Author: jpol

Susan Hu wrote earlier this evening about the latest incident in which the U.S. military seems to be targeting foreign journalists in Iraq. This time it was an award-winning Iraqi journalist, Ali Fadhal, on assignment to The Guardian and Channel 4 to investigate “claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.”

I won’t re-hash Ali-Fadhal’s horrific experience. You can read about that in Susan’s story and in The Guardian.

What I want to know is why the U.S. mainstream media continues to ignore incidents that strongly suggest a war on journalists in Iraq (and elsewhere) by the U.S. military. As far as I can tell, not a single outlet of the U.S. mainstream media reported this incident. If you know about it it is probably because of the efforts of Editor & Publisher; The Guardian; Al-Jazeera; Juan Cole; Susan Hu’s piece here at Booman Tribune; or elsewhere on the blogosphere where the Guardian article is linked.

It wasn’t long ago that much of the U.S.media was bemoaning the fate of Judith Miller, pining away in jail for shielding White House officials who had outed Valerie Plame in order to punish her whistle-blower husband. The Society of Professional Journalists even awarded her its First Amendment Award.

Yet the U.S. mainstream media continues to wear blinders despite ever growing evidence that the U.S. military is targeting journalists in incidents ranging from harrassment to arrest to humiliation to murder.

There was overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military was targeting Al-Jazeera, virtually all of it ignored by the mainstream U.S. media until a British memo was leaked in which it was revealed that Tony Blair had to talk President Bush out of bombing its headquarters. Even then, the story was played down and even mocked by much of the media.

When the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report in May 2003 revealing that the Pentagon officials and commanders on the ground knew the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad was full of international journalists before it was shelled by U.S. troops the month before, the U.S. mainstream media largely ignored their findings. Two journalists died in that shelling, and three others were wounded.

In February 2005 the International Federation of Journalists:

…accused [the U.S. government] of hiding behind a “culture of denial” over the deaths of at least 12 journalists who are alleged to have perished at the hands of the US military in Iraq.

…Since US, British and other soldiers first began Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, more than 70 journalists have been killed in the country.

The IFJ said that at least 12 journalists had met their deaths at the “hands of US soldiers”, including the killings of Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Couso of Spain’s Telecinco after US tanks opened fire on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad…

…”On that day journalists around the world will once again protest over impunity [and] secrecy over media deaths and, in particular, at the failure of the United States to take responsibility for its actions in Iraq which have led to the killing of journalists,” said the IFJ general secretary, Aidan White…

The U.S. mainstream media ignored the IFJ charges as well.

Yet the U.S. mainstream is not always silent when suggestions arise that the military is targeting journalists. Eason Jordan, former chief news executive at CNN, was forced out of his job in February 2005 after comments he made the month before at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland were leaked. Jordan dared to opine that coalition troops had “targeted” journalists in Iraq. The media firestorm that followed was relentless:

…Blogs operated by National Review Online, radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt and commentator Michelle Malkin were among those that began slamming Jordan last week after a Davos attendee posted an online account, but the establishment press was slow to pick up on the controversy. The Washington Post and Boston Globe published stories Tuesday and the Miami Herald ran one Thursday. Also on Thursday, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Bret Stephens, who was at Davos, published an account accusing Jordan of “defamatory innuendo,” and the Associated Press moved a story…

Linda Foley, president of the 35,000 member Newspaper Guild was likewise pilloried when she made similar remarks in St. Louis:

…According to a tape of her remarks, Foley said: “Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted verbally or … ah, or … ah, politically. They are also being targeted for real, um … in places like Iraq. What outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there’s not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq.”

Foley continued, “They target and kill journalists … uh, from other countries, particularly Arab countries like Al -, like Arab news services like al-Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios with impunity. …”

Much of the world believes that the U.S. military is engaged in a war on journalists in Iraq. Why does the U.S. media relentlessly avoid reporting incidents like the ordeal of The Guardian’s Ali Fadhal while attacking all those who suggest that the U.S. military war on journalists is real?

Much has already been written about President Bush’s 17 recess appointments announced on Thursday, many of them extremely controversial. It’s an old trick meant to get around those pesky Senate confirmation hearings. Every president uses it to one degree or another. Ronald Reagan made 240 during his two terms. George H.W. Bush made 77 in his one term. Bill Clinton made 140 in his two terms. George W. Bush made 110 in his first term. But these
appointments are different. Based on precedent, the appointments would expire at the conclusion of the next session of the Senate at the end of 2006. But this president, in an interpretation that can only be termed bizarre, is insisting that a one-minute ceremonial pro forma meeting of the Senate that occurred on Tuesday, January 3rd, represented the opening meeting of the second session of the 109th Congress, which he interprets as giving life to his recess appointments until the end of 2007 rather than 2006.

Largely lost amidst the outrage being expressed over the appointments themselves was an unusual twist reported without elucidation by the Associated Press and carried by hundreds of newspapers:

Under the Constitution, the president may avoid the Senate confirmation process and make appointments while the chamber is in recess. Such appointments usually are short-term, expiring at the end of next congressional session.

But because the Senate held a pro forma session Tuesday and then adjourned, the White House contends the second session of the 109th Congress has begun. Therefore, the White House believes Bush’s nearly 20 recess appointments are valid until the following session, which won’t conclude until the end of 2007.

You might well be excused if you did not know that the Senate was in session this past Tuesday. It wasn’t covered by the media. No business was conducted. No legislation was enacted. The roll was not called. If it had been, there would have been no Senators present to answer “here.” Confused? The answer lies in small print on the home page of the Senate web site:

Tuesday, Jan 3, 2006

The Senate convened at 12:00 noon for a pro forma session only and adjourned at 12:01 p.m. No record votes were taken.

Still confused? The rationale for this pro forma session of Congress can be found in Article I; Section 5 of the Constitution of the United States:

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting

.

Which the Senate web site explains as follows:

This section was included to prevent either chamber from blocking legislation through its refusal to meet. Each chamber takes very seriously its independence of the other body. To avoid having to ask the other chamber for permission to adjourn, the Senate and House simply conduct pro forma (as a matter of form) sessions to meet the three-day constitutional requirement. No business is conducted at these sessions, which generally last for less than one minute.

In other words the White House is interpreting a procedural, entirely ceremonial, one-minute meeting of the two houses of Congress, designed to preserve the independence of the two bodies from one another, as giving the president a green light to make a two-year end run around the Constitutionally mandated role of the Senate to “Advice and Consent” in the appointment of Federal officials.

Article II; Section 2 of the Constitution says:

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Surely the authors of our revered Constitution never envisioned technicalities and bizarre interpretations of that document to be utilized to make a two-year end-run around the Senate. In fact, clearly the original intent of the recess appointment was to fill only those vacancies that actually occurred while the Senate was not in session. Back in those early days of the Republic Congress did not meet as often as it does today, and the logistics of late eighteenth century roads and modes of transportation rendered it impractical to call a special session of Congress on short notice. That is what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the recess appointment into the Constitution. Moreover, the Bush interpretation that three-day technical adjournments between pro forma ceremonial meetings of the Senate constitute actual meetings and adjournments between which recess appointments can be made flies in the face of all precedent, as well as all mainstream interpretations of the Constitution. Even recess appointments made during ten-day recesses have stirred controversy as to whether they pass constitutional muster. This new three-day interpretation would seem to be way beyond the pale. Finally, it is extremely doubtful that the framers of the Constitution would have considered Tuesdays pro forma Senate meeting as a legitimate meeting and adjournment for purposes of a recess appointment. The 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary defines “adjournment” as “the time or interval during which a public body defers business.” Since the Senate did not formally meet; no votes were taken; and no business was discussed, these ceremonial meetings of less than one minute in duration could hardly meet the criteria of a meeting and an “adjournment,” particularly as the terms were understood when the Constitution was written. Doesn’t the Bush administration consider itself one that believes in a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution?

If the Senate allows the Bush administration’s view that these are valid two-year recess appointments to prevail, they will be ceding unprecedented (and very likely unconstitutional), power to the Executive Branch — not to mention abrogating their own right and responsibility to “advice and consent.”

Perhaps even some Republicans in this most partisan of Congresses will finally stand up to this White House’s blatant usurpation of the powers bestowed upon it by our Constitution. If not it may be time to ask whether we still live in a democracy.

(Now cross-posted
at Daily Kos. If you agree that this is important please recommend).

I really don’t have a lot to say here myself except that it is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration obviously has no compunction about exercizing its power to punish its “enemies.”

It seems that James Moore, the award-winning journalist who authored the best-selling book “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” has found himself on the infamous “no-fly” list — a list that is free of oversight and immune from appeal.

Does the Bush administration really consider Moore a terrorist, or is it just that they want to inconvenience him for daring to take on George W. Bush and Karl Rove?

Here is his story in his own words, as posted at the Huffington Post:

Let’s publicize this outrage and help James Moore escape this harrassment.

In the wake of the West Virgina mine tragedy troubling revelations are emerging about the safety record of the Sago Mine which claimed the lives of twelve miners the other day — the lone survivor still in a coma and possibly brain-damaged.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Nearly half of the 208 safety citations levied in 2005 against the Sago coal mine where 12 men died this week were “serious and substantial.”

Federal inspectors found 20 dangerous roof-falls, 14 power wire insulation problems, and three cases of inadequate ventilation plans, among the 96 major violations.

Sago’s “S&S” violations, which rose fourfold in 2005 over 2004, form a pattern that worries safety experts, who say it raises serious questions about mine management – and the efficacy of government inspections.

Despite major safety strides in recent decades, mining remains one of the nation’s most dangerous jobs. And it’s not unusual for mines to be cited for violations of the 1977 Mine Safety Act. But Sago’s record, some say, should have raised red flags…

During the last quarter of 2005, for instance, federal inspectors at Sago cited or ordered the company to fix 50 safety violations – 19 of them serious and substantial. As a result, the company was fined $24,374 last year. It also recorded 39 accidents in 2005, 16 with injuries requiring days away from work.

Inspectors also noted lesser violations such as electrical equipment maintenance, accumulations of coal dust, inadequate fresh air ventilation of the coal-face, and too few methane monitors. (It is still not known what caused the explosion that trapped and killed the miners.)

…The 2005 [violation] total was more than triple the 68 tallied in 2004.

Despite this record, the entire mine was never ordered closed for a safety overhaul…

How was all this possible? Is there any significance to the progressively declining safety record after 2004?
A lengthy New York Times 2004 special report (this link does not require a subscription; for Times subscribers, go here) seems eerily relevant today:

MINES TO MOUNTAINTOPS: Rewriting Coal Policy; Friends in the White House Come to Coal’s Aid

Excerpts of the article by Christopher Drew and Richard A. Opal follow:

No one will ever know if the Sago mine disaster could have been avoided, but it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that the industry-friendly policies of this administration coupled with its seeming disregard for safety and environmental concerns is not without its consequences.

George W. Bush signed the Defense Appropriations Bill this past Friday which included the McCain Amendment forbidding cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of detainees by U.S. personnel anywhere in the world.

But the President, in signing the bill, signaled a huge “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” that the mainstream media either missed or has chosen to ignore. We can thank Marty Lederman’s “Balkin Blogspot” for the important catch:

Monday, January 02, 2006

So Much for the President’s Assent to the McCain Amendment

Marty Lederman

…Most importantly, as to the McCain Amendment… the President wrote:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

Translation: I reserve the constitutional right to waterboard when it will “assist” in protecting the American people from terrorist attacks. [UPDATE: Or, as Matthew Franck eagerly puts it over at the National Review, “the signing statement . . . conveys the good news that the president is not taking the McCain amendment lying down.”]…

WOW !!!

Slate’s Eric Umansky picked up on Lederman’s blog in “Today’s Papers”. He asks:

Anybody care to ask the White House whether, given the above language, it considers the government absolutely bound by McCain’s ban?

Good question, one that both the media and Senator McCain ought to be asking.

Military Times is just out with its annual poll of active duty military, and the results do not bode well for George W. Bush.

It is worth noting before beginning that this sample is drawn from a constituency that has been solidly pro-Bush, perhaps more so than any but corporate CEO’s. The boilerplate describes the sample’s composition, and how it is drawn:

..questionnaires [were mailed] to 6,000 people drawn at random from our list of active-duty subscribers…

…Those polled differ from the military as a whole in important ways. They tend to be older, higher in rank and more career-oriented… The poll has come to be viewed by some as a barometer of the professional career military.

In other words, we’re not talking about called-up National Guard or Reserves who might be less likely to support the Iraq war or President Bush. Nor are we talking about under-priveleged minorities who may have enlisted for lack of other opportunities. As the boilerplate says, these are “the professional career military.”

Excerpt’s from the poll:

Support for President Bush and for the war in Iraq has slipped significantly in the last year among members of the military’s professional core, according to the 2005 Military Times Poll.

Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority, 54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60 percent, among active-duty readers

of the Military Times newspapers. Though support both for President Bush and for the war in Iraq remains significantly higher than in the public as a whole, the drop is likely to add further fuel to the heated debate over Iraq policy. In 2003 and 2004, supporters of the war in Iraq pointed to high approval ratings in the Military Times Poll as a signal that military members were behind the president’s policy.

The poll also found diminished optimism that U.S. goals in Iraq can be accomplished, and a somewhat smaller drop in support for the decision to go to war in 2003.

… The results should not be read as representative of the military as a whole; the survey’s respondents are on average older, more experienced, more likely to be officers and more career-oriented than the military population… The professional military seems to be lessening in its certainty about the wisdom of the Iraq intervention and the way it has been handled,” said Richard Kohn, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina who studies civil-military relations. “This seems to be more and more in keeping with changes in public views, and that’s not surprising.”

The survey mirrors a similar shift in U.S. public opinion over the last year. The CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, for example, recorded an eight-point drop in public approval for Iraq policy, from 47 percent in November 2004 to 39 percent in December 2005.

…Opinions on the president and Iraq weren’t the only shifts in the 2005 poll:

• Positive feelings about Congress, civilian and uniformed Pentagon leaders and the media all fell…
• Nearly two-thirds said the military is stretched too thin to be effective, though that figure is down substantially from two years ago…

But few of those shifts appear as significant as those on the president.

to be sure, support for the president and his policies remains stronger in the Military Times Poll than in surveys of the general public: The president’s approval rating is as much as 20 percentage points higher than in the civilian population. Part of that difference is partisan: While roughly a third of Americans describe themselves as Democrats, just 13 percent of Military Times Poll respondents do so…

…As in the previous two years, Military Times Poll respondents were reluctant to express opinions, even anonymously, about the commander in chief or his policies. About one in five refused to say whether they approved of the president’s performance on Iraq or overall…

This poll hardly signals the end of the world for President Bush and his war policies, but sagging support from a hardcore career military constituency, only 13% of whom describe themselves as Democrats, can hardly be regarded as good news in The White House.

Last year FOX News touted the Military News Poll as a sign of the high regard with which Bush was regarded by the military (though they neglected to mention that the sample reflected career military rather than the military as a whole). I suspect we’ll hear less about this year’s poll from FOX News — if they mention it at all.

Raw Story is out with a report today that could further complicate life for the Bush administration, and one that also does not reflect well on the United States mainstream media. The story harkens back to early 2003 when the Bush administration was desperately trying to coax the United Nations into legitimizing its plans to go to war with Iraq (at the urging of Tony Blair, which we now know, thanks to the Downing Street memos and minutes). In order to determine how the delegates were leaning on a UN resolution that would have given the U.S. a green light, the Bush administration decided, according to Raw Story, to “step up” efforts by the NSA to eavesdrop, via wiretaps and e-mail intercepts, on members of the UN Security Council. But the story, as Raw Story acknowledges, is not new. It caused a firestorm at the time in the corridors of the United Nations and was front-page news in the European press. But here in the United States, where a cowered media seemed resigned, even eager, to going to war, the story was almost entirely ignored.

It seems only natural, in the wake of daily revelations about warrantless NSA wiretaps authorized by the Bush administration (President Bush brands the revelations, not the spying, “shameful”), that the media would revisit this largely ignored at the time 2003 story involving possibly illegal NSA wiretaps . Having ignored the implications in 2003, it seems hardly surprising that we are now reminded of them by Raw Story rather than by The Washington Post or The New York Times.

Raw Story’s headline today reads:

Rice authorized National Security Agency to spy on UN Security Council in run-up to war, former officials say

According to Raw Story:

President Bush and other top officials in his administration used the National Security Agency to secretly wiretap the home and office telephones and monitored private email accounts of members of the United Nations Security Council in early 2003 to determine how foreign delegates would vote on a U.N. resolution that paved the war for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, NSA documents show.

Two former NSA officials familiar with the agency’s campaign to spy on U.N. members say then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice authorized the plan at the request of President Bush, who wanted to know how delegates were going to vote. Rice did not immediately return a call for comment.

The former officials said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also participated in discussions about the plan, which involved “stepping up” efforts to eavesdrop on diplomats.

A spokeswoman at the White House who refused to give her name also would not comment, and pointed to a March 3, 2003 press briefing by former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer when questions about U.N. spying were first raised.

“As a matter of long-standing policy, the administration never comments on anything involving any people involved in intelligence,” Fleischer said. “So I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no.”

Disclosure of the wiretaps and the monitoring of U.N. members’ email came on the eve of the Iraq war in the British-based Observer. The leak — which the paper acquired in the form of an email via a British translator — came amid a U.S. push urging U.N. members to vote in favor of a resolution that said Iraq was in violation of U.N. resolution 1441, asserting that it had failed to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.

…One intelligence source who spoke to RAW STORY said top White House officials and some Republican members of Congress had debated in December 2002 whether to step up the surveillance of U.N. officials to include eavesdropping on home telephone and personal email accounts. Some feared that in the event it was discovered, it would further erode relations between the U.S. and the U.N.

The source added that U.S. spying on the U.N. isn’t new.

“It’s part of the job,” the intelligence source said. “Everyone knows it’s being done.”
Eavesdropping on U.N. diplomats is authorized under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Services Act. However, it’s still considered a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which says that “The receiving state shall permit and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all official purposes… The official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable.”

According to one former official, “The administration pushed the envelope by tapping their home phones.”

…

The implications of this story are enormous. If it was indeed authorized by then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice this implicates the top reaches of the administration in illegal activity. The involvement of the NSA further makes a mockery of the claims by the Bush administration and its apologists that the warrrantless NSA intercepts were a necessary weapon in the “war on terror.” This was politics, pure and simple, authorized by top administration officials, and carried out, in violation of the law, by The National Security Agency. And the mainstream media, by ignoring the story, failed the American people, as it has time and time again in recent years.

As I said in the introduction, this is not a new story. Virtually all of it was known, and reported upon by the media before we went to war.

According to Raw Story, a memo written by Frank Koza of the NSA on January 31, 2003 “was leaked to a handful of media outlets in the U.S. {emphasis added} and U.K. by Katharine Tersea Gun, a former translator for British intelligence.” This memo was hardly an effort to stem terrorists (Read the memo here).

So the U.S. media had the story, but it was the British Observer that broke it on March 2, 2003: “Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war — Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members”

The United States is conducting a secret ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.
Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.

The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency… and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.

The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations ‘particularly directed at… UN Security Council Members… to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.

The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York – the so-called ‘Middle Six’ delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.

The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is ‘mounting a surge’ aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also ‘policies’, ‘negotiating positions’, ‘alliances’ and ‘dependencies’ – the ‘whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises’.

Dated 31 January 2003, the memo was circulated four days after the UN’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix produced his interim report on Iraqi compliance with UN resolution 1441.
It was sent by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the ‘Regional Targets’ section of the NSA, which spies on countries that are viewed as strategically important for United States interests.
Koza specifies that the information will be used for the US’s ‘QRC’ – Quick Response Capability – ‘against’ the key delegations.

Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also ‘pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations’…

Disclosure of the US operation comes in the week that Blix will make what many expect to be his final report to the Security Council.

It also comes amid increasingly threatening noises from the US towards undecided countries on the Security Council who have been warned of the unpleasant economic consequences of standing up to the US.

Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush administration officials over whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign with some warning of the serious consequences of discovery.

The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice {emphasis added}, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their efforts to win over the undecided delegations.

The language and content of the memo were judged to be authentic by three former intelligence operatives shown it by The Observer. We were also able to establish that Frank Koza does work for the NSA and could confirm his senior post in the Regional Targets section of the organisation.

The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza’s office. However, when The Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told ‘You have reached the wrong number’.

On protesting that the assistant had just said this was Koza’s extension, the assistant repeated that it was an erroneous extension, and hung up.

While many diplomats at the UN assume they are being bugged, the memo reveals for the first time the scope and scale of US communications intercepts targeted against the New York-based missions.

The disclosure comes at a time when diplomats from the countries have been complaining about the outright ‘hostility’ of US tactics in recent days to persuade then to fall in line, including threats to economic and aid packages.

The operation appears to have been spotted by rival organisations in Europe. ‘The Americans are being very purposeful about this,’ said a source at a European intelligence agency when asked about the US surveillance efforts.

The involvement of Donald Rumsfeld adds a new wrinkle, but other than that The Observer had virtually the entire story, right down to Condoleeza Rice having authorized the surveillance (and they even reported a week later that “American intelligence experts told The Observer that a decision of this kind would also have involved Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet and NSA chief General Michael Hayden. President Bush himself would have been informed at one of the daily intelligence briefings held every morning at the White House”).

As Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) noted at the time, the reaction of the U.S. media to this shocking story was underwhelming, to say the least. The New York Times ignored the story completely. NBC, CNN and FOX News all scheduled and then cancelled interviews with one of the authors, ignoring the story instead. The Washington Post ridiculed the revelations in a page 17 story “Spying Report No Shock To U.N. that inaccurately suggested that “Security Council diplomats today shrugged off a British newspaper report that the super-secretive National Security Agency had ordered an eavesdropping ‘surge’ on their telephones to determine their voting positions on a resolution that would pave the way for a U.S.-led war against Iraq.” The article went on to downplay the Observer revelations, indicating that this kind of eaves-dropping goes on all the time and is not news, quoting one diplomat: “You’d have to be very naive to be surprised.” The Washington Times and The Drudge Report meanwhile tried to brand the leaked memo a fake.

Not every one took the story so lightly. Media Commentator Norman Solomon interviewed Daniel Ellsberg — of Pentagon Papers fame — about it at the time. Ellsberg responded that “This leak is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers.” Describing the media coverage, Solomon wrote:

…The London Times article called it an “embarrassing disclosure.” And the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States.

Several days after the “embarrassing disclosure,” not a word about it had appeared in America’s supposed paper of record. The New York Times – the single most influential media outlet in the United States – still had not printed anything about the story. How could that be?
“Well, it’s not that we haven’t been interested,” New York Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale said Wednesday night, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. “We could get no confirmation or comment” on the memo from U.S. officials.

The Times opted not to relay the Observer’s account, Smale told me. “We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting.” She added: “We are still definitely looking into it. It’s not that we’re not.”

Belated coverage would be better than none at all. But readers should be suspicious of the failure of the New York Times to cover this story during the crucial first days after it broke. At some moments in history, when war and peace hang in the balance, journalism delayed is journalism denied…

Contrary to the Washington Post’s inference that this was a tempest in a teapot, it caused a furor at the UN and around the world, as the Observer reported on March 9, 2003 (while the U.S. media continued to avoid the story like the plague):

UN launches inquiry into American spying

The United Nations has begun a top-level investigation into the bugging of its delegations by the United States, first revealed in The Observer last week.

Sources in the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan confirmed last night that the spying operation had already been discussed at the UN’s counter-terrorism committee and will be further investigated.

The news comes as British police confirmed the arrest of a 28-year-old woman working at the top secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on suspicion of contravening the Official Secrets Act.

The revelations of the spying operation have caused deep embarrassment to the Bush administration at a key point in the sensitive diplomatic negotiations to gain support for a second UN resolution authorising intervention in Iraq.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were both challenged about the operation last week, but said they could not comment on security matters.

The operation is thought to have been authorised by US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, but American intelligence experts told The Observer that a decision of this kind would also have involved Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet and NSA chief General Michael Hayden.
President Bush himself would have been informed at one of the daily intelligence briefings held every morning at the White House.

Attention has now turned to the foreign intelligence agency responsible for the leak. It is now believed the memo was sent out via Echelon, an international surveillance network set up by the NSA with the cooperation of GCHQ in Britain and similar organisations in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

…The Observer story caused a political furore in Chile, where President Ricardo Lagos demanded an immediate explanation of the spying operation. The Chilean public is extremely sensitive to reports of US ‘dirty tricks’ after decades of American secret service involvement in the country’s internal affairs. In 1973 the CIA supported a coup that toppled the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

President Lagos spoke on the telephone with Prime Minister Tony Blair about the memo last Sunday, immediately after the publication of the story, and twice again on Wednesday. Chile’s Foreign Minister Soledad Alvear also raised the matter with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Chile’s ambassador to Britain Mariano Fernández told The Observer: ‘We cannot understand why the United States was spying on Chile. We were very surprised. Relations have been good with America since the time of George Bush Snr.’ He said that the position of the Chilean mission to the UN was published in regular diplomatic bulletins, which were public documents openly available.

While the bugging of foreign diplomats at the UN is permissible under the US Foreign Intelligence Services Act, it is a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, according to one of America’s leading experts on international law, Professor John Quigley of Ohio University.

He says the convention stipulates that: ‘The receiving state shall permit and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all official purposes… The official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable.’

One of the supreme ironies of this story is that the Washington Post, while clearly showing abominable judgment by blacking out this story, was pretty close to the mark when it suggested that surveillance of United Nations officials is commonplace. In 2004 it was revealed by former Tony Blair cabinet minister Clare Short that the UK had spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan during the run up to the Iraq war. Blair, in a reaction similar to the one George W. Bush would later articulate when the New York Times revealed the current NSA wiretap scandal, branded Short’s disclosures as “deeply irresponsible” and said that Short was “undermining British security.” (Short denied putting the UK or its security services at risk, and accused Blair of using “pompous” distraction tactics). The Short disclosures received little play from the U.S. mainstream media.

A few days later the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) revealed that British or U.S. intelligence had also “monitored former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix’s mobile phone whenever he was in Iraq,” according to sources in Australia’s Office of National Assessments who had read the transcripts. That too got little play in the U.S. mainstream media.

It is to be hoped that both the mainstream media and the Congress will now revisit the NSA surveillance of United Nations officials — for clearly political ends — during the run-up to war. It appears to have been in violation of not only U.S. law, but also a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The president has justified authorizing NSA surveillance without warrants as being necessary to protect U.S. citizens from the terrorist threat. Does Mr. Bush consider the UN Security Council to be a haven for terrorists?

The New York Times ran a very important editorial this past Sunday. It was about a subject many of us care passionately about: election fraud.

The Times editorial writers wrote:

The Business of Voting

Diebold, the controversial electronic voting machine manufacturer, is coming off a tumultuous week. Its chief executive, Walden O’Dell, resigned. It was hit with a pair of class-action lawsuits charging insider trading and misrepresentation, and a county in Florida concluded that Diebold’s voting machines could be hacked. The company should use Mr. O’Dell’s departure to reassess its flawed approach to its business. The counting of votes is a public trust. Diebold, whose machines count many votes, has never acted as if it understood this.

Mr. O’Dell made national headlines when he wrote a fund-raising letter before the 2004 election expressing his commitment to help deliver the electoral votes of Ohio – where Diebold is based, and where its machines are used – to President Bush. Under pressure, Diebold barred its top officials from contributing to campaigns. But this month, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland reported that three executives not covered by the ban continued to make contributions to Republican candidates.

Diebold’s voting machines have a troubled history. The company was accused of installing improperly certified software, which is illegal, in a 2002 governor’s race in Georgia. Across the country, it reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the California attorney general last year of a lawsuit alleging that it made false claims about the security of its machines. Last week, the top elections officer in Leon County, Fla., which includes Tallahassee, concluded after a test that Diebold machines can be hacked to change vote totals.

Diebold has always insisted that its electronic voting machines are so reliable that there is no need for paper records of votes that can be independently verified. Fortunately, the American people feel otherwise. Nearly half the states – including large ones like California, New York, Illinois and Ohio – now require so-called paper trails.

Paper trails are important, but they are no substitute for voting machine manufacturers of unquestioned integrity. As Diebold enters the post-O’Dell era, it should work to make itself worthy of the important role it now plays in American democracy.

To those who rely upon The New York Times as their primary news source, most of the contents of that editorial must have come as a big surprise, for virtually none of the “news” referred was “news fit to print” in the news pages of The New York Times. Thankfully, the author(s) of that editorial does not rely on “the newspaper of record” as his/her sole source for news.

So just what are you in the dark about regarding electronic voting and related news if you’ve relied upon The Times for news lately?

A report issued by the GAO (Government Accountability Office) in September revealed serious problems with electronic voting systems, including:

• “… several evaluations demonstrated that… in some cases, other computer programs could access these cast vote files and alter them without the system recording this action in its audit logs.”
• “Two reports documented how it might be possible to alter the ballot definition files… so that the votes shown on the touch screen for one candidate would actually be recorded and counted for a different candidate.”
• “…a county in Pennsylvania made a ballot programming error on its system [that] contributed to many votes not being captured correctly by the voting system, evidenced by that county’s undervote percentage, which reached 80 percent in some precincts.”
• “…California officials documented how a failure in a key component of their system led to polling place disruptions and an unknown number of disenfranchised voters.”
• In a Florida County, “election monitors discovered that the system contained a flaw that allowed one system’s ballots to be added to the canvas totals multiple times without being detected.”
• “…a DRE system in Ohio caused the system to record approximately 3,900 votes too many for one presidential candidate in the 2004 general election.”

The GAO report has never been mentioned, not even once, in the pages of The New York Times.

On December 13th a class action suit was filed against Diebold in the Northern District of Ohio District Court alleging that Diebold “violated provisions of the United States securities laws causing artificial inflation of the Company’s stock price.” The suit alleges that “the Company lacked a credible state of internal controls and corporate compliance and remained unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting machine products. It further alleged that “the Company’s false and misleading statements served to conceal the dimensions and scope of internal problems at the Company, impacting product quality, strategic planning, forecasting and
guidance and culminating in false representations of astonishingly low and incredibly inaccurate restructuring charges for the 2005 fiscal year, which grossly understated the true costs and problems defendants faced to restructure the Company… [and]also alleges over $2.7 million of
insider trading proceeds obtained by individual defendants during the Class Period.

“Finally, investors learned the truth about the adverse impact of the Company’s alleged defective and deficient inventory-related controls and systems on Diebold’s financial performance. As a result of defendants’ shocking news and disclosures of September 21, 2005, the price of Diebold shares plunged 15.5% on unusually high volume, falling from $44.37 per share on September 20, 2005, to $37.47 per share on September 21, 2005, for a one-day drop of $6.90 per share on volume of 6.1 million shares — nearly eight times the average daily trading volume.”

The suit was brought by Scott+Scott, LLC, “which has significant experience in prosecuting investor class actions… Its success has brought shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars in cases against Mattel, Royal Dutch/Shell, Sprint, ImClone and others.”

You could have read about this in The Houston Chronicle or in The Akron Beacon Journal, or at Reuters, but you did not see it in the news pages of The New York Times.

The same day Diebold’s Walden W. O’Dell abruptly resigned his positions as chairman and chief executive officer as well as his place on the company’s board of directors. O’Dell had raised eyebrows in 2004 when, in his role as head of the Ohio Bush re-election committee he had promised to “help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”

O’Dell’s resignation was not reported in The New York Times.

A second lawsuit was filed three days later on December 16th alleging “that Diebold violated federal securities laws by making false representations concerning its financial condition and prospects,” thus damaging those who bought stock through through the Diebold, Incorporated 401k Savings Plan. Not “news fit to print” in The New York Times.

Diebold has been very much in the news in Florida where Leon and Volusia Counties reversed their previous decisions to use Diebold paperless touchscreen voting machines after an outside tester was able to hack the machines in a “test election.” He found, among other things, that although the machine asked for a user name and password, it didn’t require it. He was able to get into the voting machine, manipulate its data and leave without a trace. He was also able to re-program a memory card resulting in the machine reading a result that should have been “2 yes; 6 no” as “7 yes; 1 no.” Various aspects of this story have been reported in the pages of The Miami Herald, The Tallahassee Democrat, Associated Press, The Palm Beach Post, The Boston Globe (owned by The New York Times), USA Today et al, but you did not read it in The New York Times.

The Times actually did run a somewhat innocuous Reuters story On December 21st that reported on, but seriously understated, Diebold’s problems in California where a decision has been made to seek a federal review of some of its machines “based on the discovery that federal officials had not tested software on cards that voters would use to operate the Diebold electronic voting machines.” “At issue is the source code that is located on the memory card” said [spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns], adding that if the software is found to be secure then [Secretary of State] McPherson could move forward on evaluating the Diebold systems.”

A much more thorough story ran in The San Francisco Chronicle:

…Secretary of State Bruce McPherson on Tuesday told electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems that it must submit two of its machines for more rigorous federal testing before they can be certified in California.

The memory cards on the systems have “unresolved significant security concerns,” according to a letter sent to Diebold Tuesday from McPherson’s elections chief, Caren Daniels-Meade.
She asked the company to submit source coding, or program instructions, for the machines to federal investigators.

The problems were discovered during routine testing of the machines by state employees and independent consultants, said Secretary of State spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns. She said each system approved for use in California must meet 10 security requirements, and the Diebold machines did not meet one of those standards. [emphasis added]

“This is a unique case in which we discovered that the source code had never, ever been reviewed,” said Kerns. “There were potential security risks with it.”…

The Times, along with most of the mainstream media, has also completely ignored Mark Crispin Miller’s new Book: Fooled Again – How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal The Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them),” a solid exposé of widespread voter intimidation and fraud in Ohio and elsewhere in the 2004 presidential election.

Miller wrote me that: “aside from the pre-pub reviews (Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews), which were all largely positive… [and] exposure from Air America (Morning Sedition, Thom Hartmann, Laura Flanders), Pacifica (Democracy Now!) and C-SPAN (“Washington Journal”)… [but] as for “the liberal media,” nothing on the networks, cable, NPR or PBS. Nothing in the NY Times, WashPost, LA Times, Chi Tribune or USA Today, Time or Newsweek.”

More news is breaking concerning Diebold’s impending withdrawal from North Carolina rather than comply with state law that requires it to submit its proprietary source codes. None of the earlier developments in that case were covered by the Times.

Alas, lest you come to the conclusion that the Times never reports on the trials and tribulations of Diebold or the electronic voting controversy, take heart. On December 17th Dan Mitchell, in his “What’s Online: Betting on Bird Flu” column, weighed in on the “conspiracy theorists”:

…Few companies this side of Halliburton elicit as much black-helicopter theorizing as Diebold, which makes automated teller machines, security equipment and, most famously, electronic voting machines. The company may have largely itself to blame for the conspiracy theories surrounding it, what with the security flaws in its systems and the urgings last year of Walden W. O’Dell, then its chief executive, for potential campaign donors to “help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”

For those of you who take this issue seriously and want to learn more, I recommend Mark Crispin Miller’s book, Fooled Again. Brad Friedman’s Bradblog has also done an outstanding job covering breaking news on this subject.

The one thing I can assure you is that you WON’T find it in The New York Times.

Much of the media is abuzz these days with the news that George W. Bush’s job approval ratings are on the rebound after a long and seemingly irreversible downward trend.

With CNN’s Bill Schneider proclaiming that “All the national polls show the president’s approval rating going up over the past month,” ABC News headlining “Bush’s Approval Ratings Climb,” and MSNBC and The Washington Post declaring “Bush’s Support Jumps After a Long Decline,” one might be excused for believing that those numbers are indeed on the rise.

Perhaps so, but… then again, perhaps not…

CNN’s “senior political analyst” and poll analyzer, Bill Schneider, began the current chatter about Bush’s poll resurgence with a report, complete with graphics, that aired on December 16th. As mentioned above, Schneider claimed that “All the national polls show the president’s approval rating going up over the past month,” backing up his contention with graphics that indicated that:

• CNN/USA Today/Gallup, five-point increase
• CBS News/New York Times, five-point increase
• Associated Press/Ipsos, five-point increase
• Pew Research, two-point increase
• NBC/Wall Street Journal, one-point increase

David Brock’s Media Matters pointed out that

…Schneider’s statement ignored a December 13 Zogby International poll showing a three-point decline for Bush. In addition, most of the polls listed on screen during Schneider’s report received coverage on CNN news and talk shows within 48 hours of their release, while the Zogby poll has thus far received no mention on any CNN programs.

…The Zogby poll, released prior to the NBC/Journal poll but after the other polls on CNN’s list, was the only one to show a decline in Bush’s approval rating. The network featured numerous instances of coverage for three of the five polls listed between December 1 and December 15.
The first poll showing a boost in Bush’s approval rating came on December 8, released by CBS News and The New York Times. It showed a five-point increase for Bush compared to the same poll from the previous month. On the day that poll was released, five CNN programs — American Morning, Live From, Your World Today, The Situation Room and Lou Dobbs Tonight — mentioned the poll. The poll received additional mention on the December 12 edition of American Morning.

But it was worse than that. Schneider pointed out that the CNN/USA Today poll had given Bush a 5-point boost, and it had. The poll conducted from November 17 – 20, 2005 had Bush at 38% job approval, and the December 5-8 poll had Bush at 43% — a 5-point spike, just as Schneider said. The only problem is by the time Schneider’s “analysis” aired, a new CNN/USA Today poll had come out, and that one, conducted December 9-11, 2005 had Bush’s numbers heading back down again, to 42% — a decline of one point. Another poll just out shows the decline continuing (more on that below).

It is worth noting that Bill Schneider is a Resident Scholar at The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Think Tank closely associated with strong support for the Bush administration and its policies. CNN, to my knowledge, has never informed its viewers of that association.

The other poll driving the chatter about a Bush resurgence is the new ABC News/Washington Post poll showing Bush’s job approval ratings up by a solid 8 points over roughly a 6-week period. That is impressive, but two CNN/USA Today polls conducted on nearly identical dates show Bush’s approval ratings to be flat:

ABC News/Washington Post:

• October 30-November 2, 2005: 39% job approval
• December 15-18, 2005: 47% job approval

8-Point Increase

CNN/USA Today:

• October 28-30, 2005: 41%
• December 16-18, 2005: 41% job approval

Flat

So are Bush’s numbers on the uptick or not? I don’t know, but neither does Bill Schneider, and neither does CNN, and neither does the Washington Post or any of the rest of the media, contrary to their commentary or blaring headlines.

One thing is clear though, and the media is largely silent on this point. Bush’s job approval ratings, measured over time, have been trending dramatically downward in virtually every national poll since peaking in the high 80’s and low 90’s in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Every uptick has been followed by a greater downtick. An Ipsos-Reid graph demostrates the trend with crystal clarity:

The bottom line is that the president’s numbers may be up, or they may be down, or perhaps they are flat, but if yesterday is any clue to tomorrow, don’t count on an uptick, if there is one, continuing much longer.

The United States military suffered four fatalities in Iraq Saturday, bringing the to-date total of U.S. military dead to 2,142. That number represents another grim milestone that President Bush failed to mention yesterday in a Minneapolis speech in which he claimed yet again that “steady progress is being realized.”

It was less than two months ago, On October 25th, that the United States military suffered its two-thousandth fatality in Iraq. But think back to May 1, 2003. That was the the date President Bush, bedecked in his green flight suit and white helmet, landed aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, disembarked from a Navy S-3B Viking fighter jet, and declared amid the backdrop of a very large banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

As of that date the United States military had suffered 140 fatalities in Iraq. That was 2,002 fatalities ago. Yes…

WE HAVE NOW SUFFERED 2,002 U.S. MILITARY FATALITIES IN IRAQ SINCE PRESIDENT BUSH DECLARED “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” AMID MUCH POMP AND CEREMONY! (93.5% OF OUR CASUALTIES TO-DATE HAVE OCCURED SINCE OUR PRESIDENT DECLARED THAT WE HAD “WON” THE WAR)

That statistic alone should give us pause, but the trends belie the president’s daily assurances that we are making progress.

While President Bush admonishes us to “stay the course” in Iraq, our “coalition partners” don’t seem to be getting the message. At least twenty-four of our former “partners” have withdrawn all of their troops. The statistics prove that this is becoming more and more an “American” war:

• 80.9% of “coalition” casualties in Iraq were Americans from the start of hostilities on March 20, 2003 until “Mission Accomplished” on May 1, 2003.
  

• 85.2% of “coalition” casualties in Iraq were Americans from May 2, 2003 through the end of the year.
  

• 89.9% of “coalition” casualties in Iraq were Americans in 2004.
  

• 92.5% of “coalition” casualties in Iraq were Americans between January 1, 2005 and September 18, 2005.
  

• 97.9 of “coalition” casualties in Iraq since September 19, 2005 (when fatalities began to spike after several months of relative calm) have been Americans (244 “coalition” fatalities, of which 239 have been Americans).

Data calculated using statistics found at IraqCoalitionCasualties.org*.

More below the fold:
U.S. military fatalities in Iraq are also pacing ahead of last year. Year-to-date through December 9, 2005 we have suffered 808 U.S. military casualties in Iraq versus 802 through the same date last year. Over the same periods our “coalition partners” fatalities have declined from 57 in 2004 to 51 in 2005.*

And finally some other grim statistics that I cannot vouch for, but that were cited by John McGlaughlin on his program, the McGlaughlin Group, on December 2, 2005:

“U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides, 2,125; U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, 49,500; Iraqi civilians dead, 118,900.”

Yesterday in Minneapolis the president said: “We’re there for one reason, and that is to achieve a victory to make America more secure.”

The president’s “victory” seems anything but assured. Meanwhile the grim statistics of American and Iraqi dead and maimed keep piling up with no end in sight.