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Toooooooooo funny,
I guess the only thing that might be bigger than his ego is his opinion of his........johnson?
KERRY GAFFE ON ITALY? [Michael Ledeen]
All Italy is abuzzing today about a Kerry gaffe aired last night on HBO in Italy. As reported in today's Corriere della Sera in Italy, Defense Minister Antonio Martino criticized John Kerry for an incredible remark that the conditions of the Iraqi Army were so bad that even the Italian Army could kick their a**es.
Martino remarked that Kerry, "instead of saying what he thinks, should think about what he says."
But that would be too much for the great statesman from Massachusetts, wouldn't it?
ROMA - Il ministro della Difesa, Antonio Martino, ha provato «grande amarezza e dispiacere» per le dichiarazioni di John Kerry, secondo il quale «le condizioni dell'esercito iracheno erano talmente patetiche che persino l'esercito italiano avrebbe potuto prenderli a calci nel sedere». Nell'apprendere le affermazioni del senatore, pronunciate in campagna elettorale e di cui ieri Kerry si è scusato in tv, Martino avrebbe detto: «Il senatore Kerry, invece di dire quello che pensa, dovrebbe pensare a quello che dice»
Movies and Politics
Posted by: Jon Henke
Standing in for what seems like the entire Democratic establishment--roundup here--here’s a look at the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party.
DNC Blog, Nov 4, 2003:
CBS has decided to pull its miniseries about Ronald Reagan after a Republican National Committee-organized campaign complaining that it didn’t lionize their favorite president enough.
CBS’s decision is - to put it mildly - disturbing. Essentially the network has given the ruling party veto power over the content it puts on the air.
[...]
Given this White House’s habit for controlling media coverage and altering the truth to fit its agenda, every American should be concerned about CBS’s decision to knuckle under this pressure
Kerry/Edwards Blog, October 12, 2004:
Yesterday, the Democratic National Committee announced that the DNC was filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging that Sinclair’s broadcasting of this film constituted an illegal in-kind corporate contribution to the Bush campaign.
To take action, go the DNC’s special Sinclair web site, sign the petition, and use the list of phone numbers for all of Sinclair’s stations to call them and let them know what you think about this outrageous attempt to manipulate the election.
To summarize:
1. RNC complains about movie = RNC trying to control the media!
2. DNC complains about movie and files FEC complaint = Power to the People!
NOTE: I don’t have an opinion on either this movie, or the Reagan pic. I do find it odd, though, that the DNC--which pushed Fahrenheit 9/11 and other anti-Bush/pro-Kerry movies hard--has suddenly gotten so interested in the accuracy of movies.
UPDATE: Another!
Eric Alterman, writing for the Center for American Progress (November 6, 2003)
Instead [of airing The Reagans], [CBS] bowed to something in America that turns out to be even more powerful than the promise of a single-night’s killing; a well-organized movement of pressure groups willing to threaten its advertising base.
Center for American Progress writers, writing for Alternet (October 12, 2004)
Email Sinclair President David D. Smith and tell him to stop airing partisan propaganda.
A lot changes in one year, doesn’t it?
Permalink / Comments ( 10 ) / TrackBacks ( 1 )
The roar should be deafening- they practiced last night- Who's you dad-dy
I guess Shelling didn't follow up on his pledge to shut up the fans too well, did he??
Sorry, couldn't resist
says the recession actually began in March 2001, after Bush took office in January.
This is a distinction that really carries no weight. Evem if the recession has began in march, what could Bush have done at that point to make a difference between January and March? Get real. HIs budget didn't take effect until July I believe. THe economy doesn't turn on a dime. The stock market bubble bursting had a profound effect on the economy. It was clear, due to many indicators that the economy was slowing. To parse between in recession and on the verge or precipice of recession is just not meaningful
THis might interest you also:
Job Losses Started Under Bill Clinton
Much has been made of the job losses that have occurred during the George Bush administration, even though most of that talk ignores the single greatest foreign attack on American soil and its tremendous economic impact. However, frequent CQ contributor Bandit has done a bit more research into recent job-loss history and finds that the rosy picture painted about the Clinton years by the Kerry campaign and his media allies is more cartoon than realism:
First major signs that all was not well surfaced in May 2000. This is the month the biggest recorded decline in jobs in eight years - 116,000 jobs disappeared [see private-sector jobs -- CE]. What made this number even more alarming is that the cutbacks were widespread affecting all sectors: 29,000 jobs in construction, 71,000 in wholesale and retail, 17,000 in manufacturing, and 11,000 in transportation. ...
The unions were sensing not all was well under Clinton's booming economy, in August 1999 the AFL-CIO, in a report to the Clinton Administration, said the manufacturing sector ``is in crisis, having lost 491,000 jobs since March 1998. Little has been done to assist manufacturing companies in coping.''
A Seattle Times article dated November 07, 1999 was projecting 1 million job cuts in the coming year.
The White House put out a little noticed Press release on March 5, 1999 that read: "Reflecting the weakness in the world economy, manufacturing employment fell 1.8 percent during the past year."
Bandit asks: Where was John Kerry while these portents of economic crisis appeared? Campaigning for Al Gore on the Clinton economic record while it fell apart, apparently. We know that the Democrats have tried to sell the resultant recession as Bush's problem, but economists have insisted that the economy fell back into recession as early as before the 2000 election. And while all this went on, John Kerry sat in the US Senate and did nothing -- introduced no legislation or took any action at all. He didn't even go out and open a business to create any jobs, even with the vast wealth at his fingertips.
John Kerry: the do-nothing candidate.
Even Christopher Reeves backe him up on this. Scientists involved in this area have said that the statement is irresponsible. It's sleazy trial lawyer pandering. Yes, ANYTHING could happen in the future- that doesn't make his statement any less irresponsible for many obvious reasons
DO YOU BELIVE HIS CLAIMS TO BE TRUE? WILL THESE MONENTOUS GAINS ONLY BE MADE IF KERRY IS PRESIDENT?
My fellow non-Americans ...
The result of the US election will affect the lives of millions around the world but those of us outside the 50 states have had no say in it - until now. In a unique experiment, G2 has assembled a democratic toolkit to enable people from Basildon to Botswana to campaign in the presidential race. And with a little help from the folks in Clark County, Ohio, you might help decide who takes up residence in the White House next month. Oliver Burkeman explains how
Get the name of a US voter
Wednesday October 13, 2004
The Guardian
It's just possible that you have heard this once or twice before recently, but the forthcoming American election, on November 2, may be the most important in living memory. People have been saying this about every presidential race for decades - but, as one environmentalist put it recently in a US newspaper interview, precisely the problem with crying wolf is that sometimes there is a wolf. You would be forgiven, though, for feeling increasingly helpless as you hear the "most important election" mantra repeated daily: unless you happen to be a voter in a handful of swing states, there's little you can do about the final result. If you're not American, the situation is more acute. Certainly, the actions of the US impact on our lives in overwhelming ways; British political life may now be at least as heavily influenced by White House policy as by the choices of UK voters. And yet, though the US Declaration of Independence speaks of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind", you don't, of course, have a vote. You can't even donate money to the campaigns: foreign contributions are outlawed. And you're unlikely to have the chance to do any campaigning on the ground. All you can do is wait and watch: you're powerless.
Or are you? At G2, that sounded like fighting talk. Where others might see delusions of grandeur, we saw an opportunity for public service - and so, on the following pages, we have assembled a handy set of tools that non-Americans can use to have a real chance of influencing the outcome of the vote. We've identified ways to give money to help your preferred candidate, even though direct campaign contributions from foreigners aren't allowed. There are ideas for making your voice heard in the influential local media outlets where it could really count. And at the core of it is a unique scheme to match individual Guardian readers to individual American voters, giving you the opportunity to write a personal letter, citizen to citizen, explaining why this election matters to you, and which issues you think ought to matter to the US electorate. It may even be a chance to persuade somebody to use their vote at all.
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To maximise the likelihood of your efforts making a difference, we've zeroed in on one of the places where this year's election truly will be decided: Clark County, Ohio, which is balanced on a razor's edge between Republicans and Democrats. In the 2000 election, Al Gore won Clark County by 1% - equivalent to 324 votes - but George Bush won the state as a whole by just four percentage points. This time round, Ohio is one of the most crucial swing states: Kerry and Bush have been campaigning there tire lessly - they've visited Clark County itself - and the most recent Ohio poll shows, once again, a 1% difference between the two of them. The voters we will target in our letter-writing initiative are all Clark County residents, and they are all registered independents, which somewhat increases the chances of their being persuadable.
Several of the ideas described here can easily be applied across the US too, though, and we have provided further resources on our website for this purpose. While there's no point being coy about Britain's preferences in this election (never mind those of Guardain readers) - a poll last month put backing for Kerry at 47%, against 16% for Bush - we have included information for supporters of both main candidates.
It's worth considering at the outset how counterproductive this might all be, especially if approached undiplomatically. Anybody might be justifiably angered by the idea of a foreigner trying to interfere in their democratic process. But this year the issue is more charged than ever: the Bush/Cheney campaign has made a point of portraying Kerry as overly concerned about what other nations think, and the Democrat's ambiguous debate point about American foreign policy decisions needing to pass a "global test" has become one of the president's key lines of attack. "People don't necessarily want to hear what people from other countries have to say," says Rachelle Valladares, the London-based chair of Democrats Abroad. "If you contact someone you know personally in the States, and urge them to vote, it would probably carry twice the weight." Michael Dorf, a Columbia university law professor who has studied foreign influences on US elections, points out that it would not be to either candidate's advantage "to be seen as the candidate of the foreigners. Part of it's just xenophobia, but there is also a sense that, you know, this is our election: you vote for your parliament and prime minister, we vote for our president and Congress."
On the other hand, being from Britain ought to give you a certain leverage: in stump speeches and debates, Bush has repeatedly praised Tony Blair's cooperation over Iraq, making America's long-treasured alliance with the UK key to the president's defence of his foreign policy. Kerry, too, knows that he's speaking to a resilient strand of opinion when he emphasises the need for strong international alliances: a better coalition in Iraq, he constantly reiterates, might have saved US lives. (One recent poll suggested that 43% of Americans think that declining world respect for their nation is a "major problem".) As a British citizen, you can certainly wield some influence, but you could seriously alienate people too.
Write to a voter
The most powerful transatlantic connection is a personal one, so we have designed a system to match individual Guardian readers with individual voters in Clark County, in the crucial swing state of Ohio. To join in, visit www.guardian.co.uk/clarkcounty and enter your email address. You'll receive, by email, the name and postal address of a Clark County voter. We have included only those voters who chose to list themselves as unaffiliated, instead of as Republican or Democrat: that is no guarantee that they are persuadable, of course, but it does increase the chances. The data on which our system is based is publicly available, but we have designed it to give out each address only once, so there is no danger of recipients getting deluged.
In formulating your letter, you will need to introduce yourself: no individual Clark County voter will have any reason to be expecting your communication. And in choosing your arguments, keep in mind the real risk of alienating your reader by coming across as interfering or offensive. You might want to handwrite your letter, for additional impact, and we strongly recommend including your own name and address - it lends far more credibility to your views, and you might get a reply.
Finally, post your letter soon. Letters sent by regular airmail from the UK to the US usually take five days to reach their recipient, and there is little time to waste. Postage costs 43p for a postcard, 47p for a letter weighing 10g or less, and 68p for a letter weighing up to 20g. You don't have to visit a post office, but Royal Mail recommends writing "Par Avion - By Airmail" on the front of the envelope, and your return address on the back.
Give money
American law forbids foreigners from giving money to affect the outcome of a federal election - except that, on closer inspection, it doesn't. You're banned from donating to the campaigns themselves, or to many of the independent campaigning groups that fight explicitly on behalf of one candidate. So you need to identify officially non-partisan groups whose activities, none the less, have the practical effect of helping one candidate over the other. "Perhaps the most important way foreigners could help John Kerry would be to help out those organisations which have, as part of their mission, fostering African-American voter turnout," says Nathaniel Persily, a Pennsylvania university expert on election law. "It's quite clear that if there was 100% African-American turnout in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, John Kerry would win this election running away." The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the most obvious choice here - an influential, well-organised, non-partisan body whose get-out-the-vote activities are extremely likely to end up helping the Democrats.
"On the Republican side, it would be the Christian conservatives," Persily adds. "[Bush adviser] Karl Rove has tried to register four million additional Christian evangelicals, and if they all turn out, then Bush wins." The leading option here would be the Christian Coalition, which describes itself as "America's leading grassroots organisation defending our Godly heritage". As for more overtly partisan organisations, we don't recommend trying to donate - but it's worth pointing out that much of the law banning foreign contributions has never been tested in court and, argues Michael Dorf at Columbia, may even be unconstitutional on grounds of free speech. "If a group calling itself Europeans for Truth wants to run ads giving their view of the truth," Dorf says, "it's hard to draw a principled distinction between that and a British newspaper available at a US newsstand that has an editorial calling Bush and Blair liars."
Visit the NAACP website: http://www.naacp.org
Give to the NAACP: https://www.naacp.org/contribute.php or fax a credit-card donation to 001 410 580 5623.
Give to the NAACP in Ohio:
Send a money order marked "donation" to NAACP, 233 South High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215 USA. Give to the Christian Coalition: www.cc.org or phone 001 202 479 6900.
Give to the Christian Coalition in Ohio: www.ccohio.org or phone 001 330 8871922, or send a money order to Christian Coalition of Ohio, PO Box 852, Westfield Center, Ohio 44251, USA. For resources on giving money in other swing states, visit www.guardian.co.uk/clarkcounty.
Make your voice heard
If you want to broadcast your views to a wider audience, focus on the media outlets swing-state residents are reading and hearing. Take care: deluging the same organisation with numerous near-identical messages rarely impresses (we speak from experience), and some activists have run into controversy recently by disseminating "astroturf" - letters purporting to be personal but emanating, in reality, from party headquarters. Springfielders read the Springfield News Sun (www.springfieldnewssun.com;) and the Columbus Dispatch (www.dispatch.com), based in the nearby state capital, is another influential outlet.
If you're feeling brave, though, you might want to explore the highly influential talk-radio airwaves. On the right, the overarchingly dominant figure is Rush Limbaugh, heard on hundreds of stations nationwide, including 19 in Ohio, some of which can be heard in Clark County. This is a strictly at-your-own-risk proposition, but if you want to join the debate, listen to the show live on the web at www.rushlimbaugh.com, between 5pm and 8pm UK time every weekday, and call in on 001 800 282 2882. Among yesterday's topics: why John Kerry doesn't understand the significance of 9/11; why John Kerry would be dangerous for America; how John Kerry politicised the death of Christopher Reeve.
Air America, the upstart liberal radio counterweight, is still in its infancy, but it can be picked up in parts of Ohio and other battleground states. Listen to the flagship show presented by the leftwing humourist Al Franken at www.airamericaradio.com, also between 5pm and 8pm on weekdays, then call in on 001 866 303 2270 (neither call will be free from the UK). Franken's focus yesterday was the "absolutely shameless" behaviour of the conservative media in America.
You can target your message on other key states by visiting a website such as www.electoral-vote.com, which updates regularly with the latest local polls, so that you can identify where the race is currently closest. Select your state, then call up a list of relevant media contacts - or even send them emails directly - via the impressively comprehensive Capitol Advantage site at http://ssl.capwiz.com/congressorg/dbq/media/.
Win the chance to campaign on the ground
We are offering the four people who write the most persuasive letters to Clark County voters the chance to travel there and campaign in person. At the end of October, the winners will accompany a group of Guardian journalists to Ohio to meet voters and participate in the closing days of the race. For a chance to take part, you should email a copy of your letter to clark.county@guardian.co.uk, or send a copy to Clark County competition, G2, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. Letters should arrive no later than October 20.
· For more details on how you can get involved and latest news from the US campaign trail, go to guardian.co.uk/uselections2004. For terms and conditions of the Clark County competition, see www.guardian.co.uk/clarkcounty.
Special report
US elections 2004
UFB I'm sure Kerry would approve- Eurpoeans are his natural constituency. THe Guardian is going to interfere in our democratic process
What about the demo voter fraud attempts- are those fascist as well. Don't you think all attempts should be uncovered.
I'm sure you're familiar with all the demo "get out the vote" efforts thata re tied ot the DNC?
THE MOTHER OF ALL VOTE FRAUDS [10/13 11:54 AM]
Via the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, citing vote-fraud concerns, is publicly balking at a City of Milwaukee request for almost 260,000 additional ballots in anticipation of high turnout for the Nov. 2 presidential election.
Mayor Tom Barrett blasted Walker's stance, and Common Council President Willie Hines Jr. immediately joined in, saying it was an attempt to suppress the central-city vote.
"I'm going to lay this at the footsteps of the county if there aren't enough ballots in the city," said Barrett.
Barrett said that the 679,000 ballots the county had agreed to print were less than the amount prepared for the presidential election in 2000 as well as for the the gubernatorial race in 2002. He and the city's top election official said that the city requested 938,000 ballots from the county, which, by law, pays for and prints ballots.
In a letter sent to City Elections chief Lisa Artison, Walker said that he had "serious questions" about the need for that many ballots when the city reported having 382,000 registered voters in September.
Wisconsin radio show host Charlie Sykes observes:
The total population in Milwaukee: 596,974 in 2000 and 593,920 in 2004 The total number of people who are of legal voting age in Milwaukee in 2004: 423,811
Total votes cast in 2000 fall election: 245,670
Total votes cast in 2002 fall election: 141,351 (pre-registration of 335,889)
Okay, Team Bush. When does the President himself make a public statement about this? This appears to be a coordinated effort on the part of local officials to stuff the ballot box and make sure the votes of law-abiding Americans get cancelled out.
UPDATE: The Kerry Spot despises efforts to mess with the ballot box, whoever is doing it. A former employee of Voters Outreach of America claims that this private voter-registration company is throwing out non-Republican voter registration forms. This former employee has gone to the FBI. The feds ought to investigate, and if this organization did what its former employees charged, then they should get the book thrown at them.
The one mistake W SHOULD admit to is signing the campaign finance reform bill
Chechen terrorists probed
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
U.S. security officials are investigating a recent intelligence report that a group of 25 Chechen terrorists illegally entered the United States from Mexico in July.
The Chechen group is suspected of having links to Islamist terrorists seeking to separate the southern enclave of Chechnya from Russia, according to officials familiar with intelligence reports.
Members of the group, said to be wearing backpacks, secretly traveled to northern Mexico and crossed into a mountainous part of Arizona that is difficult for U.S. border security agents to monitor, said officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The intelligence report was supplied to the U.S. government in late August or early September and was based on information from an intelligence source that has been proved reliable in other instances, one official said.
A second U.S. official said the report is being investigated, but said it could not be determined whether the group of Chechens actually entered the country, as the intelligence source reported.
"We don't know whether or not that report is true," this official said.
A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that the intelligence report was provided by another government agency, but said Border Patrol agents were unable to verify its accuracy.
It could not be learned whether the reported infiltration is related to the recent Education Department warning to school officials to examine security in the aftermath of the attack last month by pro-Chechnya Muslim terrorists on a school in Russia, in which more than 300 people were killed and some 700 wounded.
In the Russian attack, heavily armed Islamists took over and wired with explosives the school building in Beslan, North Ossetia. It is believed that an accidental explosion set off a battle between Russian security personnel and the terrorists, who set off several explosions and shot schoolchildren and teachers as they tried to escape.
U.S. officials believe the Beslan terrorists included some al Qaeda-linked foreign terrorists.
The Education Department letter said that school officials should examine "protective measure guidance" for helping to prevent and respond to a similar terrorist attack, were it to occur in the United States.
The notice said the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are "currently unaware of any specific, credible information indicating a terrorist threat to public and private schools, universities or colleges in the United States."
The letter stated that indicators of terrorist surveillance before an attack include interest in site plans for schools, bus routes and attendance lists from persons who don't normally request such information.
Authorities also were advised to remain alert for "static surveillance" by people who may be disguised as panhandlers, shoeshiners, newspaper or flower vendors, or street sweepers who seem out of place in a particular area.
Other indicators of terrorist surveillance can include spying on school security drills, people staring at employees or vehicles in parking areas, and surveillance by pedestrians.
Fears of an attack on American schools also were raised by the recent discovery in Iraq of a computer disk containing data showing the layout of six schools in the United States, including districts in California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey and Oregon.
Officials believed the disk may have been part of a terrorist plot. However, FBI officials said on Friday that there did not appear to be a terrorist threat connected to the computer disk.
The Iraqi who had the disk, a member of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, apparently was collecting information from the Internet sites of American schools that would be useful for emergency planning for Iraqi schools, U.S. officials said.
U.S. security officials have been concerned in recent months that al Qaeda or other terrorists are planning to enter the United States from Mexico.
Intelligence officials said a suspected al Qaeda leader who has been in the United States was spotted recently in Mexico. Officials believe Adnan Shukrijumah, whom the FBI wants for questioning, met with alien smugglers in Mexico and Honduras and was seeking ways to bring al Qaeda members into the United States. Shukrijumah was seen in August in the Sonora province of northern Mexico, officials said.
Since October 2003, authorities have arrested five Arabs attempting to cross illegally into the United States from Mexico.
In July, officials dismissed as untrue an Internet report that said a group of Middle Eastern men were recently caught trying to cross the border from Mexico.
The report apparently was based on a group of Oaxacan tribesmen who were stopped as they tried to cross the border in Arizona. The tribesmen spoke an Indian language native to southern Mexico that may have been mistaken for Arabic, officials said at the time.
the open border policy is suicide
Chechen terrorists probed
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
U.S. security officials are investigating a recent intelligence report that a group of 25 Chechen terrorists illegally entered the United States from Mexico in July.
The Chechen group is suspected of having links to Islamist terrorists seeking to separate the southern enclave of Chechnya from Russia, according to officials familiar with intelligence reports.
Members of the group, said to be wearing backpacks, secretly traveled to northern Mexico and crossed into a mountainous part of Arizona that is difficult for U.S. border security agents to monitor, said officials speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The intelligence report was supplied to the U.S. government in late August or early September and was based on information from an intelligence source that has been proved reliable in other instances, one official said.
A second U.S. official said the report is being investigated, but said it could not be determined whether the group of Chechens actually entered the country, as the intelligence source reported.
"We don't know whether or not that report is true," this official said.
A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that the intelligence report was provided by another government agency, but said Border Patrol agents were unable to verify its accuracy.
It could not be learned whether the reported infiltration is related to the recent Education Department warning to school officials to examine security in the aftermath of the attack last month by pro-Chechnya Muslim terrorists on a school in Russia, in which more than 300 people were killed and some 700 wounded.
In the Russian attack, heavily armed Islamists took over and wired with explosives the school building in Beslan, North Ossetia. It is believed that an accidental explosion set off a battle between Russian security personnel and the terrorists, who set off several explosions and shot schoolchildren and teachers as they tried to escape.
U.S. officials believe the Beslan terrorists included some al Qaeda-linked foreign terrorists.
The Education Department letter said that school officials should examine "protective measure guidance" for helping to prevent and respond to a similar terrorist attack, were it to occur in the United States.
The notice said the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are "currently unaware of any specific, credible information indicating a terrorist threat to public and private schools, universities or colleges in the United States."
The letter stated that indicators of terrorist surveillance before an attack include interest in site plans for schools, bus routes and attendance lists from persons who don't normally request such information.
Authorities also were advised to remain alert for "static surveillance" by people who may be disguised as panhandlers, shoeshiners, newspaper or flower vendors, or street sweepers who seem out of place in a particular area.
Other indicators of terrorist surveillance can include spying on school security drills, people staring at employees or vehicles in parking areas, and surveillance by pedestrians.
Fears of an attack on American schools also were raised by the recent discovery in Iraq of a computer disk containing data showing the layout of six schools in the United States, including districts in California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey and Oregon.
Officials believed the disk may have been part of a terrorist plot. However, FBI officials said on Friday that there did not appear to be a terrorist threat connected to the computer disk.
The Iraqi who had the disk, a member of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, apparently was collecting information from the Internet sites of American schools that would be useful for emergency planning for Iraqi schools, U.S. officials said.
U.S. security officials have been concerned in recent months that al Qaeda or other terrorists are planning to enter the United States from Mexico.
Intelligence officials said a suspected al Qaeda leader who has been in the United States was spotted recently in Mexico. Officials believe Adnan Shukrijumah, whom the FBI wants for questioning, met with alien smugglers in Mexico and Honduras and was seeking ways to bring al Qaeda members into the United States. Shukrijumah was seen in August in the Sonora province of northern Mexico, officials said.
Since October 2003, authorities have arrested five Arabs attempting to cross illegally into the United States from Mexico.
In July, officials dismissed as untrue an Internet report that said a group of Middle Eastern men were recently caught trying to cross the border from Mexico.
The report apparently was based on a group of Oaxacan tribesmen who were stopped as they tried to cross the border in Arizona. The tribesmen spoke an Indian language native to southern Mexico that may have been mistaken for Arabic, officials said at the time.
The open border policy is suicide
Insurgency Cracking In Iraq
In a sign that the joint Iraqi-American initiative to pursue the terrorists of the Sunni Triangle has paid off, the insurgency appears to be turning in on itself. The Washington Post reports that a deadly rift has been created between foreign terrorists and the native Ba'athist remnants in Fallujah and elsewhere which promises to help bring a swift end to their campaign:
Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.
Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.
What has caused the alliance between foreign terrorists and local insurgents to collapse? The brutal methods of the Islamofascists have opened eyes, even among the Fallujans, of what an al-Qaeda-dominated future would bring to Iraq. The beheadings in particular have disgusted the locals, even those involved in fighting against what they see as an occupation by infidels:
Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.
"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.
One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group. Suri's body was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.
Pressure from American airstrikes in Fallujah have caused locals to shut their doors to foreigners, fearful that if their homes become known to the joint Iraqi-American forces as meeting places for Islamofascists, they will become the next targets. Make no mistake about it -- the US action encourages such thinking, as the psy-op strategies in place have been designed with this result in mind.
One insurgency commander interviewed by Karl Vick complained that what Americans refer to as an insurgency really comprises three different movements, and Americans willfully distort all three into one terrorist offensive. Those complaints, however, are exactly what the Americans want to hear. US forces want Fallujans to know that while they harbor the foreigners who plant bombs and behead captives, they will be considered no different than Zarqawi's animals.
And it appears to be working, as the locals have tired of American attacks and watch with increased desperation as we roll up insurgency hotbeds like Samarra, Najaf, and a "string of towns south of Baghdad" which the Islamofascists controlled until this past month. Momentum has shifted to the Iraqi-American efforts to free Iraq from the grip of terrorists, and Iraqis know that places like Fallujah and Hit will be the next targets. They no longer buy the argument from Islamofascists that they come to free Iraq:
A woman in Hit said one fighter had said they had come to liberate Hit as they had Fallujah.
"We don't want to be another Fallujah," said the woman, 45, who gave her name as Umm Hussein. "Ramadan is coming, and we don't have any will to lose a father, a son, a relative or even a friend. Let them leave in peace and fight in a desert away from houses and people."
Unfortunately, unless the locals can drive out the foreigners, the streets of Hit will likely be one of the last battlegrounds. And the people of Hit know it.
Posted by Captain Ed at October 13, 2004 05:58 AM
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Job Losses Started Under Bill Clinton
Much has been made of the job losses that have occurred during the George Bush administration, even though most of that talk ignores the single greatest foreign attack on American soil and its tremendous economic impact. However, frequent CQ contributor Bandit has done a bit more research into recent job-loss history and finds that the rosy picture painted about the Clinton years by the Kerry campaign and his media allies is more cartoon than realism:
First major signs that all was not well surfaced in May 2000. This is the month the biggest recorded decline in jobs in eight years - 116,000 jobs disappeared [see private-sector jobs -- CE]. What made this number even more alarming is that the cutbacks were widespread affecting all sectors: 29,000 jobs in construction, 71,000 in wholesale and retail, 17,000 in manufacturing, and 11,000 in transportation. ...
The unions were sensing not all was well under Clinton's booming economy, in August 1999 the AFL-CIO, in a report to the Clinton Administration, said the manufacturing sector ``is in crisis, having lost 491,000 jobs since March 1998. Little has been done to assist manufacturing companies in coping.''
A Seattle Times article dated November 07, 1999 was projecting 1 million job cuts in the coming year.
The White House put out a little noticed Press release on March 5, 1999 that read: "Reflecting the weakness in the world economy, manufacturing employment fell 1.8 percent during the past year."
Bandit asks: Where was John Kerry while these portents of economic crisis appeared? Campaigning for Al Gore on the Clinton economic record while it fell apart, apparently. We know that the Democrats have tried to sell the resultant recession as Bush's problem, but economists have insisted that the economy fell back into recession as early as before the 2000 election. And while all this went on, John Kerry sat in the US Senate and did nothing -- introduced no legislation or took any action at all. He didn't even go out and open a business to create any jobs, even with the vast wealth at his fingertips.
John Kerry: the do-nothing candidate.
The light of the Sun- kerry dishonorable discharge?
Over the past few months many readers have written us regarding the status of John Kerry's discharge from the Navy. We have refrained from addressing the issue absent hard information. Today's New York Sun carries Thomas Lipscomb's page-one account, "Mystery surrounds Kerry's Navy discharge," the first serious journalistic effort to shed some light on this fundamental question:
An official Navy document on Senator Kerry's campaign Web site listed as Mr. Kerry's "Honorable Discharge from the Reserves" opens a door on a well kept secret about his military service.
The document is a form cover letter in the name of the Carter administration's secretary of the Navy, W. Graham Claytor. It describes Mr. Kerry's discharge as being subsequent to the review of "a board of officers." This in itself is unusual. There is nothing about an ordinary honorable discharge action in the Navy that requires a review by a board of officers.
According to the secretary of the Navy's document, the "authority of reference" this board was using in considering Mr. Kerry's record was "Title 10, U.S. Code Section 1162 and 1163. "This section refers to the grounds for involuntary separation from the service. What was being reviewed, then, was Mr. Kerry's involuntary separation from the service. And it couldn't have been an honorable discharge, or there would have been no point in any review at all. The review was likely held to improve Mr. Kerry's status of discharge from a less than honorable discharge to an honorable discharge.
A Kerry campaign spokesman, David Wade, was asked whether Mr. Kerry had ever been a victim of an attempt to deny him an honorable discharge. There has been no response to that inquiry.
The document is dated February 16, 1978. But Mr. Kerry's military commitment began with his six-year enlistment contract with the Navy on February 18, 1966. His commitment should have terminated in 1972. It is highly unlikely that either the man who at that time was a Vietnam Veterans Against the War leader, John Kerry, requested or the Navy accepted an additional six year reserve commitment. And the Claytor document indicates proceedings to reverse a less than honorable discharge that took place sometime prior to February 1978.
The most routine time for Mr. Kerry's discharge would have been at the end of his six-year obligation, in 1972. But how was it most likely to have come about?
NBC's release this March of some of the Nixon White House tapes about Mr. Kerry show a great deal of interest in Mr. Kerry by Nixon and his executive staff, including, perhaps most importantly, Nixon's special counsel, Charles Colson. In a meeting the day after Mr. Kerry's Senate testimony, April 23, 1971, Mr. Colson attacks Mr. Kerry as a "complete opportunist...We'll keep hitting him, Mr. President."
Mr. Colson was still on the case two months later, according to a memo he wrote on June 15,1971, that was brought to the surface by the Houston Chronicle. "Let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader." Nixon had been a naval officer in World War II. Mr. Colson was a former Marine captain. Mr. Colson had been prodded to find "dirt" on Mr. Kerry, but reported that he couldn't find any.
The Nixon administration ran FBI surveillance on Mr. Kerry from September 1970 until August 1972. Finding grounds for an other than honorable discharge, however, for a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, given his numerous activities while still a reserve officer of the Navy, was easier than finding "dirt."
For example, while America was still at war, Mr. Kerry had met with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegation to the Paris Peace talks in May 1970 and then held a demonstration in July 1971 in Washington to try to get Congress to accept the enemy's seven point peace proposal without a single change. Woodrow Wilson threw Eugene Debs, a former presidential candidate, in prison just for demonstrating for peace negotiations with Germany during World War I. No court overturned his imprisonment. He had to receive a pardon from President Harding.
Mr. Colson refused to answer any questions about his activities regarding Mr. Kerry during his time in the Nixon White House. The secretary of the Navy at the time during the Nixon presidency is the current chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Warner. A spokesman for the senator, John Ullyot, said, "Senator Warner has no recollection that would either confirm or challenge any representation that Senator Kerry received a less than honorable discharge."
The "board of officers" review reported in the Claytor document is even more extraordinary because it came about "by direction of the President." No normal honorable discharge requires the direction of the president. The president at that time was James Carter. This adds another twist to the story of Mr. Kerry's hidden military records.
Mr. Carter's first act as president was a general amnesty for draft dodgers and other war protesters. Less than an hour after his inauguration on January 21, 1977, while still in the Capitol building, Mr. Carter signed Executive Order 4483 empowering it. By the time it became a directive from the Defense Department in March 1977 it had been expanded to include other offenders who may have had general, bad conduct, dishonorable discharges, and any other discharge or sentence with negative effect on military records. In those cases the directive outlined a procedure for appeal on a case by case basis before a board of officers. A satisfactory appeal would result in an improvement of discharge status or an honorable discharge.
Mr. Kerry has repeatedly refused to sign Standard Form 180, which would allow the release of all his military records. And some of his various spokesmen have claimed that all his records are already posted on his Web site. But the Washington Post already noted that the Naval Personnel Office admitted that they were still withholding about 100 pages of files.
If Mr. Kerry was the victim of a Nixon "enemies list" hit, one might have expected him to wear it like a badge of honor, like many others such as his friend Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, CBS's Daniel Schorr, or the actor Paul Newman, who had made Mr. Colson's original list of 20 "enemies."
There are a number of categories of discharges besides honorable. There are general discharges, medical discharges, bad conduct discharges, as well as other than honorable and dishonorable discharges. There is one odd coincidence that gives some weight to the possibility that Mr. Kerry was dishonorably discharged. Mr. Kerry has claimed that he lost his medal certificates and that is why he asked that they be reissued. But when a dishonorable discharge is issued, all pay benefits, and allowances, and all medals and honors are revoked as well. And five months after Mr. Kerry joined the U.S. Senate in 1985, on one single day, June 4, all of Mr. Kerry's medals were reissued.
Thanks to the many readers who emailed us this timely story. I will be touching base later today with the communications director of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for comments on this important story.
Posted by The Big Trunk at 06:46 AM / Permalink / TrackBack (0)
Yep,
I wish that was a distinction that could be held on the arab side- would be a sign of progress anyways
But, somehow this is all very different than when CBS gives time on 60 minutes to every Bush bashing book that has been published for the last year, but refused to devote any time to the Swifties.
It's much different than Today devoting 3 DAYS to Kitty Kellys trash.
It's much different than Rathers attempt to influence an election by airing faked memos
It's much different than the head of ABC news stating that their coverage of the elction should be slanted towards Kerry because Bush is a more effective liar and that is unbalancing the political ladscape.
Silly mr, I forgot the difference- LIBERALS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT, we're just too stupid to realize it
PAYBACK IS A B**TCH ain't it
DO ANY POLLSTERS ACCOUNT FOR THE MILITARY VOTE? [10/12 12:47 PM]
Today's Washington Post op-ed by Peter Feaver is must reading. Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University, points to Bush's high poll numbers among members of the military:
We now have fairly compelling evidence, in the form of a Military Times survey of its readership (primarily career military officers and enlisted personnel), that reports of the demise of Bush's popularity were premature. By an astonishing 72 to 17 percent margin, the active-duty military personnel who took the survey favored Bush over Kerry (Guard and Reserve respondents favored Bush, 73 to 18 percent). Frankly, the margin greatly exceeds anything that I or any other analyst had expected...
The Military Times readership is more reflective of career military people who at least entertain the idea of serving the 20 years needed to earn full retirement benefits, and previous surveys have established that this group tends to be more Republican. However, survey methods cannot account for a spread of 55 points. If the groundswell for Kerry claimed in earlier news reports was happening, it would have shown up here.
Despite an extraordinary effort to woo the military, then, the Democrats still have not overcome their traditional tone-deafness when it comes to civil-military relations. Kerry's scorched-earth critique of the Iraq war may excite the base, but it alarms the military. The point is not that members of the military are blinded to mistakes or difficulties in Iraq. Rather, the point is that Kerry has unwittingly revived two specters that haunt the military.
The first is the ghost of Vietnam, which to the military (rightly or wrongly) means "fighting a war that domestic critics have made unpopular to the American public." Kerry is long on critique and short on what he would do differently from, or even better than, Bush. What the troops probably hear most loudly is red-meat rhetoric like "grand diversion," "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," and other statements likely to undermine public resolve to see the war through to a successful conclusion.
The second ghost is President Bill Clinton as commander in chief, which to the military (rightly or wrongly) means an indecisive leader who wavers in response to shifting political winds. Kerry may believe that he has never changed his position on the Iraq war, but it is doubtful the military buys that spin...
So I worry about poll findings that show such a large tilt in favor of one candidate because they risk politicizing the military further, especially when it rebuts so decisively a central theme in one candidate's marketing campaign. I worry also because of the reaction I have gotten from Democrats when informed of the poll results — there's an abrupt shift midstream from crowing about how the military would turn on Bush this year to decrying the partisan Republican tilt of the military. The Democrats have wooed the military more ardently (though perhaps not more wisely) than ever before. Does the fury of a spurned suitor prepare someone to be a good commander in chief in wartime?
Here's a fun question: Do the current polls like Gallup, Zogby, ABC/Washington Post etc. take into account members of the military serving overseas? If not, aren't they missing several hundred thousand voters, where Bush has a decisive lead?
And aren't many of those soldiers serving overseas registered in places like Florida?
Anti-Zionism and anti-semitism are the same thing? Talk about blurring the lines of politics and religion!
That's exactly the point, the authors of the books refused to make that assumption. The establshment of Isreal may be "contraversial" but it is the fact that Isreal exists that fuels the anti semetic forces. They make no distinction between the 2 and will not be happy until their goal of the annhilation of Isreal is met
Posts like this are a distraction,
the REAL news is Ricks posting of daily casualties
NYT Whitewashes Arab Jew-Hatred
Disgusting as always, the New York Times excuses and facilitates Arab Jew-hatred, with a piece on the ugly literature touted as “anti-Zionist” at the Frankfurt Book Fair: Anti-Zionist Arab Books Criticized at Fair.
FRANKFURT, Oct. 8 - Publishers from Arab countries came to the Frankfurt Book Fair as the guests of honor, seeking understanding and tolerance as well as a greater appreciation of Arab culture and literature. But several publishers, as well as the book fair itself, have attracted criticism and charges of anti-Semitism for their display of at least a dozen books with strong anti-Zionist themes.
Leaders of the official Arab delegation to the fair said on Friday that they were not promoting anti-Jewish views, adding that while some books did contain anti-Zionist arguments, they were not racist. And book fair officials said that while they regretted that a small percentage of the 25,000 books on display from Arab publishers and writers were highly critical of Israel, the books did not appear to violate German laws against the incitement of hatred or crime.
What does the New York Times call “strong anti-Zionist themes?”
On the cover of one of the books, displayed by the Dar Tlass publishing house of Damascus, Syria, was a photograph of the World Trade Center exploding in flames during the 9/11 attacks. Overlaying the photo of the Twin Towers is a Star of David and a fingerprint.
Nearby, another book showed a Star of David covering the Statue of Liberty, which held, instead of a torch, a sword that dripped blood.
At the exhibit sponsored by the Egyptian Publishers Association, the Cairo-based publisher Dar el-Shorouk displayed “The Zionist Message and Its Terms,” whose title was translated by an Arabic representative of the publisher and whose cover portrays a field of Stars of David and menorahs. The book’s author, Abdel-Wahab el-Messeri, also wrote the “Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism,” which some critics have said contains anti-Jewish themes.
The booth sponsored by Dar al-Salam, also of Cairo, displayed “Freedom of Belief in Islamic Law,” by Abdullah Nasih Ulwan. The English-language version of the book lays out “a concise view” of Islamic beliefs. Among them: “As for Jews, they are the most spiteful and cunning towards Islam and Muslims,” while “their plots against the Islamic system throughout history were too many to closely investigate.”
Shame on the New York Times once again, for whitewashing and minimizing the Arab world’s genocidal hatred of Jews—that erupts even in places like a book fair in Germany, where they are welcomed as guests of honor and where they know they’ll be seen. These hate-filled creatures feel safe in spreading their poison in the West in part because of newspapers like the New York Times, who find excuses for their behavior no matter how ugly and sickening.
by Charles at 07:27 AM PST / 36 comments / link / rss
last comment: Maine's Michael 8:14:24 am 10/12/04
Consequences for Syria- washington post
Tuesday, October 12, 2004; Page A22
IN THE PAST month, heat from the outside world has been slowly rising on the world's remaining Arab Baathist dictatorship -- Syria -- and the result has been a noticeable if somewhat inconclusive bubbling of developments in normally somnolent Damascus. Syria's government has been a longtime sponsor of terrorism, a stockpiler of missiles and chemical weapons, and an unapologetic ally of Islamic extremists; it has allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of insurgents to stream across its borders to fight U.S. forces in Iraq. Until recently it had suffered few consequences, other than economic sanctions that were mandated by Congress. That has begun to change.
In August, Syria's callow and ineffectual president, Bashar Assad, managed to provoke not just the United States but France by forcing neighboring Lebanon to extend the term of its pro-Syrian president. The result was a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. Nine days later, a U.S. delegation arrived in Damascus to insist that Syria cooperate with U.S. and Iraqi efforts to control movement across its border. Two weeks later a car bomb, almost certainly planted by Israel, exploded in Damascus and killed one of the Hamas leaders who had been given harbor there. Though it is rare for Israel to carry out such an audacious operation in the Syrian capital, Mr. Assad won scant international sympathy. Instead, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan reported to the Security Council that Syria had not met the terms of Resolution 1559, despite its claims to have redeployed 3,000 of its 20,000 troops in Lebanon.
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• Payback on K Street (Post, Oct. 12, 2004)
• Consequences for Syria (Post, Oct. 12, 2004)
• Righting Old Wrongs (Post, Oct. 12, 2004)
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Mr. Assad seems to be getting nervous. Last week he reorganized his government, installing the former top Syrian intelligence general in Lebanon as interior minister. Then he delivered a whining speech warning that chaos would overtake Lebanon if Syrian troops withdrew. Behind the rhetoric, Syrian security forces are trying to appease Washington, promising better controls on the border and acting against some of the organizers of Iraqi resistance operating in Lebanon.
This, of course, is not enough: It merely demonstrates that concerted outside pressure can bring about changes in Syrian behavior. That pressure should be stepped up. The Security Council should renew its demand that Syria withdraw from Lebanon, and accompany it with the threat of sanctions. Arab states, which for decades have insisted on the sanctity of U.N. resolutions about Israel, should be pressed to take a public position on this one. The Bush administration and Iraqi leaders should make it clear that continued infiltration of insurgents and terrorists into Iraq will be considered a hostile act by Syria and subject to the responses usually given an enemy, from the breaking off of relations to -- in the last resort -- military retaliation. There are no reasons for continued toleration of Syria's rogue behavior; instead, there is an opportunity for insisting on change in the Arab state where it is most needed.
Nobel Laureate calls for more US tax cuts
October 12 2004 at 09:09AM
Washington - Edward Prescott, who picked up the Nobel Prize for Economics on Monday, said President George Bush's tax rate cuts were "pretty small" and should have been bigger.
"What Bush has done has been not very big, it's pretty small," Prescott said.
"Tax rates were not cut enough," said Prescott.
Lower tax rates provided an incentive to work, Prescott said.
Prescott and Norwegian Finn Kydland won the 2004 Nobel Economics Prize for research into the forces behind business cycles.
The American analyst, who is a professor at Arizona State University and a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said a large tax cut in 1986 had lowered rates while collecting the same revenue.
But "in the early nineties the economy was depressed by the tax increase in 1993 by about four percent, and it's right at that level now," Prescott said.
Bush, who is fighting to get re-elected on November 2, has cut taxes by about $1,7-trillion during his term.
The US leader accuses his Democratic rival John Kerry of favoring tax increases, despite Kerry's promise to cut taxes for everyone earning less than 200 000 dollars a year. -
Gee,
Whatever happened to Kerrys assertion that Bush had a secret plan with the Saudis to keep the oil price low to help in his reelection effort???
OOps, I guess now it's Bush's failed ebergy policy that is keeping the price of oil high.
UNlike CBS, they have made the documents available to anyone to either verify or dispute their status.
Time will tell. Curious how you are ready to dismiss them offhand without any knowledge of them at all.
THE HEINZ KERRY GAFFE JUGGERNAUT ROLLS ON: Truly astonishing. Teresa Heinz Kerry is like a gaffe machine, churning out quote after quote that range from embarrassing, to comical, to downright irresponsible. It's gotten so bad you have to start wondering if she really isn't a Republican mole working to sabotage her husband's campaign.
Here is Teresa's latest effort (via Drudge):
"John will never send a boy or girl in a uniform anywhere in the world because of our need and greed for oil."
Good gracious. Folks, it's one thing for John Kerry to publicly adopt the hardcore antiwar activist position that Iraq is "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time." It's something altogether different for the potential First Lady of the United States to crawl down into the Michael Moore fever-swamp and assert that President Bush has deployed U.S. troops "because of our need and greed for oil."
Needless to say, this sort of thing may get hardcore Democratic partisans worked up into a lather but it isn't going to play so well with voters in Ohio or Florida .- T. Bevan 10:19 am
Senator von Munchausen and the One That Got Away
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By H.D. Miller
Published 10/12/2004 12:08:41 AM
This month's Field and Stream features a pair of interviews with the presidential candidates in which the two men discussed their mutual love of huntin', fishin' and the great outdoors. All fine and good, and to be expected in an election year, and as I read through the interviews I couldn't help but be pleased that both men at least paid lip-service to maintaining my Second Amendment rights.
And then, I came upon the following exchange.
Field & Stream: What's the biggest deer you ever killed?
Kerry: Probably an 8-pointer, something like that. Nothing terribly big. I once had an incredible encounter with the most enormous buck -- I don't know, 16 points or something. It was just huge. And I failed to pull the trigger at the right moment. I was hunting down in Massachusetts, on the Cape.
At that instant, it struck me: the "F" in John F. Kerry stands for "fabulist".
Like most folks I'm willing to cut a little slack to a fisherman or hunter who claims to have just missed the big one, as long as that big one is within the natural margin of error for big ones. Which, my friends, a Cape Cod sixteen-pointer is clearly not.
In other words, John Kerry was telling a tale. He was fibbing. Prevaricating. Stretching the truth. All to make himself seem a little more impressive, a little more manly, a little more like a regular guy to the regular guys who read Field and Stream.
JOHN KERRY IS NOT a regular guy. He's a Swiss-boarding-school-educated man who's bagged a billionairess widow woman, and as a consequence could spend all of his summers from here to eternity tracking the truly big ones up in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, a comfortable family-owned SUV drive from his wife's opulent ski chalet. But he doesn't do that. And because he's not a real hunter, he doesn't know enough to say that that mythical sixteen pointer was spotted on a guided hunt in Montana, or Idaho, or Wyoming, or anywhere but Massachusetts, where the largest buck ever taken measured out at only 12 points.
So he lied about a hunting trip. Who hasn't? In fact, the more I looked at what John F. Kerry said about himself, the more apparent it became that John F. Kerry is a man given to puffery. Like some insecure drunk you meet at happy hour in a cheap bar, he has a bad habit of gilding the lily where his own accomplishments are concerned.
By now most everyone knows about the charges leveled at Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, charges that he inflated both his own war record and the severity of the wounds he received in Vietnam. Much of this is still in dispute. However, what is not in dispute is Kerry's claim that he spent Christmas of 1968 upriver on a secret mission in Cambodia, a claim he repeated on several occasions, most famously in 1986 on the floor of the Senate.
"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me."
The "Christmas in Cambodia" story is not in dispute because it's been thoroughly debunked. Kerry was never, despite his seared memory, in Cambodia. Even his hagiographer, Douglas Brinkley, had to recently admit that Kerry was probably at base camp that day, writing letters home.
What you may not know about this widely reported story, however, is that it has props. Like all good fabulists, Senator Kerry has mastered the art of turning everyday objects into holy relics, relics that support his tall tales, this one included. In a June 1, 2003, Washington Post profile, it was revealed that Senator Kerry had a secret compartment in his briefcase, one that contained a well-worn, green camouflage hat.
"My good luck hat," Kerry said, happy to see it. "Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia."
Kerry put on the hat, pulling the brim over his forehead. His blue button-down shirt and tie clashed with the camouflage. He pointed his finger and raised his thumb, creating an imaginary gun. He looked silly, yet suddenly his campaign message was clear: Citizen-soldier. Linking patriotism to public service. It wasn't complex after all; it was Kerry.
He smiled and aimed his finger:
"Pow."
Pow indeed.
There's a phrase that describes men who feel compelled to claim that they served with the Green Berets, Navy Seals, or CIA special ops units when they had not. It's called the Stolen Valor Syndrome.
THEN THERE'S THE MATTER of whether or not Senator Kerry actually ran the Boston Marathon. On more than one occasion he says he has, and the way he's phrased it, "my first Boston Marathon," indicates that he'd done the feat more than once.
But, of course, no one has ever found a record of this, not in the newspapers, not in the various photographs of the young Kerry, not even, especially not even, in the records of the Boston Athletic Association, the group that organizes and sponsors the Boston Marathon.
When queried by e-mail about Senator Kerry's marathoning, Jack Fleming, the director of communications of the Boston Athletic Association gave the following response.
"It was reported (Summer 2004) to the B.A.A. by aides of the John F. Kerry campaign for President of the United States that the Democratic nominee ran the Boston Marathon in the late 1970s [1977, 1978 or 1979 most likely]. He reportedly ran as an unofficial entrant and finished the entire 26.2-mile race (i.e., without an official bib number); as an unofficial participant, his performance (name, place, time) would not appear among the official record or in any results book publication."
Don't you love that phrase "he reportedly ran"?
So, in other words, in the Summer of 2004, as questions about Senator Kerry's veracity grew, John Kerry's campaign aides contacted the Boston Athletic Association and told them that the Senator ran the race sometime in the "late 70s," but not officially, although he did finish, just that you didn't see him do it….honest.
By the way, for the record, in January of 1993, President Bush completed the Houston Marathon in exactly 3:44:52, a respectable 8:30 pace. You can look it up.
WHY DOES JOHN KERRY feel the need to brag on his imaginary exploits? Is he so insecure? I mean the man actually does have some accomplishments. He has been a United States Senator for the last 20 years, although a singularly undistinguished one.
But then again, being a Senator is plainly not proof against puffery. Case in point, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, who claims to have flown numerous combat missions over Vietnam, but actually only occasionally ferried planes into the country from his more relaxed station in Japan. Harkin has recently taken to calling himself a "Vietnam era veteran"
Speaking of flying, did you know that John Kerry claims to be a stunt pilot, (Atlanta Journal Constitution, August 3, 2004) rated to fly everything from seaplanes to the Millennium Falcon?
But who knows if that's really true or not. At this point I just can't be bothered running down every unsubstantiated claim Senator von Munchausen makes. I've got more important things to do with my time, like trying to invent a carburetor that gets 200 miles to the gallon.
My ironclad policy is this: when, towards the end of the evening, the pompous drunk on the next barstool turns to you and claims to have dated Morgan Fairchild, as both Senator Kerry and Jon Lovitz's Saturday Night Live character Tommy Flanagan the Compulsive Liar have done, you just shrug your shoulders, say, "Yeah, that's the ticket," and turn away.
H.D. Miller is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and can be found at his blog, Travelling Shoes.
The American Chamberlain
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By William Tucker
Published 10/12/2004 12:08:59 AM
Anybody who doubts where John Kerry stands in relation to history need only read the lengthy, ingratiating portrait of him by Matt Bai in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Kerry is our Neville Chamberlain, assuring us that we are not really at war, that the seeming conflict is all a misunderstanding that can be cleared up with a little clever diplomacy, and that he will bring us "peace in our time."
After a flattering portrait of Kerry as cool-headed and unflappable on September 11th (he was caught on a newsreel walking calmly down the Capitol steps while those around him were distraught), Bai, who has been covering the Kerry campaign for the Times, begins by acknowledging that, as far as much of the Democratic Party is concerned, the "War on Terror" is all an invention of the Bush Administration.
Inside liberal think-tanks, there are Democratic foreign-policy experts who are challenging some of Bush's most basic assumptions about the post-9-11 world -- including, most provocatively, the very idea that we are, in fact in a war. . .
In the liberal view, the enemy … more closely resembles an especially murderous drug cartel.… Instead of military might, liberal thinkers believe, the moment calls for a combination of expansive diplomacy abroad and interdiction at home, an effort more akin to the war on drugs than to any conventional war of the last century.
Even Democrats who stress that combating terrorism should include a strong military option argue that the "war on terror" is a flawed construct. "We're not in a war on terror, in the liberal sense," says Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton-era diplomat who could well become Kerry's secretary of state. "The war on terror is like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers."
Bai immediately tries to distance Kerry from these views, but he arrives at the same place by wandering through Kerry's tour of duty of dealing with "the shadowy world of international drug lords" on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If you don't mind my saying, I think I was ahead of the curve on this dark side of globalization," Kerry tells Bai. "I think that the Senate committee reports on contras, narcotics and drugs, et cetera, is a seminal report." Kerry adds that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror."
As Bai notes, Kerry summed all this up in his 1997 book, The New War -- even though he acknowledges the book "barely mentioned the rise of Islamic extremism." "Kerry, a former prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least controllable." Then comes the quote that is already on the verge of becoming famous:
When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview [than Bush]. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
You may have caught that reference to "the dark side of globalization." It's a recurring theme.
"The challenge of beating back those nonstate actors -- not just Islamic terrorists but all kinds of rogue forces -- is what Kerry meant by the 'dark side of globalization,'" write Bai. "He came closest to articulating this as an actual foreign-policy vision in a speech he gave at UCLA last February. 'The war on terror is not a clash of civilizations,' he said then. 'It is a clash of civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity against dogmatic fears of progress and the future.'"
All this leads exactly where you'd expect:
If Kerry's foreign–policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy, you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.
In other words, if we just ignore them, they'll go away. And if we don't ignore them but fight back, then it's our fault.
So what would Kerry do to solve all this?
He would begin, if sworn into office, by going immediately to the United Nations to deliver a speech recasting American foreign policy. Whereas Bush has branded North Korea "evil" and refuses to negotiate head on with its authoritarian regime, Kerry would open bilateral talks over its burgeoning nuclear program. Similarly, he has says he would rally other nations behind sanctions against Iran if that country refuses to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Kerry envisions appointing a top-level envoy to restart the Middle East peace process, and he's intent on getting India and Pakistan to adopt key provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. . .
John Kerry sees himself as a king of ambassador-president, shuttling to world capitals and reintegrating America by force of personality, in the world community.
So what's wrong with this picture?
Well, first of all, it never seems to occur to either Bai or Kerry that Kerry's model of international drug lords as the template for Al Qaeda is wrong. (We'll skip the prostitution analogy for now and try to deal with serious things.) Drug lords are businessmen trying to make money. They kill people and try to bring down Third World governments as a means of extending and protecting their business. They are driven by greed, which, in the end, can be satiated.
Islamic terrorists are driven by religion, not money. Their motives are not economic, which is exactly the problem. Poverty and misery are not the underlying cause. In fact, the major appeal of Islamic fundamentalism has been among the educated elite. (Engineering students seem to make the best recruits.) Exposure to Western culture usually makes Muslim fundamentalists more radical, which is why Samuel Huntington has called it as "clash of civilizations." Al Qaeda does not want to blow New York off the map because it wants to sell more heroin. It wants to destroy America because it hates it and believes Islam is destined to rule the world.
So here will come John Kerry, shuffling around Europe and the Middle East, signing treaties, accepting promises, and assuring the folks back home that everything is all right.
On top of this comes the argument that terror is really as "law enforcement problem." For more than 25 years, beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1960s decisions in criminal procedure and the academically driven "deprisonization movement," liberals rooted around the country looking for the "root causes" of crime, always promising they were just ahead and that the problem was about to be solved.
Then after 1990, two things happened. First, states started reinforcing the death penalty. Second, Rudy Giuliani put into effect James Q. Wilson and Richard Hernnstein's "Broken Windows" thesis, which said that enforcing public order and policing small infractions was the way to prevent larger crimes. All of a sudden, crime began a precipitous, decade-long drop back to 1960s levels. The search for "root causes" was forgotten.
All this tells you what's about to happen if John Kerry is elected the next President. Not only does he not have the fortitude to fight the war on terror, he doesn't even believe we're in a war. Terror will be explained away as "crime" and ultimately "an aberration." Councils of world leaders will sit around mulling over the problem -- just as the U.N. now talks circles around itself while ignoring the situation in Iran and the Sudan.
Meanwhile, al Qaeda or some offshoot will continue burrowing until they accomplish their goal – another major terrorist attack on our soil. At that point, Kerry will have an explanation similar to Neville Chamberlain's: "Everything would have worked if only Hitler had kept his promises."
William Tucker is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and a contributing writer to the American Enterprise.
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The American Spectator's personal copy of John Kerry's New Soldier could now be yours, assuming McCain-Feingold say it's okay. Click here, carefully.
The Prowler
Roberts filed his report before ABC News blew the investigation wide open by reporting that at least two of the experts CBS used to verify the authenticity of the memos either could not or would not do so. "In the end, it probably doesn't matter," says the CBS News producer. "We're sunk." [more]
Reader Mail
I loathe Kerry, like Bush, and plan to vote for the latter. I would have liked to see a realistic, candid analysis of how Kerry's tax plans would affect small businesses that actually have employees. That is a small portion of the total number of Subchapter S corporations or limited partnerships, but as the larger small businesses, the ones with employees must be concentrated in the brackets affected by Kerry's tax plan. Some solid numbers, including employment projections, would have been useful, but Tabin just served up the kind of sleazy misdirected propaganda that should be left to the Democrats, since they seem to enjoy it so much [more]
FROM SPECTATOR
"Otherwise, This Is Just a Success Story"
By Scott Norvell Published 10/12/2004
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TCS
KABUL - It was a regrettably typical comment from an American reporter in this part of the world. "At least it's news," he said of the Afghan election scuffle over the weekend. "Otherwise, this is just a success story."
God forbid it be a success story.
But that's what it was here, no matter how hard the international media tried to spin it. There were no car bombs raining body parts all over the polling stations. There were no last-minute assassinations. There were no drive-by shootings. The best they could come up with for "news" was grumbling from hopelessly trailing opposition candidates about washable ink and threats of a boycott. The media's disappointment was palpable.
Turnout was described as "massive." Men in turbans and baggy sharwals lined up in orderly fashion to cast their ballots, many of them with uncharacteristically chipper looks on their faces. One guy I saw at a mosque in central Kabul actually had mist in his eyes. Women voted beneath tents at one poll near a block of wretched Soviet-era apartment blocks, lifting their burqas even in the presence of foreign cameras. In Bamiyan, home of the giant Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban, they stood in line to vote in the first snow of the season.
Exit polls conducted by the International Republican Institute concluded that Interim President Hamid Karzai easily won the 50-percent-plus-one he needed to avoid a potentially messy runoff vote. By Monday night, the grumblers in the opposition had all-but backed off their threat to boycott the results and Afghanistan seemed well on its way to joining the Democratic family of nations after the obligatory investigation by United Nations experts.
A ride to the ballot-counting center near Darulaman Palace, which was sorting instead of counting ballots until the electoral dust kicked up over the weekend clears, was a vivid reminder of just what that means. During the wars of the 1980s and 90s, west Kabul was decimated, and it still bears the scars. Buildings half-collapsed into piles of rubble abound. The once-grand homes of the Karta-e-seh, where I lived as a boy in the early 1970s, and beyond are shells still pocked with bullet holes and artillery wounds. Overturned Soviet armored personnel carriers litter dusty lots, and palace itself is in ruins.
Afghanistan has come a long way since the hellish days that produced the landscape of west Kabul, and the prevailing picture is not, as Madeline Albright and Robin Cook wrote in the International Herald Tribune last week, "deeply disturbing."
When Kabul came out of its election-time shell on Monday, the picture was instead one of a city reveling in the chaos of commerce. Real estate prices are rising, and the din of new construction is pervasive. Foreign investment is up. There are three times as many private cars on the streets as five years ago, and women can go shopping without getting whipped by thugs from the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue for baring sockless ankles beneath their burqas. It is a chaos to which Afghans have been accustomed for centuries, one they are happy to have back.
Elections alone don't make a democracy, and Karzai has much work ahead. He is up against a culture of violence about as likely to give up its guns to soldiers from Kabul as a bunch of Wyoming ranchers would be likely to give up theirs to revenuers from Washington. Attitudes toward women engrained over thousands of years will not change overnight. Viable substitutes for the lucrative opium trade must be found, and a balance-of-power between central government and regional/ethnic leaders will not be easy to come by.
Despite their professed fondness for cultural relativism at home, certain critics of American foreign policy seem to think that unless someplace looks and feel like Boston or Brussels in short order then it must be deeply disturbed. But if we borrow a page from these critics' own book and look at the Afghanistan of 2004 relative to the Afghanistan of September 10, 2001, then the picture is not deeply disturbing. It is deeply heartening.
This may not be "news," but it should be.
The author is London Bureau Chief, Fox News.
Object Under Bush Jacket Identified: 'It's a Spine'
by Scott Ott
(2004-10-11) -- A forensic scientist studying photographic evidence has identified an object which caused a bump on the back of a suit jacket worn by President George Bush during his first debate with John Forbes Kerry.
"It's a spine," said the unnamed scientist. "The president's backbone, in a sense, was showing during his debate with Mr. Kerry."
Similar images of Mr. Kerry showed "no comparable spinal features."
When asked about the new evidence, Mr. Kerry said, "I had a spine when I defended this country as a young man, and I will have one again when I defend her as president of the United States."
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Kerry Says Do-Not-Terrorize List Would End Nuisance
by Scott Ott
(2004-10-11) -- Democrat presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry today announced the details of his plan to completely eliminate the nuisance of terrorism.
"I have a plan," said Mr. Kerry, "to create a do-not-terrorize list that Americans could sign up for on the internet. And if any terrorist would flout the law and attack someone whose name is on the list, he and his terror cell would be slammed with a $1,000 fine for each person killed and $500 for each injured survivor."
Mr. Kerry, who is also a U.S. senator, announced the plan after receiving international acclaim for telling The New York Times, "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance.''
The Democrat said his plan "hits Al Qaeda in the pocketbook where it hurts the most."
He said he's also considering a suggestion by running-mate John Edwards to double the fines for nuisance terror strikes during the dinner hour.
Wow, alert the media- wait they ARE the media- who woulda thunk it, the media coming out in favor of Kerry.
It's the same pathetic attempt to establish moral equivalence between the US and rogue nations. If we can be trusted with nukes, Iran can be trusted with nukes. We should stop developing nuclear bunker buster bombs if we expect Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons.
Could we trust Iran to not use their nukes to annihilate Isreal.
We essentially could say fu and do whatever we ewant, but we DON"T and WOULDN"T. Even the majority of the youth in Iran are bright enough to see that difference, why do you refuse to. The soviets were a threat, because their aim was world domination through intimidation.
Are you saying the the invasion of Afghanistan was a bad thing. They have held the first free election in their entire history. DO you think Iran would do that in any country they invaded? My reaction is that that is a dimwitted argument.
Religion of Misogyny
After a rush of statements about holding new liberalized elections, the Saudi royal family decided to quietly shut the door on the 21st century again: Saudi Women Won’t Vote in Elections. (Hat tip: zulubaby.)
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Women may neither vote nor run in Saudi Arabia’s first nationwide elections, the government announced Monday, dashing hopes of progressive Saudis and easing fears among conservatives that the kingdom is moving too fast on reforms.
Some women considered the move yet another indignity in a country where they need their husbands’ permission to study, travel or work. But others said they wouldn’t trust themselves to judge whether a candidate is more than just a handsome face.
The religious establishment had been lobbying against women’s participation in the elections, diplomats said.
But an electoral official cited administrative and logistical reasons Monday for the decision to ban women from the municipal elections, scheduled to be held in three stages from Feb. 10 to April 21.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there are not enough women to run women’s-only registration centers and polling stations, and that only a fraction of the country’s women have the photo identity cards that would have been needed to vote.
ELECTION INTIMIDATION [10/11 07:42 PM]
Those who are concerned about election violence must read John Fund today. Key excerpt:
We may be about to experience an election unlike any we've seen in a while. The Florida recount in 2000 raised passions and blood pressure and featured some demonstrations on both sides, but there was no violence. This year, lots of groups are jostling with each other to monitor the elections in battleground states. For its part, the AFL-CIO has promised to dispatch thousands of election monitors to battleground states to watch for any hint of trouble at polling places. From the initial reports, they may be the ones for have to be watched as potential troublemakers...
Look for the Justice Department to become a major political football in this election. Already, its warnings that terrorists may well try to disrupt the Nov. 2 election is being greeted skeptically by some local election officials. New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, a Democrat, is openly asking if Attorney General John Ashcroft's warnings are part of a GOP effort to suppress voter turnout. Last week, Democrats responded by creating their own SWAT teams of lawyers that will be dispatched to any place where voting problems are recorded. One issue certain to be disputed will be provisional ballots, which are cast when someone doesn't find his name on the registration rolls. Such ballots are set aside and verified later. A flood of provisional ballot lists could tilt the election in close states one way or the other with Democrats demanding that officials "count every vote" and Republicans questioning the validity of some of the ballots.
California Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, a Republican, says she has found 3,000 new duplicate registrations in her district. "The current process today is really Third World conditions," she told CNN's Lou Dobbs program. When asked what she thinks about Democratic charges that her calls for investigations into the duplicate registrations will scare voters away from the polls, she refuses to back down. "You're damn right, I'm going to try to scare away the crooks."
Let's hope the lawyers don't take over this election's aftermath the way they did in Florida in 2000. To prevent that the Justice Department needs to step in now and enforce everyone's civil rights. That means protecting campaign workers from intimidation as well as preventing fraudulent votes from canceling out legitimate ballots. Allowing double voting, ballots to be cast from the graveyard and those who have been disqualified because of criminal convictions to dilute the process only calls into question the sanctity of the election itself. It's no way to run a modern democracy.
Is there any chance that this won't be the ugliest election of our lives?
You have it exactly backwards. Polling indicates that 75% of the military support Bush. I have had conversations with many career officers who say that a Kerry CIC would be a disaster and they would leave at the first opportunity.
That's not even taking into account his post vietnam behavior
rush to war, under manned, not equipped wrong war wrong time blah blah blah. I live in an area that has many military bases and have contacts among the military. You have no clue.
CNSNews.com Publishes Iraqi Intelligence Docs
By David Thibault
CNSNews.com Managing Editor
October 11, 2004
(CNSNews.com) - When CNSNews.com published an article Monday, Oct. 4, entitled, "Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD, Had Extensive Terror Ties," we decided against publishing all 42 pages of the Iraqi intelligence documents in our possession and on which the article was based.
We published only the first page, fearing that if more were made widely available on the Internet, they might end up being altered or otherwise manipulated. We offered credentialed news organizations and counter-terrorism experts the opportunity to view and receive copies of the documents so that they might check for themselves on the authenticity of the documents and judge their importance in the debate over whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and/or had ties to international terrorist organizations.
Several news organizations did just that. But in light of other assertions on Wednesday, widely reported by the mainstream media, that Saddam did not pose any significant threat prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we felt it was time to publish as many of the Iraqi intelligence documents as possible.
What follows are copies of 24 of the 42 pages that are in our possession. Pages 21 through 26 were not published because they contain a list of terrorists trained at a camp belonging to the Iraqi Intelligence Directorate. CNSNews.com hopes to glean more information about the individuals on this list and provide updates in the future on their activities and whereabouts. Pages 29 through 40 were excluded because they replicate, though in a different person's handwriting, earlier documents.
Upon clicking on the individual pages of Arabic documents, readers will have an opportunity to click on the unedited English translation of those documents. We hope this serves to further illuminate a very important element of the ongoing debate.
Page 1: Jan. 18, 1993 memo from Saddam Hussein, through his secretary, to the Iraqi Intelligence Service, urging that missions be undertaken to "hunt down Americans," especially in Somalia.
Pages 2-12: Jan. 25, 1993 memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service to Saddam Hussein, outlining the existing or developing relationships between Iraq and terrorist organizations.
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Page 13: Feb. 8, 1993 response from Saddam Hussein to the Jan. 25, 1993 memo.
Pages 14, 15: March 11, 1993 memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service detailing plans for a meeting with "one of the leaders from the Egyptian Al-Jehad" terrorist organization.
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Page 16: March 16, 1993 response from Saddam's secretary to the March 11, 1993 memo.
Pages 17, 18: March 18, 1993 memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service detailing plans to "move against the Egyptian regime" of Hosni Mubarak.
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Pages 19-20: Iraqi Intelligence Service internal memos regarding the information of individuals who participated at "the martyr act camp" belonging to the Iraqi intelligence directorate.
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Pages 21-26: They comprise a list of terrorists trained at a camp belonging to the Iraqi Intelligence Directorate.
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Pages 27, 28: Notes from the Iraqi Intelligence Service outlining strategies. Included is the assessment that terrorist "efforts should be concentrated on Egypt." The notes also advise against targeting the U.S. military, but recommend targeting "Americans as general" as well as "US agents inside the (Egyptian) regime."
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Page 29-40: Duplicative of pages 2-12, except in a different person's handwriting.
Page 41: Table indicating Sept. 6, 2000 acquisition of malignant pustule (anthrax) as well as sterilization/decontamination equipment.
Page 42: Table indicating Aug. 21, 2000 acquisition of mustard gas as well as protective equipment.
So, you're saying that Bush won't be able to maintain current needs with a volunteer army, but Kerry will be able to add 40000 troops on a volunteer basis? In addition, one of my previous posts point out that in addition to the 40000 troops you would have to increase officers to lead them.
I guess he'll just use his nuanced persuasion like he plans to do to convince the french and germans to supply troops- ooops, sorry , even he has admitted that the french will not be supplying any troops.
Read my post 72896
THe lefts continued insistence that Bush will return the draft is just stupid. He CAN"T do that himself, he would have to get congress to approve it. It would be political suicide.
Why not cut out the middle man and just run Michael Moore for office?
Kerry is the one who has stated that he will add 40,000 troops to the armed services. What is his "plan" to do that without adding a draft????
You must be worried about the recent rise in tin foil, no??
Zogby is the outlier- all the other polls show bush with a 4-5 point lead. Curious that you didn't mention those. It's like over at democratic underground- they only mention favorable poll fresults and delete posts and posters that don't follow the party line
Washington post and rasmussen have bush up