Did the Mainstream Media Get the Memo?

huffingtonpost.com
Rep. John Conyers: Did the Mainstream Media Get the Memo?

For the past few weeks, I and others on this blog (including its propreitor) have lamented the lack of mainstream media coverage of the Downing Street Minutes [which has been reported on numerous times here at "The Truth About Political Stuff" http://political-stuff.blogspot.com ]. Looking in from the outside of the networks and newspapers, we have been left to surmise just what the problem really is. On a story with constitutional implications, with life and death consequences, there was first silence. Then, there was a story here and there, but no meaningful, dogged and sustained coverage. What gives?

First, this morning, I came across an insightful column on this matter from a reporter named Jefferson Morley on Washingtonpost.com. For those of you who still get our news from a paper copy with a cup of coffee, don't bother -- it isn't in the Post today, just online. Mr. Morley's beat is covering the foreign press for the Post.

A couple of quotes from his column (and then on to the startling part): "It's not hard to see why this remarkable document, published in The Times on May 1 (and reported in this column on May 3), continues to attract reader interest around the world." At the end: "Far from being a dud, the Downing Street Memo may generate more stories to come." Great column. And why couldn't I read this in the Post this morning?

Mr. Morley answered my question later in the day, in an online chat at Washingtonpost.com. The exchanges with readers speak for themselves and I urge you to read the chat in its entirety. A few stunners:

When asked why there has been so little coverage of the Downing Street Minutes here in the United States, Morley replies: "I think some combination of cynicism, complacency and insulation has stifled the instincts of very good reporters. I also think there is also a failure of leadership at the senior editorial level. The issues raised by the Downing Street minutes are very serious. To pursue them is to invite confrontation. This means that 'beat' reporters cannot realistically pursue the story. I say all this way of explanation, not rationalization. There are several natural followup stories to the Downing Street memo that we should be pursuing right now."


Later he says: "I think its because the Washington press corps is oriented around "news" as generated by the White House and the executive branch. When it comes to Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the White House and the Congress have settled on the following narrative: that the U.S. government had every reason to fear the nexus of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, that the intelligence community agreed that Hussein had WMD and therefore war was not only justified but necessary.

The Downing Street Memo invites the thought that maybe that was illusory, that in fact people in the Bush administration were having meetings dedicated to figuring how, as Richard Dearlove said, 'fix the facts and the intelligence.' I think its hard to journalist's born and bred in the ways of Washington to contemplate the implications."

This is a stunning account of the way our media has slid backwards from the days of Woodward and Bernstein. I'll let his candid remarks speak for themselves on that.

I would simply ask: after the abject failure of the media to expose the myth of WMD and Iraq, the cheerleading coverage of "embedded" reporters, and the transmission of propaganda to the American people (see Jessica Lynch story, Pat Tillman's tragic death, and the toppling of Saddam's statue), aren't we owed some good, sustained and thorough reporting on this?

A reader asks whether a Post reporter will ask about the Downing Street Minutes during the joint Bush-Blair appearances in Washington this week. Morley's reply: "If Post reporters don't ask Blair about the memo, they have abdicated responsibility in my view."

What more can I add to that?

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WSJ falsely claimed Democratic senators joined Bolton in exaggerating Syria weapons threat

mediamatters.org
WSJ falsely claimed Democratic senators joined Bolton in exaggerating Syria weapons threat

In an effort to defend John R. Bolton from charges that he overstated the threat of Syria's weapons of mass destruction, a June 6 Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that his Democratic critics in the Senate endorsed the same claims as Bolton when they voted for 2003 legislation on Syria. But the 2003 Syria Accountability Act quoted language about Syria's weapons programs that the intelligence community had officially vetted and released to the public, while Bolton, President Bush's nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, planned to make allegations in 2003 congressional testimony that went beyond what the intelligence community supported, according to The New York Times.

The Journal attacked Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT), both critics of Bolton who claimed he intended to exaggerate the threat posed by Syria's weapons programs:

As it happens, Messrs. Dodd and Biden both voted in favor of the 2003 Syrian [sic] Accountability Act. That law explicitly cites an unclassified CIA report that Syria "already holds a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin but apparently is trying to develop more toxic and persistent nerve agents. ..." The law also notes that "Syria also is developing an offensive [biological weapons] capability." We guess this means our Democratic friends are also guilty of overstating the evidence on Syria.

In fact, though the full text of Bolton's controversial draft statement on Syria is not publicly available, news reports indicate that his claims went considerably beyond what the intelligence community supported. The 2003 Syria Accountability Act quoted an unclassified CIA report stating that Syria had chemical agents and was probably developing offensive biological weapons capabilities. By contrast, "The C.I.A. specifically rejected an assertion in a classified section of Mr. Bolton's prepared testimony saying Syria had a biological and chemical weapons program that threatened regional security in the Middle East," the Times reported on April 29, citing intelligence officials' testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.


Bolton's planned testimony provoked resistance from Robert L. Hutchings, then-director of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC drafts National Intelligence Estimates, which "contain the coordinated judgments of the Intelligence Community" and that the NIC calls the "most authoritative written judgments concerning national security issues." Hutchings "directed his staff in 2003 to strongly resist assertions that John R. Bolton sought to make about Syria's weapons programs," the Times reported.

A May 10 Times article quoted Hutchings saying that in his approach to Syria, Bolton "took isolated facts and made much more of them to build a case than I thought the intelligence warranted," and engaged in "a sort of cherry-picking of little factoids and little isolated bits that were drawn out to present the starkest-possible case."

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Russert failed to correct Mehlman's claim that 9-11 Commission, Senate report "totally discredited" Downing Street Memo

mediamatters.org
Russert failed to correct Mehlman's claim that 9-11 Commission, Senate report "totally discredited" Downing Street Memo

On the June 5 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, moderator Tim Russert questioned but failed to correct Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman's claim that the "findings" of the Downing Street Memo, a secret British intelligence memo suggesting that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its case for war in Iraq, "have been totally discredited by everyone who's looked at it," including the 9-11 Commission and the Senate.

In fact, neither the 9-11 Commission nor the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence addressed the Bush administration's use of pre-war intelligence.

In the same appearance, Russert also failed to correct Mehlman when he made the misleading claim that the Bush administration "is the first administration ever that has funded with federal dollars embryonic stem cell research. In fact, Bush's stem cell policy replaced a less restrictive set of rules issued by the Clinton administration, though those rules had yet to take effect.



When Russert raised the issue of the Downing Street Memo's contention that, in the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Mehlman replied: "Tim, that report has been discredited by everyone else who's looked at it since then. Whether it's the 9-11 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort to change the intelligence at all." When Russert noted "I don't believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited," Mehlman reiterated: "I believe that the findings of the report, the fact that the intelligence was somehow fixed, have been totally discredited by everyone who's looked at it."

The Senate Intelligence committee's report examined the creation of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was the intelligence community's most comprehensive and authoritative statement about Iraq. But the committee decided at the outset not to investigate the Bush administration's use of intelligence, including public statements by administration officials, in the first phase of its investigation.

Though the committee initially planned to conduct the second phase of its investigation following the 2004 election, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) indicated in March that the committee's investigation into whether the administration misrepresented intelligence judgments in its public statements would be indefinitely postponed, because of administration officials' insistence that "they believed the intelligence, and the intelligence was wrong." "[W]e sort of came to a crossroads, and that is basically on the back burner," Roberts said.

The 9-11 Commission report said even less about the Bush administration's use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. The 567-page report focuses entirely on issues surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks, addresses Iraq only in the context of Al Qaeda and September 11, and does not assess the accuracy or honesty of the Bush's public statements about the Iraqi threat.

Other official reports have similarly avoided the question of whether the Bush administration politicized intelligence. The Robb-Silberman commission's report on intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction noted: "[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community." The Duelfer report presented the results of the Iraq Survey Group's hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq following the invasion but did not compare these findings either with Bush's prewar statements to the public or with the prewar assessments of the intelligence community.

The British inquiry into prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons program, known as the Butler report, determined that Bush's 2003 State of the Union address claim that the "British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was "well-founded," but did not examine the administration's other uses of intelligence. But despite the report's findings, Bush's statement clearly contradicted the judgments of the U.S. intelligence community: in a statement released in July 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet said agency officials "differed with the British dossier on the reliability of the uranium reporting."

Beyond the Downing Street Memo, other evidence indicates that the Bush administration misused intelligence. For example, as Media Matters for America has documented, accounts by Bush administration and U.N. intelligence officials and consultants, documented by CBS News, the Associated Press, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, indicate that the administration and CIA were aware at the time that much of the information provided in former Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations Security Council was suspect.

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China Orders All Web Sites to Register

ABC News
China Orders All Web Sites to Register
Chinese Authorities Orders All Web Sites, Blogs to Register With Government or Face Closure
By ELAINE KURTENBACH
The Associated Press

Jun. 7, 2005 - Authorities have ordered all China-based Web sites and blogs to register or be closed down, in the latest effort by the communist government to police the world of cyberspace.

Commercial publishers and advertisers can face fines of up to 1 million yuan ($120,000) for failing to register, according to documents posted on the Web site of the Ministry of Information Industry.

Private, noncommercial bloggers or Web sites must register the complete identity of the person responsible for the site, it said. The ministry, which has set a June 30 deadline for compliance, said 74 percent of all sites had already registered.

"The Internet has profited many people but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people's spirits," the MII Web site said in explaining the rules, which were quietly introduced in March.

All public media in China is controlled by the state, though limits on the Internet have tended to lag behind as advances in technology and the Web's rapid spread outstripped Beijing's ability to keep tabs on users and service providers.

China has more than 87 million Internet users, the world's second largest online population after the United States.

The government has long required all major commercial Web sites to register and take responsibility for Internet content at least 54 people have been jailed for posting essays or other content deemed subversive online.


But blogs, online diaries, muckraking Web sites and dissident publishing have been harder to police. According to cnblog.org, a Chinese Web log host company, the country has about 700,000 such sites.

Now, however, the government has developed a new system to track down and close those caught violating the rules, the ministry said.

"There's a 'Net Crawler System' that will monitor the sites in real time and search each Web address for its registration number," said one document listing questions and answers about the new rules. "It will report back to the MII if it finds a site thought to be unregistered."

The press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders protested the new rules, saying they would force people with dissenting opinions to shift Web sites overseas, where mainland Chinese users might be unable to access them due to government censorship filters.

The Paris-based group said that in May, many bloggers in China received e-mail messages telling them to register to avoid having their blogs declared illegal.

"Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist Party's propaganda," the rights group said. "This decision will enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively."

The latest restrictions follow many others. Authorities have closed down thousands of Internet cafes the main entry to the Web for many Chinese unable to afford a computer or Internet access.

They've also installed surveillance cameras and begun requiring visitors to Shanghai Internet cafes to register using their official identity cards all in an effort to keep tabs on who's seeing and saying what online.

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Judge Upholds Democrat's Win in Washington

ABC News
Judge Upholds Democrat's Win in Washington
Judge Upholds Democrat's Win in Race for Governor of Washington State; Republican Ends Challenge
By REBECCA COOK
The Associated Press

Jun. 7, 2005 - Gov. Christine Gregoire said she burst into tears in her office, surrounded by her senior staff, after watching a judge 125 miles away uphold her victory in last fall's governor's election, ending the legal fight over the closest gubernatorial race in U.S. history.

"It's an emotional day, it's an emotional moment," said Gregoire, a Democrat who has held office for five months under a cloud of uncertainty. "I'm ready to move on. I want the state of Washington to be served by a full-time governor who is not being distracted by anything other than serving the citizens."

Defeated GOP candidate Dino Rossi said he would not appeal.


"With today's decision, and because of the political makeup of the Washington State Supreme Court, which makes it almost impossible to overturn this ruling, I am ending the election contest," Rossi said at his campaign headquarters in Bellevue.

The election decided by an amazingly narrow margin of 129 votes out of 2.9 million cast included 1,678 illegally cast ballots, Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges found.

But in a ruling issued in his Wenatchee courtroom, Bridges rejected GOP claims that the election was stolen through errors and fraud, and said Republicans had failed to prove that Rossi would have won had the illegal votes been disregarded.

"Unless an election is clearly invalid, when the people have spoken their verdict should not be disturbed by the courts," Bridges said. Nullifying the election, he said, would be "the ultimate act of judicial egotism and judicial activism."

The judge threw out only a few illegally cast votes, which raised Gregoire's margin of victory to 133.

The Republicans were hoping the judge would nullify the election and then either declare Rossi the winner outright or open the way for a new election in the fall.

"I continue to believe that mounting this election challenge, and shining the lights on the various problems of our election system, was the right thing to do," Rossi said at a late afternoon news conference.

It's been widely speculated that Rossi will run for the U.S. Senate next year, if not governor in 2008. But he offered no clues Monday, saying "I'm definitely not going anywhere ... We'll see you again."

Rossi, a real estate agent and former state senator, was considered a long shot last November against Gregoire, who was Washington's attorney general.

Rossi won the first count by 261 votes, then watched his lead shrink to 42 in a machine recount. In a hand recount completed in late December, Gregoire was pronounced the winner by 129 votes the smallest margin of victory in percentage terms of any statewide election in the nation's history. Five days before Gregoire's inauguration, Rossi sued to contest the election.

Since then, Washington's residents have awaited the final word on their governor.

Preschool teacher Karen Servey, 54, was in the state Capitol leading a school trip tour when she heard of the judge's ruling.

"I was relieved," she said, sitting in the Senate's public gallery. "I think it would have cost the taxpayers a lot of money to go through another election process."

Shaun Gravatte, who also voted for Gregoire, disagreed. "It was too close," he said. "Of course there should be a revote."

Monday's ruling came after a two-week trial that turned over flaws and quirks in election departments around the state.

The Republicans argued that large numbers of votes were illegally cast by felons or cast in the names of dead people; that there were errors in the counting of ballots; and that there was stuffing of the ballot box and destruction of ballots. They concentrated their attacks on Seattle's heavily Democratic King County, the state's most populous.

While Republicans characterized the problems as "sinister," Democrats described them as innocent mistakes that happen in every county, in every election.

Bridges acknowledged that the state's election system is flawed, but said he's not the person to fix it.

"The voters are in a position to demand of their legislative and executive bodies that remedial measures be taken immediately," he said.

On the Net:

Video of the trial is available at: http://www.tvw.org

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Preventing ID Theft

ABC News
Mellody Hobson: Preventing ID Theft
How Can You Protect Your Financial Identity?
By MELLODY HOBSON

Jun. 7, 2005 - The announcement from Citigroup that it lost 3.9 million customer data files should cause all of us to take pause about the safety of our financial identity. This announcement comes only a couple of months after Bank of America lost information on 1.2 million customers. While there is nothing you can do to prevent your financial institution from losing computer data storage tapes, there are a number of proactive measures you can take to protect your identity.


1) Do not count on corporate America to notify you.
Only one state (California) has laws that require a company to notify individuals if their personal information has been possibly stolen. Therefore, you need to be proactive in monitoring your credit history.

2) Keep an eye on your credit.
Take advantage of the recent law that allows consumers to order a free copy of their credit report (will make it to the East Coast this spring). According to the Public Interest Research Group, one in four credit reports has errors that are serious enough to disqualify consumers from opening a bank account, purchasing a home home or evening getting a job! Citigroup is encouraging its customers to enroll in a free credit monitoring service for 90 days.

3) Take proactive steps with anything personal you do online.
For example, when paying your bills online, it is vital to make sure your computer is armed with the most up-to-date anti-virus software as well as some type of security or firewall protection. Most sites require a password and PIN which only work when your Internet browser is secure and up-to-date.

4) Do not leave your footprints.
Do not check the box that says save password and delete the cookies from your browser often. When banking online, do not save your information. You would not leave your drivers license and bank account information with a teller when you visit a bank, so do not leave this information on the Internet!

5) Consider identity theft insurance.
The major credit bureaus are now offering identity-theft insurance for around $100 a year. For example, Equifax will provide you with unlimited credit reports, alert you to major changes in your history and provide $20,000 worth of identity-theft insurance. Additionally, policy holders will have a special hotline they can call if their identity is stolen and are also entitled to up to $4,000 for lost salary in case you have to take a leave of absence to fix any credit-related issues. Before you sign up for this insurance, contact the provider of your homeowner's insurance as you may already be covered if your identity is stolen.

Citigroup on Monday said the lost data files only affect accounts with CitiFinancial. If you have one of these accounts and are concerned your identity may have been compromised, you should call your local CitiFinancial branch. Additionally, you can call the dedicated hotline Citi has set up at 1-866-452-2484.

How To Avoid Being 'Phished'

Do not use Web links in a suspicious e-mail to access a Web page. Instead, call the company or type the main Web address directly into your browser.

Do not disclose personal information online unless it is over a secure connection. You know a Web site is secure if it begins with https:// rather than http://.

Download a free Web browser toolbar that will alert you if you try to access a known phishing Web site. The Anti-Phishing Working Group recommends Earthlink's ScamBlocker, which can be downloaded for free at http://www.earthlink.net/earthlinktoolbar.

Check your credit card and bank statements and other online accounts regularly to ensure there are no discrepancies.

Make sure your computer has the most up-to-date security patches.

If you receive phishing e-mails, forward the entire message, header included, to the following places:

1) Anti-Phishing Working Group: reportphishing@antiphishing.com
2) Federal Trade Commission: sapm@uce.gov

Additionally, you should file a complaint with the Internet Fraud Complaint Center of the FBI (www.ifccfbi.gov) and notify the company that has been victimized.

Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Capital Management (arielmutualfunds.com) in Chicago, is Good Morning America's personal finance expert. Ariel associates Matthew Yale and Aimee Daley contributed to this report.

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Letter to Pres Bush Concerning the "Downing Street Minutes"

Letter to Pres Bush Concerning the "Downing Street Minutes"

As you may know, 89 Members of Congress, led by Rep. John Conyers, Jr., submitted a Letter to Pres Bush Concerning the "Downing Street Minutes" on May 5, 2005. That letter has not yet been responded to. There is now a petition asking President Bush to "publicly respond to these questions as promptly as possible" and, as of this writing, over 150,000 citizens have signed it.

To read the letter and sign the petition, click below to get to the link.


Here is the link to the letter and petition:
http://johnconyers.campaignoffice.com/index.asp?Type=SUPERFORMS&SEC={422D9DF8-7BED-48D2-8702-EA7BE2878006}

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Experts Warn of Intelligence Confusion

Yahoo! News
Experts Warn of Intelligence Confusion

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer

Overlapping responsibilities among U.S. intelligence agencies could lead to failures in assessing terror threats, experts said Monday in examining changes at the CIA and FBI since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Part of the problem stems from the continued lack of a reliable information-sharing system within the intelligence community, according to panelists led by a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated missteps leading to the attacks.

"There's a real vulnerability," former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh said during the two-hour discussion — the first of eight panels hosted this summer by the commission.

"The collection of intelligence, and even its analysis, is not worth much if it's not able to be translated into a realistic threat assessment that provide guidance for the application of resources designed to prevent terrorism," Thornburgh said.


Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general, said, "We clearly need greater clarity as to who is doing what."

The panel discussions will culminate July 25 with a privately financed report card on how the government has responded to the commission recommendations issued last summer. The 10-member, bipartisan commission interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including President Bush, and reviewed more than 2 million documents before issuing its weighty report last July.

Monday's panel focused on reforms at the CIA and the FBI's counterterror unit to prevent future attacks. Though experts said both agencies have made progress, they agreed many more steps need to be taken.

The FBI, in particular, faces an array of challenges, including high personnel turnover and a low internal regard for counterterror analysts, said John Gannon, a former CIA official.

"Within FBI, if you are not an agent, you are furniture," Gannon said.

The panel also criticized the FBI's failed Virtual Case File computer system that was supposed to improve greatly the management of terrorism and other criminal cases.

"I think that we have been taken aback collectively by the failure of the Virtual Case File," Gorelick said. Thornburgh called the system "an unmitigated failure." An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

Despite congressional mandates, intelligence agencies still struggle to share information with each other, Gannon said.

"You don't go to work every day in the intelligence community with the idea, 'What can I share?' It's 'What can I protect?'" he said. "And that is the idiom of the business. So if you want information to be shared, it has to be very clear to people what authorities they do have to share."

Relatives of Sept. 11 victims accused the FBI and CIA of intentionally refusing to share intelligence that could have thwarted the attacks.

"The ongoing myth that the CIA's failure to communicate with the FBI was some sort of institutional failure that is readily fixable by intelligence community reforms is a notion that is whimsical at best and extremely harmful to our nation at worst," said a statement by the Sept. 11 Advocates.

Each of the seven upcoming commission panels will focus on a specific aspect of homeland defense, including protection against weapons of mass destruction, border and transportation security measures and foreign policy and diplomatic relations.

• __

On the Net:

9/11 Public Discourse Project: http://www.9-11pdp.org/

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Fox News Admits It's In Bed With Karl Rove

newshounds.us
Fox News Admits It's In Bed With Karl Rove

Did you know that Fox News is a "private channel"? That's what Fox's London bureau chief, Scott Norvell said in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal Europe on May 20, 2005. He also wrote this:

"Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly."

Here's more from Slate.


Comment: What unmitigated arrogance. (l) If Fox thinks it's a "private channel" it should get its butt off the public airwaves owned by each and every citizen of this country. (2) I'm glad Fox has finally admitted it cuts off, talks over, and generally makes "lefties" look bad when they appear there. We've been writing about that for a year now, and Outfoxed illustrated it, all while Fox innocently denied doing any such thing. (3) No, people don't always "know what they're getting." We get endless letters here from people who absolutely insist that Fox News is the only "fair and balanced" network on television. That's the danger of Fox. Fox brainwashes people while it simultaneously convinces them that it's "fair and balanced." If Fox wants to make sure people "know what they're getting," it should immediately drop the "fair and balanced" line and come up with something new, like "Watch Fox. We Propagandize for the Radical Right."

It looks like we News Hounds, and a lot of other people, have had Fox's number for quite some time now. Thank you Mr. Norvell for confirming it. Now that the truth is out, maybe we can get on with making sure everyone knows "what they're getting" when they watch your "news."

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Estate Tax Malarkey

factcheck.org
Estate Tax Malarkey

Misleading ads exaggerate what the tax costs farmers, small businesses
and "your family."

Summary

In TV and radio ads two conservative groups greatly overstate the
burden that the federal estate tax puts on heirs to a family farm or
business.

One ad claims the federal estate tax "can bury your family in crippling
tax bills," which is untrue for nearly all of those who will see the
ad, including the large majority of farm and business owners. Both ads
claim the estate tax is a "double tax," which is only partly true, and
mostly false when it comes to very wealthy families.



We take no position on whether the estate tax should or should not be
repealed permanently. The claims made in these one-sided ads, however,
present a misleading picture of who is actually affected by the tax.


Go to the link below for the entire article:

http://www.factcheck.org/article328m.html

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Nixon's henchmen lecture us on ethics

EDITOR's NOTE:
If you or someone you know are not old enough to have actually lived through the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal, you need to read this article or pass it along to those you know who have no clue of context.

Let me bring a specific paragraph from the below article to the front here:

Lost in the wailings of Nixon's men is the one thing Americans need to know to understand Felt's dilemma. Felt couldn't go to his boss. J.Edgar Hoover had just died and Nixon had replaced him with an unqualified Nixon loyalist - L.Patrick Gray III, who proved his worth by destroying documents and slipping others to officials running the White House cover-up. Felt couldn't go to the attorney general; John Mitchell was attorney general when he presided over the Watergate break-in planning and, after leaving to run Nixon's campaign, was replaced by a Nixon loyalist not trusted by many FBI hands. Felt couldn't go to Congress - the Senate Watergate Committee didn't exist yet. Felt certainly couldn't go to Nixon or all the president's henchmen.

-R

-----------

Newsday.com
Nixon's henchmen lecture us on ethics

Colson and Liddy worked the cable news circuit, expressing moral indignation that the former FBI deputy director was Deep Throat.
BY MARTIN SCHRAM

Martin Schram is a Washington-based syndicated columnist.

June 6, 2005

History's latest con happened right before our eyes Tuesday night. We thought we'd settled in to watch the nonstop cable news when suddenly our television screen was transformed into Alice's looking glass.

All reality was backward. But perhaps only the old-timers in our midst knew it. For millions of viewers were not even born when those faces that just popped up in the looking-glass/screen were all the president's men, once in power and then in disgrace, more than three decades ago.

Richard Nixon's ex-convicts - who did jail time for their crimes against democracy and then profited from their crimes by writing books and becoming celebrities - had returned to work one more con. Nixon's former senior White House assistant, Charles Colson, and the Nixon team's burglar-in-chief, G. Gordon Liddy, worked the cable news circuit, expressing moral indignation that the FBI's former deputy director, W. Mark Felt, was Deep Throat.

He was the source who had blown their cover by feeding facts to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward - truths that helped land many in jail and drove Nixon from office.


"I was shocked because I worked with him closely," Colson said on MSNBC. "And you would think the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, you could talk to with the same confidence you could talk to a priest." Then on CNN: "I was shocked, because ... I talked to him often and trusted him with very sensitive materials. So did the president. To think that he was out going around in back alleys at night looking for flowerpots, passing information to someone, it's . . . not the image of the professional FBI that you would expect."

Ah, image. Conjure Colson, with Nixon and others in the Oval Office, as Nixon orders a burglary at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Meanwhile on CNN, Liddy tells Paula Zahn: "I view him [Felt] as someone who violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession." Then, back on MSNBC, Liddy brags that not only had he plotted the burglary of the Democratic Party's Watergate offices but, "I planned the Brookings break-in." It wasn't done, Liddy said - "too expensive."

When the face of Nixon's speechwriter Pat Buchanan appeared on our looking-glass/screens, some viewers might have expected a refreshing, ruminative literary perspective about Felt and the Watergate era. Then Buchanan spoke: "I think he's a snake."

"Here is an individual," Buchanan explained, "sneaking around at night leaking things to damage the president of the United States in the middle of a campaign. And I don't see what is heroic about ... that."

The sound you hear is the sound of one journalistic mind boggling because this was never about heroics, just a helping hand. Those of us who were journalists investigating Watergate - and there were many, from a score of news organizations in addition to The Washington Post - understand the importance of having the FBI's No. 2 man on call and willing to confirm things we'd heard yet couldn't quite prove.

Lost in the wailings of Nixon's men is the one thing Americans need to know to understand Felt's dilemma. Felt couldn't go to his boss. J.Edgar Hoover had just died and Nixon had replaced him with an unqualified Nixon loyalist - L.Patrick Gray III, who proved his worth by destroying documents and slipping others to officials running the White House cover-up. Felt couldn't go to the attorney general; John Mitchell was attorney general when he presided over the Watergate break-in planning and, after leaving to run Nixon's campaign, was replaced by a Nixon loyalist not trusted by many FBI hands. Felt couldn't go to Congress - the Senate Watergate Committee didn't exist yet. Felt certainly couldn't go to Nixon or all the president's henchmen.

So he helped his young reporter friend, Bob Woodward. And, three decades later, these Nixon criminals popped up on our looking-glass/screens, doing their shtick. They wailed like pro wrestlers pounding the mat in feigned pain.

But occasionally even they told the truth. As when Liddy, who went from jail to Hollywood and black-bag jobs to talk radio, said on MSNBC: "There's great life after Watergate."

Colson and Liddy worked the cable news circuit, expressing moral indignation that the former FBI deputy director was Deep Throat.

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Breaking News: Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People

Breaking News: Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People
Jun 6, 10:56 AM EDT

By GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal authorities may prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug.

The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug's use to treat various illnesses.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana.

The closely watched case was an appeal by the Bush administration in a case involving two seriously ill California women who use marijuana. At issue was whether the prosecution of pot users under the federal Controlled Substances Act was constitutional.

Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines.


Stevens said there are other legal options for patients, "but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress."

California's medical marijuana law, passed by voters in 1996, allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's recommendation. Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state have laws similar to California.

In those states, doctors generally can give written or oral recommendations on marijuana to patients with cancer, HIV and other serious illnesses.

In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that states should be allowed to set their own rules.

"The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

The legal question presented a dilemma for the court's conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years. They earlier invalidated federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion.

O'Connor said she would have opposed California's medical marijuana law if she were a voter or a legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse "making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own home for one's own medicinal use."

The case concerned two Californians, Angel Raich and Diane Monson. The two had sued then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, asking for a court order letting them smoke, grow or obtain marijuana without fear of arrest, home raids or other intrusion by federal authorities.

Raich, an Oakland woman suffering from ailments including scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, fatigue and pain, smokes marijuana every few hours. She said she was partly paralyzed until she started smoking pot. Monson, an accountant who lives near Oroville, Calif., has degenerative spine disease and grows her own marijuana plants in her backyard.

In the court's main decision, Stevens raised concerns about abuse of marijuana laws. "Our cases have taught us that there are some unscrupulous physicians who overprescribe when it is sufficiently profitable to do so," he said.

The case is Gonzales v. Raich, 03-1454.

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The Mobility Myth

The New York Times

The Mobility Myth
By BOB HERBERT

The war that nobody talks about - the overwhelmingly one-sided class war - is being waged all across America. Guess who's winning.

A recent front-page article in The Los Angeles Times showed that teenagers are faring poorly in a tight job market because of the fierce competition they're getting from older workers and immigrants for entry-level positions.

On the same day, in the business section, the paper reported that the chief executives at California's largest 100 companies took home a collective $1.1 billion in 2004, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year. The paper contrasted that with the 2.9 percent raise that the average California worker saw last year.

The gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is fast becoming an unbridgeable chasm. David Cay Johnston, in the latest installment of the New York Times series "Class Matters," wrote, "It's no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everybody else behind is not widely known."

Consider, for example, two separate eras in the lifetime of the baby-boom generation. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the population between 1950 and 1970, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. That gap has since skyrocketed. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent between 1990 and 2002, Mr. Johnston wrote, each taxpayer in that top bracket brought in an extra $18,000.

It's like chasing a speedboat with a rowboat.


Put the myth of the American Dream aside. The bottom line is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for working Americans to move up in class. The rich are freezing nearly everybody else in place, and sprinting off with the nation's bounty.

Economic mobility in the United States - the extent to which individuals and families move from one social class to another - is no higher than in Britain or France, and lower than in some Scandinavian countries. Maybe we should be studying the Scandinavian dream.

As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the gap between the rich and the rest of us is not growing fast enough. An analysis by The Times showed the following:

"Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000."

The social dislocations resulting from this war that nobody mentions have been under way for some time. But the Bush economic policies have accelerated the consequences and intensified the pain.

A big problem, of course, is that American workers have been hurting badly for years. Revolutionary improvements in technology, increasingly globalized trade, the competition of low-wage workers overseas and increased immigration here at home, the decline of manufacturing, the weakening of the labor movement, outsourcing and numerous other factors have left American workers with very little leverage to use against employers.

Many in the middle class are mortgaged to the hilt, maxed out on credit cards and fearful to the point of trembling that all they've worked for might vanish in a downsized minute.

The privileged classes, with the Bush administration's iron cloak of protection, avoid their fair share of taxes, are reluctant to pay an honest dollar for an honest day's work (the federal minimum wage is still a scandalous $5.15 an hour), refuse to fight in their nation's wars, and laugh all the way to their yachts.

The American dream was about expanding opportunities and widely shared prosperity. Now we have older people and college grads replacing people near the bottom in jobs that offer low pay, no pensions, no health insurance and no vacations.

A fellow named Mark McClellan, who was bounced out of a management position when Kaiser Aluminum closed down in Spokane, Wash., told The Times in the "Class Matters" series: "I may look middle class. But I'm not. My boat is sinking fast."

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

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- ON THIS DAY -

nytimes.com

- ON THIS DAY -

On June 6, 1944, the D-Day invasion of Europe took place during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.

On June 6, 1968 Sen. Robert F. Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, a day after he was shot by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.



http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20050606.html

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Biden Urges U.S. to Take Steps to Close Prison at Guantánamo

The New York Times

Biden Urges U.S. to Take Steps to Close Prison at Guantánamo
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, June 5 (AP) - A leading Senate Democrat said Sunday that the United States needed to move toward shutting down the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world," said the senator, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, on the ABC News program "This Week." "And it is unnecessary to be in that position."

A Pentagon report released Friday cited cases in which American guards at Guantánamo Bay mishandled the Koran, and last month, Amnesty International called the detention center for terrorism suspects "the gulag of our time," a charge Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dismissed as "reprehensible."

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is planning hearings this month on the treatment of detainees at the camp.

Mr. Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed that an independent commission take a look at Guantánamo Bay and make recommendations. "But the end result is, I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners," he said. "Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don't, let go."

He added, "I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there were no Gitmo."


Guantánamo Bay has about 540 detainees. Some have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. Most were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan and were sent to Guantánamo Bay in hope of extracting useful intelligence about Al Qaeda.

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Members of Sept. 11 Panel Press for Information on Terror Risk

The New York Times
Members of Sept. 11 Panel Press for Information on Terror Risk
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, June 5 - Members of the Sept. 11 commission, fearing that the Bush administration and Congress will never act on some of their recommendations, are joining together almost a year after completing their final report to press the White House for information showing whether the government has done enough to prevent another catastrophic terrorist attack, commission officials said.

The officials said the 10 commissioners, acting through a private group they founded last summer, will present a letter within days to Andrew H. Card Jr., President Bush's chief of staff, asking the White House to allow the group to gather detailed information from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies about the government's recent performance in dealing with terrorist threats.

Commissioners say they want the information to prepare for a series of public hearings scheduled to begin here on Monday and to draft a privately financed report that will evaluate the government's counterterrorism policies in the wake of the commission's final report last July.

The moves, which may not be welcome at the White House or among Congressional leaders, represent an unusual effort by members of a high-profile federal commission to retain their political viability and to lobby for their recommendations long after their official investigation came to an end.

"We're going to ask a lot of questions," said Thomas H. Kean, who was chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and is now a board member of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a private educational and lobbying group. "There are a lot of our recommendations that have not been implemented."

Mr. Kean said that with terrorist groups threatening new attacks on American soil, "we don't have a lot of time left to act."


The 9/11 Public Discourse Project has scheduled eight public hearings on the government's counterterrorism efforts; the hearing on Monday will focus on the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., the targets of the sharpest criticism in the commission's final report last year.

Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said that although witness lists for the other hearings have not been completed, he would not rule out a request for public testimony from senior administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director.

Told of the private group's plans to approach the White House, a White House spokeswoman, Christie Parell, said Sunday: "We appreciate the work the commission did. We have acted on the vast majority of their recommendations and welcome their continued involvement. We look forward to receiving the letter."

Over its lifespan, the Sept. 11 commission repeatedly clashed with the Bush administration, which had originally opposed its creation, especially over the panel's access to important White House documents and to witnesses. The battles were especially pitched because of their timing, in the middle of Mr. Bush's campaign for a second term.

With their public hearings and their plans for a new report, the Sept. 11 commission is, to a degree, back in business.

The five Democrats and five Republicans who made up the panel are returning together to the public stage - this time, solely as private citizens and without subpoena power - to investigate the government's response to terrorist threats. The 9/11 Public Discourse Project, which has a small staff based in Washington, is underwritten by several prominent private foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the panel and a former secretary of the Navy, said he hoped the White House would cooperate with the former commissioners in their renewed investigation "because we have the same objectives - they should see us as a valuable resource outside of the system."

The former commissioners have the enthusiastic support of groups representing the families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

"I applaud this," said Mary Fetchet of New Canaan, Conn., whose son was killed in the attacks and who is founding director of a family group called Voices of September 11th. "Typically a federal commission writes a report, makes its recommendations and there's no follow-through."

Members of the commission readily acknowledged that they no longer had any authority to force the Bush administration to hand over information or to make witnesses available, and they have no expectation that they will re-create the fireworks of their public hearings last year, when senior administration officials were subjected to hours of often hostile questioning under oath and on live network television. (The hearing on Monday is scheduled to be broadcast live on C-Span 2, the cable network.)

"We don't have that subpoena power anymore," said Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democratic commissioner who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and who will moderate Monday's hearing, which will be held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a scholarly organization partly financed by the federal government. "We are looking in from outside."

But Mr. Kean said he was hopeful that the White House would cooperate and that some senior administration officials might be willing to answer questions in public if only to demonstrate their commitment to preventing new terrorist attacks.

"Some of them may be eager to do that," he said.

The hearings are expected to culminate later this year in a report that the 9/11 Public Discourse Project has described as a "report card" on its "unfinished agenda."

The Sept. 11 commission, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, went out of business last August after releasing a unanimous final report the month before demonstrating that incompetence and turf battles among the nation's intelligence agencies, notably the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., prevented the government from acting before Sept. 11, 2001, on intelligence suggesting an imminent Qaeda attack.

The report, which became a national bestseller, came after a year of public hearings at which Mr. Rumsfeld, Ms. Rice and others were harshly questioned about intelligence failures before Sept. 11. Its conclusions resulted in legislation that enacted the panel's key recommendation: creation of the job of director of national intelligence, an official who would have the authority to force cooperation among long-feuding spy agencies.

But many of the report's other recommendations have not been acted on, including its call for an overhaul of Congressional intelligence oversight, for the establishment of unified radio frequencies allowing emergency workers around the country to communicate; and for the appointment of a federal civil liberties board to prevent constitutional abuses by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

In an interview on Friday in his offices at Drew University in Madison, N.J., where he will step down as president this month, Mr. Kean said that he had been gratified by many of the actions of Mr. Bush and Congress in responding to the commission's recommendations, especially the creation of the intelligence director's job and the appointment of John D. Negroponte, the former American ambassador to the United Nations and to Iraq, to the post.

"He's met with us, and we were very pleased with the questions he asked and with his approach to the job," Mr. Kean said.

Mr. Kean, who was once seen as a candidate for the intelligence job that went to Mr. Negroponte, has rebuffed suggestions that he return to politics. In January, he accepted a new job as chairman of the board of trustees of the multibillion-dollar Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J.

While insisting that he saw "the glass as half full" in the government's response to the Sept. 11 report, Mr. Kean said he was disturbed that so many other recommendations had not been acted on, especially the commission's call for an expanded American effort to secure international stores of nuclear materials, especially in the nations of the former Soviet Union.

"There's no greater danger to this nation than a terrorist group acquiring these materials," Mr. Kean said. He said he was also alarmed that there had been little movement by the government in creating the unified radio frequencies for police and fire departments around the country - "that's almost a scandal."

The civil liberties board was created under the law adopted by Congress last year that also established the job of director of national intelligence, but the White House has offered no hint that it is close to naming members of the board.

"I'm very disappointed that the president has not yet seen fit to appoint the board, which is included in the very legislation he signed into law," said Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor and a Democratic member of the Sept. 11 commission.

Mr. Ben-Veniste, who is scheduled to lead one of the public hearings next month, specifically on civil liberties issues, said prisoner abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, demonstrated the need for the board.

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Texas Gov. Signs Bill at Church School

ABC News
Texas Gov. Signs Bill at Church School
Texas Governor Signs Bill at Church School That Limits Late-Term Abortions; Hundreds Protest
By JAMIE STENGLE
The Associated Press

Jun. 6, 2005 - In a ceremony filled with religious references, Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill at a church school gymnasium Sunday that imposes more limits on late-term abortions and requires minors to get written parental consent for abortions.

The signing came as several hundred demonstrators some opposed to the signing of a bill on church property protested outside.


"It has been a tragedy of unspeakable consequences that for decades activist courts denied many Texas parents their right to be involved in one of the most important decisions their young daughter could ever make whether to end the life that was growing inside her," Perry told a crowd of about 1,000 people gathered at the Calvary Christian Academy. "For too long, a blind eye has been turned to the rights of our most vulnerable human beings that's the unborn in our society."

During the 90-minute program, Perry also signed a resolution to amend the Texas Constitution by banning same-sex marriages. However, that signature was only ceremonial since voters must approve the proposed ban in November.

"A nurturing home with a loving mother and loving father is the best way to guide our children down the proper path," he said.

Texas already had a parental notification bill, approved in 1999. The new, tougher measure requires a parent to provide written consent for unmarried girls under 18. The bill also restricts doctors from performing abortions on women who have carried a child for more than 26 weeks unless having the baby would jeopardize the woman's life or the baby has serious brain damage.

Before Perry spoke, several pastors received standing ovations and shouts of "Amen!" from the crowd as they touted the two measures being signed by Perry.

"It seems to me that people of the great state of Texas will be silent no more," said Rod Parsley, of the Center for Moral Clarity in Ohio. "Folks in this room understand, God is still watching."

The ceremony brought out about 350 protesters carrying signs. They included opponents of the ban on same-sex marriage, including two with posters reading "Hate is not a family value" and "God values all families."

Others were there to protest the use of church property for a bill signing.

"It hurts that he can cheapen politics and religion by this kind of maneuver and people can think it's OK," said Karin Cagle, a 45-year-old from Fort Worth who carried a sign saying "Separate church and state Keep America great."

But Pastor Larry White of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Houston said the gathering inside the church school was about life, family and marriage.

"There are those that would drive people of faith from the public square if they could," White said.

Perry spokeswoman Kathy Walt said many of the critics "would object to this bill-signing if it were in a public school, a library, a Wal-Mart parking lot or any other venue, because they oppose pro-life and pro-family issues."

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The News Media Is Still Recovering From Watergate

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What is the Media Running From?

counterpunch.org
What is the Media Running From?
We Need More, Not Fewer, Anonymous Sources

By DAVID LINDORFF

The voluntary outing of Mark Felt as the "Deep Throat" of Watergate fame puts into relief the current White House's cynical attack on journalists' use of anonymous sources.

It also should shame the corporate media, which has been caving in to this pressure, with the announcement of new stricter rules and promises to limit the use of such sources in the future at many news organizations.

As an investigative reporter who has made frequent use of anonymous sources throughout my career, let me put it bluntly-if Americans want a press that functions even minimally as a watchdog on corruption and abuse of power, they'd better get comfortable with anonymous sources. Toss them over the side and all we will be reading will be official press releases.

Nixon lovers, like Pat Buchanan, the late dark lord's former speechwriter, are blasting Felt, saying if he the erstwhile number two man at the FBI had evidence of illegal behavior he should have reported it to the Justice Department or to his boss, not to a reporter.

Excuse me, but is Buchanan expecting us to seriously believe that Attorney General John Mitchell, or FBI Director Patrick Gray, both later convicted of being feloniously involved in the cover-up of Nixon's crimes, would have done anything with such information besides sacking Felt and burying his story? Well, that and destroying his reputation?


That, after all, is what the Nixon administration MO was. Remember the Nixon "Enemies List"? If someone was a threat, like Daniel Ellsberg, for example, he went on the list. Then you broke into his psychiatrist's office and looked for damaging evidence to leak to the public. Or you sent some of that secret army of dirty tricksters-an army that Woodward and Bernstein say one source tallied at 50, but which a source I know-an anonymous source who was one of them-says numbered in the hundreds-and you messed them up somehow.

We see the same thing happening today, of course. This administration is at least as vicious as the Nixon White House was at destroying its enemies. Just look at the Valerie Plame outing case.

If anything, the cowardly corporate media, which can't even bring itself to report openly on the damning memorandum to British PM Tony Blair detailing in 2002 how the Bush administration planned to "fix" the evidence about terror links and WMDs to create a pretext for an invasion of Iraq, needs to round up more anonymous sources to report honestly about this most devious and corrupt of governments.

Just for an example, when I was breaking the story (in Counterpunch, Salon and Mother Jones) about the device under President Bush's jacket during the three presidential debates-all on the basis of named sources, I might note-there clearly were Washington reporters from all the major news organizations with sources inside the White House and the Republican National Campaign committee who could have taken the story further. Instead, they all ran with lame denials from the White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign that the lump on the president's back was a "wrinkle" in a "badly tailored" suit or shirt. The only news organization that even tried to do a genuine investigation of the bulge story, the New York Times, killed it on the eve of publication (allegedly because it was too close to the election, but then of course they never went back to it after the election).

"The New York Times can't say the president is lying," Elizabeth Bumiller famously said at a public forum on covering the campaign. I'm sure that journalists and editors at the other major news outlets, print and electronic, would say the same thing if they were honest. How far we have come from the early 1970s, when a young Dan Rather could imply just such a thing at a presidential press conference.

The reason the public has such a low opinion of the media today is not that the media uses anonymous sources. It's because the media doesn't tell the truth. The reading and viewing public are savvy enough about advertising and marketing to recognize that most of what they're getting in the "news hole" is just more of the same-official handouts from corporations and government officials, carefully packaged reports aimed at supporting advertisers, and entertainment filler.

If the media gave them red meat, in the form of hard-hitting investigative reports that looked at what government is really doing, how the war in Iraq is really going and how we got there in the first place, what is really happening to the environment, and how we are all being gouged by a tax system that gives away the store to the rich and corporations, you can bet they'd have a higher opinion of them, even if many of those stories relied on unnamed sources.

I'm not saying reporters should take shortcuts and not even try to get sources to go on the record, but let's face it-you cannot expect people with knowledge about wrongdoing to put their jobs and lives in jeopardy just to get a story out. If you want to know about those things-many of which can be life-and-death matters of public interest--you've got to accept that the information will be provided by an anonymous source.

The Bush White House knows this, and that's why it is coming down so hard on stories that use such sources.

They want to nip any chance of a return to Watergate-era journalism in the bud.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

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Guard, Reserve monthly death toll at high

USA TODAY

Guard, Reserve monthly death toll at high

WASHINGTON (AP) — May was the deadliest month of the Iraq war for part-time American servicemen. Thirty-one of them died: 14 members of the Army National Guard, 12 from the Marine Corps Reserve, four from the Army Reserve and one Navy Reserve hospital corpsman attached to a Marine combat unit.

The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq last month — counting active-duty as well as mobilized reserve forces — was 80. That is the highest for any month since January, when 107 died as insurgent attacks rose sharply prior to the Iraqi election. Fifty-two died in April and 36 in March, when it appeared the insurgency was waning.

Iraqis bore the brunt of insurgent violence in May, but it also took a heavy toll on the approximately 140,000 U.S. troops there. The 80 deaths compares with a monthly average of 70 over the previous 12 months.

The death toll among the Guard and Reserve underscores an important aspect of their recruiting problems: More potential recruits, citing concern about being sent to the war zone, are opting for other careers. The Army Guard missed its recruiting target last year and has fallen even farther behind this year.

The previous worst months for Guard and Reserve deaths in Iraq were January, when 30 died, and last November, with 28. Those also happened to be among the deadliest months overall for American forces in Iraq.

The 12 deaths among Marine reservists in May was the most for any month of the war.


Eight of the 12 Marines were with the same unit — the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment of the 4th Marine Division. It participated in a weeklong combat operation dubbed Operation Matador that targeted hide-outs, staging areas and infiltration routes for insurgents and foreign fighters near the Syrian border.

Also killed while operating with that unit was Petty Officer 3rd Class Jeffrey L. Wiener, 32, of Louisville, a Navy reservist.

Previously, the deadliest month for Marine reservists in Iraq was last November, when an all-out offensive routed insurgent strongholds in Fallujah, west of Baghdad. Eleven Marine reservists died that month.

The National Guard and Reserve, which make up nearly half the force in Iraq, have generally had fewer than 20 deaths per month during the war, and it's not clear why their losses spiked to 31 in May.

The May total reached 31 when the Pentagon announced Friday that Sgt. Miguel A. Ramos, 39, of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, died May 31 in Baghdad when a rocket struck near his position. He was assigned to the Army Reserve's 807th Signal Company, 35th Signal Battalion, based at Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico.

Another of the month's 31 fatalities died in the United States. Staff Sgt. Tommy S. Little, 47, of Aliceville, Ala., died May 2 at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, of injuries sustained on April 19 near Iskandariyah, Iraq. A roadside bomb detonated near his Humvee utility vehicle. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 114th Field Artillery Regiment of the Mississippi Army National Guard at Columbus, Miss.

May also was a costly month for the regular Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which had 10 reported fatalities. Since it arrived in Iraq in February to become the first Army division to return for a second combat tour, the 3rd Infantry has lost 34 soldiers, Pentagon figures. During its previous tour, which lasted eight months and included the initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the capture of Baghdad, the division lost 44 soldiers.

Last month also was a costly month for the Air Force, which plays a smaller and less publicized role in Iraq. On May 30, four Air Force Special Operations airmen were killed when the Iraqi aircraft in which they were flying crashed. The Iraqi pilot also died. It was the largest number of Air Force members to die in Iraq in a single month.

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