Tuesday, May 31, 2005

More on Mark Felt, Deep Throat, and Bennett

Bob Woodward, according to the Washington Post website, confirms that Mark Felt is Deep Throat.

Most will now consider the matter resolved. And yet -- as of an hour ago, at least -- one noted researcher offered a counter-argument to the Felt scenario.

Jim Hougan, author of the essential Secret Agenda, wrote a response to Vanity Fair's assertion that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. Even earlier today, I had already written about this matter at some length; my post below references both Hougan and Robert Bennett, a confirmed Woodward source who was previously my favorite in the throatstakes.

Hougan's response came in the form of an email. To be frank, I'm not sure about the ethics of sharing his words with my readers; normally, I am fastidious about keeping private mail private. On the other hand, Hougan's text was cc'd to, like, everyone. Many folks on his brobdinagian recipient list have quickly shared the piece with others, which is how the damned thing reached me. By now, this letter is about as "private" as the Downing Street memo.

Since the author seems to want an audience, I've decided to publish. Despite Woodward's admission, I believe that Hougan raises some good points; he reminds us that, despite today's revelations, Watergate lore still contains many mysteries.

Read what he has to say, and then -- if you are of a mind to do so -- scan my own humble offering, which attempts to reconcile the Felt admission with what we know about CIA's involvement with Watergate.

All y'all,

In the last couple of hours I've gotten half-a-dozen emails, and a couple of phone-calls, about Mark Felt's belated declaration (in the upcoming *Vanity Fair*) to the effect that he's Deep Throat. I've just done an interview with Fox (James Rosen/Britt Hume), and it looks like this is the story de jour.

That said, it's possible, maybe even likely, that you have no absolutely interest in Wategate. If so, put this down as parapolitical spam, and stop reading.

Anyway, here's my take on Felt's declaration:

1. He was badgered into it by family and friends. Felt is 91 years old, and counting. A reporter who recently interviewed him found the interview an incoherent waste of time, and killed his own story.

2. Felt has always denied that he was Deep Throat until, as we're told, members of his family recently pointed out to him there might be a buck in it, and that his children and grandchildren have bills to pay.

(And there is a buck in it: Bob Loomis told me, 20 years ago, that Throat could probably get a $4-million advance from Random House for his life-story.)

3. Felt wrote a book about his career in the FBI. In it, he goes out of the way to say that he met Woodward on a single occasion. This was in Felt's FBI office, and the upshot of it was that Felt told Woodward that he would not cooperate with him in his pursuit of "Watergate."

4. After a careful study of Throat's relationship to the *Post* and to the White House, first in *Secret Agenda* and subsequently while working with Len Garment, it became clear that *no one* in or around the Nixon White Hoouse was in a position to know all of the things that Throat is alleged to have told Woodward. For example, Felt had no way of knowing about the 18-and-a-half minute gap in Rosemary Woods' tape. This strongly suggests that Throat was a composite.

5. Just as importantly, if Felt was Throat, he betrayed the people for whom he was a source. This is so because the biggest story that anyone could have broken in the Summer of 1972 was Alfred Baldwin's decision to come forward and tell what he knew. An employee of James McCord's, Baldwin told the U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI that he had monitored some 250 telephone conversations from "the Listening Post," his room in the Howard Johnson's motel across the street from the Watergate. The significance of this information was that the public and the press believed that the Watergate break-in was a failure, and that the burglars were arrested before they could succeed in placing their bugs. Because of that, the public believed, no telephone calls were ever intercepted. Baldwin gave the lie to that, and Felt knew it. For him to have withheld that information from the *Post* would not only have been a betrayal---it would not have made sense if Felt's alleged intention (as Throat) was to keep the story alive. (The Baldwin story was eventually broken in the Fall of 1972 by the Los Angeles Times.)

6. What we have here, then, is the sad spectacle of an old man being manipulated.

For the record, it seems to me that if anyone proposes to identify Deep Throat, or to identify the lead singer in the choir of sources subsumed by the identity of Throat, they must meet a very basic criterion. That is, they must demonstarate, at a minimum, that their candidate met repeatedly and secretly with Bob Woodward. (Throat is obviously Woodward's creation. I don't think Bernstein would know him from a bale of hay.)

The only person who meets that criterion, to my knowledge, is Robert Bennett. Now one of the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate, Bennett was President of the Robert R. Mullen Company in 1972-3. This was the CIA front for which Howard Hunt worked. (It was also the Washington representative of the Howard Hughes organization.) As I reported in *Secret Agenda*, Bennett's CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, drafted a memo to his boss, Eric Eisenstadt, reporting on his monthly debriefing of Bennett after the Watergate arrests. According to Eisenstadt, Bennett told him that he, Bennett, had "made a backdoor entry to the Washington Post through Edward Bennett Williams' office," and that he, Bennett, was feeding stories to Bob Woodward, who was "suitably grateful." (Williams was the Post's attorney, and attorney, also, for the Democratic National Committee.)

Woodward's gratefulness was manifest in the way he kept the CIA, in general, and the Robert R. Mullen Company, in particular, out of his stories. (I obtained the Lukoskie memo under the Freedom of Information Act. Eric Eisenstadt's reaction to that memo, which I also obtained under FOIA, was considered so secret that it was delivered by hand to then-CIA Director Richard Helms.

What bothers me the most about all this, and what inspires me to write this unforgiveably long email to so many about something so few care about, is the gullibility of "the press"---by which I mean Talking Heads like Jeffrey Toobin---who have bought Felt's story hook, line and sinker.

That Woodward and Bernstein have taken a no-comment stance toward Felt's story is interesting and probably predictable. On the one hand, if I'm right about Bennett being Throat, they have a serious problem where their source is concerned---not just that he was a composite, but that their relationship to him was predicated on a quid pro quo concealing the CIA's involvement in the Watergate story.

Thanks for listening (if you're still there),

Jim Hougan

Nuke's a-comin'

Meet the Press devoted an episode to the likelihood of a nuclear attack within the United States. Iran and North Korea are, naturally, labelled the "most dangerous actors." The panelists do not discuss Al Qaeda's documented interest in creating a portable nuclear device. We are being prepared.

Deep Throat: A Felt response

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

John Conyers needs 100,000 fighters for truth

John Conyers, American hero, deserves a spot on the next Democratic presidential ticket. (Conyers/Obama? Conyers/Boxer? Not bad ideas!)

Right now, he wants to hold the president accountable for the infamous Downing Street Memo, which both this administration and our allegedly "liberal" media have studiously ignored. The memo proves that Bush waged an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, and that all the reasons for war proffered by this administration were never anything more than pretexts.

You can place your John Hancock on a letter from Conyers that will reach the President. More importantly, it will force the press to pay attention -- if the number of people who sign on is significant.

So do your part! If the links prove difficult (as is the case with me, right now), just save the URL and try again later. You may also want to check out the relevant discussion at BradBlog.

By the way: Here is an important DU thread on John Conyers' recent statement on the assault on the independence of the press, and here is link to Conyers' broadcast forum on the media.

Star Wars

On weekends, I allow myself the occasional non-political post. Since the Star Wars saga is coming to an end, this may be my last opportunity to share this anecdote.

The year was 1976. I was in high school. Having spent some time at the UCLA library, I hopped over to the Avco theatre to see Silver Streak with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder.

A fair-haired young man and his younger brother (or so I presumed the relationship to be) came into the theater and sat nearby. The trailer for Star Wars came on -- the original trailer, with the goofy "futuristic" music. After the trailer was finished, the young man and his bro got up to leave.

"Wait," I asked. "You came just to see the trailer?"

"I was in the movie," the young man replied. "It stars SIR ALEC GUINNESS." He pronounced the name in all caps, the way an ancient priest might have pronounced the name of his deity.

This fellow seemed incredibly excited by the upcoming film, which he described in tones of nerdish wonder. Repeatedly, he told me of the sheer awe he felt, just being in the presence of SIR ALEC GUINNESS. I had no idea (he told me) what it was like to speak to SIR ALEC GUINNESS.

Well, I thought, whoever this guy was, he could not have played a very large role in the film. Probably a bit part. Maybe an extra. He could not have been one of the leads, because someone in a starring role would not refer to SIR ALEC GUINNESS with such awestruck reverence.

"Yeah," I said. "Looks like it'll be pretty good. But the one I'm really looking forward to is Close Encounters." Remember: The year was 1976, and Steven Spielberg had recently made the highest-grossing film of all time.

The young "bit player" sitting near me looked a bit miffed by my words, and left without so much as a 'see ya.' Must've been something I said, I thought. (I said those words to myself quite often during my awkward adolescence.)

Oddly troubled by the encounter, I waited after Silver Streak to see the trailer again. Turned out that the guy I spoke to was no mere extra. His face (I now understood) showed up quite often in the preview.

When Star Wars finally came out, I finally realized that I had pissed off Mark Hamill.

As a teen, I stuck my foot in my mouth so often that I grew quite used to the flavor. These days, I sometimes come close to forgetting the taste of my own toes. But life always finds a way to remind me.

Friday, May 27, 2005

Vote fraud: Shoe's on the other foot

Here's a fascinating turn of events. Republicans in Washington state have argued that the Democrats perpetrated vote fraud during the razor-thin governor's election, which was decided in the Democratic candidate's favor by absentee ballots. Republican lawyers have even made that argument in court.

As we all know, if a Democrat had brought exactly the same arguments into a courtroom, GOP propagandists have guffawed and made ever-so-clever references to tin foil hats and black helicopters. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, the only person laughing at the current shenanigans is Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times.

What he has to say about the Republicans sounds -- irony of ironies! -- awfully similar to the things said about Democratic activists who have alleged vote fraud:

After coming into court and saying government officials perpetrated "sinister fraud" to steal the 2004 governor's election, Republicans have finished backing up that claim in the trial in Wenatchee. Their fraud claim, supposedly based on statistical science, wouldn't earn a passing grade on the 10th-grade WASL.
More:

The GOP presented data showing discrepancies in absentee-ballot counts from 11 King County precincts.

In some precincts, the county tallied more mail-in ballots than there were voters recorded as having voted by mail. In others, the opposite occurred: The county recorded more voters than ballots.

The proof that ballots were fabricated for Democrats, the GOP says, is that four of the five precincts with the most excess mail-in ballots backed Democrat Christine Gregoire. And the proof that ballots were misplaced or destroyed to harm Republicans is that four of the six precincts in which the most mail-in votes can't be accounted for backed Republican Dino Rossi.

"This is a pattern, and there can be no explanation for it other than somebody was manipulating the ballot box," Foreman said.
The obvious question arises: How the hell can any Republican claim that this matter rates as a serious concern, when the illegalities and irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere were so much more outrageous?

Westneat offers a non-conspiratorial explanation for the King County questions:

These are mail-in ballots. They did not pass through the chaotic polling places. They were handled and counted at central King County facilities.

If you were working at one of these county facilities and you wanted to fabricate or destroy ballots to aid Gregoire, what difference would it make how the voters in the rest of that precinct had voted?

Suppose you wanted to pick 10 Rossi votes off the mail-in ballot pile and shred them. You could just as logically pick from a precinct in which the votes were split 50-50 between the candidates. Or 60-40. Or 40-60.
(Rossi was the Republican candidate; Gregoire's the Democrat.) More telling still:

Even if you go down the GOP's rabbit hole, the rest of the data -- the part they didn't share in court -- don't support their own theory. For example, there were 703 King County precincts in which there were more absentee voters than ballots, not just six. The GOP said in court that ballots were undercounted mostly in precincts that backed Rossi, but 500 of these 703 precincts -- 71 percent -- actually backed Gregoire.
But this tale takes us into stranger realms than this columnist comprehends. Paul Leto (and I apologize again for misspelling this man's name in previous posts) has offered a compelling argument that the paper ballots -- the write-in ballots, the provisionals -- were actually more accurate than the computer-controlled votes. In other words, the Democrat should have won handily, not by a thin margin.

There was a mysterious pattern of voting machine "repairs" in nearly every precinct.

Moreover, Sequoia, the machine supplier, had made an inexplicable demand of the poll workers. Instructions specified that the power cords for these machines had to be "daisy-chained."

Imagine sitting in a room filled with dozens of computers -- which, coincidentally, happens to be the situation I find myself in right now. All the computers plug individually into power strips. There is no earthly reason -- no above-board reason -- to plug one computer into another into another into another. In other words, there's no technical or ethical reason to "daisy chain" the machines.

So what might be the underhanded reason for such an arrangement? Few understand that power cords can act as a networking device. Like the traditional modem-and-phone-line arrangement, power lines can allow computers to communicate with each other -- in fact, some countries have considered delivering internet services in precisely this fashion. Of course, the computer needs to be properly configured. We all know that Sequoia is famously secretive about the actual layout of their machines.

Thus, a machine in any given precinct could easily receive new programming during repairs. That modified machine could go on to "infect" all the other machines in that precinct, just as a virus replicates in cyberspace.

During these all-too-convenient repairs, new programming might shift x number of votes from one candidate to the other. That shift would occur not just in that one voting booth, but precinct-wide.

The plan is devious and nearly fool-proof. But do we have evidence that such chicanery actually occurred?

Yes. We have the clear pattern of discrepancy between the compu-vote and the non-computer vote. Paper votes (absentees and provisionals) are the only thing keeping the system tied to reality. The discrepancy between the two voting systems cannot grow beyond a certain margin, or even the dullest of the dullards will grow suspicious.

And that, my friends, is why Republican lawyers are working overtime to discredit the paper ballot in Washington State.

Leto:

A new report found that problems of switched votes or machines freezing up occurred at more than 50 Washington polling places. Voters reported that touch screens would appear pre-voted, or would select the Republican box when the Democratic candidateÂ’s box was pressed. Countywide, there were 19 formally reported instances of machine switching, each favoring the Republican.

Two-thirds of Snohomish County voted with paper absentee and provisional ballots, favoring Gregoire by 2,000 votes (97,044 to 95,228). The remaining one-third, voting electronically, favored Rossi by an 8,000-vote advantage (50,400 to 42,145). The chances of this anomaly as a result of voters randomly choosing whether to vote by paper ballot or by touch screen is one in one trillion.

The precincts with voting machines requiring repairs within two weeks of Election Day Rossi hada touchh screen advantage in 56 out of 58 (96.6%). The average margin for Rossi at these polling places were 11.58% more favorable than the absentee votes, and averaged 10.8% more than Gregoire on Election Day.

However, among 90 precincts with no reported machine problems 44 had touch screen vote counts more favorable to Rossi than paper ballots, while 46 had a touch screen favored Gregoire. This raises serious questions as to whether the machines requiring repairs were tampered with toimproperly assignn votes and/or undervotes to the Republican candidate ("switched" against voters' intent).

Snohomish County had the highest Election Day increase in vote for Rossi relative to absentee voters, while other nearby counties had either smaller increases or actually favored the Democrat Gregoire.

More than 100,000 electronic votes were never recounted in Washington. More than 2.7 million paper votes statewide were recounted by optical-reader machine and by hand. But the 106,000 touch-screen ballots -- constituting almost 4 percent of the state vote -- were simply re-totaled without review and added in. The validity of many of those touch-screen votes suggest that Gregoire should have beaten Republican Dino Rossi in the initial tally.
That's from the summary of Leto's work. For the full report -- which deserves far more attention than it has heretofore received -- see here.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

The next 9/11

We all know it's coming. The only question is: Will we believe the administration when it tells us to blame Iran -- the invasion of which (according to Scott Ritter and others) is scheduled for June?

I note that the CIA will soon conduct a three-day "cyber-terrorism" exercise called "Silent Horizon." This odd factoid reminds me of the under-appreciated "Vigilant Guardian" exercise NORAD conducted at the time of the World Trade Center attacks.

Basically, Vigilant Guardian was intended to simulate that which Al Qaeda did for real. On the same day. Pure coincidence, of course.

If I may be allowed to indulge in a bit of grim humor: Toward the finale of the wonderful new Star Wars films (my favorite of an erratic series), the evil Palpatine initiates the Jedi massacre by calling for "Order 66." Wouldn't it be ironic if the new 9/11 occurs on 6/6?

Of course, scheduling the event for 6/6 of next year would send our ever-predictable fundamentalists into ecstasy...

Gosch-2-Gannon: The conspiracy theory that refuses to die

Admittedly, my thinking on the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert scandal has been (you should pardon the expression) outside the box. In sum and in short, I suspect -- but cannot prove -- that "Jeff" and a certain fellow we shall here know only as "W" have made the beast with one back.

Don't presume, though, that I'm likely to fall for every oddball theory to arise out of this controversy. One popular theory which I have treated scoffingly holds that Jeff Gannon (whose real name is James Guckert) is actually famed child kidnap victim Johnny Gosch.

This scenario should have lost all popularity by now, given the tidal wave of counter-evidence. We have:

1. The documented history of Guckert's youth (including yearbook photos).

2. The divergence in ages between Guckert/Gannon and Gosch (47 and 35, respectively -- presuming Gosch is still alive).

3. An utter lack of verifiable, factual material in the presentations of the best-known Johnny/Jeff theorists, Ted Gunderson and Sherman Skolnick. Neither man has a sterling reputation.

Despite all this, the Gosch-2-Gannon theory refuses to acknowledge its own death. Like El Cid on his mount, the damn thing rides into post-mortum battle.

The latest charge comes to us via a report broadcast on KWWL news in Dubuque, Iowa. The report quotes an investigator named James Rothstein. Of Gosch's kidnapping in 1982, Rothstein says:

"This man has told us that at the end of their investigation that there were 834 kids involved that were kidnapped," says James Rothstein. He's talking about a former CIA agent who must remain anonymous.

Rothstein is a former New York City police detective, now a private investigator working the case for Johnny's mother, Noreen. And within the last couple weeks, Rothstein has uncovered new evidence linking Johnny's kidnapping to child prostitution.
More:

Rothstein is talking about individuals who would spend as much as $10,000 to have sex with young boys and girls. And this new evidence points to the involvement of U.S. government officials. "They were using kids to compromise people. And what better way to compromise somebody than get a young boy with a politician or some powerful person that may be in the military or whatever and then you can compromise them and get what ever you want."

Last month, people on the internet and investigators like Rothstein began to believe a man who passed himself off as a White House reporter and known male prostitute Jeff Gannon could be Johnny Gosch. And while Gannon's true identity still can't be confirmed, Rothstein says the more clues he uncovers, the possibility Gannon may be Gosch increases...
Who is Rothstein? A bit of cursory googling indicates that he is fairly well-known on the "conspiracy" circuit. He has been associated with radio host Michael Corbin, a decent fellow who operates on a level located some ways above the Skolnickian sewer. This site offers a rather tantalizing tidbit:

Noreen Gosch and James Rothstein were interviewed on KCRO radio in Omaha, Nebraska by Marty Stacy, a local talk show host in Omaha. Following the interview, Marty Stacy was fired from his job, and Noreen had a strange warning at her home in Iowa.
There may be less here than meets the eye. The only web-based info I have on Stacy indicates that he runs, or ran, a religious radio show that has aroused the interest and the ire of various fanatics. (Readers in Iowa may be able to help me gather more data.) At any rate, insubstantial data of this sort cannot add much strength to the Gosch-2-Gannon rumor.

Toward the end of the KWWL story, Rohstein refers to a "phone conversation he had with a CIA agent. 'That's solid information with names. That's where you start investigating and that should have been done years ago,' he says."

So far, what do we have? Simply this: A man claiming to be CIA calls Rothstein out of the blue and offers up some names and other tidbits. The investigator decides to do some investigating. At some point, the investigator decides -- for reasons never made clear to the public -- that the Gosch-2-Gannon story may be valid.

Now, I have little problem with any of this; in checking out the info provided by his source, Rothstein has proceeded precisely as he ought.

Even so, I counsel caution. Leads are not evidence. The Gosch-2-Gannon theory has at least three serious strikes against it, and we've been given nothing to counter the counter-arguments. Rothstein's tale reminds me of the one told by Ted Gunderson, who also based his report on the word of a never-named informant -- whose information we are given no reason to trust.

Lots of people -- lots and lots of people -- have falsely claimed to work for one intelligence agency or another. And even if Rothstein's source presents verifiable bona fides -- what of it? Spies lie.

Ah, but now we come to the most intriguing question of all: Why would this source lie? Why (as I have elsewhere suggested might be the case) would someone mount a disinformation campaign intended to deceive researchers into accepting a false link between Gosch and Gannon?

A widespread obsession with an intriguing false theory may misdirect interested parties away from an equally intriguing reality. I advise the reader to scroll back to this post's opening -- particularly to my beast-with-one-back jape. The rest of the story should tell itself.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Blackwell's perfidy, and more on vote fraud

I should have commented on this article yesterday, but better late than never. Today's must-read piece is by the reliable Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, who continue to look into the outrageous Ohio pseudo-election overseen by GOP insider Ken Blackwell.

You may recall Sherole Eaton, the Hocking County election board staffer who discovered that a Triad computer "repairman" had swapped out a hard drive on a machine that allegedly suffered from a dead battery. Even worse,

According to a December 3, 2004 affidavit sworn by Eaton, the Triad technician "advised" the Hocking County Board of Elections' Republican Director Lisa Schwartze on how to "post a 'cheat sheet'" to make the recount match the officially reported election total.
Eaton's affidavit figured in a lawsuit against the Ohio results filed by the Libertarian, Green and Democratic candidates.

Since no good deed goes unpunished, Eaton now stands in danger of losing her job.

In an exclusive May 23 interview, Schwartze told Freepress.org that "Sherole is on vacation." When asked if Eaton had been fired, Schwartze commented that Eaton has until June 30 to resign or be fired, and "that decision came from the Board."

At the Ohio Democratic Party's annual dinner, Eaton told the Free Press that she is not at liberty to discuss the situation, but that she is "a federal whistleblower" who sees the Board's action against her as "retaliation" for her affidavit revealing Triad's critical intrusion.
Yes, the election board consists of both Democrats and Republicans. The time has come to ignore those apologists who claim that a bipartisan board makeup insures fairness. The major voting machine manfucaturers have a long, documented history of bribery and corruption -- indeed, bribery (in all its varied and subtle forms) is the only way these companies could get their obviously-rigged products into our voting booths.

Never underestimate Blackwell's own lawlessness and rancid partisanship:

Under Ohio law, all election board members serve at Secretary of State Blackwell's pleasure. Cuyahoga Bureau of Elections director Michael Vu mentioned the letter at a Congressional hearing staged at the Ohio statehouse by Republican Congressman Bob Ney. Ney brought the hearing to Columbus in part because Blackwell refused to testify in Washington. The hearing was highlighted by angry, bitter exchanges between Blackwell and US Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who co-introduced (with Senator Barbara Boxer of California) the historic Congressional resolution challenging the seating of the Ohio Electoral College delegation for Bush.

In his October letter Blackwell made it clear that any Election Board official, Republican or Democrat, who challenged Blackwell's decrees would be summarily removed. Election Board positions are well paid, and Blackwell's threat erased widespread claims the presence of Democrats on Election Boards guaranteed that the election was administered in a neutral, bi-partisan manner.

In fact, with the club of a loss of substantial salaries, this leaked letter makes it clear Blackwell was running the election with an iron partisan hand, and that claims of true bi-partisanship were strictly for show.
When -- if -- justice returns to this land, Blackwell will be led from his offices in handcuffs. The man is a criminal.

Baiman responds to "Febble": Quite a few of you must be feeling the same frustration I have felt. Elizabeth "Febble" Liddle has criticized the all-important US Count Votes study of the exit poll disparity. While she maintains, persuasively, that she is not a Mitofski (or Bush) apologist, her work has been helpful to those apologists. Unfortunately (and here is where the frustration sets in) the controversy has become one difficult or impossible to follow, if you are unversed in high-level mathematics.

Today, statistician Rob Baiman has offered a convincing response to Liddle -- and you can find his work on Democratic Underground. I believe that Baiman's work will prove useful and (more or less) comprehensible both to those who progressed beyond Alegebra 2 and to those who did not.

One DU responder offers this summary of his view of the situation:

This is in fact what I had suspected all along...

"Liddle unfortunately does not point out that the USCV analysis was based on these very same K and B partisan response rates patterns that she investigates in her paper."

Unfortunately is an understatement, she barely even moves off her theory that there is in fact an unprecedented precinct mean bias. In this case, the uniform precinct bias should be far more divergant. It should be completely random, and in every way it is not.

It goes from one side of the country in the other, and shows the same result in up to 4 previous elections where Mitofsky first made the idea. The very concept of the reluctant responder was used as a covert "guess" in order to hide the real truth of what happened there.....And I bet being on the corporate payroll has alot to do with that.

Rest in pieces reluctant responder, we hardly knew ye uniform invisible guess.
I, for one, never have and never will accept the idea that Bush supporters were reluctant to discuss their views. I do not base my feelings on statistics. The notion is simply too counterintuitive.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Double your standards, double your fun

The semedi blog raises a good point -- one I've seen nowhere else: Why does the right-wing castigate Newsweek for using an unnamed source while defending Novak's use of an unnamed source in the Valerie Plame case?

It's a simple question. Anyone have an answer?

Fanatical?

Chris Matthews -- one of the few cable newsmen to gain a reputation as a non-propagandist -- recently refered to People For the American Way as "fanatical." That's a little like referring to Caspar the Friendly Ghost as a "violent hothead." Worse, his recent comments lumpPFAW together with James Dobson:

MATTHEWS: But isn't this a defeat of the leaders? I mean, you had Harry Reid working in league with the People for the American Way, the most pro-choice, most fanatical liberal groups in the country, who are pestering all members like yourself with this absolutism.

On the other side, you have people like James Dobson, the same kind of right-wing, if you will, absolutism from the conservative church groups, demanding 100-percent loyalty, “We have to have pro-life judges.
Dobson supports theocracy. PFAW has never sought to undermine the very foundation of the republic, and has (to the best of my knowledge) always expressed its views in a moderate, understated fashion. Any attempt to posit PFAW as a counterpart to Dobson's "Focus on the Family" is odious. (Thanks to a reader for this one.)

Monday, May 23, 2005

Bush, Iran, and a new cult of intelligence (updated)

I'll never forgive Michael Isikoff for his slimeball tactics against Clinton, but I must admit: His latest on Bush and Iran is an astonishment.

You recall how Bush, in the run-up to the Iraq war, hopped into bed with the crooked Iraqi exile leader Achmed Chalabi? History repeats itself. In its scramble for dirt on Iran, the White House relies on information supplied by a controversial Iranian exile group called MEK. Human Rights Watch has compiled much data indicating that this organization is, in essence, a cult:

Human Rights Watch alleges that the Iranian exile group known as Mujahedine Khalq (MEK) has a history of cultlike practices that include forcing members to divorce their spouses and to engage in extended self-criticism sessions.

More dramatically, the report states, former MEK members told Human Rights Watch that when they protested MEK policies or tried to leave the organization, they were arrested, in some cases violently abused and in other instances imprisoned. Two former recruits told the human-rights group that they were held in solitary confinement for years in a camp operated by MEK in Iraq under the protection of Saddam Hussein. MEK representatives in the United States and France, where MEK is headquartered, did not immediately respond to NEWSWEEK phone calls and an e-mail requesting comment.

MEK has long been controversial because of its history of violent attacks in Iran, its relationship with Saddam's regime and its background as a quasi-religious, quasi-Marxist radical resistance group founded in the era of the late Iranian shah.
This last paragraph will remind readers of motifs explored in several past posts.

Neocon propagandist Max Boot recently offered a bizarre rewrite of history, in which he tried to create the impression that conservatives of the 1970s had pressed for the U.S. to dissociate itself from the Shah. Quite the opposite actually occurred: Conservatives insisted that President Carter stick with "America's ally" to the bitterest of ends; for years afterward -- well into the 1980s -- rightists excoriated the Democrats for being insufficiently supportive of the Iranian despot.

The Bush/MEK link helps explain why Boot now pretends that conservatives were always anti-Shah. (Just as we have always been allied with Westasia, and have always been at war with Eastasia.)

The Marxism of the MEK also fits the neocon agenda. The Bushites have allied themselves with Marxist parties in Iraq. Their Great Funder, the Reverend Moon, has undeniable ties to North Korea. Grover Norquist is an fanatical admirer of Lenin. The Bush administration has bent over backwards to enrich communist China. Most neocons have Trotskyite backgrounds.

MEK also had strong ties to Saddam Hussein, who provided the bulk of the group's funding for years. Of course, Bush the elder helped to arm Iraq.

One MEK detainee interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Mohammad Hussein Sobhani, claimed to have spent eight and a half years in solitary confinement in MEK detention facilities after he started raising questions about the leadership's policies. He said he was beaten on 11 occasions with wooden sticks and leather belts. Another former MEK member interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Farhad Javaheri-Yar, claimed to have been imprisoned in solitary confinement by the group for five years.

Other witnesses told Human Rights Watch claimed it was the practice of MEK interrogators to tie thick ropes around prisoners' necks and drag them along the ground. One witness told investigators: "Sometimes prisoners returned to the cell with extremely swollen necks—their head and neck as big as a pillow."
Small wonder the Bushies love these guys. They have so much in common!

Perhaps the neocons knew that Newsweek (Isikoff's publisher) planned to offer this expose of Dubya's new pals. And perhaps we can now better understand the underlying reasons for the recent smear campaign against that publication.

UPDATE: This page offers a good, objective overview of MEK. Interestingly enough, the group's leader -- viewed by followers as something akin to a deity -- is a woman: Maryam Rajavi. She hopes to become the new leader of Iran, just as Chalabi had once hoped to be Saddam's replacement.

An interesting view of the MEK and similar Iranian exile groups can be found on the Iran Interlink site.

Iran Interlink has been established as a point of contact for families and friends of members of the Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq (aka MKO, MEK, PMOI, NCR, NCRI, NLA, MISS) which is now based in Iraq.

There is now urgent concern since the organisation has been labelled as a terrorist entity by the US State Department, the UK government and the European Union. Whilst the description and activities reported are accurate, they do not reflect the full situation of the Mojahedin.

Over the past 15 years, the Mojahedin has been changed from an armed political force into a cult. As the Mojahedin has become more cult-like it has become more closed and insular. Those people who joined the organisation for political reasons now find themselves in a completely changed organisation, in a totally different world scene. Over the years, as with any organisation, people have left the Mojahedin for any number of reasons; personal, political etc. At present, many more would like to leave and are prevented from doing so. The fundamental human rights of these people are being violated.

The Mojahedin has retreated all its forces to Iraq and is holding some of them there against their will. People who wish to leave are prevented first and foremost because they are in Iraq and have no money, passport or identity papers. They are unable to find succour in Iraq because the Mojahedin has become part of the Iraqi regime and defectors from the Mojahedin are treated as enemies of the State and dealt with accordingly. People are unable to move outside the Mojahedin bases without risking internment.

Iran-Interlink is extremely concerned about the fate of those people who would like to leave the organisation and are prevented from doing so. People who managed to leave in the past have reported abuses and mistreatment. This includes both physical and psychological pressure. Iran-Interlink is also concerned that because of the psychological coercion and manipulation, members of the Mojahedin cult are not free to choose a course of action for themselves. Their thoughts and actions are strictly controlled by the leadership.
We now enter some strange territory.

I'm reminded of Michael Ledeen's continuing joined-at-the-hip linkages to Ahmed Chalabi, exposed as a conduit of secret intelligence to the Iranian regime. Yet Ledeen's is one of the loudest voices in favor of regime change in that nation. The MEK (or whatever it sees fit to call itself) also seems to have a case of multiple personal disorder -- opposing the Iranian government and doing its dirty work.

I'm stumped. For once, I don't even have a theory. What the hell is going on?

Wal-mart, Nazis and communists

Wal-Mart has apologized for its ad comparing those who resist the company's expansion to Nazi book-burners. This whole mini-scandal operated on several levels of hypocrisy. How dare Wal-Mart bring up Nazi censorship when the stores refuse to stock books that do not fit the company's right-wing agenda?

Since Wal-Mart makes a practice of crushing smaller stores, customers in many parts of the country cannot easily go elsewhere to purchase such "banned" books as Jon Stewart's "America." (The company cited a non-political pretext for its censorship of that work.)

Wal-Mart also makes a practice of stocking goods from China.

Dig it: The retail giant doesn't mind enriching the world's most powerful communist country. But they won't let you read Jon Stewart, because he's too far to the left.

For decades, the far-right railed against Armand Hammer because he did business with the Soviet Union. Why don't the righties ever lodge such complaints against Wal-Mart? What, exactly, is the difference?

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Galloway, Israeli spies and more

I'm sure some of you were as outraged as I was when CNN, in covering the testimony of Britain's George Galloway, refused to air his damning indictments of the Bush administration. Yet they offered the disingenuous Republican committee chairman Norm Coleman ample opportunity to repeat charges against Galloway which were discredited ages ago. For the truth of the matter, see Scott Ritter's fine piece in the Guardian.

George Galloway, the politician in question, stared down the US Senate subcommittee on homeland security and government affairs, and its notoriously partisan chairman Norm Coleman, and blasted as totally unfounded the committee's allegations that he had profited from oil vouchers in exchange for his anti-war stance. He emerged from the hearing victorious. If only more politicians, British and American alike, were able to display such courage in the face of the atmosphere of neoconservative intimidation prevalent in Washington these days.

Galloway is now the darling of the American left, and has fed punch lines for late-night comics and generated headlines like the New York Post's "Brit fries senators in oil". But mainstream America still seems unable to digest the horrific reality that the MP's testimony underscored: that Senator Coleman's McCarthy-like hearings are but a smoke screen for a crime of horrific proportions.
Wayne Madsen also has a new piece about the Galloway affair. Previously, I've expressed some reservations whenever I've linked to Madsen's work on vote fraud -- his reports, always interesting, placed far too much reliance on unnamed sources making extreme allegations. (Extreme even by my standards.) But my reservations about Madsen's latest are fewer -- although the piece does tend to become less organized as it goes on. Still, it's at least worth a skim:

For Galloway, it was déjà vu. He had already successfully fended off charges that he accepted oil money from Saddam Hussein and successfully sued the neoconservative-owned Daily Telegraph for libel. Articles in the Telegraph and Christian Science Monitor citing documents from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry implicating Galloway in the Oil-for-Food scandal were later determined to be forgeries.

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq invited Telegraph reporters into the bombed out remains of Iraqi intelligence headquarters. Among the documents "found" by the paper's reporters were those that "revealed" that Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Iraq, funds skimmed from the Oil-for-Food program.

Coleman's committee resurrected the spurious charges against Galloway in its report. Mark L. Greenblatt, the counsel for the committee, relied on new suspicious documents said to have been obtained from the Iraqi Oil Ministry, now run by convicted bank embezzler and disinformation source Ahmad Chalabi.
Never forget that Chalabi's INC ran a shop that specialized in document forgery. As Xymphora points out, the current fake documents were produced in collaboration with the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Likudnik group based in Washington, DC.

MEMRI is clearly more than it pretends to be, as this expose in the Guardian demonstrates:

The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon - are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence.
London mayor Ken Livingston has also discussed MEMRI as (in essence) a Mossad cut-out.

Back in November of 2003, Galloway revealed that four members of the U.N. weapons inspection team were actually Mossad spies. Here, no doubt, is the real reason for the smear campaign against this British MP launched by the spooked-up MEMRI, Chalabi, and Coleman.

Brad Friedman reports that Galloway's inflammatory anti-Bush rhetoric was scrubbed from the official website of Coleman's committee. (For the full transcript, try here.) Those who get this story only from cable news aren't getting the story at all.

Coleman has been compared to Joe McCarthy. In fact, he's worse: He reminds me of those lower-level McCarthy wanna-bes (Myron Fagan comes to mind) who spent much of the 1950s waving around bogus lists filled with the names of political adversaries.

More on Gannon, Moon, and GOP sex scandals

A few added comments on my previous post on Moon, the Gannon affair, and the insights to be gleaned from David Brock's Blinded By the Right:

"Bulldog" reviewed: I finally found the nerve to check out a site devoted to reviewing Jeff Gannon's performance as a male prostitute. (The link was posted to the comments section some days ago.) The most interesting comment comes from a self-described "active duty senior officer" in the U.S. Army, who -- quite understandably -- appreciated Gannon's discretion. Discretion is, of course, the virtue most needed for someone who did the job that I (and a number of others) suspect that Gannon did in the White House.

The reviewer felt that he and Gannon had much in common because of their shared military background. Odd. That "Marine" history has since been exposed as a pose, a lie; Gannon/Guckert was never involved with any branch of the military. How did he manage to "talk shop" convincingly with serving officers?

Moon walk. A friendly voice recently introduced me to a rather interesting theory about Moon. Even though I remain unpersuaded by the idea, I thought I'd present it before a wider public.

What if Moon is not truly on Dubya's side? What if the wacko leader of the Unification Church remains sufficiently angered by his long-ago incarceration that he secretly holds a grudge against all United States politicos?

This theory has the virtue of explaining the UPI story (Moon owns UPI) which briefly convinced many that the capture of Saddam Hussein was falsely reported. And if you are of a truly conspiratorial turn of mind, you may find in this theory an explanation of the Guckert scandal. In this scenario, Moon intentionally planted a he-whore close to Bush in order to embarrass the administration.

Do I buy into this theory? Nah. But it has a certain appeal, nonetheless.

Stop Republican pedophilia! A Democratic Underground reader directs our attention to an astounding list of Republican politicos who have demonstrated a weakness for the one sexual variation that must never be tolerated. The original page for this list is here. Here are just a few of the low-lights:

Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.

Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.

Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls.

Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos.

Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.

Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.

Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped.
Note: Patti, who was arrested in January in a sweep that included a number of others, has vigorously contested the charges. However, a New Jersey DA was quoted as saying: "These people were storing the material, they distributed it to other locations... This isn't an accident." I haven't been able to find an update on the case.

Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.

Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl.

Republican anti-gay activist Earl "Butch" Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.
And that's not all, folks! I actually rather feel sorry for Sam Walls, the Texas Republican whose race for the state House was upset when folks learned that he likes to dress up in women's clothing. My sympathy ends when I recall the ugly and unsubstantiated things Republicans said about Hillary Clinton. Until the conseratives apologize for that series of smears, they have no right to complain about the things said here.

Incidentally, if you're wondering whether a similar list could be compiled featuring democrats, just google the words "democratic pedophiles." You may be pleasantly surprised by the exculpatory results.

Washingtonienne. Even though Wonkette has given this story sufficient play, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I've not yet discussed it on this site. How could I have blogged for so long without devoting much space to Jessica Cutler, close "aide" to a bevy of (mostly) powerful Republicans? While this scandal does not involve gays, it does feature prostitution, BDSM, adultery, hypocrisy -- in short, plenty of material designed to shock the religious rightists.

Too bad their media refuses to keep them informed.

For those of you you have not yet caught up with this scandal -- which has already resulted in the inevitable Playboy shoot -- Jessica offered an initials-only list of her powerful (politically powerful) Republican customers/paramours. Scandal-watchers have made a game of matching the initials to real-life figures. (The above link goes to a site last updated in mid-2004. It also features a rather hot picture of Jessica with Anna Marie Cox, an image I found rather more enticing than the results of the Playboy shoot. I have my weaknesses.)

Jessica's lover "RS" has been identified as Judiciary Committee staffer member Robert Steinbuch (quote: "Who the hell comes missionary anymore?"), who has a wife and two children. Steinbuch is now suing Washingtonienne for revealing the handcuffs-n-all details of the relationship.

The most intriguing initial on the list is W, the well-paying aficionado of anal-only. Could Jessica Cutler's W be the W?

I dredge up this sordid old business for one reason: Mention the names "Jessica Cutler" or "Washingtonienne" to most rank-n-file right-wingers -- I'm thinking here of the "Jesus" voters -- and you will likely encounter blank expressions. This old story is a new story to them. Imagine what Darth Limbaugh and Darth Murdoch would have done with this tale if the men on Jessica's list were primarily Democrats...

Lest we forget: Bush owes his presidency to the all-too-hackable voting machines owned by the Ahmanson family, who were also key supporters of theocrat R.J. Rushdoony, who advocated executing homosexuals -- as well as all those who refused to conform with his version of Christianity.

And yet the Republicans claim to be the party of traditional morality...!

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Sex under the Moon: Was Brock meant to be a Gannon?

The recent revelations about the sublimely-named Neal Horsley -- noted fundamentalist, Republican propagandist, and anti-abortion crusader -- have prompted me to take another look at the hypocritical sexual mores of the far right. (Horsley, as you probably know, recently came out as an aficionado of sex with "consenting" mules.)

My thoughts went back to the Gannon scandal. As long-time readers may recall, Gannon's phony-balony news organization had subterranean ties to the Reverend Moon. Aside from Gannon's propaganda, GOPUSA ran primarily UPI copy (Moon owns UPI), and GOPUSA front man Bobby Eberle was known only for his work for other Moon publications, such as the Washington Times and Inisight. Gannon also worked for the Moon-linked group Frontiers For Freedom.

Many (including yours truly) have wondered whether Gannon's unusual overnight White House stays indicate that he provided the administration with non-journalistic services. Those familiar with the Koreagate scandal know that Moon has a history of using prostitutes to compromise politicians.

Something about this scenario has always sounded eerily familiar to me. Where, I wondered, have these elements (fake journalism, hidden gays, Moon) appeared before? Then I re-read the early chapters of David Brock's Blinded By the Right.

Take another look at those pages, and ask yourself: Was Brock being groomed to be an early-day Gannon?

Brock makes clear that, at the age of 22 -- and despite the lack of impressive writing credits, an advanced degree or the usual journalistic apprenticeship -- he was hired fresh out of college to write for Moon's publications. He received rapid promotion within that milieu, as did a number of other young men who were gay or presentable. Everyone in Moon-world knew full well that Brock was gay, despite his reticence to discuss his sexuality.

Moon's formula for success involves outrageous contradiction and hypocrisy. Moon considers Jesus pathetic, yet he funds fundamentalist preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye. Moon decries promiscuity, yet his sect began as a sex cult. Moon thinks Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, yet he is closely linked to Jewish neocons and funds a group allegedly devoted to resolving differences between Israelis and Palestinians.

So perhaps we should not be surprised to see that Moon, a man who denounces homosexuality in no uncertain terms, owns publications noted for -- how to put it? -- their unusual staffs.

In his book, Brock paints an interesting portrait of Insight editor John "Pod" Podhoretz, son of famed Jewish conservative Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Brock pictures Pod as a man opposed to homosexuality, who nevertheless once wrote an effusive essay praising Sylvester Stallone's "pectorals" and Don Johnson's "manliness." Pod also wrote a column under the name "Tiffany Midgeson." One needn't acquire many more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to comprehend the picture.

The Washington Times briefly hired John Lofton, a twice-born fire-and-brimstone screecher who charged that the paper's staff was riddled with "homosexuals, adulterers and fornicators." While one must consider the source for this claim, one must also admit that Brock's sojourn with the Moonie right introduced him to a little-known world populated largely by barely-closeted conservatives. Brock makes telling references to Terry Dolan of NCPAC, Republican lobbyist Peter Maletesta, and Marvin Liebman of Young Americans for Freedom (a group which has a stranger history than most know).

Peter was only one of the many closeted gay right-wing Republicans I would come to know in my years in Washington. Perhaps because they were trying too hard to fit into GOP ranks, they often embodied the worst attributes of the extreme right -- racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism. While I was well-acquainted with the hidden subculture of conservative gay life, as a journalist I was never brought fully into the closely guarded fold. And I was never sure I wanted to be, either. The secretiveness, not to mention the binge drinking and the common use of male prostitutes, lent a disturbing quality to it all.
Brock's natural reticence, his one-step-removed attitude, may have deflected his mentors -- his would-be puppet-masters -- from making the offer that I suspect was made to Jim Guckert/Jeff Gannon.

The wonders of the net never cease

I just discovered that someone has apparently tried to interfere with my site via a Japanese porn site. (I believe this site features the sort of material nicknamed "etchie.")

Playing hooky

Never forget the virtues of hooky.

Despite thinning wallets and onerous work schedules, my lady and I granted ourselves the gift of a perfect outing last night. Nothing special, nothing expensive: A twilight feast of fast-food Chinese take-out in Chatsworth Park, that magical landscape known to Charlie and Squeaky and other fun couples. After that, a moonlight walk along our favorite dog-friendly beach in Ventura. Then a long drive along the California coast while listening to a broadcast of Fritz Reiner's old performance of Beethoven's Ninth. Take it from someone who's heard 'em all: If you're shopping for a superb Ninth, get the Reiner (which comes on a budget CD). Even though I must have heard that piece 1500 times in my lifetime, my eyes moistened; the work was new.

(Be warned! The Ninth is, in my household, the ultimate sing-along, and my voice is nothing like what it used to be.)

Why describe this perfect night in a blog devoted to politics? Because I haven't played hooky in months, and I want to give my readers the reminder someone should have given me: Be gentle on yourselves, and, on occasion, be indulgent. Take a night-time drive along a lake. Toss a baseball with your nephew. Cook up some farm-fresh green beans with almonds. Kiss a beautiful lady while standing beside a moon-lit sea. Remind yourselves of your humanity, and you can better confront these days of fear and rot. As a wise fellow once wrote: "What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?"

My lady and I used to take midnight strolls on the UCLA campus. The sculpture garden there has one of Deborah Butterfield's magnificant horse statues -- which our dog has also been known to, er, appreciate. While the pooch would show her appreciation, we would sit back and study the stars. They're all different. You don't notice the differences until you take the time to look.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Democracy gets the Boot (updated)

Max Boot is one of the oddest neocon columnists, as his latest proves. He calls for real democracy in Egypt -- a worthy goal anywhere, of course. Oddity sets in when he affects outrage because the electoral process in that country has shut out -- get this! -- the Muslim Brotherhood.

Members of the Kifaya (Enough) movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, the most notable anti-government groups, have seen their peaceful public demonstrations broken up by riot police. Protesters have been arrested and roughed up.
Boot neglects to mention that the dangerous, fascist-linked Muslim Brotherhood stoked the fire which brought Al Qaeda to the boiling point. Does Boot believe that the Adenauer government of West Germany committed a grave offense against democracy by disallowing Nazi participation?

Odder still:

Even Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief, on a charm tour of the United States this week, has to admit that Egypt won't see a truly contested election until 2011 at the earliest.

Nazief justifies this go-slow approach with soothing talk about how "democracy is an evolutionary process," and you can't go too fast lest Islamic extremists take control. But that's what the shah of Iran said in the 1970s. It turned out that his opposition to democratic reform made an Islamist takeover more, not less, likely. Same with Egypt: The less access that fed-up people have to the political process, the more likely they are to be seduced by the hard-line mullahs' siren song.
Obviously, Boot presumes that his younger readers don't know much about what really happened in the 1970s. I was around then, and I well recall the domestic controversy over Iran.

When the world's press trumpeted the atrocities committed by the Shah, conservatives of Boot's stripe insisted that President Carter stand by an ally no matter what. (Foolishly, Carter heeded this advice). When the Shah fell, conservatives blamed Carter for providing insufficient support. When Iran's people voted for an Islamic Republic, conservative columnists and the rising religious right argued that Islamic nations simply were not ready for democracy -- a sentiment you can find expressed (for example) in one of Hal Lindsey's books from that period. When Khomeini's regime took American hostages, the Rush Limbaughs of that day routinely accused Carter of bringing about the debacle by subverting the Shah.

Alas, members of the under-40 crowd who read Boot's version of history will come away with the impression that the American right had politely requested the Shah to leave power earlier. Here's a fact, Jack: At that time, the only people in America who demanded the Shah's ouster were Iranian refugees and Pacifica-listening, tree-hugging lefties.

It's cheeky of Boot to bring up the Shah in the first place. In 1953, the CIA ended Iran's brief democratic experiment by subverting Mossedegh and placing the Shah back in power. That nation would be a democracy today, if not for the meddling of American reactionaries.

A similarly sad history afflicts other states in the region. Both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his predecessor Anwar Sadat are known to have come to power as a result of covert American string-pulling (just as the CIA helped Saddam Hussein's Baath party rise to power in Iraq). To balance out Boot's revisionism, scan this piece by Eric Margolis:

Some $1.3 billionUS in annual U.S. military aid keeps the armed forces and security apparatus loyal to Mubarak. CIA, DIA, FBI and NSA run major operations in Egypt to protect Mubarak's regime from domestic opponents. The U.S. tightly controls the military's communications and limits stocks of spare parts and munitions.
More:

When Mubarak goes, Washington will discreetly install a new leader from the pro-U.S. elite -- unless there is a massive uprising against foreign domination by nationalist-Nasserites and Islamists ("terrorists" in Bush-talk). But if nationalists somehow oust U.S. influence, how will they feed Egyptians?

The Bush administration's "crusade for freedom" in the Mideast has reportedly already selected intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, defence minister Muhamed Tantawi or another senior army general to be Egypt's next "democratic" ruler. But, as Iraq shows, things can go terribly wrong.
Here, perhaps, we find the real reason for Boot's piece. The puppet has, for whatever reason, displeased the master. Time for a new puppet.

All in the name of democracy.

Additional note: In the original version of this post, I forgot to mention Boot's ultra-bizarre sign-off gesture, in which he demands that America act in the spirit of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The latter date was particularly striking to me, since not long ago I helped to translate some Socialist documents from that period in German history. Pretty extreme stuff.

Conservative rhetoric really has changed, hasn't it? Then again, perhaps we should have expected this sort of thing after David Brock revealed that Grover Norquist idolizes Gramsci and keeps (or kept) a majestic portrait of Lenin in his living room.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

When in doubt, lie

The right lies. You know that; I know that. But we never cease to be outraged by the most recent examples.

Example 1: Jive F. Turkey. This is from John Conyers' wonderful piece on the GOP movement for "voter identification" (which is just another term for keeping poor people out of the polling place):

6: The number of days the American Center for Voting Rights, a new, "non-partisan," "voting rights" organization, had been in existence before it was called to testify by Republican members of Congress before a House Administration Committee hearing on March 22. The American Center for Voting Rights was formed by a lawyer for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the notoriously anti-voting rights Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, who described the group as a non-partisan, voting rights advocacy group. He testified and submitted a report on Ohio election irregularities, which highlighted the Mary Poppins Conspiracy in this country. If you haven't heard about it, the Mary Poppins Conspiracy consists of many, many ineligible voters -- using the names Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive F. Turkey -- fraudulently voting in elections.

Unfortunately for advocates of this conspiracy theory, a precinct has yet to report that a citizen by the name of Mary Poppins showed up on Election Day and voted. Searches for Dick Tracy votes and Jive F. Turkey votes have also come up empty.
If the Republicans are not trying to disenfranchise the poor (who often lack two forms of identification), then why do they make up these lies?

Example 2: The Koran in the toilet. Rush Limbaugh and the dittohead legions insist, in the loudest possible tones, that Newsweek concocted this story because the powers-that-be at said magazine hate America. Conservative propagandists insist that Newsweek admitted the story to be fraudulent, and that the story sparked riots.

But, according to the Columbia Journalism Review:

Consider the central question of the story about the story: What exactly has the magazine retracted? Most reporters, particularly on television, are reporting that Newsweek has retracted the allegation that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. But that's wrong: The magazine has said only that it no longer stands by its claim that allegations of Koran desecration appear in a forthcoming report from U.S. Southern Command. That's a very different point. There have been numerous other reports -- mostly from detainees -- suggesting that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo did abuse the Koran. We don't know exactly what happened, but we do know that there's a significant difference between what Newsweek said -- that its source can no longer be sure that the allegations appear in an upcoming military report -- and what the press is reporting the magazine said -- that no desecration of the Koran ever took place.

But since the press has largely ceded control of the story to the White House, administration spinners have been able to twist it. Consider another central issue: whether Newsweek's premature report actually spurred the riots. Thanks to the White House spin, and the media's lazy reporting, the conventional wisdom is now that it did. But the reality is that it probably did not, at least in any significant sense. According to a statement last Thursday by General Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, after hearing from commanders on the scene in Afghanistan, the "rioting was related more to the ongoing political reconciliation process in Afghanistan than anything else."
Molly Ivins lists a number of stories about abuse of the Koran -- stories which preceded Newsweek's.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Vote fraud: Invention of the "reluctant Bush responder" theory -- in 2000

A reader at Democratic Underground made a great catch, and I just had to pass it along.

As you know, the quasi-official explanation for the exit poll/"actual" disparity in 2004 is the "reluctant Bush responder" theory. Turns out Mitofski used the exact same formulation to explain away some uncofortable poll results in 2000 -- in a Bush-vs-Buchanan primary race. (Since we are dealing with a primary, Elizabeth "Febble" Liddle can't claim that this early reliance on the rBr mythos resulted from an alleged oversampling of Dems.)

First go to cited DU page, then check out the original piece -- which includes these key paragraphs:

Here is a quote from page 88 of Plissner's "The Control Room." In the below passage, VRS is another name for Voter News Service, the exit polling arm of the 4 Big TV networks; Mitofsky is the sinister Warren Mitofsky, longtime mystery man behind Voter News Service. Here's the quote from page 88:

"By early afternoon on the computer screens of the member networks, history seemed to be in the making. In the New Hampshire Republican primary, George Bush led Pat Buchanan by a puny 48 percent to 42 percent. (For some of us with long memories, those numbers seemed spookily familiar. Six New Hampshire primaries back, Lyndon Johnson had edged out Eugene McCarthy by 49 to 42 percent, and a few weeks later Johnson abandoned his bid for re-election.) Those early Bush-Buchanan numbers were never broadcast, but they circulated throughout the day among the coterie of politicians and reporters with access to news unsafe for public consumption. As it turned out, the public in this instance was well served by the embargo. When the real votes came in, Bush had won not by a piddling six but by a solid sixteen percentage points. This was the first appearance of the "Buchanan Bias" in exit poll responses for which Mitofsky in later primaries would try to make adjustments. (In polling usage, it should be noted, the term 'bias' has nothing to do with the politics of the pollster. Survey experts define 'bias' as error -- unlike sampling error, which can be plus or minus – that errs in only one direction. When you find it, it's not always easy to explain. Mitofsky’s best guess is that Buchanan's voters were prouder of what they had done and, hence, more prone to respond, than Bush's were.)"

Well, well, well. Here we have a complete admission that exit polls by the Big TV Networks are not scientific. When they find a Buchanan --- who exit polls higher than his final vote, -- they have to suppress the exit polls as "not fit for public consumption", and then adjust their exit polls in the future based on the "Buchanan bias."

I don't know whether Plissner is a blissfully ignorant useful idiot who is focused on the surface goings on of what he witnessed in his 35 years at CBS, or if he is deliberately masking the realities here, but I have news for all of them: Buchanan BIAS is known as PUBLIC SUPPORT when it happens for any other candidate. In fact, there is no other candidate in the history of "exit polling" that has generated a "bias", according to these manipulators.

Furthermore, the earliest returns were 49% to 49%, and someone who was in the Buchanan inner circles when these results became known, heard Buchanan say, "...we could win this thing." But that’s before the strange goings on began in which Bush stayed at 49% and Buchanan dropped 3% every few hours until he was at 40% at 2 AM. THEN, the next morning, 10,000 ballots were "found" as reported by Larry King the next night – and Buchanan dropped ANOTHER 3% to 37% -- just what Bush was hoping for. In the meantime Bush allegedly rose to 53%..."
Odd, ain't it? The exit polls go nutty only when a Bush is running for high office...

That darn Holocaust...!

You remember Francis Fukuyama, don'tcha? The fella who made the rather premature announcement that history had ended? He's now a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and director of the Human Biotechnology Governance Project.

His most recent statement will astonish even the most jaundiced reader. I"d say it crosses a line -- but this administration has erased all lines:

We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation. If companies were allowed to use clinical trials in Third World countries, paying a lot of poor people to take risks that you wouldn't take in a developed country, we could speed up technology quickly. But because of the Holocaust...
Poor Francis! He could do so much good for the world, playing Dr. Mengele in riff-raff land, outsourcing human experimentation the way we now outsource torture, poisoning the brown to aid the white.

But he can't perform these valuable services. All because of that silly old business with the Nazis. I guess some people consider human experimentation to be politically incorrect...

And remember: Fukuyama is Bush's point man on bioethics. Thank god we have a president who embraces the culture of life.

Race and the race

During his final episode of the season, Bill Maher asked if race continues to be a genuine problem in America. A fair question. One fair answer: Race is nothing like the problem it was in my childhood.

Back then, even alleged liberals (white liberals, I should add) stuttered like Porky Pig when confronted with the inevitable question: "Would you let your sister marry a non-white?" In discussion after discussion, the issue ended up as a below-the-waist concern, as ever seems to be the case in this sexually-obsessed culture.

Today, interracial couples are seen at many a mall here in Los Angeles -- and, I am happy to report, nobody cares. In 1970, even in 1980, a young black/white couple would have caused murmurs and surreptitious glances. Now, nobody gives a damn. I wonder if those lucky kids know just how hard a lot of people had to work in order to achieve this who-gives-a-damn moment.

So: Is the race issue closed?

Before you answer, take another look at a race of a different sort: The Los Angeles mayoral contest between James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa. That confrontation shall find its conclusion within mere hours.

This election reminds me of that old Star Trek episode (classic Trek, of course) in which Spock turns to one beautiful female robot and says: "I love you." Then he turns to her (its?) identical twin and adds: "But I hate you." The contradiction causes the robots' computerized brains to fry. That's how we all thought computers worked back in the 1960s.

Today, some Angelenos love Hahn and hate Villaraigosa, and vice-versa. But the two candidates are really twins, politically speaking. They have few real differences, if any. Hahn, the son of old-school liberal icon Kenny Hahn, may, in fact, turn out to be the more progressive of the two men, if only by a smidgen.

And yet...and yet...

The Republican party in Los Angeles has recently embraced Hahn as though he were Rush Limbaugh. Local Rovians even sent out brownshirts to harass John Kerry when Kerry spoke in favor of Villaraigosa. The harassment was quite ugly and thuggish, or so reports my ladyfriend. (See the post below.)

Why do Republicans support Hahn so fervently, when Hahn has never been identified with their interests? Why do they instinctively rail against Villaraigosa? Why do they love one twin and hate the other?

Try to think of a reason. I suspect that an answer will occur to you before your brain fries.

Monday, May 16, 2005

Kerry on the mystery bulge...?

I had hoped that my lovely ladyfriend could write this post, but her college load -- five tough classes, heading toward finals -- prevents her from doing any blogging.

You may recall that in a previous post, I talked about an appearance made by John Kerry on behalf of the man who is sure to be the next mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. (I'm still kind of hoping Hahn wins, if only because his name is easier to spell.) I could not attend that rally, but my beloved one did.

Long-time readers will recall that this very same lady sparked a national controversy when she remarked, during a rebroadcast of the second debate, "What's that thing on Bush's back?" Her observation prompted me to write a post on what I called "promptergate." Next thing I knew, this 200-reader-a-day blog turned into a 60,000-reader a day blog. (That number has dampened considerably since the election.)

Thus it was that my lady love, the obscenely-nicknamed "Bulge Girl," showed up at the event at San Fernando Valley College. She heard Kerry speak, and then heard out Vila...Villaray...um...you know...the candidate. At rally's end, Kerry signed autographs.

Bulge Girl tried her damnedest to hand the man who should have won a piece of paper bearing these words:

"After the second debate, when you patted Bush on the back, did you feel anything unusual?"
Kerry would NOT take the paper. Bulge Girl got the distinct impression that he wanted to avoid even glancing at it, even though he signed blank pieces of paper thrust toward him by everyone else standing nearby.

But Vila...uh...Antonio (I'll vote for him if we can be on a first-name basis) did try to snatch the paper out of her hand in order to sign it!

Lord knows what he would have made of the message. Bulge Girl prevented him from taking a look at the words meant for Kerry; her actions may have miffed Antonio.

Well, folks...she tried.

She tried to get confirmation from the one objective observer who has felt Bush's back. She tried to prove, once and for all, that there really was something odd between our beloved President's shoulder blades during those debates. (By "something odd," I mean something other than the skewed view of reality bouncing around in W's cranium.)

If John Kerry makes an appearance in your area any time soon, perhaps you would care to repeat the experiment...?

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Must-read article

Tom Paine has published a powerhouse piece by John Conyers: "The GOP's Attack On Voting Rights." So why are you still here? Go there! (Then come back here and read my lovely new piece on Iran and atom bombs. Pleasant dreams...)

More on Corsi, Ledeen, Iran, Israel and atom bombs

You may recall our previous discussion of Jerome Corsi and his unnerving prediction that Iran would set off an atomic device within a major American city. This atrocity, Corsi insists, will be aided and abetted by such alleged Iranian "appeasers" as John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy -- four Democratic politicians whose pro-Tehran activity has so far remained invisible to all rational observers.

Corsi's foresight does not derive from any claimed parapsychological abilities. Rather, he presents himself as a conduit of "inside the beltway" dope.

Who is this man, and who are his associates?

As mentioned previously, he first came into view as one of the key authors of the "swift boat" smears against John Kerry. At that time, William Hare wrote the following:

A simple Google search under the name Jerome Corsi reveals a treasure trove of information, particularly one productive link through MediaMatters.org. This reputable site has compiled comments of Corsi and others from his Free Republic site. Their discourse reads like a Skinhead seminar. Corsi has revealed himself to be an unmitigated Neo-Nazi bigot with an unquenchable thirst for hateful commentary, with special emphasis on degrading Catholics, Jews and Muslims. The Pope is senile; Catholicism and Islam are routinely referred to as actively condoning "buggery" while Hillary Clinton is a fat lesbian without hair.

Kerry is referred to as a "Jew boy" who cannot be trusted for that reason...
(One wonders when conservative Jews and Catholics will wake up and take note of just how strange a bedfellow Corsi truly is.)

Corsi's incessant emphasis on the "appeasement" bogeyman forces us to ask: By what standards are Kerry, Clinton, Kennedy and Biden labeled "appeasers"?

A closer look reveals a startling double-standard. Those pushing for action against Iran often invoke Ronald Reagan. The propaganda film "An Atomic 911," linked to Corsi's effort, was produced by Tim Watkins, previously involved with the making of "In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed." The makers of this documentary offer this summary:

The film presents Ronald Reagan's forty-year campaign against Soviet communism as a blueprint for fighting evil in the world.
Translation: Dubya's crusade against Islam is just like Saint Ronnie's crusade against the bolshies.

One could counter this notion on any number of levels, not least by noting that Democrats made anti-communism official policy when Reagan was still an alleged actor and a corrupt Screen Actor's Guild president. But I would call your attention to one special irony:

Ronald Reagan's administration illegally sold arms to Iran!

Odd, isn't it, that the current anti-Iran crusaders would invoke Reagan's name in order to fire up the troops against the Tehran regime (which is, arguably, a bit more moderate now than in RR's day)?

But that's not all, irony fans...!

One of the web sites affiliated with the current crusade is Regime Change Iran, which supports, and is supported by, ultra-neo-con Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. (As Ted Koppel once put it: "Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man...in the tradition of Machiavelli." Of course, Ledeen lives in a world where a comparison to Machiavelli is considered complimentary.)

Ledeen, as you will recall, remains a die-hard supporter of the disgraced Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi. And why did Chalabi fall into disgrace? In large part because he was routing intelligence to Tehran.

Ledeen is also strongly linked with the mysterious Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Even though the CIA had dismissed Ghorbanifar as a prevaricator, Ledeen insisted on arranging a series of meetings between the Iranian and a number of likeminded Defense Department bigwigs.

All of which brings us to one simple question: How can Corsi accuse Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden of "appeasement? None of them ever sold weapons to Iran; none of them ever palled around with Iranian arms merchants of inscrutable loyalties; none of them ever helped funnel intel to Tehran. In short: None of them have demonstrated any link to Iran. Yet we are supposed to believe that these four Democrats are hand-puppets of the Iranian mullahs -- while Reagan, Ledeen and Chalabi must forevermore remain free of all such accusations.

The road to war. Ledeen and his defenders became angry when the Times of London described him as "the prominent neo-conservative who has led calls for an attack on Iran." As the Regime Change blog puts it:

Ledeen has long been an advocate of regime change in Iran. Perhaps they [the Times] drew the false conclusion he was referring to militarily forcing a regime change. But he has not led calls for an attack on Iran, but rather advocates supporting of a regime change in Iran using similar methods as were used in Romania, the Ukraine, Lebanon and elsewhere.
If that were the end of it, I'd have no overwhelming disagreement with Ledeen's position -- although I strongly doubt that the Iranians will soon rise against the mullahs the way the Romanians rose against Ceausescu.

Ledeen, however, obviously wants to sneak war through the back door -- indeed, this goal seems to have been the entire purpose of his more recent dalliances with Ghorbanifar. From the Sydney Morning Herald of August 9, 2003:

Administration officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, Douglas Feith, have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in United States arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s.

The officials who disclosed the secret meetings said the talks with Mr Ghorbanifar were not authorized by the White House and appeared to be aimed at undercutting sensitive negotiations with Iran's Government.

A senior Administration official said the US Government had learned about the unauthorized talks by accident.

The senior official and another Administration source said the ultimate objective of Mr Feith and a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.

The immediate objective appeared to be to "antagonise Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them"
(Emphasis added by me.) Later, we read: "It is understood Mr Ledeen reopened the Ghorbanifar channel with Mr Feith's staff."

All very telling -- especially when we recall that there had been, not long before, a brief thaw in relations between Tehran and Washington, due in part to mutual antipathy toward the Taliban.

Perhaps more telling still is this paragraph from Rightweb's profile of Ledeen:

Michael Ledeen, the neocons' point man on regime change in Iran (and in Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia), is apparently capable of viewing diplomacy only through the barrel of a gun, arguing in a November 2003 piece for the National Review Online that the "appeasers" in Congress and the State Department "don't want to know about Iran, because if they did, they would be driven to take actions that they do not want to take. They would have to support democratic revolution in Iran, and they prefer to schmooze with the mullahs." He concludes, "I guess some top official will have to die at the hands of (obviously) Iranian-supported terrorists before the Pentagon is permitted to work on the subject."
(Emphasis added by me.) Notice the recurrent motifs: Anyone who disagrees with Ledeen's position is an "appeaser," and we won't get action until the Iranians do something drastic and terrible -- and better that day come sooner than later. The entire purpose of the Ghorbanifar meetings apparently revolved around a scheme designed to goad Tehran into taking an incautious step.

Corsi and Ledeen are obviously singing from the same songbook.

Unfathomably strange bedfellows: As others have previously noted, Corsi had demonstrated on the Free Republic site a Goebbels-esque penchant for insulting Jews and Catholics, and allegedly referred to John Kerry a "Jew boy." Although I have yet to see confirmation of the "Jew boy" remark, he did once write of Kerry: "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judaism? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"

To put that remark in context, here's Corsi on Catholics: "Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press." (If the mainstream media ignored the church's sex scandals, why did I read so much about it in the Los Angeles Times?)

And while we're at it, here's Corsi on Islam: "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion." These words will not convince Mr. Average Iranian that Jerome Corsi has his best interests at heart.

Despite these unfunny "jokes," Corsi claims to be both a Catholic and a supporter of Israel. Many would argue that the Iran war he promotes would serve Likud interests.

Not only that. One portion of the afore-cited 2003 story on Ghorbanifar now carries a resonance not apparent at that time:

The senior Administration official identified two of the defence officials who met Mr Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Mr Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defence Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office.
(Emphasis added by me.)

Rhode is a Ledeen protege who acted as a liaison between Pentagon neocons and Chalabi. But the most intriguing figure here is, of course, Larry Franklin -- the central figure in the current AIPAC scandal. You may want to read Xymphora's recent observations on that score.

Larry Franklin was passing highly sensitive information to AIPAC (translation: to Israel) in the same time period as those hush-hush meetings with Ghorbanifar. Again: While we don't know precisely what went on at those meetings, they seem to have centered on attempts to provoke Iran into giving America a causus belli.

The best piece on this imbroglio remains Laura Rozen's analysis from about a year ago:

1) The secret meetings between Pentagon officials and associates of Ghorbanifar in Europe went on for almost two years, a full year longer than the Bush administration has acknowledged. Ghorbanifar told me of three meetings. While the Pentagon originally told the Post last year that Harold Rhode, an official in Feith's office, had simply run into Ghorbanifar in Paris in June 2003, Ghorbanifar tells me that the two spent weeks planning the meeting.

2) The Italian military intelligence organization SISMI provided logistics and security at the first meeting, in Rome, in December 2001. And the head of Sismi, Nicolo Pollari, as well as the Italian Defense Minister, Antonio Martino, attended the meeting, along with Michael Ledeen, Ghorbanifar, Pentagon officials Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin. [Sismi has been in the news recently for having been reported to have used an Italian middleman to put the forged Niger docs into circulation.]

3) Ghorbanifar told me he has had fifty meetings with Michael Ledeen since September 11th, and that he has given Ledeen "4,000 to 5,000 pages of sensitive documents" concerning Iran, Iraq and the Middle East, "material no one else has received."
Since the Italians have long-standing trade ties to Iran, one can easily understand why Ledeen's faction would use SISMI to arrange the enigmatic liaisons with Ghorbanifar.

In the 1980s, a number of books and articles fingered Michael Ledeen as a member of Italy's fascist P2 "lodge," a pseudo-Masonic power group founded by former blakshirt and SS liaison officer Licio Gelli. Gelli's fascist cabal infiltrated, and largely controlled, SISMI. According to reports published in the 1980s, Gelli had created an organization within the organization, jocularly labeled "Super SISMI."

How do we reconcile the seeming contradiction between Ledeen's hawkish pro-Israeli views and his reported alliance with the Nazi-fied Gelli? I'm not sure how to answer that one. Neither can I explain why a man like Corsi, who also claims to support Israel, would spew ugly anti-Semitism on the Free Republic site.

In summary: Yes, I know that this post tosses the reader into a stew containing a very confusing array of ingredients. I apologize if this essay resembles a "brain dump," as opposed to a structured argument.

My bottom line, at least, is simple: A faction within our power establishment wants war with Iran. To that end, they will not refrain from staging a provocation. And they will use this incident both to attack that country and to assail freedom within the United States.

Forewarned is forearmed. Let us hope the forearmed can forestall.