posted October 17, 2004 01:38 PM              

"I'm not sure we've really seen a campaign with so many explicit plays to emotion. What we're seeing this year are direct plays to fear and anxiety."
DARRELL M. WEST, a political science professor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/17rich.html?th

Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

Published: October 17, 2004

SUCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.

To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.

It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.

Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.

"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"

What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."

posted October 17, 2004 05:33 PM            

They think dredging up Richard Nixon and attempting to tie Nixon to Bush..his name or similar actions, will scare everyone into voting for their leftist dud duo of Kerry and Edwards. But in the typical myopic blundering style of leftists, they forget they've already attempted to hook Bush up with Hitler, the antichrist and even Satan himself. No sale.

No reporters have lost their credentials...to my knowledge and no reporter has had his or her butt kicked by Bush or anyone else in the Bush campaign. They want to know what Bush knows about a lot of things that are absolutely none of their business, might harm national security and even tip off enemies as to what's next or even expose the source of the intelligence we get.

Because Bush won't give them classified information, as the idiot Carter did when he let slip the revelation about Stealth technology, Bush is deemed "secretive." Oh my God, the President is keeping secrets from the press.

Hahaha, those idiots would sell out America, lock, stock and barrel to get to press first with a story.

Hey Times and the other libofaciast media organizations, Up Yours. Yeah, there are some new kids on the block who attempt to get the story right instead of foisting lies, distortions, total frauds and their idiotic views on the rest of us.

Listen to the screeching of the press get louder and meaner as we get closer and closer to the day their dud duo, Kerry and Edwards go back to whatever they usually do on a workday...which by the way sure as hell isn't what they've supposed to have been doing as Senators from their respective states. Hell, maybe being a Senator is just a part time job for them. Whatever it is, they need to start showing up for work.

Of course in typical moocher style, these two always show up to pick up their paychecks, never missed one yet...even though the rules are very specific that they are not to be paid when they don't show up for their work in the Senate.

posted October 17, 2004 08:07 PM              

which is more important for us to know? details of a pakistan sting or what role saudi arabia played in 911?

U.S. leak 'harms al Qaeda sting'

Until U.S. officials leaked the arrest of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan to reporters, Pakistan had been using him in a sting operation to track down al Qaeda operatives around the world, the sources said.
Then on Friday, after Khan's name was revealed, government sources told CNN that counterterrorism officials had seen a drop in intercepted communications among suspected terrorists.

"You always want to know the evidence," said Sen. George Allen.
"In this situation, in my view, they should have kept their mouth shut and just said, 'We have information, trust us.' "
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/08/09/terror.wrap/

posted October 17, 2004 08:39 PM              

"they all had kurds in their whey.....!!!"

posted October 17, 2004 09:13 PM              

kurds http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq203/crossroads02.html

In 1975, Saddam agreed to settle a border dispute with Iran if the Shah of Iran would cut off his support for the Kurdish fighters. The Nixon administration, which had seen the Kurds as a buffer to both the Iraqis and the Soviets, also withdrew its aid. Saddam's army regained control of northern Iraq, continuing its campaign of ethnic cleansing and massive human rights abuses.

A congressional report later concluded that the United States and the Shah had not wanted the Kurds to succeed. The Kurds were never aware that they were being used as pawns in a geopolitical game.

posted October 17, 2004 10:20 PM              

In fact, many news sources have published articles regarding the attacks on reporters. Those attacks have stepped up lately because they are reporting the truth about what is happening in Iraq. Bush's administration is using these intimidation tactics to instill fear into other reporters by letting them know there will be reprisals if they report the truth instead of what they want them to report. They want to silence the press because they don't want the American public to know the truth.

Rarely does the chairman and publisher along with the chief executive of any newspaper write articles on the opinion page as happened this past week. But the reporters of the New York Times are under attack because they are one of the few who have not knuckled under to the intimidation tactics of the Bush administration and have reported the truth all along.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/opinion/10sulzberger.html?pagewanted=1&th

The Promise of the First Amendment

By ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR., chairman and publisher, and RUSSELL T. LEWIS, chief executive, The New York Times

Published: October 10, 2004

Last Thursday, a federal district judge ordered a New York Times reporter, Judy Miller, sent to prison. Her crime was doing her job as the founders of this nation intended. Here's what happened and why it should concern you.

On July 6, 2003, Joseph C. Wilson IV - formerly a career foreign service officer, a chargé d'affaires in Baghdad and an ambassador - wrote an article published on this page under the headline, "What I Didn't Find in Africa." The article served to undercut the Bush administration's claims surrounding Saddam Hussein's nuclear capacity.

Eight days later, Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist, wrote an article in which he identified Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as an "operative on weapons of mass destruction" for the C.I.A. "Two senior administration officials told me," Mr. Novak wrote, that it was Ms. Plame who "suggested sending Wilson" to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from Niger. After Mr. Novak's report, several other journalists wrote stories in which they said they received similar information about Ms. Plame from confidential government sources, in what many have concluded was an effort to punish Mr. Wilson for speaking out against the administration by exposing his wife as a C.I.A. operative. The record is clear, however, that Judy Miller is not one of those journalists who reported this information.

Because the government officials who revealed Valerie Plame's status as a C.I.A. operative to the press might have committed a crime in doing so, the Justice Department opened a federal criminal investigation to find whoever was responsible.

During the course of this investigation, the details of which have been kept secret, several journalists have been subpoenaed to provide information about the source of the leak and threatened with jail if they failed to comply.

On Aug. 12, Ms. Miller received a subpoena in which she was required to provide information about conversations she might have had with a government official in which the identity and C.I.A. connection of Mr. Wilson's wife might have been mentioned. She received this subpoena even though she had never published anything concerning Mr. Wilson or his wife. This is not the only recent case in which the government has subpoenaed information concerning Ms. Miller's sources. On July 12, the same prosecutor sought to have Ms. Miller and another Times correspondent, Philip Shenon, identify another source. Curiously, this separate investigation concerns articles on Islamic charities and their possible financial support for terrorism that were published nearly three years ago. As part of this effort to uncover the reporters' confidential sources, the prosecutor has gone to the phone company to obtain records of their phone calls.

So, unless an appeals court reverses last week's contempt conviction, Judy Miller will soon be sent to prison. And, if the government succeeds in obtaining the phone records of Ms. Miller and Mr. Shenon, many of their sources - even those having nothing to do with these two government investigations - will become known.

Why does all of this matter? The possibility of being forced to leave one's family and sent to jail simply for doing your job is an appalling prospect for any journalist - indeed, any citizen. But as concerned as we are with our colleague's loss of liberty, there are even bigger issues at stake for us all.

The press simply cannot perform its intended role if its sources of information - particularly information about the government - are cut off. Yes, the press is far from perfect. We are human and make mistakes. But, the authors of our Constitution and its First Amendment understood all of that and for good reason prescribed that journalists should function as a "fourth estate." As Justice Potter Stewart put it, the primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press was "to create a fourth institution outside the government as an additional check on the three official branches."

The founders of our democracy understood that our government was also a human institution that was capable of mistakes and misdeeds. That is why they constructed a First Amendment that would give the press the ability to investigate problems in the official branches of our government and make them known to the public. In this way, the press was sensibly put in a position to help hold government accountable to its citizens.

An essential tool that the press must have if it is to perform its job is the ability to gather and receive information in confidence from those who would face reprisals for bringing important information about our government into the light of day for all of us to examine. Without an enforceable promise of confidentiality, sources would quickly dry up and the press would be left largely with only official government pronouncements to report.

A quarter of a century ago, a New York Times reporter, Myron Farber, was ordered to jail, also for doing his job and refusing to give up confidential information. He served 40 days in a New Jersey prison cell. In response to this injustice, the New Jersey Legislature strengthened its "shield law," which recognizes and serves to protect a journalist's need to protect sources and information. Although the federal government has no shield law, the vast majority of states, as well as the District of Columbia, have by now put in place legal protections for reporters. While many of these laws are regarded as providing an "absolute privilege" for journalists, others set out a strict test that the government must meet before it can have a reporter thrown into jail. Perhaps it is a function of the age we live in or perhaps it is something more insidious, but the incidence of reporters being threatened with jail by the federal government is on the rise.

posted October 17, 2004 10:37 PM            

You should really read the stories you post more carefully Petron.

You should also get it firmly fixed in your mind that the President does not mark the fall or every sparrow, does not read the minds of government employee, therefore knowing what information they possess and who will blab something to the press, does not edit every line of dialogue any government employee might engage in with the press or anyone else.

You should also come to the understanding...someday, that only the administration is a White House Source and all others are government sources....as this story quotes. Please take note of that Petron and also that this source is an anonymous source. This is the second time you've attempted to elevate someone to a White House Source who isn't and never was.

quote:

---

In background briefings with journalists last week, unnamed U.S. government officials said it was the capture of Khan that provided the information that led Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to announce a higher terror alert level.

---

posted October 17, 2004 10:50 PM              

Harris Regrets Bogus Terror Plot Claim
WILL LESTER
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Republican Rep. Katherine Harris said Wednesday she regrets concerns caused by her claim that a plot existed to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Ind. City officials disputed the claims of a plot.

Harris, who was at the center of the political storm over the disputed 2000 presidential election, made the comments about terrorism and the plot on Monday at a rally for President Bush in Venice, Fla., and a subsequent interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

"I was told in an open, group setting that a recent situation threatened a Midwestern community and that it had been diffused," Harris said Wednesday. "I regret that I had no knowledge of the sensitive nature of this situation and any undue concern this may have caused."

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/9321600.htm
**********

but which was it?
another leak or a bogus claim?

posted October 17, 2004 11:41 PM              

**********

Bombing of Vietnam's Dikes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Late in the Vietnam War, the United States of America engaged in a policy of systematically bombing a system of dikes in Vietnam's Red River Delta that protected several hundred thousand people from having their land overrun by water.

The threat of the bombing was used as a leveraging tool against the North Vietnamese to encourage them to accept a proposed truce. The Red River Delta provided the majority of the food to North Vietnam, and the destruction of the farmland and the people within would have starved the nation's population and army. Under this threat, in September, 1972, North Vietnam agreed to drop their demand that President Theiu of South Vietnam be overthrown. Theiu rejected the treaty, not wanting to leave North Vietnamese troops in the south.

Many have referred to the bombing of the dikes as a war crime, although little was accomplished in the bombing before it ceased. Actress Jane Fonda is often credited with helping publicize the bombing, for which then U.N. Ambassador George H. W. Bush ACCUSED HER OF LYING.

The following transcript between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on the subject was recorded in 1972; it has since been published in "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" by journalist and publisher of The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg.

Nixon: We've got to quit thinking in terms of a three-day strike [in the Hanoi-Haiphong area]. We've got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack - which will continue until they - Now by all-out bombing attack, I am thinking about things that go far beyond. I'm thinking of the dikes, I'm thinking of the railroad, I'm thinking, of course, the docks.

Kissinger: I agree with you.

President Nixon: We've got to use massive force.

Two hours later at noon, H. R. Haldeman and Ron Ziegler joined Kissinger and Nixon:

President: How many did we kill in Laos?

Ziegler: Maybe ten thousand - fifteen?

Kissinger: In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen.

President: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind, power plants, whatever's left - POL [petroleum], the docks. And, I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

President: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

President: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes. (Ellsberg p. 418, ellipses original)

posted October 18, 2004 12:24 AM              

Tapes: Nixon too drunk
to discuss ’73 Arab-Israeli
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5069430/

******

hows that for scary?
i suppose in jwhops theory ,it was bushsr., cheney and rumsfeld who "went after and got rid of nixon" , thats when they began turning the country around for the better by getting hw bush appointed head of the cia......lol

posted October 18, 2004 12:28 AM            

What a total lying jerk Kerry really is. Did I mention Kerry is also a traitor for giving aid and comfort to an enemy...and for attempting to sway the Congress to accept the peace terms put forth by the Communists?

Well, let me do so now. John Kerry is a traitor who committed treason against the United States when he was a Naval Reserve Officer in the United States military services.

posted October 18, 2004 12:49 AM              

the only problem is the lack of connection with kerry to most of the major middle east scandals, he seems to always be helping to uncover them and make them public....
but maybe thats precisely his job...??

but if you dont believe that you must think his job prosecuting murderers and rapists and organized crime racketeering was just as phony as his vietnam war lie.....(too bad bush cant lie about killing and being wounded in vietnam)

then of course his investigation into the iran contra scandal was just 1 more useless thing he ever did like his record in the senate

oh and yeah, instead of authoring legislation with his name on it, he was busy pressing the bcci investigation....helping morgenthau bring down the largest drug dealing, terrorist financing, international organized crime rings ever uncovered.....

hey i'm getting a good idea for a kerry conspiracy theory, either way, i'll get plenty of material....

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blbushkerryembrace.htm

posted October 23, 2004 04:27 PM              

****************
Bush impressed fellow trainees with the way he learned to handle a plane, but he became a celebrity for something else. In the middle of his training, President Richard M. Nixon sent a plane down to fetch him for an introductory date with his older daughter Tricia, according to fellow trainee Joseph A. Chaney. It did not lead to another date, but the story lives on. So does memory of the graduation ceremony: Rep. Bush gave the commencement speech.

Then, after losing to Bentsen, Bush's father was named ambassador to the United Nations by President Nixon. The Bushes moved to New York, leaving their eldest son to rely on his family's old school and corporate ties to find a job.

By the end of 1972, Bush's father was mulling over a new job offer from Nixon – to be chairman of the Republican National Committee. With his parents back in Washington, Bush went to stay with them for the holidays and was involved in one of the most notorious incidents of his "nomadic" years. He took his 16-year-old brother Marvin out drinking, ran over a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home, and when his father confronted him, challenged him to go "mano a mano" outside
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072899.htm