“Has the criticism of CIA Director George Tenet been unfairly politicized?”

That’s the question CNN put to its viewers. How biased can you get? During the 8 years of Republicans politicizing each and every rumor, allegation and bald-faced lie about Clinton with the press gleefully tailing along, I do not recall any issue during that time which was characterized by the press in that light, especially so early in the life of the story.

And yet just a few days after the story gets into the spotlight, the story is not centered, as it should be, on the fact that the government ignored clear evidence and decided to lie to the American people in order to drag us into a war we didn’t want. Instead, it is being framed by the press as a story about Democrats unfairly criticizing the president for political gain.

No greater ally could President Bush ask for than the one the press is continuing to provide him with.

The excuses are flying again, this time in response to the revelation concerning Bush’s State of the Union address. Turns out that Bush’s claim that Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger was not just false, but knowingly false. The CIA knew it was wrong. A government representative sent to Niger reported it was impossible. And yet with this knowledge, wanting to fuel the war against Iraq, it was decided that the CIA’s information be ignored and a report from British intelligence be used instead. the question is, who decided to lie? Well, you can guess what the Bush administration is saying:

Anybody but George.

Apparently, a George Bush was out of the loop yet again in the White House. Despite the fact that we should have known that Iraq had no nuclear program and a severely diminished bio- and chemical weapons program, despite the knowledge that there was no tie between Hussein and Al-Qaeda or 9-11, despite the intelligence that said Iraq was no threat to us at all, and now despite the fact that the administration knew the Niger story was a complete lie–despite all these things, George W. Bush made statements completely to the contrary in his State of the Union speech, and in countless speeches before and after, and yet somehow, he never lied.

Really, there are only a few possibilities. One is that Bush knowingly lied to us. The other is that everyone lied to Bush. Neither possibility is good, but you can guess which one the administration is playing.

George Tenet, director of the CIA, is now in the process of falling on his sword. George W. Bush, Condaleeza Rice and Senator Pat Roberts are helping him, making sure the sword is guided directly to his heart and not faked into his armpit. Tenet is the only one who has to fall right now, as the Niger story is the only one with the definitive smoking gun.

But the question should become, who’s responsible for all the other lies? Who’s going to fall on his or her sword when WMD are never found? Who lied to Bush about that? Who’s taking the fall for deceiving bush about Al Qaeda and 9-11 ties?

The “anybody but George” strategy has a flaw in it: used too often, it will give the impression that Bush is surrounded by deceitful liars who keep him in the dark, and/or he is an unwitting, gullible fool. But we know, in our heart of hearts, that neither is true. We know that Bush has been lying. It’s simply that a majority of Americans either don’t want to believe it (for personal, political or other reasons), or they know it and don’t care because it relieves them of being responsible for doing things they want but know are wrong.

To note yet another stroke against the myth of a liberal media, take a look at CNN’s latest front-page headline: “Democrats grow bolder in criticism of Bush on Iraq” (story here). Underneath that headline is the note that “Republicans say Democrats are playing politics, trying to make some headway in the upcoming 2004 election.”

I do not recall, in the uncountable times that Republicans accused Clinton of everything and anything to score political points, that the media characterized the political assault and its motives as the chief story; rather, they focused on the charges and whether or not they were true. It was never “Republicans strengthen their attacks: Democrats say Republicans are playing politics”; rather, it was “Clinton accused of [insert accusation here],” followed by details and analysis of the accusation. See examples here and here.

By representing the story as shown above, CNN is effectively putting the actual criticism in the back seat, and is instead highlighting the story as a political move. This may well be, but, as noted, it is inconsistent with reporting styles under Clinton, and ignores very real and well-deserved criticism of the administration. This spin put on the different stories makes the difference between supporting and attacking a political party.

I am by no means the first person to comment on the fact that in the 21st Century and the Information Age, one of the major issues that we will face is that of privacy. As it becomes more and more possible to collect information and monitor any given person via electronic means, keeping a database of where they live, where they work, where they go, what they buy, and so forth and so on–it will be more and more possible to almost passively allow computers to build databases detailing our activities on a daily basis, records to be accessed whenever someone with access (read: government and industry) so desires.

Think about it: records are kept on where you live (city records), where you work and how much you make (IRS), where you go (trail of credit card receipts, hotel registrations, airplane ticket purchases, gas purchases), what you buy (receipts connected to your credit, debit, and bank cards; records from “membership cards” at supermarkets, rental stores, etc. which keep close track of every purchase), what information you access on the Internet (cookies and other tracking information), email you send, whom you talk to and what you talk about (if your email is unencrypted, it can be legally read at many points along its path), medical records, bank records, credit histories, work records, and much, much more.

Computers, able to collate this data by keeping a record of all references to you, will be able to sift through the gargantuan heaps of data on the Internet and other sources and compile data which can be smoothed out manually to build an incredibly detailed record of all your activities–more than you can even recall yourself. That database will be available to be used against you (can you even imagine how that kind of information could or would ever possibly be used for you? Not likely). It will be available to find you, pigeonhole you, persuade you, perhaps control you in subtle ways. Or to blackmail you threaten you, expose you, embarrass you, catch you doing things you should be able to do in private without hindrance, but that others may not approve of.

The right to privacy against this is under concerted attack. Laws are being drafted (thankfully, against the tide of the courts) that can tell you what kind of person you can be, what activities you can take part in between consenting adults in private places, deciding what you are allowed to watch, read, do or speak about, and with whom. Some of it is not legislated; some is simply discouraged with the force of law or popular public pressure. What places in the world you are allowed to go to, what kind of persons you can associate with, what opinions you can hold, what statements you can make even semi-privately. In the building atmosphere of fear, simply speaking out publicly on your rights as an American citizen can get you branded as unpatriotic, making people less liable to talk to you, meet you, hire you, do business with you. We see it around us, with so many Americans getting angry at those who would question the government, shouting others down even with the threat of violence for doing no more than stating a peaceful, rational opinion. Take, as one example, the man who runs the baseball hall of fame canceling a Hall of Fame event because he didn’t like the political views of one actor who had spoken out against the war. Here, an event that should belong to all of us, the celebration of our national pastime, was hijacked by one or a small number of people to do harm to a person who was simply exercising his constitutional rights and asking the country not to go to war. Turning against people for their views takes place every day at the personal level, and so we do not often hear about it widely and publicly, ergo the celebrity example; but this drama does play out all over our country. The point is that by doing things which harm no one and which are our right as Americans, we can be hurt in real ways, denied opportunities, have things dear to us taken away. A lack of privacy is the means to widen what we can be criticized for, penalized for, and threatened concerning; the less privacy we have, the more control others have over us.

Privacy is part of our birthright. Neo-conservatives, claiming to want government out of our lives but in truth hoping they will interfere deeply but selectively, tell us that there is no express right to privacy in the Constitution; Thom Hartmann, however, said it very well in his column at commondreams.org:

In his dissent in the Texas sodomy case, Thomas wrote, “just like Justice Stewart, I ‘can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,’ or as the Court terms it today, the ‘liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.'”

Echoing Thomas’ so-called conservative perspective, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on June 27, 2003, “There is no right to privacy specifically enumerated in the Constitution.” Jerry Falwell similarly agreed on Fox News.

Limbaugh and Thomas may soon also point out to us that the Constitution doesn’t specifically grant a right to marry, and thus license that function exclusively to, say, Falwell. The Constitution doesn’t grant a right to eat, or to read, or to have children. Yet do we doubt these are rights we hold?

And he equally well commented on how that right indeed exists, in so many different ways, in the constitution:

[T]the Constitution wasn’t written as a vehicle to grant us rights. We don’t derive our rights from the constitution.

Rather, in the minds of the Founders, human rights are inalienable – inseparable – from humans themselves. We are born with rights by simple fact of existence, as defined by John Locke and written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Founders wrote. Humans are “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights….” These rights are clear and obvious, the Founders repeatedly said. They belong to us from birth, as opposed to something the Constitution must hand to us, and are more ancient than any government.

The job of the Constitution was to define a legal framework within which government and business could operate in a manner least intrusive to “We, The People,” who are the holders of the rights. In its first draft it didn’t even have a Bill of Rights, because the Framers felt it wasn’t necessary to state out loud that human rights came from something greater, larger, and older than government. They all knew this; it was simply obvious.

Thomas Jefferson, however, foreseeing a time when the concepts fundamental to the founding of America were forgotten, strongly argued that the Constitution must contain at least a rudimentary statement of rights, laying out those main areas where government could, at the minimum, never intrude into our lives.

We have the right to privacy; there is no question. At minimum, we have the right to do what we please, as consenting adults, in the privacy of our own homes, if it does not infringe on the rights or safety of others. We have the right not to be tracked, databased and kept close tabs on without our knowledge or consent. We have the right to say and do as we please as long as it does not reasonably infringe the rights and freedoms of others, and we have the right not to be constrained by small people who would absurdly abuse the definition of “reasonable.” (The Baseball Hall of Fame president would likely deem it “reasonable” to cancel a popular public event because an actor lobbied against war on the grounds that any dissent “harms” our troops and is “unpatriotic.” All that proved was just how the meaning of “reasonable” can be distorted by someone with an agenda).

Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, who often speculated on the shape of society in the future, once wrote:

“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere.”

Perhaps Heinlein was much more prophetic on this point than many people gave him credit for. Unfortunately, we don’t have many places to move on to from here, so instead we have to try to turn things around here and now, or at least fight the oncoming tide.

Or at least in a way that gets carried by the media. Maybe this is more a shift in the media’s bias (now that the FCC ruling is done with and looks to be struck down by Congress) than in Democratic rhetoric, but whatever the cause, at least finally some criticism is getting disseminated. It’s all about the “Bring them on” quote he made a few days ago, daring Iraqis to kill U.S. soldiers:

Dick Gephardt: “We’re losing soldiers every day, and he is not putting together the international help and the international coalition to deal with this problem. He doesn’t deal with other countries well, and there’s an arrogance, there’s a state of mind in thinking that drives people away rather than bringing them in to help us…. He’s president, you don’t taunt the enemy…. You try to keep our troops safe, you try to help them in what they’re doing …. This phony, macho business is not getting us where we need to be.”

Sen. John Kerry: [The comment was] “unwise, unworthy of the office and his role as commander in chief, and unhelpful to American soldiers under fire.”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg: [The comment was] “irresponsible and inciteful…. When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander — let along the commander in chief — invite enemies to attack U.S. troops.”

Howard Dean: [The comment was] “incredibly reckless rhetoric…. These men and women are risking their lives every day, and the president who sent them on this mission showed tremendous insensitivity to the dangers they face.”

I still haven’t heard anyone paying attention to Bush’s comment on how “God instructed” him to invade Iraq.

“Let me finish. There are some who feel like the conditions [in Iraq] are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on.”
–George W. Bush, July 2, 2003

So says the man who chickened out of Vietnam service by getting into a celebrity unit of the National Guard, then went AWOL while having drunken binges. I am sure that the families of the service men and women in Iraq are all very comforted by the fact that the president is daring the Iraqis to attack their loved ones so that he can sound macho.

Here’s an excellent article called “The First Casualty” in The New Republic. It details how the Bush Administration shaped, shaded, influenced and tainted the intelligence community’s data and analysis on Iraq in order to justify a war. A few snippets:

“Yet there was no consensus within the American intelligence community that Saddam represented such a grave and imminent threat. Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war. …

“Had the administration accurately depicted the consensus within the intelligence community in 2002–that Iraq’s ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongoing–it would have had a very difficult time convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm Saddam. But the Bush administration painted a very different, and far more frightening, picture.”

There was an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz about the peace talks in the Middle East. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas met with President Bush, and told Ha’aretz that, after speaking with Bush about Sharon, Bush told Abbas:

“God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

Is that scary, or what? And so far, the U.S. press has not seemed to pick up on the story yet. Can you imagine any other president before saying that God instructed him to invade a foreign country and the press not having a field day about it?

One can only hope that the press is at least asking about the quote. Naturally, Bush’s people will claim it was a misquote, especially if it wasn’t, but if the press doesn’t at least partially cover it, this should be yet another proof that the press is covering and shilling for the Bush administration.

Thanks to Sako for the tip on the story.

It seems now that the excuses for why we aren’t finding WMD in Iraq are as varied as the falsified reasons for invading Iraq were before the invasion. In the months before we sent forces in, we heard that Hussein had massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had reconstituted its atomic program; but now a massive, long-term search has brought up only a few empty trucks that even the U.S. State Dept. doesn’t think were for WMD production and a small cache of 12-year-old parts and plans for atomic production, which if anything show that the atomic program was not in fact reconstituted.

So what are the excuses? The weapons are still there, but hidden (said “massive stockpiles” must be damn well hidden to avoid any detection after this time); the Iraqi public and people involved are still so terrified of Hussein they won’t speak (right); the weapons were moved before/during the invasion (read: we may need justification for war against Syria); the weapons were destroyed before the invasion (how stupid is that? If they destroyed the WMD before the invasion, why not shout it to the world and avoid the invasion in the first place?); or the WMD were looted (every single last gas canister and document? And if so, why haven’t we found even the smallest part of these massive stockpiles in looter’s caches that have been found?).

How about this possibility: we were totally lied to.

The Media is either desperate or shameless, or both. The latest “breaking news” is that an Iraqi nuclear scientist buried in his backyard some parts and plans that would contribute to the building of a centrifuge that would contribute to the building of an atomic weapon. Twelve years ago. And they were never disturbed, until now (when the scientist wanted a deal to relocate).

And this is somehow supposed to make use believe that Iraq was, potentially, at some unknown time in the future, maybe digging up these parts and making a bomb. The media is spinning this as being the tip of the iceberg, and maybe we’ll start seeing a lot more after this.

What a crock.

Before the war, Bush and Cheney were making open statements saying that they believed Hussein had or was on the verge of producing atomic weapons. Nearly three months after the war in Iraq, we have found squat–so little that a measly 12-year-old buried cache of spare parts is earth-shaking news.

If anyone in the American public sees this as being somehow justification for the war or proof that Iraq was seriously developing WMD, they deserve little respect.

What next? Will they find a few hypodermic needles thrown out from a hospital 20 years ago and say that this could be the tip of the bioweapons iceberg? Stay tuned.

Or maybe switch to another channel and watch some Star Trek–much better grounding in reality in that show.

Here’s a good blog entry detailing two and a half dozen prominent statements by Bush and his officials swearing up and down that Hussein had massive stocks of all sorts of WMD, and we knew it for a fact including where they were.

Note how, as time goes by in these chronological quotes, there is a wee bit of backpedaling. And of course, you can be assured that this is only a very partial list.

And let’s not forget some of the other scary quotes:

“A report came out of the Atomic — the IAEA — that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.” — George Bush, September 7, 2002

We know (Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.” — Dick Cheney, March 25, 2003

Senator Orrin Hatch made news recently when he proclaimed that those guilty of downloading copyrighted material from the web without paying for it should have their computers trashed.

But web critics quickly discovered that Hatch’s own web site used at least one and possibly more copyrighted software scripts without following the license agreements required by the maker.

In addition to that embarrassment, a broken link on Hatch’s site was found to lead to an X-rated porno site.

Oops.

The record labels are going nuts.

First they sued Napster to shut them down–understandable, Napster was a centrally identifiable organization with a direct hand in piracy. Then they started suing people, from those that produced pirating software to those who put copyrighted material on the web. Harsh, maybe heavy-handed, but still legal and understandable.

Then they started going just a tad overboard, creating a computer virus and intentionally infecting computers with it. Now, Orrin Hatch and others are getting mean, too–escalating the threat from “damage” to “destroy.” Under the proposed legislation, if you downloaded, say, three Beatles’ songs from KaZaA, you would not be sued or imprisoned–instead, your property would be trashed.

Now, I am not trying to argue that online piracy should be allowed, but there is such a thing as going way too far to punish people for it. It is equivalent, for example, to creating a car that, when stolen, would burn down the thieve’s house; or a shoplifting tag on clothing that would, if taken out of the store, melt your entire wardrobe. Those who are stolen from have the right to try to catch those who steal and retrieve their stolen property. They do not, in my humble opinion, have the right to destroy other belongings that person holds.

This is just the next step in an escalating war on music piracy that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is trying to take, and if you ask me, it stinks to high heaven, undermining our principles of justice. If you steal my bicycle, I have no right to trash your garage. I get the evidence and present it to the police. But the RIAA feels they are above us all on this one, that they can not only take the law into their own hands but also go beyond normal standards of decency.

And the reason? Online piracy is destroying their sales, they say. Baloney. Record sales started falling when the economy started to tank. Before the bad economy, people were downloading like crazy from Napster, and yet record sales increased throughout that period. The record labels–and anyone who looks at the figures and does some simple correlation–know full well this is true. But the labels, despite knowing they don’t lose much, want to protect their property entire. But they know full well that consumers will not swallow these “protections” without good cause, so they hold up their sagging sales as the justification. But the justification is false.

The RIAA has to be held to the same standards as the rest of us. I don’t pity the pirate who gets trashed, but I do fear the corporation or organization that believes it is above the people and can infringe on their civil rights.

Not to mention, hackers will likely find a way to get around the trashing scheme rather quickly–so what will the RIAA ask for next?

Update: This Kuro5hin article says it all beautifully, much better than I could.

…then you may not have heard much about Private Jessica Lynch. Not much having to do with reality, that is. She was the one who, according to the Pentagon, was shot, stabbed and captured by the Iraqis, who took her to a hospital where her injuries were ignored and she was slapped around by Iraqi soldiers, until a valiant squad of American soldiers staged a nighttime rescue mission during which, under enemy fire, they got Private Lynch out of danger and onto a chopper that brought her back safe. We even saw parts of it on TV.

Sadly, it’s fiction. Practically science fiction, in fact. The BBC broke the story that Lynch’s rescue was a staged media event. First of all, she was injured when her vehicle overturned, and was not shot or stabbed–this confirmed by U.S. doctors, who added that her wounds had indeed been properly treated, not ignored. Apparently, Lynch was given the best possible treatment in light of the situation, and local doctors donated their own blood. She was not, it turns out, slapped or even interrogated in any way. In fact, Iraqi forces deserted the hospital many days before the “rescue,” and Iraqi doctors even tried to deliver her back in an ambulance–but were turned back when U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint opened fire on the vehicle. The “rescue” a few days later was unnecessary, no one fired on the American troops, though the U.S. troops did fire many shots and set off some explosions in the hospital. They were even offered a master key so they would not have to knock down the hospital’s doors, but for some reason declined to accept it. And the video we saw was shot by the military, was carefully edited, and the original tape is still under lock and key–the administration refuses to release it. Now a Democratic contender, Dennis Kucinich, is demanding the full and unedited tape be released. Like that’ll happen soon. It’s likely resting comfortably in a secure, undisclosed location next to Cheney’s transcripts of energy policy meetings and President Bush’s full criminal record.

And now, everyone involved has shut up. An Iraqi lawyer who gave intel for the attack was rewarded with asylum in the U.S. and refuses interviews. The soldiers who were involved in the raid also refuse to recount what happened, Private Lynch has “amnesia,” and her family says they’re “not supposed to talk about it” (but if Lynch has amnesia, what could they possibly say?).

The media, which gave endlessly repeated coverage to Lynch’s plight, rescue, and aftermath, is now quiet as a church mouse about it. The main media outlets cover the story only laterally, usually in reference to some other story like an attack on the BBC’s reliability, or in the form of a Pentagon denial. More stories appear on newspaper web sites, but usually laden with refutations by military analysts and “experts” which make the Iraqi doctors sound like liars. The L.A. Times had a reasonable story on it, and I’m sure some others, but most others carried the standard AP Newswire feed–and what coverage there has been of how we were lied to is massively overwhelmed by the coverage given to the fiction.

The TV people will certainly make sure you get the more palatable version. A&E has already broadcast a documentary about the false version of events, and NBC (which gushed about the rescue in this “news” story) has a made-for-TV movie coming out later this year. Think they’ll go for the BBC account?

Thanks to Mani for providing more links to the FCC story, including one that led me to find the following full-page ad taken out in major U.S. papers recently:

The ad is downloadable in PDF format.

As expected, the FCC decided that one person or corporation may own wider and broader swaths of the media than ever before. Already lacking voices outside the mainstream, the big 6 television media owners are already moving to consolidate ownership. Forgive me if I sound like I am beating a dead horse, but I feel this is important: there can be no free press if that press is monopolized. Just as there is no real competition in the OS market because Microsoft controls 95% and dictates to everyone what they must do, so will it be with the media.

We own the airwaves, but politicians run it, and they’ve been bought. And the media, which buried the story except for a brief flurry the weekend before the closed-door FCC sessions (when it was too late), has again started burying the story. Only those who read carefully through business sections or search deliberately for the story will find it. What stories are appearing downplay the damage done, suggesting that Congress will be watchdog to untoward media sales (har!) and There’s Nothing Really to Worry About.

We’ve just lost a very important battle for our freedoms, which are based upon the free and fair dissemination of knowledge–and, ironically, because we are already deprived of said dissemination to the degree we are, most people are not even aware of it.

[exit public gloom mode]

This coming Monday, a decision will be made by the U.S. government which will decide how the property of the American people will be parceled out to large corporations, a decision that will greatly affect the interests of the American people, and how we receive information that enormously influences the public’s stance on all social and political issues. And if you are a member of the American public and want to have a part in this decision: too bad. The doors are closed, and you’re not allowed in.

It’s payoff time.

Remember how the large media organizations tore into Clinton whenever there was even a whiff of scandal? How they went endlessly on about relatively unimportant issues such as how he “didn’t inhale” and had affairs and then lied about them. That demonstrates how willingly, even enthusiastically presidents were hounded by the press in light of a potential scandal.

Remember in the 2000 campaign, whenever Gore, a man with strong character, was caught in the smallest of prevarications, he was widely labeled a liar and a spinner of tall tales in the media, but when Bush was found to have been a drunk driver, cocaine user, National-Guard deserting, SEC reg violator who lied under oath as governor of Texas and showed the worst of character–that the media essentially shrugged its collective shoulders and said, “so what?”

During that election, Gore was often put down by the media and Bush was given every benefit (save for the funny stuff about his speaking skills). And in the crucial days of December in Florida, the media clearly favored Bush–for example, it made big news about the “people of Florida” protesting and disrupting the recount, but went silent when it was revealed they were really Washington D.C. Republican staffers.

It was quite clear to anyone who looked at the overall picture: the media corporations liked Bush and did not like Gore. But why? A conservative media? Not really, it has more to do with a relatively little-known corner of FCC regulations. Currently, there are limits to how many TV and radio stations one person or corporation can own. The reason: so that the media cannot be controlled by one person or a small group of people who could then control what people see and hear. Remember the Frank Capra movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” where the political machine run by the kingmaker Taylor owned all the media in Smith’s hometown, and silenced any opposing views about him? That caricature is what the current FCC rules are designed to prevent.

Not for long, though.

All the media bias over the past several years is about to pay off. Gore was staunchly opposed to changing these FCC regs, but Bush was clearly in favor of letting the big boys have even bigger slices of the pie. And the large media conglomerates have known that if they want the FCC to allow them to own as much of the media pie as they want, they had better show that it will benefit the president–after all, would Bush want to allow the media giants to own it all if they worked against his interests? The media conglomerates also made sure that the issue did not get much play–only now, at the very last minute,are a few news outlets picking up the story, far too little, far too late, perhaps so they can claim that they “covered the story” before the decision was made. It would not have served their interests to alert the public beforehand.

See these stories by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) and Truthout.org.

Ironically, activists on both the right and the left are against the new FCC regs to be swept in under the cloak of the gag on Monday. Liberals and conservatives both reel at the thought of the media conglomerates, which could potentially swing to the left or the right depending on the issue or the CEO, dominating the airwaves and sending only a single voice out to the people. Even the NRA is getting into the picture, getting their faithful to send out 300,000 messages to the FCC, fearful of what they see as a press consolidated against free gun rights.

But the political activists and the people are in the back seat on this one–the media lobbyists, with the full weight of media power endorsing the current office holder, have control of the wheel, and it looks like they are going to get their way.

Look for the current 6 television and 2 radio media giants to merge soon under the blessings of the current administration, and expect voices of opposition to be broadcast less and less. So goes the state of Bush’s America.

9 months ago, I was in my heavily politically-oriented blog mode, before I got Movable Type and all. One of the entries I wrote concerned the then-upcoming war with Iraq. Looking back, it is interesting to see which predictions came true, and which didn’t. Some excerpts, and post-mortem comments:

First is international support. There is none. A coalition is vital to carrying out an armed conflict in the Middle East, and not only is there no coalition, but it appears that at this point, a coalition would be impossible to form.

Well, I got that one right. The “coalition of the willing” was more a joke than anything else. Essentially, the coalition was the U.S. and U.K. Spain was an anomaly more than anything else. Ari Fleischer once tried to fictionalize the coalition’s size by lining up all the “member” nations, and adding up their populations. Of course, coalition “members” included anyone who simply voiced any approval, and almost no “members” gave any actual financing or support. And the population ploy, saying “X millions of people are behind us” was a joke. Spain was a coalition member, but 90% of its population opposed the war. Kuwait was a more active member, but then, duh. Most laughable member: Afghanistan. If the coalition is so weak that you have to include puppet dictators to indicate support, you know you’re in trouble.

The immediately obvious repercussion of the go-it-alone strategy is cost: This war could easily cost $80 billion, probably much more than that. Bush Jr. has already snatched a huge deficit from the jaws of a surplus, and the country can ill-afford to pay for a costly war all by itself. We’re already in big budget trouble, helping to push us into deeper into recession, but a war paid for by the U.S. alone could aggravate the national debt substantially; Bush Jr., in just the course of a few years, could erase more than a decade of red-ink recovery and send us into deficits that would dwarf those of the 80’s.

If anything, this was an understatement.

But the cost would not simply be financial: we would also pay in terms of lost reputation, international respect and influence in world affairs. … Future presidents would be saddled by the body blow to our prestige, likely needing decades to repair the damage and to rebuild worldwide confidence and trust. This kind of irresponsible action could remove us from our already precarious seat of world leadership.

This certainly seems to be coming true.

…there is also the specter of Armageddon rising in the Middle East as a direct result of a U.S. invasion. Already relations are tense, not helped by the confusion and neglect that the Bush administration has used to turn a region grasping for peace into a region torn by escalating conflict and little hope for even a cease-fire. But if the U.S. should invade with opposition from the Arab states, the hope for any peace of any kind will die a swift death. Contrary to the rosy the-Arabs-will-love-us-for-saving-them pipe dream that Cheney has been hawking, the Arab people do not and never have reacted kindly to U.S. intervention, even when their governments allow it; should we go in with everyone opposing us, tempers will flare further still. … Cheney argued that “extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.” Is he truly so utterly naive?

“Armageddon” may have been too much, but again, the jury is out on this one–the region is still unstable, more so then it was before. Certainly the Israeli-Palestine situation has not been helped, despite White House predictions. And I was right on the nose about the reaction of the Iraqis; aside from (a) Kurds, who were a sure thing, and (b) Shiites, who benefitted but still hate us with a passion, the celebrating you have seen was largely engineered by the military and the media. Cheney’s jihad-rethinking mentality has certainly proved wrong.

And let us not forget the Israeli part of the equation: an attack by the U.S. would, without question, be answered by Iraq with missile attacks on Israel, just as it was in the Gulf War. The difference will be that this time, Israel will not sit back and take it without acting–they will retaliate, and that retaliation will bring outrage and reprisals from the Arab world.

I’m glad to say I was dead wrong on that one. Why, I have no idea.

Cheney recently asserted that “many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon, we cannot really gauge.” In other words, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq is even working on nuclear weapons. Furthermore, we have no data to substantiate the claim of a current nuclear program in Iraq. …we would be naive to presume that Cheney or anyone else spouting that rhetoric is not lying through their teeth. Remember the old admonition: “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Boy, was I right on that one. But I didn’t go far enough–like almost everyone else, I believed that Iraq had bio- and chemical WMD stockpiles. Got fooled on that one.

Isn’t this a blatantly obvious pattern? Bush Jr. uses whatever country is best at hand to frighten the American people, and hypes them as a soon-to-be-nuclear terrorist state on the verge of destroying America. This is not done to protect America, it is done to fool the American people into letting Bush Jr. get what he wants. With North Korea, it was to get SDI pushed through; with Iraq, it is to restore his wartime popularity. Now SDI is still being paid for with your taxes (forgot about that, didn’t you? It’s not gone, it just went secret so that you don’t hear about its failures any more). Will you allow yourself to be suckered again?

Now it’s Iran, harboring Al-Qaida and building nukes!. Gee, where did I hear those accusations before? And, hey, don’t pay any attention to the deficit, education, environment, recession, joblessness, corporate scandals and all those other issues hiding behind the curtain. Pay attention to Iran! Dubya’s got a brand new bag!

And then we come to the end game: what is the exit strategy? How long will it take? How many Iraqis (whom the Bush Jr. administration claims to be acting to benefit) will we end up killing? How long will our troops be there? How deeply will we become involved in rooting out everyone there who violently disagrees with our occupation? And how will the nation-building succeed? What guarantees do we have that the moment we extract ourselves, another Saddam Hussein won’t pop up again and bring us back to square one? As far as I can determine, not a single one of these questions has been answered.

And still they haven’t been answered. But Halliburton is doing great in the end game.

And do not forget to ask, “why now?” Why the immediate interest in invading Iraq at this specific time? Why not anytime since the 80’s, when we knew Iraq had developed and was using chemical weapons, and later when we found that Hussein was trying to build biological and nuclear weapons? Why not any time since the Gulf War? Why not when Bush Jr. first took office, and knew as much then about Iraq as now? Why not just after 9-11, when world support was stronger? What is the sudden emergency in the late summer of 2002? The truth of the matter is, there is no more reason to invade Iraq now than there has been in the past decade and more. The only likely reason for the timing is, as I have argued before, because Bush Jr.’s poll numbers are dropping and an election is coming soon.

Karl Rove would probably tell us that it’s not yet time to push for war with Iran or Syria. Wait until mid-year 2004; that’ll both shut up the Democrats and raise the president’s poll numbers just in time. In the meantime, lay the groundwork. Hey, it worked in 2002.

I made some errors in prediction, notably how the region would immediately explode, particularly involving Israel. But overall, I was pretty accurate.

Not that it’ll make any difference….

Thanks to Brian for bringing the good news–Congressional leaders, meeting to hash out the respective Senate and House tax cut plans, have killed the proposed repeal of the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. CNN reported:

In a significant concession, House leaders agreed in principle to accept some, but not all, of the so-called “offsets” needed to bring the tax package down to $350 billion. Those offsets are effectively tax increases. The group also agreed to kill one particularly controversial offset, the elimination of $32 billion in tax breaks for overseas workers.

So you can file your 2555 and get the $80,000 exclusion in April ’05 and forward, as usual. Crisis ended.

Here we go again with conservatives trying to smother all dissenting voices. Michael Moore is producing a new film called “Farenheit 911,” a film reportedly focusing on the ties between the Bush and bin Laden families. Disney, only a few days after picking up the film (via Miramax) after Mel Gibson dumped it, is already the target of massive conservative publicity and mail-in campaigns, threatening to boycott and smear the company if it dares allow Moore a voice.

Go Disney. And boo to Gibson for chickening out.