Before I mention too many new developments, I very much want to reiterate one solid point: while the Bush administration did not get telegraphed the exact time, date, location and method of the 9/11, they did in fact receive more than enough information to put them on a higher alert, so that they should have asked for and seen the clearer warnings of 9/11 that never got passed up far enough for them to see–and they could have easily prevented 9/11 had they done so. I reiterate this because I see so many excuses from Bush & Co. getting far too much credence in recent days. Here’s the equation:

From the beginning of the year, they were warned by Clinton administration officials that al Qaeda cells were in fact in the country. On July 6th, the CIA warned of a terrorist attack that would be “catastrophic,” and that would be quantitatively different from anything that had been done to date. In late July, during the Genoa conference, they were made acutely aware of al Qaeda’s plans to use aircraft as weapons. And in the now-infamous August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing (PDF file), it was made clear that there was a great deal of al Qaeda activity in the U.S., and there were hints that they were planning to hijack aircraft.

None of that equals 9/11, as Bush is desperate to point out, but here is what it does equal: they knew that al Qaeda was here, they were up to something, and it would be very bad. That much is not in question, is not challenged. So, their reaction should have been this: shake the trees. Something bad is coming guys, and we want anything and everything even remotely concerned with al Qaeda given top priority. Bush’s people claim they did this, but it is incredibly obvious they did not. If they had, then two key pieces of intelligence would have fallen from the trees, namely: the Phoenix Memo of July 10, sent from Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams, which reported that individuals connected to Osama bin Laden were studying at flight schools in the area, and there was “the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges,” and “[t]he individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.” And then, there was the August 15th arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota, a man with jihadist connections who was training to fly commercial jets, but with no prior flying experience and no explanation of how he got his funding or why he was in the U.S. And it’s not like the agents involved weren’t stressing the intel enough.

That’s what Rice would have seen: two reports within one month of potential terrorists attending flight schools in the U.S., with reports elsewhere that bin Laden was (a) thinking of using airplanes, and (b) planning a “catastrophic” attack on the U.S.

That would have been more than enough for Rice to look at and say, “hmmm, let’s maybe send some FBI agents out to all the other flight schools around the country and see if there are any suspicious, Middle-Eastern flight school students with possible terrorist links.” From there, it would have taken only a few days to find the majority of the suspects, go to high alert, investigate the suspects, give warnings to airports and law enforcement agencies nationwide, and well before 9/11, slap their asses in jail. No 9/11.

This method was proved in the millennium terror attempts, and the perfect job that Clinton’s people did in preventing all of the al Qaeda attacks in Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston and New York. Sure, the one Seattle customs agent Rice pointed to got lucky, but (a) only because she was warned and directed to look for something in a way that Rice never warned FBI agents to do, and (b) that was only one of many attacks that were foiled by the tree-shaking which Richard Clarke described.

“But we didn’t have enough time to get things set up,” the Bush people whine, “233 days wasn’t enough time!” Bull. A few weeks would be all that it took. A massive reorganization of the intelligence community would have been nice (though Bush & Co. were against homeland security and were cutting counter-terrorism funding), but that wasn’t enough to keep the government from working–as Clinton’s people showed us in the millennium terrorist roll-up. The FBI was in place, Clinton’s experienced counter-terrorism people were still there, trying to tell the Bushies to do what they should have done, and the Bush people were in place. Time is not what killed the making of the connection. It was the lack of will to focus on terrorism, the plain dearth of common sense. There was more than enough time.

“But we never got warnings in the form of giant, flashing neon signs that told us the time, date, flight numbers and methods of the hijackings!” the Bush people cry desperately (and repeatedly). Well, if that’s what you need to stop a terrorist attack, then we are in deep shit, because you never get that kind of detailed information in the real world. This excuse is the worst of all, because it is so ridiculous, so pathetic beneath the false formica veneer of its surface, that there is no doubt whatsoever that Rice and Bush know that they are misleading the people, desperate enough to use such a lame excuse because it’s all they’ve got. As I have laid out above, there was more than enough warning. All the pieces were there. It would not have been hard at all to put them together without the benefit of hindsight; all it would have taken was basic competence to put 2 plus 2 together. But because Bush & Co. were do damned focused on missile defense, because terrorism was antithetical to that agenda, and because they were so keen to diss anything even smelling of Clinton, they failed to do what they needed in order to get that second “2” of the equation, and so they failed to add the pieces together. As a result, the terrorists walked right past the otherwise-engaged Bush administration, right onto the airplanes and committed their atrocious act.

There is no excuse folks, and don’t let any of the Bushies tell you otherwise.

Okay, a lot of stuff going on here. First, there is a report that the three Japanese hostages reported on earlier will be released. Apparently, there was “mediation by the Islamic Clerics Committee – an Iraqi Sunni Muslim organization.” The hostage-takers revised their demand to having the Japanese people bring their case to their government to pull out their troops, which makes little sense in two ways: the troops are not there to fight, but to reconstruct, and there is little chance the Japanese people will press their government on the issue, by their request or otherwise. But the hostages will likely be released, so great news.

On the other hand, this seems to have started a trend. This group claims to have an American hostage, and may be one of six Americans–two soldiers and four civilian contractors–who are currently missing after an attack near Baghdad International Airport. This might be the same group that claims to have taken as many as thirty hostages, as they claimed to have killed American soldiers and have the bodies–though they claim to have killed four, not the two reported missing. “We are calling for the withdrawal of American and coalition forces,” they reported; “We have Japanese, Bulgarian, Israeli, American, Spanish and Korean hostages.” They threatened that “[i]f America doesn’t lift its blockade of Falluja their heads will be cut off.”

It looks like this will not be the end of the story, not by far. If they start taking more and more civilian hostages, this could become even more of a morass for the United States and other coalition states.

It may be time for an upgrade.

For a while now, I have been using the freeware/donationware “Kung-Log” app for the Mac to make my blog entries. I am just finishing up grading my final exams (and finishing up suffering from a particularly bad throat cold, but you don’t want to hear about that, trust me), and was planning to reinstall Kung-Log, as it had started to get buggy on me–I could no longer retrieve posted articles to edit, for example, and the comment and format settings would switch at apparently random times.

But now the same people have evolved Kung-Log, changing its name and status: it is now called Ecto, and is now shareware (US$17.95, two-week free trial allowed; visit their web site).

For those of you who are not familiar with this kind of thing, it’s a blog authoring tool. Usually, when you make entries in your blog, you have to do so through your browser, in a web page format using forms and CGI scripts. It can be tedious, requiring jumping between several pages (which can take a while at times), there is no spell-checking (unless you have outfitted your browser that way), certain blog software works differently with some browsers (they’re usually designed to work optimally with Explorer, which I hate), and if the browsers crashes, you’re out of luck, unless you publish often as a draft, which can also be a pain. And forget about uploading images, I couldn’t even figure that one out.

Blog authoring tools are stand-alone apps which are designed to make blogging much easier. They allow easier access to functions, speedy response, and in-line spell-checking, along with easy image uploading–a huge help. For those of you poor souls stuck with a PC, the common tool is W.Bloggar, a clunky tool at best. For the Mac, there has been Kung-Log, and while snazzy, it needed a cleaning-up–and it got that, with the new version, Ecto.

Ecto is very similar in form to Kung-Log. Most of the features are the same, though many have morphed a little bit. For example, the various text windows (Main, Continuation, Summary) have been divided into tabs; the categories are now a check-box list, not a pull-down menu; the recent entries and drafts have both been removed from tabbed placements in the slide-out drawer, and thrown together into a single window, which is now searchable (a la iTunes, though the entry with the search term is highlighted, and the list does not reduce to found entries only); the upload manager has a few more features; and there is now a status window that tells you what is going on.

Another feature brought over from Kung-Log is the ability to set HTML tags. Let’s say you like to put quotes from others in blockquotes, in italics. This would usually require typing “blockquotes” and “em” in brackets before the quote, and the ending versions (with a slash before the command) at the end of the quote. You can set such HTML tags in Kung-Log/Ecto, along with your own hotkey commands; just select the text you want to affect, and type the command. Ecto will automatically place the HTML for you.

The same is true for images, which are a snap here. First, place the cursor where you want the picture to go. Open the Upload Manager window, drag and drop an image (or other) file onto the preview window, select your settings (alternate text, alignment, borders, margins, etc,), then click Upload. Ecto automatically sends the image up to your web site, and then places the required HTML tags in your entry where you left the cursor. This is perhaps one of the most indispensable features of the program if you want to include photos in your blog like I do.

There is another feature which, for a while, I mistook as a bug: in Kung-Log, when I set the URLs to Ping (this is a feature that alerts blog monitoring web sites when you post a new entry; you can add more monitoring sites manually), the new settings disappeared when I quit and returned later. This happened with Ecto also, but my Upload Image settings seemed to have reset as well. I finally figured out that to avoid this happening, you have to change the settings, then go to the Draft menu and select “Save Settings.” I don’t like this bit, as it struck me as counter-intuitive, but it seems to be just a difference of opinion between myself and other users; according to the software author, it is set up this way at the request of users who use different settings, but only by exception.

New features in Ecto: the new windows, the redesign of the buttons, tabs, drawers and palettes; a very easy setup procedure, you just have to type the blog’s URL, your username and your password, and Ecto does the rest; inter-operability with iPhoto for photo placement (I haven’t tried this yet), to go along with the long-standing feature of including a note of what you’re playing on iTunes at the time of posting; and very importantly, a now truly-WYSIWYG preview window (Kung-Log’s was not in the least accurate). Another improvement is better save features. In Kung-Log, the app went into spinning-beachball wait mode when it was posting an entry, something which could take some time. Ecto does this in the background, allowing you to get on to the next task immediately.

Ecto can post in English as well as Japanese, French and German, can switch between brushed metal and OS X eye-candy skins, is highly customizable and and has tons of features, many of which I haven’t explored yet. It can post to Movable Type, TypePad, Metaweblog, Blogger, WordPress, MarkDown, and Nucleus weblog platforms. If you blog a lot on your Mac, it can soon become something you can’t live without. I’ll very likely be buying the upgrade when the trial runs out, save if some hairy bug presents itself before then, which I doubt.

As I mentioned before, one thing that was clear in Rice’s testimony was that she wanted to bring the point home on a set of talking points, repeating them several times so that they were certain to make the sound-bite reel. Ones that stood out included that Bush met with CIA chief and other principles almost every day; there was no “silver bullet” that would have stopped 9/11; there were “structural problems” that were the real cause of the problem (she mentioned this a few dozen times); the August 6th PDB was “historical” in nature, not a warning; that Clarke was responsible for a lot (implying that he was more to blame), and the like.

But the one point that stuck out to me was the idea that the Bush administration was not at fault because there was no specific warning about 9/11, that we did not get the specific date, time, location and method of the attack. Commission member James R. Thompson (R) repeated that, saying that we didn’t know “when where and how” the attacks would come. The attacks were too vague, Rice pounded home.

I mean, come on. If we can only stop attacks if we have the exact plans telegraphed to us, then we are in huge trouble. It’s a shameless red herring, saying that we didn’t have good enough intel.

Let’s review what we did know.

• On January 25th, Clarke told Rice that there were al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S., and gave warnings that al Qaeda was the greatest terrorist threat facing the U.S.
• In the summer of 2001, the FBI uncovered the fact that al Qaeda operatives were in the U.S., and were planning an attack using airplanes, according to Sibel Edmonds.
• On July 6th, the CIA warned of a terrorist attack that would be “catastrophic,” and that would be quantitatively different from anything that had been done to date.
• On July 10th, Phoenix, AZ FBI agent Kenneth Williams reported that individuals connected to Osama bin Laden were studying at flight schools in the area, and there was “the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges,” and “[t]he individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.” [this point added in edit]
• On July 20-22, Rice and Bush were both at an economic summit in Genoa, Italy, where there was specific intelligence about bin Laden using jet liners to attack the summit; the threat was taken so seriously that there were anti-aircraft batteries deployed in the city, and Bush spent the night on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.
• On August 6th, the PDB was titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”
• On August 16th, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota on immigration charges, a man who had jihadist connections, who had been in a flight school in Minnesota trying to learn how to fly a commercial jetliner despite having no prior training, had no explanation for the funds in his bank account, and no explanation for why he was in the United States. The Minnesota FBI was trying to pursue the matter, pushing a reluctant Washington FBI bureau.
• And on September 4, Richard Clarke sent Rice a memo warning Rice “to imagine a day after hundreds of Americans lay dead at home and abroad after a terrorist attack.”

And that’s just the warnings that we’ve been told about. Clearly, there could be and probably are warnings that are still classified and hidden by the Bush administration (like the August 6th PDB, the title of which was classified until yesterday).

Knowing all of this, it becomes all but impossible to imagine that the September 11 attacks were not preventable. It is a fact that from the start, the Bush administration did not take the terrorism threat very seriously, put major emphasis on missile defense, and—just before 9/11—they cut counter-terrorism funding.

However, if Rice and Bush had taken the threat seriously from the start, alerts could have been put out to intelligence agencies to be alert for anything possibly related to this (as commission member Gorelick pointed out, they were not given any such warnings or instructions). In July, Rice had sufficient warnings that something was coming along, such that if she had “shaken the tree” in earnest, if she had told the FBI and CIA to go on high alert and pass on all warnings, they would have learned about the Edmonds tapes, and would have known something big was coming–and then Zacarias Moussaoui would have stuck out like a gigantic sore thumb. With him, they would have had a potential terrorist training for jet piloting; that would have led them to check pilot training schools across the U.S. for others like him, they would have found most of the other hijackers, and could have rolled up the entire operation with weeks to spare.

This is not pie-in-the-sky or pure hindsight, this is real information that could have been passed on, and probably would have been under Gore because he would have carried on with Clinton policies that called for this kind of thing.

We were warned. We did have information specific enough to lead us to find the terrorists. This was not an inevitable attack. Rice screwed up. Bush blew it. It’s as simple as that.

More details have come out about the three Japanese hostages held in Japan, some of them harrowing:

“The government will do its utmost so that those who have become hostages will be safely released as soon as possible,” he said, adding there is “no reason” for Japan to withdraw troops that are conducting humanitarian reconstruction aid for Iraqi people. …

Armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the kidnappers shouted “Allahu akbar” — God is great — in the video and held knives to the throats of the Japanese. …

In the full video, four masked men point knives and swords at the blindfolded captives as they lay on the floor of a room with concrete walls.

At one point, a gunman holds a knife to the throat of one of the men, whose blindfold has been removed; his eyes widen in panic and he struggles to try to get free. The woman screams and weeps.

A Senior SDF (Self-Defense Forces) official said, “We could be laughed at by other countries if we run away.” Perhaps true enough, but it seems to me that this is not really the point. I think that it is a foregone conclusion that Japan will not agree to any sort of pullout in exchange for the hostages. The question is whether the hostage-takers, if they can even be contacted, will agree to anything less than a troop pullout as a reason for not killing the hostages.

And if the hostages are killed, especially if it done in a way that would shock the Japanese people–especially with such personal information, names and faces and families to associate with the victims–what will be the political fallout, not just for the current Koizumi government, but for the whole right-wing-led movement to remilitarize Japan?

Interestingly, the news reports in Japan seem to be emphasizing the fact that this terrorist group, calling themselves the “Mujahedeen Brigades,” is not on the list of known terrorist groups, and seem to be suggesting that this is not truly a political terrorist action, but rather one done for money or other non-political reasons.

I spoke to two Japanese acquaintances about the issue, one who supported sending the SDF forces, the other against. Both mentioned that the three people who went there went of their own volition, and they knew the risks; therefore, although this is a terrible thing, it is not really related to the SDF forces being in Japan. The target–three civilians–didn’t seem to make sense. Japan’s SDF forces, while armed, are only doing reconstruction work, so why target Japan? My friend who supported the SDF being there said that killing these three civilians wouldn’t change their mind on sending people to help reconstruct Iraq, though they did say that if SDF forces became the targets, they might change their opinion because it would clearly be too dangerous.

One factor that plays into this matter laterally is the nature of the SDF forces sent overseas. This is a political hot potato in Japan, though the lines are sometimes blurred. My friend who supported the SDF being in Iraq saw them as purely reconstruction workers, and while armed, armed only for self-defense. That much is of course true, but there are deeper politics involved. If the forces are only there for reconstruction, then why send military troops? My own belief is that this is a gradated political effort to transform Japan’s constitutionally mandated self-defense-only military stance into one that allows Japanese troops to go overseas–right now, just a fledgling step to do reconstruction, but as time goes on, perhaps they will take on more of a military role–one which would naturally evolve as armed Japanese soldiers are sent into combat zones.

So while I agree that the hostage situation is not really connected to the political situation per se, and the hostage takers chose a strange and perhaps even meaningless or powerless manner to effect change, this situation is a direct consequence of changing Japan’s military stance.

Comments?

Soon as I get the time, I will add this site to my Link Board. The Center for American Progress really does a bang-up job of highlighting information that you need to know to deal with the constant stream of disinformation and lies coming out of the Bush White House.

Most recently: their coverage of the Rice testimony before the 9/11 commission, and specifically the August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing entitled, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.’The highlights:

* The Bush administration hid the PDB, probably because it was called “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” That is a bit embarrassing. “The American public deserves to know what President Bush knew and when.” Right on.

* There were “explicit and repeated warnings about al Qaeda attacks.” Rice claimed that the FBI sent warnings to field offices, but the commission member could find not a single piece of evidence to verify this.

* The administration did little or nothing to combat terrorism before 9/11. The administration even tried to cut counterterrorism funding.

I have been watching the Rice testimony (it’s still not over right now) before the 9/11 Commission, and it has been both interesting and predictable. It has been predictable as Rice has given the same old stale excuses about why they didn’t do anything: they only had 233 days, there were structural problems that kept the agencies from communicating, there was never any specific information about al Qaeda attacks, and no matter when they could have started to do anything, there just wasn’t any time to do anything that could have prevented 9/11.

On the other hand, there have been some surprises, and a little declassification, such as the fact that a PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) while Bush was on vacation in Crawford was titled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States.” Rice tried to dismiss this as a “historical document,” that it did not address potential threats but just covered what bin Laden had done in the past. This PDB is still not declassified, and despite many requests by the Democratic members to declassify it, Rice hemmed and hawed and avoided answering directly. Obviously if this memo were declassified, there would be some pretty damaging information there.

Rice also kept saying that the threats were vague, and that she would have “moved heaven and earth” to stop the attacks if they had known the day, the targets, and the manner of the attacks. The thing is, one almost never gets that kind of detailed information. If you have to be telegraphed such detailed info in order to stop an attack, then you are pretty undeniably incompetent–a responsible and even halfway competent administration would take warnings, just like the ones it did receive, and work to locate more detailed information, and institute security measures that could be used to thwart the attack. Rice’s repeated claims that there was nothing she or anyone else could have done come across as self-serving, to say the least.

A great moment was when Bob Kerrey asked about Bush being “tired of swatting flies,” which Rice had spoken of time and again, and he blew that simpering platitude out of the water by asking Rice exactly which flies had he swatted–pointing out that Bush could not have tired of something he hadn’t done yet. Rice, of course, avoided the question. Kerrey’s question, hopefully, clarified to the public that these kinds of sound bites that Rice was clearly trying to put out there for the media to pick up (“swatting flies,” “structural problems,” “no silver bullet”) really are empty and meaningless.

There is a lot of information here to go over, and I’m sure we’ll be going over a lot of this very soon.

UPDATE: The Commission’s head stated that they have made a direct request to the White House to declassify the PDB, and that will be answered perhaps by next week.

Three Japanese civilians Japanese civilians have been kidnaped in Iraq, along with seven or eight South Koreans. The three Japanese are being focused on now, as a videotape has been released (and shown on NHK national television) showing their identities, along with a message of extortion forwarded by Al-Jazeera: “Three of your sons have fallen into our hands. We offer you two choices: either pull out your forces, or we will burn them alive. We give you three days starting the day this tape is broadcast.”

The three, two men and one woman, have been identified as Noriaki Imai (18), Soichiro Koriyama (32) and Nahoko Takato (34).

This will be an extremely difficult problem for Prime Minister Koizumi, as the story of these three Japanese citizens will be closely followed, and he and his policy to support the Iraq war and sending Japanese military (Self-Defense Forces, or SDF) to battle zones. If the Japanese people are faced with three of their citizens, with names and faces, being burned alive as sacrifices to Koizumi’s militaristic policies, then Koizumi’s government will be faced with a grave test to justify themselves.

This is significant because Koizumi and others have been pressing for Japan to take a much more militaristic stance, changing the post-war constitution (or sidestepping it) to allow Japan to send armed troops overseas and have more than just defensive forces. The conservatives here have long been pressing hard for this, with the right-wing Yomiuri media corporation especially using its media outlets to popularize the campaign.

But when you do things like that, things like this happen. Until now, the Japanese people have uneasily acquiesced to this campaign–but faced with a terrorist response with such a personal face, it is uncertain how the Japanese people will respond to all of this.

UPDATE: The seven South Koreans, evangelical Christian ministers, have been freed. Two Arab men have also been kidnaped, and at least one had a U.S. driver’s license, and attended school in the U.S. The Japanese government has already stated publicly that it will not withdraw its troops, saying it has “no reason” to do so.

This information on the hostages comes from Japan Today:

Koriyama, 32, is a freelance journalist from Miyazaki Prefecture. The video footage showed his staff identification card from Japanese magazine Weekly Asahi.

The Asahi Shimbun said Koriyama is currently not contracted to the company but has frequented the office due to personal ties with editors there. He had provided photos for the weekly magazine by contract on several occasions.

Takato, 34, is a volunteer worker from Chitose, Hokkaido. Her mother Kyoko said on Thursday night, “That is her in the footage. I believe the Foreign Ministry will contact us later.”

Imai, 18, is also from Hokkaido. His family said he is a friend of Takato’s and that he got to know Koriyama in Amman. His mother confirmed the man in the video is her son, and said he was scheduled to return around April 17-18.

I don’t usually blog on this topic, but the synchronicity of these two stories struck me as interesting.

First we have a woman from Utah who, when told it was necessary by her doctors, refused to undergo a C-section to give birth to her twins. Finally, she did undergo a C-section, but because of her delay, as well as the drugs in her system, one of the children was stillborn. Now, I believe her when she says that she did not avoid the C-section because she didn’t want the scar–apparently she had had two C-sections before–but certainly she was negligent to ignore the doctors’ advice (unless claims of mental incompetence are true, which I sort of doubt in a very uninformed way), and more so for using alcohol and illegal drugs, which even a person who is relatively incompetent should know is not kosher.

But the interesting contrast comes from a story from Mexico, where a woman not only had a C-section to give birth to a healthy child (she had lost a previous child in labor), but–because the baby was not coming naturally, and because she was 8 hours from a hospital, in a rural area with no electricity and no clean water–and I presume also there was no one else present or willing to do it–she performed the C-section on herself with a kitchen knife after downing three small glasses of tequila. Now that is an amazing feat, and demonstrative of what lengths a parent will go to in order to preserve a child. That woman deserves a medal.

Well, with the official web site going up and down on a daily basis, it might be better to just link directly to the main blog pages of the top 3 shows on AAR:

The O’Franken Factor Blog
The Majority Report Blog
The Randi Rhodes Web Site

Oh, and by the way–Nader failed to get enough signatures in one day to qualify for the ballot in Oregon, of all states. Couldn’t even get 1,000 people to sign their names for him in a single day. That’s saying something. So Nader will have to fall back on the option to get 15,000 signatures within a 3-month period. Too bad.

New reports from Iraq report that 12 marines have died in the fighting in Ar Ramadi, a city about 40 km west of Al Fallujah, which is about 50 km west of Baghdad. This is in addition to the deaths in Fallujah, after U.S. forces closed in on the city (previously left alone to fester as an anti-coalition stronghold) in response to the killing of Marines and civilian contractors (mercenaries) in the area. Fighting is also going on in the Sadr City slums, sparked by the arrest of the deputy of the Shiite cleric al-Sadr.

The thing is, this fighting is not a winding down of anything, nor is it a climax–it is just the beginning of a new round of unrest and rebellion, and it is just going to get worse. It will get worse when troop rotation brings in a majority of reservists (as opposed to active-duty troops), it will get worse in the heat of the oncoming summer, and it will get worse as the people of Iraq become more and more unwilling to live under U.S. command.

As noted a few posts ago, Bush’s flacks have been spinning most of the news coming out of Iraq, trying to establish the talking points of (a) we’re greeted as liberators, not occupiers; (b) we’re improving things and the infrastructure is better now than it was under Saddam; and (c) things are getting better, they’re under control, we’re winning the peace, and we’re ready to hand the whole thing over to the Iraqis well in time for the election. However, the truth of the matter is that most Iraqis, even those ecstatic over the ouster of Hussein, want us gone, completely, not with 14 permanent military bases, not with a pronounced 10-year military presence, and not even with any control over the new government–they just want us gone, and now radical groups are taking up arms and shooting at our soldiers.

With the recent fighting in Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, and Najaf, the death toll for the month of April is up to 37 just for the first six days of the month, making April so far the bloodiest month for U.S. and coalition forces since the invasion began last March, with an average 6 or so deaths per day. And this is just the beginning of a bloody new uprising. This is decidedly not going our way.

Administration officials try to play this down, of course, and have been for some time. This little snippet is from Fox News’ Brit Hume last August:

California Roughly Same Size As Iraq

Two hundred and seventy seven U.S. soldiers have now died in Iraq, which means that, statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California…which is roughly the same geographical size. The most recent statistics indicate California has more than 2,300 homicides each year, which means about 6.6 murders each day. Meanwhile, U.S. troops have been in Iraq for 160 days, which means they are incurring about 1.7, including illness and accidents, each day.

What Hume failed to mention is that California has a population of 34 million people, as opposed to 145,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. That means that one out of every 14,783 people in California is murdered each year, as opposed to one out of every 206 now in Iraq–a 72-to-1 disparity. When told of this, Hume blithely replied, “Admittedly it was a crude comparison, but it was illustrative of something.” Yes indeed. It was illustrative of the fact that Hume is an idiot.

Iraq may very well be a far bigger issue this November than we thought.

This from Talking Points Memo. I was flabbergasted, appalled and outraged when I read it.

Remember the speech Condi Rice was supposed to have made on 9/11 but got interrupted by the terrorist attacks? A speech on the threats that faced the nation, in which she was pushing mainly for missile defense, and barely mentioned terrorism at all except as a reason to suspect states like Iraq?

The 9/11 commission told the White House they wanted to see the speech.

The White House said “no.”

Why? It’s confidential. That’s right. A speech that Condi Rice was going to make at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a speech that would have been 100% available to anyone who wanted to get ahold of it after she made it–it is now a state secret. Coincidentally, it is announced as classified just a few days before Rice is scheduled to testify before the 9/11 Commission and explain how Richard Clarke was wrong about how she and the Bush administration were so intently focused on al Qaeda as she has claimed–a defense that would be slightly difficult to support in the light of her giving a speech on 9/11 that essentially dismissed terrorism as the most serious–or even a fairly serious–threat.

How far does Bush think he can go in the outrageous behavior?

Today marks one full year since the inauguration of this blog site. Many thanks to all of those who visit! I plan to continue for however many years to come as I can manage, posting every day.

“The United Nations representative is there now to work on the — on a — on to whom we transfer sovereignty. I mean, in other words, it’s one thing to decide to transfer. We’re now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty.”

–Bush answering a reporter’s question in Charlotte, North Carolina, April 5, 2004

What the heck does that mean?

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has released the results of their latest survey: Bush’s popularity rating has (finally!) fallen to a new low of 43%, the lowest Bush has ever polled at. The bad news is that Pew has always been on the low side, and it is too early yet to tell if this is a blip or a new trend. One encouraging piece of corroborating evidence is that Zogby has had him at 46% and 47% over the past several weeks, though they have often been a low poll too. So I am watchfully hopeful.

The poll adds that public approval of Bush’s handling of Iraq has fallen to 40%, which will probably only fall further as the death toll sadly and inevitably mounts. Support for Bush on the economy is down to 39%, and his energy policy gets only 29%, undoubtedly not helped greatly by high gas prices.

At the same time, low poll numbers could be a bit scary, for reasons that I have spoken of for a long time now: we know that Bush and Cheney have no problem with committing extreme acts for their political benefit, and the only thing that has ever brought Bush’s poll numbers up were terrorist attacks, starting a war, and capturing an enemy–and if they can’t (or haven’t) capture(d) Osama bin Laden, then what will they do if things become desperate for them?

In the meantime, I will take these poll numbers as a good sign.

It is hard to see just a few days go by without another set of lies and scams perpetrated by the Bush people, and remember, people, these are just the ones we find out about–there are without doubt many more.

The first one is all too public, the failing of the Bush administration to manage postwar Iraq. Their failure to have a coherent postwar strategy, their arrogant posturing and just plain stupidity making a far more respectable U.N. force to keep the peace, and Bush’s desperate rush to hand over power so he can pretend that U.S. troops aren’t there (while they will really be there for at least another decade), have all led to this carnage we see today.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed now number 15 for the month of April (one other foreign soldier died as well), for an average of 3.2 Coalition troops killed per day–which is a startling number. That’s just slightly behind the 3.6 per day killed in November, and that was when helicopters full of soldiers got shot down–this month our people are getting killed one by one, by bombs and in combat. And if you go past last November, this month so far has been bloodier for our troops than any month since the invasion began last March.

And that is before the summer heat starts up, and before a major turnover of troops will make a majority of troops reservists, minimally trained, the first time practically untrained soldiers have outnumbered active-duty troops. That, along with growing resentment of American troops in Iraq by the Iraqis, promises to make this quagmire bloodier and bloodier still.

But at least we have the comfort of knowing that the sacrifice of our young fighting forces will not be allowed to work against the election campaign of George W. Bush. Why? Because he’s stacked the Iraq press office with a very large number of GOP staffers whose job it is to spin the Iraq news to benefit Bush’s election run. “One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush’s re-election effort with Iraq a top concern.”

And Bush’s corruption of public information to help him get elected doesn’t stop in Baghdad. Remember the 9/11 commission? Remember how Bush, through Dennis Hastert, did everything possible to stop the 9/11 commission from getting a 2-month extension because they were terrified of the investigation report coming out too close to the November elections? Well, problem solved. You won’t get a chance to see the 9/11 commission report before the election, if Bush gets his way. They are saying that they will have to put the report through a “vetting” process, and they may not get finished with it until after the election.

But with luck, we’ll get a look at what they’ve found through leaks, and that is the fact (which I’ve blogged on recently) that the 9/11 attack “were probably preventable.” Any wonder the Bush White House–who before were incredibly anxious to get the report out asap and tried to block a 2-month extension the commission called for–is now saying that it’ll take so much time they won’t be able to say anything before the election. What a surprise.

And then we have piece of evidence #26 that Bush was planning to invade Iraq from early on: a former British ambassador reported that just nine days after 9/11, Bush told Blair that “when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.” Remember how the Bush people blasted Paul O’Neill, smearing him as some kind of psychotic, greedy liar because he claimed Bush was focused on invading Iraq from long before 9/11? Same for Richard Clarke? What will they say about this former British ambassador? Will they call him a raving loony? How many more ultimately respectable, intelligent and formidable men and women will Bush’s people have to smear before people get wise to the lies?

And while we’re talking about how Bush’s people are smearing those who dare criticize them, look at the list of people who served the Bush administration that they are now attacking: Paul O’Neill, Joseph Smith, Lawrence Lindsay, Anthony Zinni, Eric Shinseki, Richard Foster, John DiIulio, Scott Ritter, and Richard Clarke. That’s a lot of people, and that’s just the A-list, but my point is this: if so many people who used to work for Bush are all liars, profiteers, child molesters, psychotics and so on–what does this say about the quality of people working for the Bush administration? These are the smart, honorable and dignified people Bush promised to surround himself with? No, the fact is, these are the honorable people about which none of the Bush smears are true, which is why they all had to leave–there’s no place for people of such integrity in Bush’s White House.

And closing for today before I overload once again (too late!), now we also find out that Bush’s people sent out an email to the troops telling them to lie about the environment whenever asked about it, to wit: “global warming has not been proved, air quality is ‘getting better’, the world’s forests are ‘spreading, not deadening’, oil reserves are ‘increasing, not decreasing’, and the ‘world’s water is cleaner and reaching more people.'” The source of these claims? A research institute funded by Mobil Oil. A Republican strategist behind most of this is reported to have said, “There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.” Which is the hallmark of Bush’s scientific policy: fight the science. Make sure the ideology wins out. Science proves Bush wrong? Rewrite the report. It’s as simple as that!

Oy. Yet more Outrage Overload. How much longer can this go on?

Well, if you visit the Air America Radio web site, you’ll find that it is pretty much back to what is was supposed to be at the start. The sections that were there when AAR started, including Member Login, Audio Archives, and Blogs, have now returned. Things seem to be getting smoothed out over there, and the streaming audio is getting better, too. Still a few “Tune back during regular broadcast hours” during broadcast hours, but now at least I don’t get my stream cut off every hour or so.

The audio archives, by the way, still don’t have anything in them–but it should be coming soon. I’d love to be able to hear the entire Michael Moore interview at last, and because of the timing of The Majority Report (during my working hours) and there being no repeat broadcast of that show, I haven’t heard as much of that show as I’d have liked.

One of the shows said that San Francisco’s radio station should be starting within a few weeks, and I understand that San Jose is coming too; San Jose may be necessary for south peninsula listeners because, as my father tells it, the SF station may be FM and might not have the reach that AM stations do.

More as it comes in.

UPDATE: And now it’s back to the abbreviated version. Ah well. I’ll let you know when it comes back.

Turnout, turnout, turnout. Remember, the mantra of this site until election day. And Kerry is showing strongly in that area. People are turning out in huge numbers to contribute to Kerry’s campaign–and I joined them today as well. As they have announced online, they have been breaking records–Democrat and Republican records alike–for fundraising. The most raised in any month ($38 million in March), the most grassroots (regular folk) contributions per quarter (355,000), and records for the most raised online for the quarter or for a specific day ($2.6 million on March 4th).

Let’s keep up the donations, folks, he’s still more than $100 million behind behemoth Bush, who didn’t have to spend a dime of his own during the primaries (but he spent lots of your tax dollars using Air Force One to buzz spectators at NASCAR), and now has a $170 million war chest. So while Kerry is catching up fast, he still needs our help–I just pitched in a hundred bucks, what can you give? Post a comment if you gave, tell us how much and add your encouragement!

Here’s how: go to Kerry’s main page, click on the Make a Contribution button, and input your name, address, occupation and credit card information. Select the amount you’d like to contribute.

After that, you’ll get a thank you page:

And you can click on the option to get a printable receipt (though it’s not tax-deductible).

So go for it!

It’s nice to see one’s views vindicated every once in a while. About 9 months ago, I blogged on my opinion that the drop in music sales was not due to people downloading music across the file sharing networks. The RIAA claims that their sales have been dropping for close to four years now because of the music pirates. I pointed out that the sales of music CDs began dropping when the economy turned bad and we dipped into a recession–hardly something that requires a rocket scientist to figure out. I also pointed out that people were using Napster like crazy before 2000, and music sales were booming then.

Well, a new study–this one, for a change, not paid for by the music industry–has found there there is really no connection between piracy and falling music sales. They closely monitored levels of illegal music downloads and legal music sales, and found that there was no correlation between the two. When illegal downloading spiked, music sales were unaffected–or if there was an effect, it was at a 5000-to-1 ratio, meaning that 5000 people would have to download a song before one person decided not to buy it legally. People who download and don’t buy are people who would not have bought the music anyway. That doesn’t make it legal, or right, but it does show that the RIAA’s claim is bogus and their vehement crackdown is wholly unjustified by the terms they themselves claim.

The RIAA discounts this, pointing to the studies they have done–but their studies are based on surveys, where people are asked about whether they commit crimes or not. The authors of the new study point out that people will not always answer such questions honestly.

And let’s not forget, the RIAA aren’t exactly saints themselves; you should really read this very well-written essay by Orson Scott Card on the subject; the RIAA has, for a very long time, ripped off artists to no end.

Caught this nice image on the way home the other day, the sun setting behind a cherry blossom tree. The trees are in full blossom in Tokyo now, and the trees are very popular, and are all around. It’s a beautiful time, even though the past few days of rain have subdued the trees a bit.