral equivalency with what we do with what the terrorists do, and he does. But Clarence, I've gotta tell everybody, you are a stand-up guy, number one.

PAGE: Well, thank you, Bill.

O'REILLY: You knew this was going to be tough. And we appreciate your opinion. You're always welcome here.

PAGE: Let's hear it for free speech, Bill.

— J.M.

Posted to the web on Friday June 23, 2006 at 7:06 PM EST

© 2006 Media Matters for America.

"Congress was briefed," Mr. Bush said. "And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America."

The New York Times, followed by The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, began publishing accounts of the program on Thursday evening.

In his remarks during a brief photo session in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Mr. Bush appeared irritated, at times leaning forward for emphasis, though he did not mention any newspaper by name.

Mr. Cheney, who had earlier said he was offended by news accounts of the financial tracking program, on Monday went a step further, singling out The Times for criticism in a separate appearance at a fundraising luncheon for a Republican candidate for Congress, Adrian Smith, in Grand Island, Neb.

"Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs," the vice president said, adding that the program provides "valuable intelligence" and has been "successful in helping break up terrorist plots."

The executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller, said in an e-mail statement on Monday evening that the decision to publish had been "a hard call." But Mr. Keller noted that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has "embarked on a number of broad, secret programs aimed at combating terrorism, often without seeking new legal authority or submitting to the usual oversight."

He added, "I think it would be arrogant for us to pre-empt the work of Congress and the courts by deciding these programs are perfectly legal and abuse-proof, based entirely on the word of the government."

Representative Peter King, Republican of New York and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, released a letter on Monday in which he called on the attorney general to investigate whether The Times's decision to publish the article violated the Espionage Act.

In a television interview on Sunday, Mr. King described the disclosure as "absolutely disgraceful" and said he believed that the newspaper's action had violated the statute.

In Nebraska on Monday, Mr. Cheney reminded his audience that The Times had also disclosed the National Security Agency's secret program of monitoring international communications of suspected terrorists without court warrants. Mr. Cheney said it was "doubly disturbing" that The Times printed the article and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest honor, for it.

"I think that is a disgrace," he said.

Administration officials had argued strongly that in reporting on the financial tracking operation, The Times would endanger national security by prompting the Belgian banking consortium that maintains the financial data to withdraw from the program. On Sunday, Mr. Keller, the paper's executive editor, posted a letter on The New York Times Web site saying that the newspaper "found this argument puzzling," partly because the banking consortium is compelled by subpoena to comply.

Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

Mr. Keller said in the letter that the administration had made a "secondary argument" that publication of the article would lead terrorists to change tactics, but he said that argument had been made "in a halfhearted way."

Mr. Snow, the Treasury secretary, challenged that view in strong terms in a letter to Mr. Keller, saying, "Nothing could be further from the truth." Mr. Snow said that he and other high-level officials, including Democrats, had made "repeated pleas" in an effort to dissuade The Times from publication. The letter was made public by the Treasury in a news release on Monday evening.

In explaining the newspaper's rationale for publication, Mr. Keller also wrote that it was not the newspaper's job "to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective" — an explanation that drew pointed criticism from Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, during a televised briefing on Monday.

Mr. Snow, who is not related to the Treasury secretary, said journalists made such judgments all the time, and accused The Times of endangering lives and departing from what he said was a longstanding tradition by news organizations of keeping government secrets during wartime.

"Traditionally in this country in a time of war, members of the press have acknowledged that the commander in chief, in the exercise of his powers, sometimes has to do things secretly in order to protect the public," Mr. Snow said. "This is a highly unusual departure."

Mr. Snow said there was no coordinated effort by the White House to ratchet up pressure on journalists, or The Times in particular. But he said the president seemed eager to have a chance to express his views about the issue, and decided at the last minute to take reporters' questions at Monday's photo session, after a meeting with supporters of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"If you want to figure out what the terrorists are doing, you try to follow their money," the president said. "And that's exactly what we're doing. And the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror."

On Capitol Hill, the financial-tracking program itself has not generated much criticism, even from Democrats, since its existence was disclosed. A spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said Mr. Reid was briefed on the program several weeks ago and had concluded that "it does not appear to be based on the same shaky and discredited legal analysis the vice president and his allies invoked to underpin the N.S.A. domestic spying program."

An exception has been Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has made privacy a signature issue and who said in an interview Monday that the Bush administration was adopting a strategy of "shoot the messenger" in trying to avoid Congressional oversight of the financial tracking program.

"There are very serious constitutional and legal questions that have been raised," Mr. Markey said, "and they're being obscured by this almost ad hominem attack on The New York Times."

Administration officials have held classified briefings about the banking program for some members of Congress and the Sept. 11 commission, intelligence and law enforcement officials said, and more lawmakers were briefed after the administration learned that The Times was making inquiries for an article about the program.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Joel McNally: GOP's illegal immigrant comes from another world

By Joel McNally
June 23, 2006

Illegal aliens gonna get your mama.

Certainly, a widespread invasion of purple people with tentacles growing out of them like the slimy creature that popped out of that guy's chest in the movie "Alien" would be a serious concern that should be addressed in the upcoming elections.

Talk about your threats to homeland security.

But it turns out the illegal aliens that Republican politicians are trying to get us all excited about aren't inter-planetary life forms that feast upon our internal organs. They are merely brown people who have come here to wash our dishes.

What a comedown. It can be a challenge to try to whip folks into a terrified frenzy over immigration from Mexico in a state that is nearly 2,000 miles from the border.

It's a piece of cake for politicians in states bordering Mexico to spread anti-immigrant bigotry. But ours is almost on the edge of Canada, where the greater threat is from hordes of illegal immigrants wearing ugly flannel shirts and hats with ear flaps.

That hasn't stopped determined Wisconsin politicians from jumping right in.

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has become a Spanish curse word for his vicious anti-immigrant legislation, which could imprison nearly 12 million immigrants and anyone else kind enough to serve them food at a soup kitchen.

Waukesha District Attorney Paul Bucher, running for the Republican nomination for attorney general, now wants to out-Sensenbrenner Sensenbrenner.

He brags on his Web site that he would become the first attorney general in the United States to seek authority from the federal government to track down illegal immigrants.

"I would use this authority to micro-target those illegal immigrants in this state who are violent criminals and felons cocaine dealers, gang bangers, murderers, child molesters and the like," Bucher blusters.

That sounds like a really tough, aggressive stand until you think about it. Bucher has built a career on making proposals that sound tough and aggressive until you think about them. He counts on appealing to voters who don't think.

The first thing you realize when you bother to think about what Bucher says is that there already are laws in this state against murder, child molestation, cocaine dealing and "gang banging," if that means what I think it means.

Police departments all over this state are arresting people who commit those crimes whether they are illegal immigrants or not. They don't need the attorney general to remind them to do that.

So how exactly is Bucher going to "micro-target" the tiny number of illegal immigrants who might get accused of murder in this state?

Will some alarm go off in Bucher's office whenever an undocumented Latino is accused of shooting somebody so he and a band of state agents can rush to the scene and shove local police out of the way?

Someone should tell Bucher that the state attorney general does not command an army. He keeps talking about putting "boots on the ground" to assist the federal government in arresting all those dastardly illegal immigrants.

It sounds as if employees of the attorney general's office under Bucher would be wearing storm trooper uniforms, complete with boots and sabers. Since their real duties involve providing legal advice to the state and filing environmental and consumer protection lawsuits, most of the current employees wear smart business suits.

Currently, only about 5 percent of more than 22,000 inmates in the Wisconsin prison system are illegal immigrants. We clearly are not being overrun by murdering, child-molesting illegal immigrants.

So, why exactly should the attorney general in Wisconsin, of all places, be the only attorney general in the United States authorized to track down illegal immigrants and perhaps march them through the streets in chains?

Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager put her finger on the obvious when she described the real motivation for Bucher and other Republicans around the country to try to play on the emotions of the public over immigration.

"It's creating a race war," Lautenschlager said. "It's just that simple. It's being done in an attempt to gain electoral advantage, and it's certainly not enhancing the country."

Bucher's response, like that of the corrupt police captain in "Casablanca," was to profess to be shocked, shocked that anyone would accuse him of race-baiting when he tries to insert the Wisconsin attorney general's office into immigration issues that are raging along the Mexican border.

"Does she even know the race of the 1,100 inmates identified by the state as being illegal aliens in our prisons?" Bucher asked. "I don't, and I couldn't care less."

That's an absolutely incredible statement. Bucher tries to stir up racial hatred against illegal immigrants by referring to them as murderers, child molesters and gang bangers. Then he claims he has no idea that the people he's talking about are Latinos.

Maybe we've identified the wrong side as the aliens.

Copyright 2006 The Capital Times

    Friday 23 June 2006

US Republicans are planning to change the law to stop black, Hispanic and Native American voters going to the polls in 2008.

    Don't kid yourself: the Republican party's decision yesterday to "delay" the renewal of the Voting Rights Act has not a darn thing to do with objections of the Republican's white sheets caucus.

    Complaints by a couple of good ol' boys to legislation have never stopped the GOP leadership from rolling over dissenters.

    This is a strategic stall that is meant to decriminalise the Republican party's new game of challenging voters of colour by the hundreds of thousands.

    In the 2004 presidential race, the GOP ran a massive, multi-state, multimillion-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of black, Hispanic and Native American voters. The methods used breached the Voting Rights Act, and while the Bush administration's civil rights division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers began circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the act before the 2008 race.

    So Republicans have promised to no longer break the law - not by going legit but by eliminating the law.

    The act was passed in 1965 after the Ku Klux Klan and other upright citizens found they could use procedural tricks - "literacy tests", poll taxes and more - to block citizens of colour from casting ballots.

    Here is what happened in 2004, and what's in store for 2008.

    In the 2004 election, more than 3 million voters were challenged at the polls. No one had seen anything like it since the era of Jim Crow and burning crosses. In 2004, voters were told their registrations had been purged or that their addresses were "suspect".

    Denied the right to the regular voting booths, these challenged voters were given "provisional" ballots. More than 1m of these provisional ballots (1,090,729 of them) were tossed in the electoral dumpster uncounted.

    A funny thing about those ballots: about 88% were cast by minority voters.

    This isn't a number dropped on me from a black helicopter: they come from the raw data of the US election assistance commission in Washington DC.

    At the heart of the GOP's mass challenge of voters was what the party's top brass called "caging lists" - secret files of hundreds of thousands of voters, almost every one from a black-majority voting precinct.

    When our investigations team, working for BBC TV, got our hands on these confidential files in October 2004, the Republicans told us the voters listed were their potential "donors". Really? The sheets included pages of men from homeless shelters in Florida.

    Donor lists, my ass. Every expert told us, these were "challenge lists" meant to stop these black voters from casting ballots.

    When these "caged" voters arrived at the polls in November 2004, they found their registrations missing, their right to vote blocked or their absentee ballots rejected because their addresses were supposedly "fraudulent".

    Why didn't the GOP honchos fess up to challenging these allegedly illegal voters? Because targeting voters of colour is against the law. The law in question is the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    The act says you can't go after groups of voters if you choose your targets based on race. Given that almost all the voters on the GOP hit list are black, the illegal racial profiling is beyond even Karl Rove's ability to come up with an alibi.

    The Republicans target black folk not because they don't like the colour of their skin; they don't like the colour of their vote: Democrat. For that reason, the GOP included on its hit list Jewish retirement homes in Florida. Apparently, the GOP was also gunning for the Elderly of Zion.

    These so-called "fraudulent" voters, in fact, were not fraudulent at all. Page after page, as we have previously reported, are black soldiers sent overseas. The Bush campaign used their absence from their US homes to accuse them of voting from false addresses.

    Now that the GOP has been caught breaking the voting rights law, it has found a way to keep using its expensively obtained "caging" lists: let the law expire next year. If the Voting Rights Act dies in 2007, the 2008 race will be open season on dark-skinned voters. Only the renewal of the Voting Rights Act can prevent the planned racial wrecking of democracy.

    Before the 2000 presidential ballot, then Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black citizens' registrations on the grounds that they were "felons" not entitled to vote. Our review of the files determined that the crime of most people on the list was nothing more than VWB -Voting While Black.

    That "felon scrub", as the state called it, had to be "pre-cleared" under the Voting Rights Act. That is, the US justice department must approve "scrubs" and other changes in procedures.

    The Florida felon scrub slipped through this "pre-clearance" provision because Katherine Harris's assistant assured the government the scrub was just a clerical matter. Civil rights lawyers are now on the alert for such mendacity.

    The burning cross caucus of the Republican Party is bitching that "pre-clearance" of voting changes applies only to southern states. I have to agree that singling out the old confederacy is a bit unfair. But the solution is not to smother the voting rights law but to spread its safeguards to all 50 of these United States.

    Republicans argue that the racial voting games and the threats of the white-hooded Klansmen that kept African-Americans from the ballot box before the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act no longer threaten black voters.

    That's true. When I look over the "caging lists" and the "scrub sheets", it's clear to me that the GOP has traded in white sheets for spreadsheets.

    Greg Palast is an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering turned journalist. Tribune magazine called him "the most important investigative reporter of our time" and he is best known in his native USA for his investigative work on how thousands of black people were not able to vote in the Florida ballot at the 2000 election in which George Bush was elected president.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Survival of the Richest
The real "Two Americas" are not the poor and everyone else, but the mega-rich and everyone else.

By Robert Kuttner
Web Exclusive: 06.26.06

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Former senator John Edwards gave a terrific speech to the National Press Club Thursday, one that felt like eloquence from another age. His theme: America should end poverty in three decades, mainly by rewarding work and promoting opportunity.

"Poverty is the great moral issue of our time," Edwards declared. This speech was his de facto kickoff for a run at the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Unlike most of the undeclared Democratic field, Edwards is not putting his finger to the prevailing wind. He's trying to change it. After his 2004 vice-presidential run, Edwards admirably went home to the University of North Carolina to head its Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity.

Though the speech was long-scheduled, Edwards' timing was unerring. On Wednesday, Senator Edward Kennedy's bill to raise the federal minimum wage from its paltry $5.15 an hour to $7.25 won the votes of 52 senators, a majority, including eight Republicans. But the Republican leadership blocked it with a filibuster.

Meanwhile, as if to underscore just whose interests they serve, the Republican majority in the House pushed through a bill to repeal the estate tax, except for the mega-rich. Only estates of over $5 million ($10 million for couples) would pay any tax; most of them would pay just 15 percent.

The Senate takes up repeal next week. Last week, Senate sponsors fell three votes short. So the Republican leadership has added a billion-dollar bribe in tax cuts to the timber industry, hoping to lure two wavering Democrats from Washington State, Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray.

The minimum wage increase would raise incomes for some 7.3 million Americans directly; as wages at the bottom rose, another 8.2 million would likely get modest raises, too. Counting workers' families, at least 30 million Americans would gain improved living standards.

By contrast, estate tax repeal would reward a few thousand mega-rich. However, wealth has become so highly concentrated that the cost would be $760 billion over a decade. Keeping the estate tax as it was before the Bush cuts would affect only the top 2 percent, and the revenue could pay for much of Edwards' program to reward work.

But if the right's legislation passes, $760 billion more of deficits will intensify pressure to repeal what's left of federal outlays on health insurance, aid to education, child care, home-ownership -- all the supports that help working people get out of poverty and help anchor the middle class.

This brings me back to Edwards' bravely unfashionable speech. Today there are 37 million poor people in America -- out of just under 300 million. Back when Franklin Roosevelt delivered his famous second inaugural address in 1937, declaring "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," a third of Americans were indeed poor, and another third had good reason to fear poverty. The vulnerability of the non-poor was a major issue that FDR brilliantly energized.

Today, with only 12 percent of Americans officially poor, the challenge of leadership is more complex. Yet four Americans in five have had basically stagnant living standards since the mid-1970s. That's because three decades of economic growth have gone almost entirely to the top, not merely the top 20 percent but mainly the top 1 percent.

Estate tax repeal is just part of the story. Executive pay, relative to typical worker pay, has risen tenfold in two decades.

The right has managed to savage the institutions that produced increasing opportunity and a broader middle class in the decades after World War II -- minimum wages, trade unionism, job-security, decent health and retirement plans, affordable college and housing, Social Security that rose with inflation, and economic regulation to keep Wall Street from grabbing most of the winnings.

The middle class hasn't been so insecure since the depression. But today, unlike 1937, this epic reversal is off the political radar screen. The insecurity is experienced privately rather than as a national issue.

It's courageous of Edwards to tackle poverty. But if he wants to become a presidential contender by re-introducing unspoken realities of class to American political discourse, there is a far larger class of people taking an economic bath. It's four Americans out of five. The real "Two Americas" are not the poor and everyone else, but the mega-rich and everyone else.

If we want to help the poor, prevent giveaways to the elite, and anchor a secure middle -- let's get the working middle class and the working poor back in the same broad coalition. I look forward to Edwards' next speech on that.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe.

© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.

STEVEN F. FREEMAN AND JOEL BLEIFUSS

A call to investigate the 2004 election

By Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss  |  June 26, 2006

WE'VE ALL heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of celebration for Democrats. The exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political observers, sat down to watch the evening television coverage convinced that Kerry would be the next president.

But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. But the exit poll discrepancy is not the only cause for concern.

In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman of the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign, borrowed a chapter from Secretary of State Katharine Harris's Florida 2000 playbook. Like Harris, he used the power of his office to affect turnout and thwart voters in heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohio have been documented, first in January 2005 by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, and in June 2005 by the Democratic National Committee, which found, in the words of DNC Chairman Howard Dean: ``More than a quarter of all Ohio voters reported problems with their voting experience."

Election Day 2004 also saw the advent of a congressional mandate under the Help America Vote Act to replace punch-card systems with new, unproven technologies. In that election, 64 percent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan systems, both of which are vulnerable to hacking or programming fraud. According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office investigation, such systems contained flaws that ``could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to . . . the integrity of the voting process."

A reasonable person could thus argue that a well-conducted exit poll that confirmed the official count would be about the only reason we would have to believe the results of such an election. Without an audit or a recount to verify the official count, those of us who suspect that the presidential election was stolen do so based on the information now available.

In the days after the election, the media largely ignored this exit poll discrepancy. When it was mentioned, it was only to report that the exit polls -- based on a confidential, 25-question written survey of 114,559 voters in 1,480 precincts -- were flawed. The discrepancy, however, was real and beyond the statistical margin of error. On that, there is widespread agreement. What is still being debated is only the reasons for the discrepancy.

In January 2005, on the eve of Bush's inauguration, the two men who conducted the 2004 exit poll, Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, released their promised explanation. Their report began: ``The inaccuracies in the exit-poll estimates were not due to the sample selection of the polling locations at which the exit polls were conducted." In other words, the precincts they sampled were representative of the nation, so the discrepancy was not the result of choosing unrepresentative precincts.

The data they released allows researchers to correlate voter characteristics (race, age, sex, etc.) with voting preferences -- but it was not the data that identified specific exit poll results with specific precincts. That data remains the property of the media consortium (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and the AP) that commissioned the polls. No one has provided a coherent account of how polling error could explain the discrepancy. We have only the pollsters' blithe assertion that Kerry voters must have disproportionately participated in the polls. Yet the available state-level data contradicts the pollsters' explanation, also termed the ``reluctant Bush respondent" theory. The data does show that key variables -- racial makeup of a state, partisan control of governorships, whether a state is a swing state, and reports of Election Day complaints -- all correlate with the magnitude of the poll discrepancy.

The report also indicated that for rural and small-town precincts -- the only ones where comparable data does exist -- the difference between the exit poll results and the official count is three times greater in precincts where voters used machines than in precincts using paper ballots alone. If we had access to the withheld precinct-level data, we would be able to investigate whether the size of the exit poll discrepancy correlates with the voting technology used.

For these reasons and more, it is imperative that our newspapers of record as well as our governmental oversight bodies now investigate the question people continue to ask: Was the 2004 election stolen?

Joel Bleifuss and Steven F. Freeman are authors of the book ``Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?"

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 25, 2006; A01

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.

"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."

While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.

Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech. Other warnings came prior to President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. In the same speech that contained the now famous "16 words" on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium, Bush spoke in far greater detail about mobile labs "designed to produce germ warfare agents."

The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials said. In briefing Powell before his U.N. speech, George Tenet, then the CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim, according to participants in the briefing. Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.

"No one mentioned Drumheller, or Curveball," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, said in an interview. "I didn't know the name Curveball until months afterward."

Curveball's role in shaping U.S. declarations about Iraqi bioweapons capabilities was first described in a series of reports in the Los Angeles Times, and later in a March 2005 report by a presidential commission on U.S. intelligence failures regarding allegations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Drumheller's first-hand accounts add new detail about the CIA's embrace of a source whose credibility was already unraveling.

More than a year after Powell's speech, after an investigation that extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.

But in the fall of 2002, Curveball was living the life of an important spy. A Baghdad native whose real name has never been released, he was residing in a safe house in Germany, where he had requested asylum three years earlier. In return for immigration permits for himself and his family, the Iraqi supplied Germany's foreign intelligence service with what appeared to be a rare insider's account of one of President Saddam Hussein's long-rumored WMD programs.

Curveball described himself as a chemical engineer who had worked inside an unusual kind of laboratory, one that was built on a trailer bed and produced weapons for germ warfare. He furnished detailed, technically complex descriptions of mobile labs and even described an industrial accident that he said killed a dozen people.

The German intelligence agency BND faithfully passed Curveball's stories to the Americans. Over time, the informant generated more than 100 intelligence reports on secret Iraqi weapons programs -- the only such reports from an informant claiming to have visited and worked in mobile labs. Other informants, also later discredited, had claimed indirect knowledge of mobile labs.

In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats. Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball. Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service.

The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid assessment, Drumheller recalled. "He said, 'I think the guy is a fabricator,' " Drumheller said, recounting the conversation with the official, whom he declined to name. "He said: 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports.' "

When Drumheller relayed the warning to his superiors in October 2002, it sparked what he described as "a series of the most contentious meetings I've ever seen" in three decades of government work.

Although no American had ever interviewed Curveball, analysts with the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control believed the informant's technical descriptions were too detailed to be fabrications.

"People were cursing. These guys were absolutely, violently committed to it," Drumheller said. "They would say to us, 'You're not scientists, you don't understand.' "

In January 2003, Drumheller received a new request from CIA headquarters to contact the German intelligence service about Curveball. This time, Drumheller recalled, the U.S. spy agency had three questions:

Could a U.S. official refer to Curveball's mobile lab accounts in an upcoming political speech?

Could the Germans guarantee that Curveball would stand by his account?

Could German intelligence verify Curveball's claims?

The reply from Berlin, as Drumheller recalls it, was less than encouraging: There are no guarantees.

"They said, 'We have never been able to verify his claims,' " Drumheller recalled. "And that was all sent up to Tenet's office."

When Drumheller listened to Bush's speech several days later, he was astonished to hear the mobile labs described in detail.

"Boom, there it was," he said.

A few days later, Drumheller was handed a draft of another key speech on Iraq: Powell's remarks to the U.N. Security Council accusing Hussein of reconstituting his WMD programs. This time, the speech included an obvious reference to Curveball -- an unnamed "chemical engineer" who worked in one of the labs -- as well as detailed drawings of mobile labs inspired by Curveball's descriptions.

Drumheller said he called the office of John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director, and was told to come there immediately. Drumheller said he sat across from McLaughlin and an aide in a small conference room and spelled out his concerns.

McLaughlin responded with alarm and said Curveball was "the only tangible source" for the mobile lab story, Drumheller recalled, adding that the deputy director promised to quickly investigate.

Portions of Drumheller's account of his meetings with McLaughlin and Tenet appear in the final report of the Silberman-Robb commission, which was appointed by Bush to investigate prewar U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq's weapons programs. The report cites e-mails and interviews with other CIA officials who were aware of the meetings.

In responding to questions about Drumheller, McLaughlin provided The Post with a copy of the statement he gave in response to the commission's report. The statement said he had no memories of the meeting with Drumheller and had no written documentation that the meeting took place.

"If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech," McLaughlin said in the statement.

In their briefings to Powell on Feb. 4, one day before the secretary's U.N. speech, Tenet and McLaughlin expressed nothing but confidence in the mobile-lab story, according to Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was present during the briefings.

"Powell and I were both suspicious because there were no pictures of the mobile labs," Wilkerson said. The drawings were constructed from Curveball's accounts.

But the CIA officials were persuasive. Wilkerson said the two men described the evidence on the mobile labs as exceptionally strong, based on multiple sources whose stories were independently corroborated.

"They said: 'This is it, Mr. Secretary. You can't doubt this one,' " Wilkerson said.

On the eve of the U.N. speech, Drumheller received a late-night phone call from Tenet, who said he was checking final details of the speech. Drumheller said he brought up the mobile labs.

"I said: 'Hey, boss, you're not going to use that stuff in the speech . . . ? There are real problems with that,' " Drumheller said, recalling the conversation.

Drumheller recalled that Tenet seemed distracted and tired and told him not to worry.

The following day, Tenet was seated directly behind Powell at the U.N. Security Council as the secretary of state presented a detailed lecture and slide show about an Iraqi mobile biological weapons program.

Tenet, responding to questions about Drumheller's accounts, provided to The Post a statement he had given in response to the Silberman-Robb Commission report in which he said he didn't learn of the problems with Curveball until much later. He did not recall talking to Drumheller about Curveball, and said it was "simply wrong" for anyone to imply that he knew about the problems with Curveball's credibility.

"Nobody came forward to say there is a serious problem with Curveball or that we have been told by the foreign representative of the service handling him that there are worries that he is a 'fabricator,' " Tenet said in his statement.

In late summer 2003, seven months after the U.N. speech, Tenet called Powell to say that the Curveball story had fallen apart, Wilkerson said. The call amounted to an admission that all of the CIA's claims Powell used in his speech about Iraqi weapons were wrong.

"They had hung on for a long time, but finally Tenet called Powell to say, 'We don't have that one, either,' " Wilkerson recalled. "The mobile labs were the last thing to go."

Staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company