Monopoly Looms on Electronic Voting

While we’ve been concentrating on the healthcare debate, the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, another story important to American democracy has gotten inadequate attention: a single company is poised to monopolize the counting of over 75 percent of the nation’s votes.

Earlier this month, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which counted roughly 50 percent of the ballots in the last four major U.S. elections, purchased Diebold’s electronic voting unit, Premier Election Solutions, which controls roughly a third of the voting machine market.

The merger of these two companies has set off alarm bells, and not just in the voting activist community.

Hart InterCivic, a competitor in the voting machine market, has filed a lawsuit seeking a federal court injunction to block the merger as an antitrust violation and a threat to “the integrity of the voting process in the United States.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, wrote Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that the Antitrust Division review the deal for possible violations. Schumer’s letter referenced a Congressional Research Service report from 2003 which indicated that having a diversity of systems and vendors might decrease the likelihood of widespread election fraud.

(Please read the rest of my article at Consortium News)

Supreme Court to decide tomorrow (9/9/09) if corporations can contribute directly to campaigns

Red alert!

I don’t have time to do a full diary on this, but the Supreme Court is poised to overthrow years of precedent and allow corporations to directly contribute to political campaigns.

If that happens, you’ll only have whatever free speech your money can buy. Guess who can buy more?

Please read up on this at http://action.citizen.org/t/5489/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=2067 and sign the petition and bang some drums on this.

We have a conservative court. They could open the floodgates here, and very well might, unless they fear complete public outrage. Please help make that happen!!!

R.I.P. Senator Ted Kennedy

The Lion of the Senate is gone, and our country is the poorer for his passing. Senator Ted Kennedy passed away late last night, surrounded by his family. While we all knew that, given his prognosis, this event seemed inevitable, I am immensely sad now that he is gone.

I had the great privilege of seeing Ted Kennedy on two occasions of great personal significance.
The first time I saw him was in 1994. It was November, and I was in Washington D.C. to attend my first conference on the assassinations of the sixties, sponsored by the Coalition On Political Assassinations (COPA). I had spent the last year reading a great deal about the deaths of his brothers, and had, at that moment, just returned from a visit to the graves of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy at Arlington. I was touring the Senate gallery when all of a sudden, this larger than life presence walked through. I wanted to run over to him, to give him a hug, to tell him I was there on that day because of his brothers, because I wanted to be with those who still felt the truth about who killed them mattered, and was worthy of study.

But I didn’t. Why bring up something sad to this man? He was the one who mattered most, now. He was still alive, still helping people. I checked my impulse and just watched from afar until he had passed out of sight.

The only other time I saw him was at Occidental College in Los Angeles. I took a vacation day from work, grabbed a co-worker from France who, after hearing Kennedy’s book on tape, was a fervent admirer. Kennedy was speaking at a rally for Obama. I sat through all the local politicians seizing their moment in the sun, talking to people who were there to see only one man, but who politely waited as would-be politicians borrowed phrases from Obama’s stump speeches, trying to wash themselves in his glory.

Then Ted Kennedy ascended the stage. My friend, an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter, had been silent during the other speeches. But when Ted Kennedy came on the stage, she turned into a fan at a rock concert, screaming his name and tearing up. It was both hilarious and endearing to see this change come over her. But such was Kennedy’s affect on people.

I had heard for years what a great speaker Kennedy was, how much energy he had. Finally, I was able to witness it myself at close range. He was a consummate speaker. He started with a couple of joking anecdotes, and then let his passion flow as he talked about the need for a leader like Barack Obama. He didn’t screech or bellow. He truly roared, and I remember thinking, this must be why he’s called the Lion of the Senate.

After he was done, his much younger and quite beautiful wife Vicky helped him off the stage. He nearly teared up when he mentioned her, and I remember thinking she must be a very special lady to have won the heart of this man. And it was very clear, watching the two of them, that the love was deeply returned.

I managed to snag his signature before he left the stage. He signed my placard, upside down, with blue ballpoint pen on a blue placard. You can barely see it. But that didn’t matter. I just wanted a moment of contact with the man, however brief, and was ecstatic that I got it.

I am listening, as I type, to several Republicans on Joe Scarborough’s morning show on MSNBC talk with great fondness about him. He had an ability to befriend people with whom he had vigorous and deep-rooted political disagreements, and was loved in return.

When his brothers were killed, Uncle Ted brought those kids–all thirteen of them–into his own family, which would include three children of his own and two stepchildren. He loved all of them deeply.

One of the reasons Ted Kennedy was so effective in the Senate is that he never demonized his opponents, even while never giving ground on his own political morality. He would argue the merits of a bill without ever turning it into a personal attack. And Ted Kennedy knew how to compromise. He fought to get solid legislation passed, and didn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I fear with his passing that bipartisanship in the Senate may die as well. Kennedy was one of the few still willing to reach across the aisle, to engage those with whom he vigorously disagreed in a respectful manner. Perhaps all the coverage of this aspect of Kennedy will help inform a new generation of leaders how the art of politics should be practiced.

The only solace I have is the knowledge that, unlike his two brothers, who were robbed of their lives too early and too abruptly, Ted had the rare experience of being eulogized, to a degree, while he was still alive. I am grateful he was able to find out just how much he was loved by so many, in the last year of his life.

Rest in peace, Edward Moore Kennedy. I pray we may someday see your like again.

Something important is missing from this story. What is the military hiding?

Why was the military trying to film a plane low-flying over NYC?

I don’t buy the explanation – the only one given – that they were just trying to update file photos. Because according to this article, the exercise cost nearly $330,000!

But what really disturbs me are two lines in this story:

… The Federal Aviation Administration said the aircraft, which functions as Air Force One when the president is aboard, was taking part in a classified, government-sanctioned photo shoot.

… New York Police Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne said the department had been alerted about the flight “with directives to local authorities not to disclose information about it.”

Classified?

Why would such a public act be “classified”?

Why would the government officials direct the NYPD to keep silent?

I mean, why shouldn’t I jump to a conclusion here. Why not pre-film a plane low-flying over NYC and then use that in some story later to present an event as real that might be entirely fake? A “Wag the Dog” scenario, so to speak?

I’d really like to hear a better explanation. Because lacking one, this story reeks of something far more sinister. I hope Obama and McCain join forces to get to the bottom of why this plane was launched on such a mission, which ended up retraumatizing some citizens of NYC. I know how they feel. I start to feel ill when I see planes over downtown Los Angeles, and we weren’t even attacked. It’s a horrible feeling, to be afraid of something I never gave a second thought to before.

I really want to know, now.

What the heck was the military doing?

Obama is already writing the book on Diplomacy

This story is a reminder of why so many of us worked so hard to get Barack Obama elected President. He’s showing exactly the kind of diplomatic skills we so desperately need in anyone who would help America be a leader in the world again.

Read the full thing, but here’s a teaser:

According to sources inside the room, President Obama just played peacemaker in a spat between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Hu Jintao, President of the People’s Republic of China.

The dispute? Sarkozy, on behalf of France and other European nations, wants stricter standards for tax havens, and specifically wanted to publish a list of non-compliant jurisdictions. The Chinese fear that cracking down on such places would endanger major Chinese banking centers like Hong Kong and Shanghai.

So what did Obama do?

Mr. Obama, according to this account, stepped between the two men, urging them to try to find consensus, and giving them a “pep talk” about the importance of working together.

The senior adminstration official said that Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Sarkozy aside, took him to a corner, “and discussed possible alternatives,” the senior official said.

Once they arrived at one, President Obama “sent a message to the Chinese” that a counter-offer was on the table. The Chinese spent some time considering the offer. But they took a few minutes.

So Mr. Obama, with the assistance of translators, suggested that he and Mr. Hu have a conversation as well. They, too went to the corner to talk. After a few minutes, Mr. Obama called upon Mr. Sarkozy to join them.

“Translators and sherpas in tow, they reached an agreement,” the official said. “There was a multiple shaking of hands.”

That is what diplomacy looks like. You look for your common concerns and build on those. You don’t go for the heart of the issue, which can be divisive. You nibble around the edges until you find the core principles you both agree on.

I wish activists across the political spectrum could learn this trick. And I wish a lot of journalists and historians could UNLEARN this one. I recall talking to a mainstream journalist, who was very much about forging a “consensus” about what happened in Dealey Plaza. To me, the truth is absolute, whether we ever agree upon it or not. But in politics, and action, consensus-building is a necessary skill.

His ability to talk to differing parties and bring them together is what drew me to Obama in the first place. I started looking into his background, since the press wasn’t talking about it, and found he had a long history of bringing disparate groups together (like getting the police and anti-death penalty advocates to agree on measures that would reduce the number of innocent people on death row).

I’m really proud of my president today. I hope we get to hear many more stories like this in the months and years to come.

Why we won’t get an investigation of Bush’s crimes

I was inspired by BooMan’s post re Iran Contra to revisit this speech, one of my early forays into Real History.

Robert Parry spoke at an event in Los Angeles sponsored by FAIR. Parry, currently the proprietor of ConsortiumNews.com, was an AP reporter who joined Newsweek while covering on the Iran-Contra story.

I was so shocked to hear a journalist boldly tell so many uncomfortable truths about this period that I felt the need to share his talk with the world. I bought the tape of his talk, and, with nothing more than a regular tape recorder – no dictaphone equipment – I painstakingly transcribed his hour-long talk for my then incipient web site, the Real History Archives.

I’m posting his talk here in full. I wish this was mandatory reading for every citizen. This and Carl Bernstein’s breakthrough Rolling Stone article on The CIA and the Media describe how the media really works, or rather, doesn’t work, where our vital interests are concerned.

And so, without further ado, here is Parry’s talk based on his book of the same name.

Fooling America
A talk by Robert Parry given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993

Well, thank you for coming out tonight. I do want to first thank FAIR [Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting] for inviting me. It’s always a pleasure to leave Washington and come to the West Coast. It’s a fascinating aspect of how Washington and Los Angeles interrelate these days. I’m not sure which city is more used to producing fantasy than the other, but I always think that LA’s fantasy is often more entertaining.

But there is this tremendous sense of both envy and concern between Washington and LA, but Washington will often look down at Los Angeles as a place that produces movies, sometimes like JFK, movies that were very upsetting to the Washington establishment because they suggested that there was a cover-up of the murder of the President back in the 1960s.

But you also find that people in Washington are incredibly attuned to what’s happening out here. I was talking to a journalist friend of mine the other day who was saying that there was, for Spike Lee’s latest movie, she saw Vice President Quayle in the line waiting to get into the movie, but he thought it was a Roman spectacular, Malcolm 10. And then someone else said they saw Clarence Thomas waiting to get in, but he thought it was an X-rated film. So Washington is a place that does keep track of what is happening out here. Of course, I’m not sure that Los Angeles could produce entertaining shows like the McLaughlin Group, but it does do it’s best.

Tonight I’d like to talk about what I was doing in the 1980’s. I was a reporter for the Associated Press. I started with the AP back in 1974, and worked briefly in Baltimore and then in Providence, Rhode Island, where I covered some of the problems of the Democratic power structure there – Freddy St. Germaine was of course involved with the banks in a very unsavory way. And eventually I was brought to Washington for the AP back in 1977 and covered the Carter administration. And I was examining some of their, what seem like today rather minor scandals, things like the General Services Administration, the waste and fraud that was going on there. And in 1980, after the election, I was assigned to go work on the Special Assignment team for the Associated Press which was there investigative unit.

In history, AP’s investigative team was actually quite impressive. Sy Hersh had been there, a number of important stories had been broken out of that investigative unit, which at one time was ten, fifteen, twenty people. By the time I was there it had shrunk to about four. I was assigned to do investigations. Other people were doing things like columns about the State Department or about politics, and I was really the only investigative reporter so designated at the AP’s Washington Bureau at that time.

But no one told me what to work on. And it struck me one day, as I was sitting around, that this administration had a thing about Central America. At the time there had been a number of atrocities that were occurring, and the four American churchwomen had been killed. And the explanations coming from this transition team were quite remarkable. If you remember, Jean Kirkpatrick suggested in one interview that these weren’t really nuns, they were more political activists, which always struck me as an amazing suggestion that it’s okay to kill political activists. Anyway, it seemed like a very important area to them, one that might end up driving much of what they did, at least in terms of foreign policy and national security issues.

So I began working on it. And that experience, in a way, shaped what I did for the rest of my time at the AP. And it was also striking to me that that experience was beyond anything I could have imagine, as an American citizen, watching. It was a case of wide- spread killing – political killing – of dissidents, torture, in the case of women often rape was involved; and this government was not just supporting it, not just providing the weapons and the military support, but trying to excuse it, rationalize it and essentially hide it.

Which is where I sort of came in and I think many people in the American press corps in Washington came in, and the press corp in Central America. At the time the press corps was still the Watergate press corp, if you will. We were fairly aggressive, we were not inclined to believe what we heard from the government, and sometimes we were probably obnoxious. But we were doing our jobs as I think, more or less, as they were supposed to be done. That is – to act, when necessary, in an adversarial way.

So when we began covering this topic in early 1981, we had some very brave people in the field in El Salvador particularly and throughout Central America, and some of them risked their lives to cover that story. And those of us back in Washington who obviously were not facing that kind of risk, were trying to get at things. Initially, and maybe we all sort of forget this, but I remember one of my first stories about this had to do with how the State Department was counting up the dead in El Salvador and who they were blaming. At that time the position was that the guerrillas were killing more than half of the people dying in the political violence and that the government was less responsible.

So I went over to the State Department to review their methodology, and what I found was that the way they got their figures was that they took the total number of people who had presumably died within a period of a month or so, and then each time the guerrillas would claim on a radio broadcast that they had killed some soldiers, if there was a battle going on and they said “We killed ten soldiers” and then the battle kept going on and it was twenty, and then it was fifty, and then another one of their stations would say fifty, what the State Department did was they added up all the numbers. And so they were able to create these false figures to suggest that the government that the Unites States was supporting was not as culpable as the human rights groups and particularly the Catholic church in ES were saying.

It began a pattern of deception from the very beginning. Even when there was something horrible happening in those countries. Even when hundreds, thousands of human beings were being taken out and killed, the role of the US. government became to hide it, to rationalize it, to pretend it wasn’t that serious, and to try to discredit anyone who said otherwise. And the main targets of that were the reporters in the field, the human rights groups, and to a degree, those of us in Washington who were trying to examine the policies to figure out what was really happening and what was behind this. I remember again after the new administration came in and of course Secretary Haig made the remarkable comment that the four churchwomen were perhaps running a road block, which is how they’d gotten killed. And even people in the State Department who at that time were investigating this fairly honestly – they had not yet been purged – were shocked that the Secretary would say such a thing because they knew what the circumstances were even then. They knew that they’d been stopped, they knew that they’d been sexually assaulted, and shot at close range. None of that, of course, fit the image of running a road block, and exchange of fire.

But the reality became the greatest threat, even at that stage, to what the new administration wanted to accomplish, and what they wanted to accomplish was I think something they felt strongly about ideologically which was their view that the communists were on the march, that the Soviets were an expanding power, that you had to stop every left wing movement in its tracks and reverse it. And they were following of course the theory that Jean Kirkpatrick had devised that the totalitarian states never reverse and change into democratic states, only authoritarian ones do, which as we know now is perhaps one of the most inaccurate political theories. It’s best if you’re having a political theory, not to have it disproven so quickly, you know it might be best if you would, maybe fifty years from now you wouldn’t really know as much. But Jean Kirkpatricks’s was disproven very quickly but it was still the driving force behind the administration’s approach to a number of these conflicts, and their justifications for going ahead and trying to conduct what became known later as the Reagan Doctrine which was to sponsor revolutionary operations or what am I saying, counterrevolutionary operations in many cases in various parts of the world and in the Third World in particular.

In ES of course, which was my first focus and the first focus of this policy, it was to protect a very brutal government which was at that time killing literally from a thousand to two thousand people a month. These were political murders; they were done in the most offensive fashion. I think any American, any average American, would have been shocked and would have opposed what his government was doing. So it became very important to keep that secret, or to minimize it, or rationalize it or somehow sanitize it.

So what we saw, even at that early stage, was the combat that was developing and the combat in terms of the domestic situation in Washington was how do you stop the press from telling that story. And much of what the Reagan administration developed were techniques to keep those kinds of stories out of the news media.

In some cases, as we saw later, in late 1981 of course there was, what is now fairly well known, the massacre in El Mazote. And this was a case where the first American trained battalion was sent out over Christmas time in 1981 into rebel controlled territory and it swept through this territory and killed everybody, everyone they could find – including the children. When two American reporters, Ray Bonner and Alma Jimapareta (?), went to the scene of this atrocity in January of 1982, they were able to see some of what was left behind and they interviewed witnesses who had survived, and came out with stories describing what they had found. This was of course extremely upsetting to the Reagan administration, which at that time was about to certify that the Salvadoran military was showing respect for human rights, and that was necessary to get further funding and weapons for the Salvadoran military.

And I was at those hearings which occurred afterwards, on the hill, and when Tom Enders who was then Assistant Secretary Of State for Inter-American affairs gave his description of how the State Department had investigated this and had found really nothing had happened or that they had found no evidence of any mass killing, and they argued with great cleverness that the last census had not shown even that many people in El Mazote – there were not the 800 or so who were alleged to have been killed – only 200 had lived there to begin with, and many still lived there, he said. Of course it wasn’t true, but it was, I guess in their view, necessary – it was necessary to conceal what was going on. And, it became necessary then, to also discredit the journalists, so Raymond Bonner, and Alma and others, who were not accepting this story, had to be made to seem to be liars. They had to be destroyed. And the administration began developing their techniques, which they always were very good at – they were extremely good at public relations, that’s what’s they had – many of them had come from – the President himself had been an advertising figure for General Electric – and they were very adept at how to present things in the most favorable way for them.

But what we began to see was something that was unusual I think even for Washington – certainly it was unusual in my experience – a very nasty, often ad hominem attack on the journalists who were not playing along. And the case of Bonner was important because he worked for the New York Times, and the New York Times was one of those bastions of American journalism – this was not some small paper, it was not some insignificant news figure. So there began an effort to discredit him and the Wall Street editorial page was brought into play, Accuracy In Media was brought into play, he was attacked routinely by the State Department and White House spokespeople, there were efforts to paint him as some kind of a communist sympathizer, the charge would go around that he was worth a full division for the FMLN – the Salvadoran guerrillas – he was treated as an enemy – someone who was anti-American, in effect. And sadly, it worked. I was in ES in October of ’82, I was down there to interview Roberto Dobesan, who was head of the death squads, and I was with a conservative activist, and after that interview we had lunch with the head of the political-military affairs office at the Embassy and the officer was then head of the military group, and on the way back to the hotel, they were boasting about how they had “gotten” Ray Bonner. “We finally got that Son-of-a-Bitch,” they said, and at that time his removal had not yet been announced, so it was very interesting to hear that they knew what was about to happen, and he was, in fact, removed by early 1983, and then he was sort of shunted aside at the New York Times and eventually left.

So the message was quite clearly made apparent to those of us working on this topic that when you tried to tell the American people what was happening, you put your career at risk, which may not seem like a lot to some people, but you know, reporters are like everybody else I guess – they have mortgages and families and so forth and they don’t really want to lose their jobs – I mean it’s not something they aspire to. And the idea of success is to keep one of these jobs and there are a lot of interesting perks that go with it, a certain amount of esteem, you know, as well as you get paid pretty well. Those jobs in Washington – you can often be making six figures at some of the major publications, so it’s not something you readily or easily throw away, from that working level.

But what happened in and around that same time frame, was the development, secretly, of another part of the Central America story, which was, of course, the covert war in Nicaragua. And William Casey and Ronald Reagan began putting this operation together, and it involved building up this paramilitary group called the contras, and they were supposed to be seen as an indigenous fighting force, the American role was supposed to be minimized or hidden, again, and that was how it was going to be sold to the American people. It was a classic covert operation, and then it was a legal one at that time – it had been authorized under the finding provisions of the National Security Act. But there were problems with this war from very early on, and one of the problems was that the Contra’s weren’t very good at fighting – they would go into some villages in Northern Nicaragua and commit atrocities, which began filtering back also to Washington. Congress began hearing about them lining up people in villages and killing them. But it wasn’t a very effective group in terms of like taking territory. And there was one story which I did later but goes back to this time, when the CIA, in 1982, prepared a plan – it was written by the head of military operations, named Rudy Enders, and Mr. Enders had this timetable, and it talked about how the Contras were going to grow at a certain rate and where they’d be at a certain date and they had them marching into Managua by the end of 1983 – and so this was the plan. The plan was to, well, officially even to Congress the White House was saying we have no intention of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua – we’re simply trying to interdict weapons going to El Salvador. In their own files at CIA, the policy file for the Contra war contained this timetable to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. So this was their plan – except that it wasn’t working. And so by early ’83, it became clear even to people at CIA that the Contras weren’t what they hoped they’d be cracked up to be, and they ended up looking at this and saying we’re going to have to do some different things.

Part of this problem though was still that, the longer this thing dragged out, the harder it was to keep all these secrets – plus the Contras were still going out and killing people left and right. So Bill Casey was stuck with a bit of a problem. And he approached it – as he was a very – Bill Casey is often, I think, misperceived – he was a very smart man, and he was extremely committed ideologically to what he was doing, and he was a person who believed in making things happen – whatever the rules might be, or whatever the red tape might be. And so he sat down and developed some strategies in 1983 on what to do. One thing is they would need more time to train the Contras – they weren’t going to work the way they were going. Secondly, they had to create the impression the Contras were better than they were, so people wouldn’t get tired of supporting them in Congress. So they decided the CIA would have to start sending in its own people, its own specially-trained Latino assets to begin doing attacks which the Contras could then claim credit for, like blowing up Corinto where they blew up this oil depot in the little town of Corinto on the coast, they sabotaged some oil pipeline in Porto San Dino, and these were all being done now by the CIA except that after they’d be done the agency guys would call up the Contra spokesmen, in this case often Edgar Chimorro, and they’d get them out of bed and say, “Now you’re going to put a news release out saying that you guys have done this.” Now the reason of course for that was to create the impression in the United States, to fool the American public and the Congress, to make the American public think the Contras were really quite effective – that they were now running sea assaults on Nicaragua – pretty sophisticated stuff for a paramilitary force.

And Casey had some other ideas. He also began to put together what became known later as the Psychological Operations Manual or the Assassination Manual, and he authorized that in the Summer of 1983, to be prepared – plus they prepared another little booklet on how if you’re a Nicaraguan how you sabotage your own government – it was a delightful comic book which I later wrote about at AP – and it showed how you’d start off with, you know, calling in sick was one of the strategies to sabotage, and you’d build up to putting sponges in the toilet to make them back up, as if any of these things work in Nicaragua to begin with, and then they taught you how to make your own malatov cocktails, it was sort of – you graduated – you moved up in your sabotage – and they’d take these little comic books and the Contras were supposed to leave them behind wherever they’d go, so the people could then start calling in sick.

So that was one of his ideas. The other one was to do this book – this very sophisticated book in many ways. It made reference to ancient scholars, and how you gave speeches, but the most interesting part was that there was a section about how the Contras should use ‘selective use of violence’ to ‘neutralize civilian targets’ that is civilian officials, judges, people of that sort. And the idea was, apparently, that you would kill these people or at least, you know, incapacitate them somehow, but what was the most remarkable thing about that point was that, when this was finally uncovered when I did a piece on this a year later or so, the CIA then argued, “Well, you don’t understand. We were trying to get the contras to be selective in their violence against civilians, not indiscriminate.” And that became actually the defense that was used by the CIA to explain why they were running this booklet.

But anyway, these things were things that Casey put together in the summer of ’83 but he had other plans, which is one section – one of the sections of my book deals with this most remarkable operation that he came up with at that time which is called the Public Diplomacy Apparatus. And what the Public Diplomacy Apparatus did was to make more systematic, to better staff, better finance this campaign to shape the reality that the American public would see. They had a phrase for it inside the administration. It was called ‘perception management’ and, with US. taxpayers dollars, they then went out and set up offices, mostly at the State Department – there was this Office of Public Diplomacy’ for Latin America – but secretly it was being run out of the National Security Council staff. And the person who was overseeing it was a man named Walter Raymond. And Mr. Raymond had been a thirty- year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and was the top propaganda expert for the agency in the world. He shipped it over to essentially run similar programs aimed at the American public. And overseeing all of this was the Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey.

The documentation on this now is extremely strong and clear, that even on matters of personnel, as well as on matters of general strategy, Casey would be given reports, asked to provide assistance, he would help or his people would help arrange bringing in people to staff this office.

They even turned to psychological warfare experts from Fort Bragg, who were brought up to handle the cable traffic coming in from Central America. And, as they say in their own documents, the purpose of these psychological warfare specialists was to identify exploitable themes that could be used against – with the American public – to excite the American public to be more and more angry about what was happening in Central America.

The documentation is also clear that the idea was to find our ‘hot buttons’ and to see what – how they could turn, twist, spin certain information to appeal to various special groups. They’d reached the point, and this was really being directed by the CIA, of breaking down the American people into subgroups, and there were people that they thought might be, for instance the press – they developed the themes relating to freedom of the press in La Prensa, which was the newspaper in Nicaragua, which was opposed to the Sandinistas. They targeted Jewish Americans – they had a special program to attack the Sandinistas or to paint them as anti- Semitic, which of course is one of the most, to my view, one of the most heinous things a person or any group could be. But, the idea in Nicaragua was to create this image, and then use it to build support among Jewish Americans for the Contras.

They did run into a bit of a problem with this, when they first devised it, which was that, they had not yet purged the US. Embassy of honest foreign service officers, so when they were preparing this, the Embassy, Ambassador Cranton (?? couldn’t hear the name), sent up a cable – couple of cables – they were classified and I was later able to get ahold of them – which said it isn’t true! That the Sandinistas are a matter of many things that are nasty and bad, but they’re not anti-Semitic, and he said there was no verifiable ground upon which to make this charge. So what the White House did was they kept that classified and went ahead with the charge anyway. It was just too good a theme.

They also developed this – what they called the ‘feet people’ theme. This was one that was based on Richard Worthlund’s polling data. Richard Worthlund who was this sort of legendary, conservative polling strategist did polling of the American people – they had special groups of people to sample these things with, and they’d found out that most of the themes about the communist menace in Central America left people cold. They didn’t really take it that seriously – it just didn’t hit the hot buttons right. But they found that one hot button that really, they could really use, was this idea of the Hispanic immigrants flooding into the United States. So they developed, what they called, the ‘feet people’ argument, which was that unless we stopped the communists in Nicaragua and San Salvador, 10% – they came up with that figure somewhere – 10% of all the people in Central America and Mexico will flood the United States.

Now, I suppose at this point already – and this was about ’83-84 – we were sort of losing any touch with reality in Washington after we had been undergoing this stuff, but, if anyone had sat down and really said ‘okay, now does this make any sense?’, you were probably left with this opinion I think, which is that the massive flows of immigrants at that time were coming from El Salvador and Guatemala and of course, from Mexico – which was mostly economic – and in Guatemala and El Salvador it was that there were conservative governments in place, and at that time the flow from Nicaragua wasn’t very great at all, and there was no 10% of the Nicaraguan people having fled, so that wasn’t happening. There had been some flow of the wealthier Nicaraguans immediately after the revolution around 1979, but, it was not until later – much later actually – ’85-85, actually ’87-88, when the flow of Nicaraguans increased because as part of our strategy we were trying to destroy their economy. And after we destroyed their economy, people being people, they left – or a lot of them left.

But still, the feet people argument was considered very good because it played to the xenophobia of America, and it gave some political clout to Reagan in making this case, and he was able to use it with particular effect with border state congressmen and senators who felt politically vulnerable if their had been a sudden surge of refugees across the border.

So we had in place by this ’83-84 timeframe, this Public Diplomacy office. And what it did was escalate the pressure on the journalists who were left, who were still trying to look at this in a fairly honest way and tell the American people what they could find out. You had cases, for instance at National Public Radio, where, in sort of a classic example of this, the Public Diplomacy team from State began harassing National Public Radio for what they considered reporting that was not supportive of the American position enough. And finally, NPR agreed to have a sit-down with Otto Reich – who was head of that office – and one of his deputies, and they were particularly irate about a story that NPR had run about a massacre of some coffee pickers in Nicaragua – and the story was more about their funeral, and how this had really destroyed this little village in Nicaragua, having lost a number of the men in the town – and the contras had done it so it didn’t look to good, and Otto Reich was furious and he said ‘We are monitoring NPR. We have a special consultant that measures how much time is spent on things that are pro-Contra and anti-Contra and we find you too anti-Contra and you’d better change.’

Now, the kind of effect that has is often subtle. In the case of NPR, one thing that happened was that the foreign editor, named Paul Allen, saw his next evaluation be marked down, and the use of this story was cited as one of the reasons for his being marked down and he felt that he had no choice but to leave NPR and he left journalism altogether. These were the kind of prices that people were starting to pay, all across Washington. The message was quite clear both in the region and in Washington that you were not going to do any career advancement if you insisted on pushing these stories. The White House is going to make it very, very painful for your editors by harassing them and yelling at them; having letters sent; going to your news executives – going way above even your bureau chiefs sometimes – to put the pressure on, to make sure if these stories were done they were done only in the most tepid ways. And there also was, in an underreported side of this, there were these independent organizations, who were acting as sort of the Wurlitzer organ effect for the White House attacks. Probably the most effective one from their side was Accuracy In Media, which we find out, from looking at their internal documents – the White House internal documents, was actually being funded out of the White House. There was – in one case we have because we have the records, the White House organized wealthy businessmen, particularly those from the news media, from the conservative news media, to come into the White House to the situation room where Charlie Wick, who was then head of USIA, pitched them to contribute a total of $200,000 to be used for public diplomacy and the money is then directed to Accuracy In Media and to Freedom House and a couple of other organizations which then support the White House in its positions, and make the argument that the White House is doing the right thing and that these reporters who are getting in the way must be Sandinista sympathizers or must not be very patriotic or whatever we were supposed to be at the time.

So you had this effect of what seemed to be independent organizations raising their voice, but, the more we kept finding out, the more we found at that these weren’t independent organizations at all. These were adjuncts of a White House/CIA program that had at its very heart the idea of how we reported the news in Washington and how the American people perceived what was going on in Central America. I’m not sure this has ever happened before – I can’t think of it, but it was a remarkable change in the way that the government, as I guess Ross Perot might say, was coming “at” the people rather than, you know, being “of” the people.

The overall effect as this continued over time was cumulative. Those of us in the press who continued – who were not smart enough to seek cover, found our work more and more being discredited, and us personally being attacked, because the game really became how do you destroy the investigator. And whether it be America’s watch, which was finding that the Contras were engaged in human rights violations as well as the Sandinistas (I should say), or if it were the Catholic Church in El Salvador reporting upon the atrocities there, or it was some journalist finding out about the deceptions in Washington, the best way to deal with that was to discredit the people who were doing the investigation. If you made them look like they were unpatriotic, wrongheaded, somehow subversive, the overall effect was to, first of all make it harder for them to do their job, and secondly when they did their job, people would tend not to believe it. So it worked, basically.

So, as we get into the mid-80’s, we’re now in a situation where it’s getting touchier and touchier to do these stories, but Congress, because of the mining problems and because of the bad publicity that followed, the disclosure that the CIA was actually doing many of these things which the Contras had been claiming credit for, when that was exposed in 1984 – accidentally exposed by Barry Goldwater on the floor of the Senate – what happened on that case was that Goldwater had gotten drunk and had gone down to the Senate and started talking about how the US. was mining the harbors of Nicaragua. And Rob Simmons, who was then staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee rushed onto the floor to grab this slightly drunken Senator and tell him that he wasn’t supposed to say that and they – it was literally expunged from the Congressional Record, even though – this was before C- Span so you couldn’t record it – it was expunged from the Congressional Record but a very diligent reporter, David Rodgers for the Wall Street Journal, happened to be in the press gallery and wrote it down so it ran in the Wall Street Journal and it got sort of out, and that contributed mightily to the problems that they had in continuing the war. So Congress stopped the funding for the Contras.

Immediately, and actually even before because they knew there was going to be a problem, the White House had this backup plan, and it was, of course, to have Ollie North become the point man. So North becomes, secretly, the point man. He is also being secretly supported by the CIA, and by the NSA, and by other US. intelligence services. That comes out much later. But Ollie North is now the man who is supposedly running everything but that’s all secret too, at least from the American people. And he’s arranging to get weapons and raise money, and they’re doing their various things they did with Saudi Arabia and so forth, to get the money, and so we end up with a lot of us in Washington really sort of knowing about this. This isn’t like, all that secret, you know. I’d met Ollie North in ’83 and he was actually a source for many journalists because he would, as part of the deal he would tell you some sexy stuff about the Achilles Laurel or something, but you protect your source, so you wouldn’t really write about him.

But I was writing about him. And by the summer of 85 – by June of 85, I did the first story about Oliver North. And it was a very tepid story, I must say, looking back at it. I had gone to the White House with it and they had flatly denied it. They said it was completely wrong, completely opposite from the truth – and I at that point had still not caught on to how dishonest these people had gotten. So I sort of softened it, but I still put it out – we had this story out for AP about Ollie North, and how he was running this Contra support operation, and how the White House was saying it wasn’t happening, and that led eventually over that summer to a few other stories appearing, and of course it was all denied and the pressure on the journalists was so intense that the other news organizations backed away – the New York Times backed away, the Washington Post backed away, and it was left strangely to the AP and to the Miami Herald which was also following it with Al Charty’s work to pursue this story – and really the story of the decade, but no one wanted it. It was an amazing story – it was a story about a really remarkable character, with a remarkable support cast, I mean, you know it was better than Watergate in that sense – I mean, you had Fawn Hall as opposed to Martha Mitchell, I mean this was a much better story! You had this secret war being fought, you had the government lying through its teeth every time it turned around, but no one wanted the story. The price had gotten too high.

So as much as I would like to say, like I was really some sort of journalistic genius who’d figured this all out, it didn’t require that much. It just required sort of following the leads. They were all over the place. But we’d learned to sort of shield our eyes from the leads in Washington. And as we’re doing this – I was now working with Brian Barger who we had brought on at AP – to help on this story, and we did the Contra-drug story in December of 1985, which was really well received around town [he said sarcastically], and we then proceeded to follow the North network into early ’86 and we wrote the first story that there’d actually been a federal investigation in Miami, of what we knew as the North network. It had been suppressed because you weren’t supposed to investigate this because it wasn’t happening anyway, and the US. attorney who make the mistake of trying to investigate this, or the assistant US. attorney ended up in Thailand, working on some heroin case, and the investigation went literally nowhere.

So this was what was happening by the Summer of ’86, when Barger and I finally did a story – we had 24 sources by this point – it was getting silly, you know? You know, it wasn’t like two sources, or three sources, we were up to 24, and some of them named, and we did this story in June of ’86 where we laid a lot of it out – we didn’t have all of it, I’ll grant – we didn’t know about Secord’s flights, but we had Rob Owen, and we had Jack Singlaub, and we had how the intermediaries were moving the weapons and so forth. So we get to this point, and we put this story out, and finally Congress – which had been very afraid of touching this – the democrats were extremely timid – finally Lee Hamilton, who was then Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee takes our little story with the rest of the Intelligence Committee over to the White House and they sit down with Ollie North and they say, “Colonel North – we have this story that says you’re doing these things which are kind of illegal, uh, what about it?” He said, “It’s not true,” they said “Thank you,” and they went back to Capitol Hill. And I get a call from one of Hamilton’s aides, and he told me, he said – I’ll never forget this, because it was probably my worst moment in the whole Iran Contra Scandal – I get this call from a Democratic aide who tells me that Lee Hamilton has looked into my story, and he had a choice between believing these honorable men at the White House or my sources and it wasn’t a close call.

And so, at that point, we were, sort of, done. They could have – as Ross Perot might say – they could have stuck a fork in us. Barger was stuck on the overnight at AP and was sort of pushed out of the company – he left. I was basically told, more or less, well, you know, take your medicine like a man, you got it wrong, you know, and we were wrapping up our investigation – it was over. During that summer we tried to get a longer version of this into any publication, virtually none would take it. None would take it – I mean, we even went to Rolling Stone and they turned us down.

So that’s where we were. This phony, dishonest, false reality had won out. And the reality had lost out, and anyone who was crazy enough to actually believe in the reality was a real loser in Washington.

And then, as it all looked like it was pretty much over, one of the last planes of Ollie North’s little rag-tag airforce, was chugging along over Nicaragua on October 5th, 1986, and just because history is like this – history is kind of, you know, it’s quirky sometimes – there was this teenager, draftee, never filed a SAM missile in his life, didn’t even know how to fire it exactly, but he described after the fact how he sort of aimed it at this plane that was sort of lumbering along through the sky, and it went off! The SAM missile went off, and it went right at the plane, which really amazed this kid. They say it was Soviet made – I mean, what would you have thought? So the missile goes right at the plane and hits it right under one of the wings and the plane starts spiraling out of control. And another little quirk of history is that – most of the guys were kind of macho on board, and they didn’t wear parachutes, but Eugene Hasenfus had just gotten a parachute sent to him by one of his relatives, and because he had the door open to start kicking out these weapons to the Contras, even though the plane spiraled out of control he could crawl to the door and pushed himself away from the plane and parachuted down through the Sandinistas.

And so, there was literally a smoking fuselage on the ground in Nicaragua, and the press corps in Washington suddenly said, ‘oh gee! Maybe we had missed something after all.’ But even then the White House initially – this was – it was an interesting meeting. October 7th, at the NSC – they were in kind of a panic. Ollie was out of the country working on the Iran project, so Elliot Abrams was chairing this meeting, and they were trying to figure out what to do – what was their story going to be. Later on I talked to one of the participants at this meeting and I said, “Gee, what did you guys think you were up to? Did you think you shouldn’t just maybe fess up at this point?” He said “No. We had been so successful in managing the information, we, you know, just thought we could just do anything!” So the anything they did was that they just started lying again! And they put out – and it wasn’t just from the State Department anymore, it was from the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, and virtually every senior official in the position to do anything about this, came out and said there is no US. government connection to this flight. And Elliot even sort of came up with this neat idea [sound lost for a moment] – I know Singlaub pretty well and I happened to put a call in, and he hadn’t been told he was supposed to take the fall – they hadn’t gotten around to telling him that. So when he flies back from Asia he lands, and he comes down off the plane and all these reporters are up to him saying, The New York Times has just run this story based on a senior official saying it was your plane and he said, “I had nothing to do with that plane!” So later on he told me that he have taken the fall if he’d only known that he was supposed to take the fall, but they hadn’t told him he was supposed to take the fall, so, crazy enough, he told the truth.

So they were still looking for someone to take the blame on this, and then a very enterprising freelancer, an American journalist, went into the Salvadoran telephone office, and since everything’s for sale down there, he bought the phone records for the safe house. They hadn’t thought to, you know, take care of the phone records. And so he buys these phone records and, my goodness, there are all these calls to the White House, and to Ollie North’s personal line, as well as by the way to the Vice President’s office because Felix Rodriguez who was running the drops was calling virtually daily – well maybe, certainly weekly – the Vice President’s office to talk to then George Bush’s national security advisor Donald Greg. So they had to come up with some new stories again. And these stories kept shifting.

But what was incredible about the whole thing was the arrogance that pervaded the White House at this point. They really thought they could control how everybody in this country understood the facts. They could create the reality, and the press would go along with it, and through the press the American people would either be deceived or so confused that they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway. The perception management wasn’t going to give up.

But that began to cause problems when the next shoe falls, which is the disclosure of the Iran initiative in early November of ’86, and that is also a problem legally, because what they know inside the White House which we don’t know yet, is that, in 1985 the President had authorized the first shipment of missiles to Iran through Israel without proper authorization. He had not signed a finding; he was in violation of a felony which is called the Arms Export Control Act.

So they had to cover that up. And what we saw was the next remarkable stage of this. And probably this is what changed a lot of how I saw journalism. Obviously I’d not been really too thrilled by what I was seeing up to this point, but the next phase was even more unbelievable. And the next phase is the scandal was broken – there are three parts to it basically: there’s the illegal shipments of weapons to the Contras in defiance of the law, the Boland Amendment; there is the problem of the Arms Export Control Act, which President Reagan was violating back in ’85; and of course there’s what became the focus – the crossover – the use of residuals from the arms sales in Iran for the Contras – the so-called ‘diversion’ which many people feel was indeed a diversion of the public at least. So you had these three elements. The White House chose to make a stand on the latter one – the diversion, and they proceeded to lie about the other two. They put out false chronologies on Iran to show that the President did not know about the ’85 shipment. They insisted – even as Vice President Bush insisted until December of ’86 that he had no idea there was a Contra operation going on – even though it had been much of the press, he just hadn’t bothered to read it.

So you had this decision to sort of deny straightforwardly, possibly accurately that the President did or did not know about the diversion – they said he didn’t. And that became the focus for the press and for the congress as the investigation gears up, which is very bad enough because these other questions are very important. Was the President involved in a felony under the Arms Export Control Act? Was he involved possibly in another type of crime by defying a law which he signed into law – the Boland Amendment? Can the President just unilaterally conduct war using third country funding? All of these are very important questions to our democracy.

But the focus was on the diversion. And on that they felt they could contain it as long as John Poindexter said the buck stopped here, which of course he would do. However, what we began to see very quickly in Washington was a – almost a collaboration at this point to contain the scandal. Obviously the White House and the Republicans had a very strong interest in containing this scandal; they were politically in hot water. But the Democrats, and the press, were also inclined to contain the scandal. As the phrase went – nobody wanted another Watergate. The people may have wanted another Watergate – but that was the view in Washington – nobody wants other Watergate. And at this point, my last story for AP – AP and I had really had some struggles because although they were in a way happy with my work, but in a way I put them in some very tough spots, and they had not always been the best, but I must say they did put out most of our stories, eventually, and they did the most, of any news organization, but – my last story for them in February of ’87 was – we jumped at one of the last firebreaks. We brought the story into the CIA. And I reported that the CIA had assisted North’s operation, despite their denials; that North was using National Security Agency highly-sensitive secret cryptology equipment and had been passing it out like candy to all the people who were working with him – they all had these KL-43’s as they were called which could send these secret messages back and forth, and so we’d broken that barrier. We’d broken into the CIA.

And then I went to Newsweek. Maybe a mistake, I guess, in retrospect, but I went to Newsweek. And I thought – I always think of Newsweek as what it used to be – sort of a gutsy magazine that had changed. So anyway I get to Newsweek and the first week I’m there, some stories about these phony chronologies are circulating and I call a friend of mine on the National Security Council staff and I say, “What are you doing now? You’re doing false chronologies on how the Iran sales happened?” and he said, “Bob, you don’t understand,” he said “These were orders from the Oval Office. Don Regan sent down word that we were to protect the President and write him out of these events.” And so, I tell my new Bureau Chief at Newsweek Evan Thomas, and he’s real excited by this ’cause he gets excited, and he goes in and Tommy DeFrank, who was the assistant Bureau Chief, calls another source – well known person whose name I can’t mention I guess, from the NSC, and this person said yes, that’s exactly right, we were told to do it.

So Newsweek ran this – I have one copy of this because Newsweek sort of threw it away afterwards – but we ran a cover story called “Cover-up” and we recount how, to protect the President, the NSC staffers were ordered to put these phony chronologies out. And what we didn’t realize at the time was we had just broken through the last firebreak. We were in the Oval Office with this story.

And the reaction was incredible. Many of my colleagues in the press attacked us. The Wall Street Journal, not just in its editorial pages but its news columns attacked us; Newsweek – of course, Don Regan, who was one of the people of course named here attacked us; and Newsweek decided that they wanted to retract the story. And they sent me back to my source, several times over the next period of time, to get him to take it back and he wouldn’t. He said, I told you what I knew, and what do you want me to say, and I said well, we want to retract the story is what we want to do. Anyway, so one of my friends went around – because this was such an embarrassment to Newsweek – that he told me he went around Newsweek and got all the copies he could find and threw them away, so people wouldn’t know – so there wouldn’t be a reminder – it was sort of a ‘nice thing’ he was doing – so there wouldn’t be a reminder of my big mistake. And I found out fairly recently – as recently as a year ago, Newsweek was going to Judge Walsh’s office and asking him to give them information so they could retract this story – in their view – to fix the historical record. But of course Judge Walsh wouldn’t help them on it.

So anyway, here we are, and the problem is – and, uh, it’s hard to understand if you haven’t lived in Washington it may not make a lot of sense, but I’ll explain it anyway – there were three choices at this point:

Choice “A” was to tell the truth, to say that the President had violated a variety of laws, committed felonies, and violated our constitutional safeguards about the way we carry out wars in our country, and impeach him. Option A.

Then there was Option “B” – to tell the truth and have congress sort of say well, it’s okay with us, which creates a dangerous precedent for the future, that is, that now President’s would say well hey, look at the Reagan example, you know, if he can wage war privately, why can’t I? So that was Option “B.”

And then there was Option “C” – to pretend it didn’t happen, or to pretend that, say, some Lieutenant Colonel had done it all. So Washington, I guess understandably, settled on Option “C.”

And it didn’t hit me until one evening in March of ’87, the Tower board had just come out with its report, which basically said that the President was a little bit asleep at the switch, but hey, you know, it was really these crazy nuts who did it, and we had one of these Newsweek dinners – they’re fancy affairs – and it was at the Bureau Chief’s house, and they’re catered, and there’s a tuxedoed waiter, and he pours the wine, there’s nice food, and I was new – I came out of AP which is kind of a working class/working man’s kind of news organization so I wasn’t used to this. And we had as our guest that evening Brent Scowcroft, who had been on the Tower Board, and Dick Cheney, who was then – who was going to be the ranking minority figure on the house Iran-Contra Committee, and we’re going through this little delightful dinner, and at one point Brent Scowcroft says, he says “Well, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but if I were advising Admirable Poindexter, and he had told the President about the diversion, I’d advise him to say that he hadn’t.” And being new to this whole, sort of game, I stopped eating, and looked across the table and said “General! You’re not suggesting that the Admiral should commit perjury, are you?” And there was kind of like an embarrassed little silence at the table, and the editor of Newsweek, who was sitting next to me, says – I hope partly jokingly but I don’t know – he says, “Sometimes we have to do what’s good for the country.”

So that became – I somehow realized I was in a different place than I thought I’d been in you know? So what happened then was that played out. It played out. And it played out almost predictably, almost sort of with a sadness. And even when Oliver North finally told the truth, which was that he was ordered to do all this stuff, and that there was a cover-up going on – you see, he even told them there was a fall guy planned – it was the first cover-up that had been announced probably in front of 100 million Americans and still it was believed by Congress! So Lee Hamilton again, the same guy who had accepted North’s word and other guys’ back in August of ’86, he decides, as Chairman of the Iran-Contra Committee, that we all should sort of say that it was just these ‘men of zeal’ – there’d been a coup d’etat in the White House, we’d find out – there’d been a junta of a Lt. Col and maybe an Admiral here and there you know who were running this policy and that somehow the CIA had missed it, the White House had missed it, NSA had missed it – it wasn’t like the Russians were doing this, it was like, being done, like, under their nose! But, you know, okay – it’s not very believable – a lot of Americans didn’t believe it, to tell you the truth – but in Washington we believed it. We all believed it. Not all of us, but we pretty much had to believe it. And at Newsweek and elsewhere we were told in the press this was not a story anymore, this was not to be pursued, I guess because this wouldn’t be good for the country to pursue it. And again, history being kind of quirky, there was this other element of the story, which was that these three Republican judges who picked independent counsel, picked Lawrence Walsh to be the independent counsel on this investigation, and Lawrence Walsh was sort of this non-descript sort of fellow – he’s not a really sharp legal mind? But he’s very honest – and maybe they thought they could manage him. But he just kept pursuing the leads, and despite all the lies and the cover-ups that went on, there were other breaks because he kept pursuing the leads, that you then had of course, with the North trial and the Poindexter trial, these guys – basically North saying – here’s more and more evidence that these guys were running this thing, and then in the Poindexter trial Reagan comes out and makes a complete fool of himself and is just all over the place with his story.

But then another event happens that we really don’t know much about – and that event is that this guy named Craig Gillan is hired to do a sort of clean-up operation at the Independent Counsel’s office – just to get the loose ends together so they can wrap up the investigation and end this thing – it’s 1990. And Craig Gillan finds out that there are a lot of document requests that had been sent out in the early days and some hadn’t been answered! One was from Charlie Hill, who was an aide to George Schultz, and who was – last time I knew he was at Hoover up at Stanford – and so they write to Charlie and they say Charlie – you didn’t give us your notes. And Charlie finally sends his notes, and in it they find this strange reference to Casper Weinberger taking all these notes! But of course Casper Weinberger told them that he had no notes. Then as they follow those leads they find that in fact there had been an Oval Office cover-up, and that what we had seen, and what remarkably the White House had been able to successfully maintain, in the defiance of all the logic and reason that should have been brought to bear – they were able to maintain for six years what amounted to a felony obstruction of justice out of the White House. And they did it under the nose of the Congress, under the nose of the Washington press corp, and the way they were able to do it was essentially this acceptance in Washington of an absolutely phony reality, one which is accepted in sort of a consensus way – what you’ll hear if you listen to the McLaughlin Group or these other shows is a general consensus – there may be disagreements on some points – but there is a general consensus of the world that is brought to bear, and often it is in absolute contradiction to the real world. It is a false reality – it’s a Washington reality.

And what we have seen at the end of these twelve years, and what I guess the challenge of the moment becomes is how that gets changed. How do the American people really get back control of this – not just their government, but of their history – because it’s really their history that has been taken away from them. And it’s really what the Washington Press Corps and the Democrats in Congress as well as the Republicans are culpable of, was this failure to tell the American people their history. And the reason they didn’t was because they knew, or feared, that if the American people knew their real history – whether it goes back to the days of slaughters going on in El Salvador – if they had known about El Mazote – if they had known about the little children that were put in the house and shot to death and garroted – that they wouldn’t have gone along with that. And if they had known that there were felony obstructions of justice being carried out of the Oval Office they wouldn’t have gone along with that either, and there would have been a real problem – there would have been a political problem to contain I guess, but – it is not the role of the Washington press corp – maybe this is sounds like an understatement, but it’s not the role of the Washington press corps to take part in that. Our job was supposed to be, I thought, to kind of tell people what we could find out! We go in, we act nice, we ask a lot of questions, find some things and run out and tell you! We’re sort of like spies for the people, you know, and instead, we sort of got in there – and I guess it was real nice, we felt like we were insiders, we felt like these were all nice, respectable men – they dressed well – Casper Weinberger went to every single one of these press/government functions – the Grid Iron Club, the White House Correspondents’ dinners, the Congressional correspondents’ dinners – you’d always find Casper Weinberger there. And so when he finally gets indicted the Washington press corps comes out and says that’s a terrible thing to do, ’cause Casper Weinberger’s a good man! He went to all our parties! How could you think badly of him? And there was even a column by liberal columnist Richard Cohen in the Washington Post who said, it’s a terrible thing to indict Casper Weinberger because we shop at the same store in Georgetown! He said Casper Weinberger even pushed his own shopping cart! And before Thanksgiving one year, Richard Cohen saw Casper Weinberger buying his own turkey. And so how could you think about indicting a guy for a felony obstruction of justice when he pushes his own shopping cart? This may seem funny out here but in Washington it’s not! This is very serious stuff!

I know I’m taking too long, but one other thing I wanted to talk about was – well, you know life being what it is, and history being quirky as it is – so I left Newsweek in 1990 – I was not on the best of terms with them – because I wouldn’t go along with this. I mean, I wouldn’t – I kept saying first of all George Bush knew it and we should have told the people about it in 1988 when he was running for president – we knew what he knew, we knew that his stories were absolutely the most implausible, idiotic, embarrassing cover stories imaginable and they should not have been treated with the kind of respect they were treated with and we should definitely have pursued that. We also knew that there was a a cover-up going on – which I kept insisting on even though Newsweek kept trying to retract it, and so I left. And I was going to do this book, and this book was going to be about how Washington sort of works or doesn’t, and about how the press behaved sort of cowardly, and then I get this phone call one day, in August of 1990, from PBS Frontline, and they asked me if I would do some investigative work on this project called the October Surprise. And I’d been through a lot, and I really didn’t want to go through any more. And of all the taboos – obviously for a long time the North network was just a ‘crazy conspiracy theory’, and then the idea that Bush was involved was a ‘crazy conspiracy theory’, and the idea that there was a cover-up was a ‘crazy conspiracy theory’, and I’d seen all these conspiracy theories actually turn out to be true, so I really didn’t want to discount anything without having looked at it carefully, I thought, and anyway I thought it would be kind of wimpy, you know, unprofessional and wimpy to say no. This was a reputable outfit – PBS Frontline wanted me to look at something and, as much as I had my doubts about it I thought, okay.

So, I went off on this little strange adventure. I had a producer named Robert Ross who’s a wonderful guy who speaks Persian and has lived in the Middle East. We took our little camera – our little high eight camera – and we went around as cheaply as possible, and we went to Europe, we went to the West Coast – we interviewed some arms dealer over in Santa Monica – and we went around and put together whatever we could. And we found, to our surprise I think, that there was more there than we thought. We had doubts about a lot of it still, and we did not in our – when we finally decided to go with the program we wanted we were very I think skeptical – that we didn’t feel it was proven, but that there was enough there that merited further attention, I guess that’s a fair way to say where we ended up. So we did this program, and it aired in April of ’91. Gary Sick the day before – Gary Sick was interviewed on our show – he was a former national security man under Carter and a very respected historian, and it was partly his decision to think that this had happened that influenced us to some degree, because it wasn’t just crazy arms dealers and intelligence guys – it was also this fairly respectable guy, and the day before our show aired he did a piece in the New York Times describing his angst and how he came to this conclusion. And so this story that had sort of lived on the fringes for some time but which the government itself had brought in on the public record in a perjury trial in the Spring of 1990, and lost, this now moved into the mainstream much more, and it drew – even by the comparisons to the other stuff – this one was attacked, and continues to be attacked. Frontline commissioned a second program – an update, which we tried to do in just a very straightforward, honest way – because at that point the debunkers – The New Republic and Newsweek actually leading the way – we felt were wrong on a number of points. But we also felt that we didn’t think it was anywhere near proven and we did a show saying basically that, and trying to track Casey’s whereabouts and all the rest of the stuff we did.

Anyway, so after the second show, there was this Congressional investigation, which the Republicans fought, which George Bush personally strategized to stop, and it was stopped in the Senate with a filibuster, but the House approved an investigation – the Senate did a little one in one of the subcommittees, and it just has to be that Lee Hamilton was of course assigned to head the investigation. It wouldn’t have been fair otherwise – see, Lee Hamilton was a very honorable man, in many ways, I think, except he doesn’t believe anyone else can lie, I guess. He was chairman of the Middle East subcommittee when the Iran stuff was happening – the Iran arms stuff and he missed it. He was then chairman of the intelligence committee when North was going full board – missed that. He was then rewarded by being made head of the Iran-Contra investigation and he kind of missed that. And so, because of his sterling record they made him head of the House Task Force on the October Surprise! And of course then the House Task Force found that it was just fantasy, and they put out their report – and I must say I’ve read a lot of reports and I think it’s the worst one I’ve ever read – but it was well-received in Washington but I’m going to tell you one little – I mean when people talk about fantasy in Washington – there is this section in this report, and this I think is emblematic of it, where the House wants to put Casey somewhere, and they decide that on August 2nd, 1980, Bill Casey was on Long Island. And you look for why they think that – this becomes important to the story and I’ll make it brief. When you look back at this, what they have is that, on August 2nd, Richard Allen – who was then a foreign policy advisor to candidate Reagan, wrote Casey’s Long Island phone number on the bottom of a sheet of paper. It was Bill Casey, 516, you know, whatever, and there’s no notation of a call or conversation, and Allen when he testified he said I think I called the number, he said, but I don’t recall talking to Casey or even if the call was answered. And there’s no phone bill showing a call. So what normally people would say, even my four year probably would say, is that doesn’t prove anything. That proves, like, zero! If someone calls my number in 703 in Arlington hey, I’m not there! And it doesn’t matter that they call my number, or write it down. Yet this becomes conclusive proof to the task force that Bill Casey was on Long Island.

Now the reason that’s important is because Bill Casey was really at the Bohemian Grove in upstate California. And what we had, was – he actually purchased their annual play book on August 1st at the Grove, according to the Grove. We had a contemporaneous diary entry from one of the people at the Grove that was in the same cottage Casey was in, Matthew McGowan, who describes meeting with Casey that weekend, and they throw out th

Your vote is endangered by overzealous activists

I’m not kidding.

Your vote is seriously at risk, and we have possibly only the next two years to fix it. Two years into Bill Clinton’s term, we lost Congress, and didn’t gain it back until nearly twelve years later. So time is of the essence.

There’s a very good bill that, while not perfect, moves the ball very far down the field toward a victory of an accurate and transparent vote, at least at the federal level.

But overzealous activists are already stretching the truth past the breaking point in their criticisms of it.

Look. The first test of whether someone is a useful activist, or even a good person, for that matter, is whether they tell the truth. Whether by ignorance or design, some of the leading voices in the election activist community are failing that test.

A lot of people follow others unquestioningly simply because they don’t know they are being hoodwinked. I see it on Orange frequently – a mass stampede when a few voices speak out in a certain direction.

I’ve always admired that our own BooMan is one of those who is never afraid to stand against the herd, to point out when the conventional wisdom is wacko.

In the electronic voting community, two voices speak very loudly, and have a lot of reach: Bev Harris, and Brad Friedman. Both have done some very excellent work reporting on election problems. But both have also proven abominable at reviewing and commenting on proposed legislation, and their ignorance and overblown hysteria is truly hurting the election reform movement.

Right now, nearly 1/4 of all voting jurisdictions are using DRE machines that have no voter-verified auditable permanent paper trail. I won’t take the time here to explain how dangerous that is. If you don’t understand this, search “DRE hack” in Google and self-educate before you read the rest of this.

For the last three Congressional terms, a brave little team in Rush Holt’s office has been diligently trying to find a way to protect our elections from hacking. Each session they have introduced a bill to protect elections. Each time, opposing interests, which include Republicans, voting machine vendors, those with an agenda to steal elections, and, sadly, Brad Friedman and Bev Harris, have banded together to defeat it. Pretty odd company, don’t you think?

I wouldn’t mind if their objections were based on fact. But their objections are based in large part on an inaccurate reading of the bill, as I will show you.
Let’s start with the headline. Brad’s blog screams a quote from Bev Harris:

BBV: New Holt Election Reform Bill Would Allow ‘Surreptitious Dismantling of Self-Government’

Can we all agree that screaming hyperbole never helped any progressive cause? Good. I knew we could start there. But it gets worse.

I’ve read the new Holt election bill. Many of those decrying it have not. And that’s unfortunate. If they read the bill for themselves, I wouldn’t need to be here pointing out just how inaccurate Brad and Bev’s rantings on this bill have been.

This Brad/Bev post needs to be broken down line for line so people understand just how factually inaccurate it is. Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of time. But for a sample, look at this: a mere seven words in the first paragraph make three dramatic misrepresentations.

Brad opens with this:

From BlackBoxVoting.org’s Bev Harris, on the section of the new Election Reform bill being proposed in the U.S. House by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), which would federally institutionalize secret software for vote counting, and the requirement of non-disclosure agreements for those who are lucky enough to be allowed permission to examine it…

Let’s see what Brad (quoting Bev) just accused the bill of doing, in seven words:

1. Federally institutionalizing secret software for vote counting.

Seven words. Three misrepresentations.

Misrepresentation #1.

The software functions that relate specifically to the vote counting process cannot be kept secret. The bill explicitly provides for its review. Now bear in mind that vote counting programs are often built on top of “off the shelf” (OTS) software, like Microsoft Windows, the code of which is exempt from disclosure.

What does this mean?

Well, if you were a programmer, you’d know that you can’t change OTS software, but you can write the code that interacts with it. Everything you write has to be disclosed.

For nonprogrammers, think of this as an analogy. Think of the OTS software as a dunking machine. Your code is the ball you can throw at it to trigger the dunking mechanism. But your ball and your throw will not change the internal workings of the dunking machine.

To carry forward the analogy, let’s say someone wanted to program the dunking machine to drop the currently seated person after every fifth throw. The “vote” would be “rigged.” But the problem with that is that Microsoft Windows and all that other OTS software is written and released long before ballot order is set. What if the machine dunks the wrong person? How would one build in code?

It could be done, but not undetectably so. The rigging depends on the toss of the ball, and the programming for that side of the equation must be disclosed, per Holt’s bill. If the code that CAN be inspected needs to trigger something special in a special circumstance, that would be detectable to a knowledgeable observer.

People have also mentioned code that would be self-deleting after it runs. That’s possible to do, but not possible to hide, to the savvy observer.

So Brad and Bev’s first point is simply not true. But let’s continue.

Misrepresentation #2

Holt’s bill does not “institutionalize” “secret software for vote counting” either. Many provisions in the bill leave the door wide open for an open source solution to election code. There’s nothing secret about open source code.

In addition, no law “instutionalizes” anything, in that any other bill can always revise it. They’d like you to think that any flaws in the bill, and there are a few, will do permanent damage. They won’t.

The U.S. Code of Law is amended almost daily by laws passed in Congress. The Holt bill itself amends a portion of the bill that was added to the U.S. Code through the misnamed “Help America Vote Act.” Holt’s bill corrects mistakes made in HAVA.

Misrepresentation #3

Even the last two words in those seven, “vote counting,” are referenced in a misleading fashion. Brad and Bev want you to believe that your vote is ONLY counted by these secret computers programs (which, as we see, aren’t even secret, if Holt’s bill passes).

But the reality is, Holt’s bill requires two things we don’t have currently at the federal level: voter verified permanent paper ballots, and an audit, i.e., a hand count, of those paper ballots. In addition, no election can be certified until at least a portion of the voting districts have been counted by hand.

A typical Congressional district has, as a very loose average and for the sake of simplicity, roughly 400 voting counts/precincts/townships/buckets) into which votes are cast and counted. Holt’s bill would require a percentage of those buckets of votes to be counted 100% by hand. In other words, this is an apples-to-apples audit, a complete recount of selected precincts.

This sort of an audit has 100% chance of catching fraud or error if either occurred in any of those districts.

The mandated audits are conducted on a tiered scale. The closer the vote, the higher the percentage of precincts to count by hand. The greater the margin of the victory, the fewer precincts are needed to statistically turn up error.

Holt’s bill says that an election cannot be certified until the audit has transpired.

In short, no federal election could be certified unless and until a percentage of the paper ballots had been counted by hand. So if Holt’s bill institutionalizes anything, it’s hand counted paper ballots, not secret software, as the hand count trumps the machine count, per specific language in the bill.

In the past, because we have no such legislation to date, paper ballots have been discounted by some courts in favor of the computer record. Holt’s bill would reverse that completely, specifying in clear language that the voter-verified paper ballot is the legal ballot of record (unless it can be convincingly shown that the paper ballots had been tampered with. And even in that case, the Holt bill explicitly states that the electronic count cannot be the sole determiner of the election.)

BooMan has been ranting of late how some progressives are stretching the truth in an attempt to make points. The same holds true for some election activists.

We must be honest with each other, and should not try to propagandize each other. We should focus not only on what’s ideal, but on what is actually possible, and work for that. That’s how activists get things done in this country.

Hyperbole and sarcasm never got any bill passed. We have to take what we can get and then keep reaching for more. Nowhere is this more true than in our quest for honest elections.

My Oscar predictions

Los Angeles is busily preparing for the Super Bowl of the Entertainment Industry, the Oscars. The Hollywood and Highland complex that hosts the Kodak Theater has been bristling with security for days, guarding the newly installed bleachers, ensuring no one gets near enough to the places where the celebrities will soon be to do damage.

I’m looking forward to the Oscars this year more than in previous years for two reasons. First, I’ve seen nearly all the nominated films for a change, so I care more than usual about the outcomes. Second, this year, the host will be Hugh Jackman.

I was not a big fan of Jackman’s until I saw him on Broadway in “The Boy from Oz.” I’ve seen a lot of excellent theater in my life, so it means something when I say he was extraordinary. His charisma didn’t just ooze; it came rolling like a tidal wave from the stage, and the audience was clearly as swept away as I was, both times I saw his show.

The guy can flirt with the audience and sing and dance like nobody’s business, and with any luck, all his talents will be on full display Sunday night. I just hope the writers don’t ruin it for him with dumb jokes! I do hope, however, the writers saw fit to lampoon the hilarious slow motion shower Jackman took in his recent film “Australia.” That cheesy shot deserves to be parodied for a long time to come.
This is also the first year in recent memory where I agreed, and very strongly, with the five films nominated for Best Picture. These films were all extraordinary. If you haven’t seen them all, do not delay.

How could Frost/Nixon, a story most of us either remember or know something about, have been so suspenseful on film? I was riveted by the story itself as much as by the tremendous feats of acting by Frank Langella, a lifelong favorite actor, and Michael Sheen, who captured completely the essence of Frost. Of course, my favorite character was the fiery, passionate James Reston, Jr. (played by Sam Rockwell), who wanted to turn the televised interviews into the trial Nixon never had.

How could Jewish filmmakers get me to care so much about a Nazi guard in “The Reader”? This is a film made with and about tremendous compassion. And Kate Winslet should absolutely get the Oscar for her amazingly layered and nuanced portrayal.

How could a film by the writer of that awful faux history of the CIA, “The Good Shepherd,” be so good? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was an immensely thoughtful and moving examination of life, love, and the hardships of aging both physically and emotionally.

And seriously, how could a low budget film with Hindi subtitles become the frontrunner for Best Picture? Slumdog Millionaire wound its way into our hearts by giving us a look at hardships few of us ever have to deal with in not only a moving way, but in often hilarious segments, with the brilliant framing device of the world’s most famous game show.

I wish all the top nominated films could win at least one award so people go to see them. In any case, without further ado, here are my Oscar picks in some of the major categories.
Actor in a Leading Role

Who will get it: Mickey Rourke
Who I’d like to see get it: Sean Penn

Sean Penn is known for his dark, brooding, willful characters. But as Harvey Milk, he dials up the fun and lightness to the point where he’s unrecognizable as anyone other than the charismatic Mr. Milk. Rourke, however, did a fine job of resurrecting his career, and will probably get it, because 1) it was a fine performance, and 2) Hollywood is full of people who hope they too can get a second chance at greatness.

Actor in a Supporting Role

While each of the nominees gave remarkable performances, if you have any doubts, you 1) are not paying attention and 2) have not yet seen “The Dark Knight.” Don’t be put off because it’s a film about a comic book character. Heath Ledger’s performance as “The Joker” is already legendary, and deservedly so. Ledger will win. The only question remaining is who will accept the award his three-year-old daughter will eventually inherit.

Actress in a Leading Role

While I feel compelled to note it was a crime that Cate Blanchett was not nominated for her extraordinary role in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” hands down, this one belongs to Kate Winslet.

Winslet plays a Nazi prison guard so ordinary it was terrifying. She didn’t fully understand the role she played until the compassion of another helped her face the horrible truth about herself. As great as Winslet was in (that awfully depressing film) Revolutionary Road, she’s that much better in this. All the actresses in this category were fantastic and deserving. Meryl Streep created yet another version of herself we’ve never seen before with her amazingly hilarious portrayal of a fundamentalist nun in Doubt. But this should be Kate’s year. She more than earned it.

Actress in a Supporting Role

This is one of the most suspenseful award categories this year, as all of these actresses gave fine performances. Here, I start to think overall best film sentiments kick in. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” will lose several awards to “Slumdog Millionaire.” Here’s a chance for the film to pick up one. Tariji Henson’s performance was excellent, and while not as nuanced or passionate as some of the others, given that her picture is the biggest of those nominated, I think she’ll pick this one up. If not, I’m pulling for Viola Davis, whose portrait of a mother caught between unacceptable options in “Doubt” was chilling, if brief. However, conventional wisdom would probably pick Penelope Cruz, who has already received awards for her role in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Animated Feature Film

Again, if you don’t know the answer to this, you don’t live in Los Angeles. Everyone knows Wall-E will win this one going away. It was a brilliant little film with precious little dialog, but a lot of heart. This one is a slam dunk.

Art Direction

Wow, this is a tough category. All of the nominees–“Changeling,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Dark Knight,” “The Duchess,” and “Revolutionary Road”were gorgeous and meticulously presented. I think the award will go to Benjamin Button, though. This is truly one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. So many scenes were almost like paintings. And with thirteen nominations, it’s important the film actually win some awards. I think this category is a likely victory for Button.

Cinematography

This one is a toss-up between Button and Slumdog. I think Slumdog is going to win this one because the task of making Slumdog look good while running through the streets of Mumbai and on a shoestring (by Hollywood standards) budget was monumental and well-executed. But you’ll get no disagreement from me if the Academy sees fit to award the gorgeous shots of Button. If the award goes to any other film I’ll feel a bit cheated, even though the other films were clearly worthy of their nominations.

Costume Design

Typically, this award goes to the period piece, and The Duchess was the most “period” of the films nominated. While Benjamin Button covered the longest period of time and therefore might have required the most thought and research, the results were so subtle I don’t think this one will get the nod. Personally, I’d like to see “Australia” pick this one up, as it required quite a lot of variety, and I’ll never forget Jackman’s Rhett Butler-like entrance in that white suit. That image alone was worth an award. (It’s safe to assume my Jackman infatuation is coloring my judgment here, for better or for worse.)

Directing

All five of these films are so wonderful, so well done, that it’s a crime the award this year can’t be split five ways. David Fincher did a sensitive and beautiful job with Button. Ron Howard, one of the underrecognized yet much beloved directors in Hollywood, really put forward a personal best with “Frost/Nixon.” Stephen Daldry’s job with “The Reader” is remarkable for its unflinching yet compassionate look at a difficult moment in history. And Gus Van Sant always delivers quality work, as he did again this year in “Milk.” But this year, Slumdog has all the momentum, and it’s going to carry its most enthusiastic champion and deserving director, Danny Boyle, to the stage to accept this award.

Documentary

I haven’t seen any of these, but most of the buzz this year seems focused on “Man on Wire,” about a French citizen who came to America and staged a daring and illegal tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in New York, which he dubbed “the artistic crime of the century.” The dark horse in this race would be “Trouble the Water,” about a couple trapped in New Orleans during Katrina.

Film Editing

Again, this is a tough category, because all the nominated films–“Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “The Dark Knight,” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” were so well edited they crackled with energy and intensity. Given the close race, I’m giving the edge to the underdog again, Slumdog. Watching that film was like taking a roller coaster ride through Mumbai, at times, and that’s due to the amazing editing.

Foreign Language Film

The buzz in town seems to center around the Israeli entry, done in filtered animation style (modified from live action), called “Waltz with Bashir.” The runner-up seems to be the film that has sparked a lot of vehement discussions, “The Class,” France’s entry.

Makeup

This award should and will go to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” How they age both Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, in reverse directions, in this film, is amazing.

Music (Score)

This is one award that might go to Slumdog that I feel strongly really should go to Benjamin Button. At the end of the film I felt like I had just seen and heard an amazing work of art. The score was lush and romantic without being corny or obtrusive. It was modern yet lyrical, beautiful without being sentimental. I loved the score to Slumdog as well, but I really want this one to go to Button. Still, I’ll call this for Slumdog.

Music (Song)

This one is anyone’s guess. I’m leaning towards “Jai Ho” from Slumdog, but wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Peter Gabriel’s song “Down to Earth” (from Wall-E) took this one.

Picture

This one will likely go to “Slumdog Millionaire,” and deservedly so. The little film that could has chugged to victory in several of the other awards arenas, and I expect the Oscars will be no different. As I said, the other films are all fantastic, and should any of them win, it will be justified. But the world is enamored of the international underdogs right now, as demonstrated by Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency. Given its recent momentum, betting on Slumdog seems safer than any bet you could make on the market right now.

Screenplay (adaptation)

This category always puzzles me. Is an adaptation “better” if it adhere closely to the original material, or “better” if it invents something new, but in somewhat of the spirit of the original? How does one judge? Or do you just pick the movie you liked best in this category? If the latter, I think this award will likely go to Slumdog Millionaire.

Screenplay (original)

This one is hard for me to call. I think “Milk” and “Wall-E” were both outstanding screenplays. But I’ll give “Wall-E” the edge because it was so different from anything else we’ve seen, whereas we’ve seen really great biopics and political stories before. And Andrew Stanton, a key writer on the project, has been responsible for so much of the success Pixar has enjoyed (he wrote “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Monsters, Inc.,” and “Finding Nemo”) that it’s high time the Academy awarded him some serious recognition for his compelling stories and keen sense of humor.

Those are my predictions, and I’m standing by them. What are yours?

How to find and read bills before they are passed

There are a lot of good minds in the blogosphere with time on their hands, who care passionately about the issues and read blogs all day long.

But many of these same people have never read a bill, including the ones they comment on! So let me offer a little info re how easy it is to find, read, and understand a bill.

First, to find a bill – you will need the bill number. You can also look up a bill by sponsor (the Representative or Senator who submitted the bill). Not sure who your congressional representative is? Go to www.house.gov and look it up. Not sure who your senators are? Go to www.senate.gov.

Once you have the bill number or sponsor, you can find the text via Thomas, the Library of Congress’ public Web site for legislation.

Check out Thomas here: thomas.loc.gov

You’ll see a link to HR1 – the economic recover plan, hardcoded onto the main page, due to the importance of that bill, but that’s rare.

In the middle of the screen you’ll see a search box. The default search is set to a key word or phrase. But that will usually yield many results and not help you find your bill. So check the second option below the search field to search by “Bill Number.”

Precede any Senate bill number with “S “. Precede any House bill number with “HR ” (as in House of Representatives).

Let’s search HR 1, for example. Put that in the box and search, and you should see a link to HR 1. Click that link and you will get a display that shows  the bill title, sponsor, and links to much more info about the bill, including the full text of the bill.

The first time you look at a bill, it can feel intimidating. There’s a lot of jargon and legalese. But if you read the bill, trust me, you will understand enough to have a far more informed judgment on it than those who have NOT read the bill.

Sometimes, the bill is modifying other laws. If you see “U.S.C.” and some number, that’s referring to the United States Code (of Law) which can be found via Google. You then have to manually add or delete text, mentally or by copying into a Word Processor, to see how the revised law would read. Is this time consuming? Rarely. Sometimes, sure. It depends on the extent of the changes, of course. Most of the time the change is innocuous, but you should always check.

I watched a couple of years ago as people who had NOT read Holt’s bill, provably, nonetheless voiced all these objections to it that were in some part ridiculous to those of us who HAD read the bill. But guess what? The mob ruled, and ignorance prevailed. I hope that, by educating you to read bills for yourself, you will not just follow the masses, the leaders of whom may have private agendas you know nothing about, and make up your OWN mind re what you find within.

If anyone has questions, ask, and I’ll try to answer.

Markos, Jan Hamsher, Caroline Kennedy and us

I’m glad that Booman did not follow the mob and join in the anti-Caroline hysteria, neatly disguised (however thinly) as anti-dynasty hysteria.

Dynasties can be good and bad. Would Jane and Markos have also opposed the ascension of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he was a cousin of former President Teddy Roosevelt? Should we not have had John Adams’ son as president, since his father had already taken that role?

Competence, interests, and histories are shared in families. When you have something good going, it’s natural to want to repeat it. When you have something bad going on, like the ongoing crimes of the Bush family (Bush Sr. got us into the first Gulf War based in part on false evidence of troops massing at the border of Kuwait – a photo later proved to be a forgery).

Historian Jim DiEugenio wrote an open letter to Markos and Jane Hamsher explaining why they were on the wrong side of history in opposing Caroline. Here are some snippets:

One of the reasons I only lurk [on Daily Kos and FireDogLake] is that I find many of the posters to be very young.  Therefore most seem to lack any sense of history and perspective.  This includes both of you.  Jane was about one year old when Caroline’s father, President Kennedy was elected.  Markos was yet to be born when her uncle, Senator Robert Kennedy, was murdered at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968.  And apparently, none of that matters to you, since you never mention any of what happened in between or afterward.  Markos just says indiscriminately : I hate political dynasties! Sort of like saying: I hate three-piece suits!

The problem is that some of us were around back then.  And further, some us have studied what happened in those intervening years–and afterwards.  So lumping the Kennedys with say, families like the Rockefellers or Bushes in the dynasty category is, at best, indiscriminate.  At worst, it is ignorant, insulting and irresponsible. (For all that it means, why  not throw in the Colbys?)  Yes, there are some political families that should be avoided.  Since it has been proven that they have little interest in providing for the common good.  But to lump the Kennedys in with them is utterly preposterous.

Jim then details some of the history Markos and Jane clearly know little about, such as Kennedy’s trip to Vietnam in the 50’s, and his subsequent warnings about trying to conquer them. Kennedy recognized that what John Foster Dulles and others tried to paint as “communism” was really just nationalism. But in our world, when one country tries to protect its own and causes our business class woes, we paint them as communists and use that as an excuse to overthrow them. Especially when they have precious resources – which are not limited to energy resources such as oil and gas.

Nowhere was this more true than in the Congo:

When Patrice Lumumba, nationalist leader of the Congo against the colonialist Belgians, was attempting to keep his country independent, then President Eisenhower sided with the Europeans.  And Allen Dulles OK’d a CIA plot to help in his murder.  The CIA hurried this plot in the interval between Kennedy’s election and his inauguration since they knew JFK would not back it . His sympathies were on Lumumba’s side.  The plot succeeded. (Remember Markos, the CIA is the agency you wanted to join before you took up blogging. Maybe you missed this episode.)  But Kennedy still supported the cause of independence for the Congo all the way until his assassination. Against Belgian advocates like William Buckley and Thomas Dodd. (This is Sen. Chris Dodd’s disgraced father. You two should read up on him.)

Jim also talks about Bobby Kennedy’s record. This is one we really wouldn’t wish continued?

In 1963, A. Philip Randolph was organizing the legendary 1963 March on Washington.  (You two probably thought it was Martin Luther King.)  The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King’s group, signed on.  But they could not get a white politician to endorse the demonstration.  In July, about six weeks before it began, President Kennedy did so at a press conference.  He then called in his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He essentially told him that he was entrusting the project to him and it had to come off very well, in fact, perfectly. If not, their enemies would use it to their detriment. It did come off perfectly.

Which leads us to Caroline’s uncle, Bobby Kennedy. A man who, as Attorney General, led what was probably the most unrelenting campaign against organized crime in American  history.  A campaign that once started, eventually brought the Mafia to its knees. And at this time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would barely recognize that there even was such a thing. RFK also forced Hoover into recognizing the fact that the Klan operated a murderous terrorist group that killed civil rights workers.  As Attorney General he sued the steel companies when they tried to conspiratorially rig prices to gouge the American consumer. He also actually placed the executives of electric companies in jail when they tried to cheat the government.

Aren’t we always crying about accountability? Bobby Kennedy and his brother pursued white collar criminals to an extent never seen before or sense, in government. But no, we wouldn’t want Caroline in there because heck, she’s just a Kennedy.

Never mind that another son of the JFK/RFK generation, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., has also proven successful fighting the corporations on behalf of the environment and the citizens who suffer the effects of pollution.

Never mind Ted Kennedy’s incredible record of fighting for those who have the least access to government, the poor, the dispossed.

Nope. It’s more important to keep someone out because they happened to be born into a dynasty than to 1) look at the individual’s qualifications and 2) realize that not all dynasties are equal, and some have been incredibly good for our country.

Shame on all in the blogosphere who joined this irrational bashing. And kudos to our fearless leader here who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and made up his own mind.