Friday, January 23, 2004
Weapons hunter says "Ain't nuthin' there"
David Kay stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq on Friday and said he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.
In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.
"I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties," he said.
The CIA announced earlier that former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who has previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found, would succeed Kay as Washington's chief arms hunter.
Story here. Cheney, of course, doesn't believe it.
posted by chris at 5:06 PM
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Thursday, January 22, 2004
Spy games
Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
You'd think this might be a big deal, wouldn't you?
posted by chris at 5:15 PM
Context for the SOTU
USA Today provides a little context to some of Bush's statements in his State of the Union kick-off to the election year.
posted by chris at 5:13 PM
Not quite what they had in mind
When the American Family Association posted an online poll last month asking its constituents their position on gay marriage, it thought it was engaging in a straightforward exercise.
The conservative organization supports a constitutional amendment defining marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, and it planned to forward to Congress the results of the poll, which it expected would support its position, as evidence of Americans' opposition to gay marriage.
But the AFA never counted on the power of the Internet. And once the URL to the poll escaped its intended audience, everything went haywire. As of Jan. 19, 60 percent of respondents -- more than 508,000 voters -- said, "I favor legalization of homosexual marriage." With an additional 7.89 percent -- or 66,732 voters -- replying, "I favor a 'civil union' with the full benefits of marriage except for the name," the AFA's chosen position, "I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and 'civil unions,'" was being defeated by a 2-1 ratio.
"We're very concerned that the traditional state of marriage is under threat in our country by homosexual activists," said AFA representative Buddy Smith. "It just so happens that homosexual activist groups around the country got a hold of the poll -- it was forwarded to them -- and they decided to have a little fun, and turn their organizations around the country (onto) the poll to try to cause it to represent something other than what we wanted it to. And so far, they succeeded with that."
Of course, no such poll can be said to represent an accurate picture of popular opinion. But, clearly, the AFA had hoped Congress would take the numbers it planned to produce as exactly that kind of evidence.
Now, Smith says, his organization has had to abandon its goal of taking the poll to Capitol Hill.
I love the very telling statement that activists caused the poll to "represent something other than what we wanted it to."
posted by chris at 5:08 PM
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Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Uh, we need just a little bit more money
President Bush and his aides have spent the last year and a half telling the American people that the war in Iraq would cost little. A new report by Defense News, however, says the president will propose another $50 billion, in addition to the $166 billion already spent. According to the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the request "won't come until after the Nov. 2 presidential election" - effectively concealing the spending request from public scrutiny.
But hasn't the Administration already gotten enough money?
Then White House Budget Director, Mitch Daniels, said Iraq "will not require sustained aid" and that the war cost would "be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion." The president's top reconstruction official at the State Department told Nightline that "The American part of [reconstruction] will be $1.7 billion and we have no plans for further-on funding of this." The president's top economist, Glen Hubbard, said that "costs of any such intervention would be very small." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz "dismissed articles in several newspapers asserting that put cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion." And Bush had his new Budget Director tell the Senate that "we don't anticipate requesting anything additional for the balance of this year" - six weeks before he announced a request for an additional $87 billion. When White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey admitted that Iraq could cost up to $200 billion in the fall of 2002, he was summarily fired for his candor.
posted by chris at 2:25 PM
Get tough, and get rid of steroids now!
The Center for American Progress matches up Bush's claims in his State of the Union address with the actual facts in the real world. Besides the title above, my favorite line was "Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities..." Wow. That's a mouthful. I coulda sworn Bush was a lot more certain last year that Iraq was just swimming in WMD. Times change, I guess . . .
posted by chris at 1:14 PM
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Monday, January 19, 2004
MLK in America
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.
Why?
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.
By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
More.
posted by chris at 4:43 PM
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