This just in from Brad Templeton.
A Little Humor At The Governator’s Expense
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Prelinger Photos Of Howard Dean and Yours Truly At Yesterday’s Rally
Rick Prelinger took these pictures of me and Howard Dean at yesterday’s rally in San Francisco.
I’ll have footage from the rally up tomorrow.
Jesse Jackson Defends Howard Dean Against Inaccurate Racial Attacks Launched By Al Sharpton
A friend of mine sent me this article yesterday in an attempt to inform me that Howard Dean was really a racist. I had to just laugh when I read the article, at first, because Dean’s platform is so pro-civil rights and pro-racial equality that it was more than a little funny to me that anyone would be asinine enough to launch those allegations.
But when I read the article, I was more than a little angry at Al Sharpton. He had distorted the truth just enough to make Dean’s intent sound questionable. I decided not to blog the article so as not to perpetuate the negative, inaccurate propoganda. And hoped it would just go away, I guess.
This morning, I awoke to a very pleasant rebuttle by Jesse Jackson, strongly criticizing Al Sharpton for his inaccurate remarks and reaffirming what I already knew about Howard Dean: that he is pro-civil rights and pro-affirmative action.
Thanks, Jesse!
Jackson Urges Democrats to Accentuate the Positive
Calls On All Democrats To Reject Racial Rhetoric
By Jesse Jackson, for t r u t h o u t.
Clearly, Gov. Dean is not anti-black and it is ridiculous for Rev. Sharpton to compare him to President George Bush in that regard. When it comes to addressing issues that directly affect African Americans, and indirectly affects all Americans, Gov. Dean clearly has good record. Up until this point – until I indicated my intention to endorse Gov. Dean – the Democratic campaign has been free of such racial rhetoric. I would recommend that it remain so. Such rhetoric will not contribute to defeating George W. Bush in 2004. Indeed, it will insure his re-election.
Injured American Soldiers Claim They Have “Never Been So Treated Like Dirt”
Just to clarify again — These stories are not about our soldiers not getting proper medical treatment on the front lines. They are about Shrub War Veterans not getting propers medical treatment upon returning home.
But wait! It’s worse than that. Upon re-reading the article, I see that many of these soldiers had existing health problems that should have prevented them from being deployed in the first place. I also see that many of them were forced to reside in substandard housing, and received injuries from incidents like the roof falling in on their own barracks, rather than in active combat.
I hope the citizens of our armed forces can remember this experience long enough to vote the Shrub out next year.
By Mark Benjamin for UPI.
“I joined to serve my country,” said Cpl. Waymond Boyd, 34. He served in Iraq with the National Guard’s 1175 Transportation Company. He has been in medical hold since the end of July.
“It doesn’t make any sense to go over there and risk your life and come back to this,” Boyd said. “It ain’t fair and it ain’t right. I used to be patriotic.” He has served the military for 15 years.
Boyd’s knee and wrist injuries were severe enough that he was evacuated to Germany at the end of July and then sent to Fort Knox. His medical records show doctor appointments around four weeks apart. He said it took him almost two months to get a cast for his wrist, which is so weak he can’t lift 5 pounds or play with his two children. He is taking painkilling drugs and walks with a cane with some difficulty.
Many soldiers at Fort Knox said their injuries and illnesses occurred in Iraq. Some said the rigors of war exacerbated health problems that probably should have prevented them from going in the first place.
Boyd’s X-rays appear to show the damage to his wrist but also bone spurs in his feet that are noted in his medical record before being deployed, but the records say “no health problems noted” before he left…
Sgt. Buena Montgomery has breathing problems since serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. She said she has been able to get to doctors but worries about many others who have not.
“The Army did not prepare for the proper medical care for the soldiers that they knew were going to come back from this war,” Montgomery said. “Now the Army needs to step up to the plate and fix this problem.”
In nearly two dozen interviews conducted over three days, soldiers also described substandard living conditions — though they said conditions had improved recently.
A UPI photographer working on this story without first having cleared his presence with base public affairs officials was detained for several hours for questioning Tuesday and then released. He was told he would need an Army escort for any further visits to the base. He returned to the base accompanied by an Army escort on Wednesday.
This reporter also was admonished that he had to be accompanied by an Army public affairs escort when on base. The interviews had been conducted without the presence of an escort.
After returning from Iraq, some soldiers spent about eight weeks in Spartan, dilapidated World War II-era barracks with leaking roofs, animal infestations and no air conditioning in the Kentucky heat.
“I arrived here and was placed in the World War II barracks,” one soldier wrote in an internal Fort Knox survey of the conditions. “On the 28th of August we moved out. On 30 Aug. the roof collapsed. Had we not moved, someone would be dead,” that soldier wrote…
“They are treating us like second-class citizens,” said Spc. Brian Smith, who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom until Aug. 16 and said he is having trouble seeing doctors at Fort Knox. The Army evacuated him through Germany for stomach problems, among other things. “My brother wants to get in (the military). I am now discouraging him from doing it,” Smith said.
“I have never been so disrespected in my military career,” said Lt. Jullian Goodrum, who has been in the Army Reserve for 16 years. His health problems do not appear to be severe — injured wrists — but he said the medical situation at Fort Knox is bad. He said he waited a month for therapy. “I have never been so treated like dirt.”
Nothing New Going Up Tonight
I’m BEAT with a capital everything tonight guys. I managed to get out and record the Dean rally, but last night was one of those late one’s that I mentioned are known to happen on occasion, so I’m going to go to bed early-like, and I’ll put up a bunch more foo clips, and Daily Show clips, and Howard Dean on 60 minutes, and other goodies in the AM.
Change Of Time/Location For Howard Dean Rally Today
Hi guys!
Okay the rally has been changed to 4pm at Lafayette Park on the corner of Laguna and Clay.
Show up early to help out and get a free T-shirt!
Here’s the message I just received:
Lafayette Park and volunteer meeting point will be Clay & Laguna Streets…
IMPORTANT CHANGE OF VENUE-
Sorry this is all so last minute folks.
The Rally tomorrow at 4:00 pm will be at LAFAYETE PARK at the corner of Laguna and Clay.
Any volunteers who can help I would appreciate it so much.
Sorry for all of the confusion, just problem with permits, satellite trucks, and so on.
This location will not change.
Any further help with promoting the rally would also be helpful, but we really need 20 or so folks to come and help with our advance team. Any one who can come early and volunteer will of course get a free T-shirt (like you all don’t have one already!!)
Send Me Questions For Tom Ammiano
So I just set up an in-person interview with Tom Ammiano for Friday afternoon. I’ll be videotaping the interview and making it available here.
Since the purpose of this interview is to give you a chance to know Tom better, so you’ll vote for him next Tuesday, I thought I’d give you a chance to send me questions ahead of time. Please email me at lisarein@finetuning.com with your questions and I’ll work them into the interview on Friday.
Thanks!
Shrub Administration Officials May Need To Be Subpoenaed In Order To Cooperate With 911 Investigation
I’m not saying it has anything specific to hide, other than the intelligence incompetence that has already been exposed. But what else is the public supposed to think when it hears about this Administration witholding information?
Administration Faces Subpoenas From 9/11 Panel
By Philip Shenon for the New York Times.
The chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks said that the White House was continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he was prepared to subpoena the documents if they were not turned over within weeks.
The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.
“Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach,” Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush’s desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I will not stand for it,” Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.
“That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document.”…
Last year, the White House confirmed news reports that President Bush received a written intelligence report in August 2001, the month before the attacks, that Al Qaeda might try to hijack American passenger planes.
Ms. Snee, the White House spokeswoman, said, “The president has stated a clear policy of support for the commission’s work and, at the direction of the president, the executive branch has dedicated tremendous resources to support the commission, including providing over two million pages of documents.”
After months of stating that it believed subpoenas to the executive branch would not be necessary, the commission voted unanimously this month to issue its first subpoena to the Federal Aviation Administration after determining that the F.A.A. had withheld dozens of boxes of documents involving the Sept. 11 attacks.
The subpoena appeared to be a turning point for the commission and for Mr. Kean, a moderate Republican known for his independence. In a statement on Oct. 15, the commission said it was re-examining “its general policy of relying on document requests rather than subpoenas” as a result of the issues with the F.A.A…
Mr. Kean’s comments on Friday came as another member of the commission, Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, became the first panel member to say publicly that the commission could not complete its work by its May 2004 deadline and the first to accuse the White House of withholding classified information from the panel for purely political reasons.
“It’s obvious that the White House wants to run out the clock here,” he said in an interview in Washington. “It’s Halloween, and we’re still in negotiations with some assistant White House counsel about getting these documents
Shrub Administration Went Around The CIA When Searching For WMD Evidence
CIA May Have Been Out of Iraq Loop
Top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel says some officials in the administration appear to have bypassed agency in gathering Iraq data.
By Greg Miller for The Los Angeles Times.
Officials in the Bush administration appear to have bypassed the CIA and other agencies to collect their own intelligence overseas on Iraq, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday…
Making the case for an expanded inquiry, Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the committee’s vice chairman, said some in the administration appeared to have been collecting intelligence “without the knowledge of the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department or anybody else” in the intelligence community.
Such operations, if verified, would be highly unusual and would bolster critics’ claims that the administration has short-circuited the normal flow of intelligence to search for facts that support its assumptions.
Rockefeller’s comments appeared designed to pressure Republicans to expand the probe’s scope at a time when both parties are struggling to control the course of the investigation as next year’s presidential election looms.
His remarks culminated a week of uncharacteristic outbursts from a committee that has traditionally sought to steer clear of the partisan rancor that often characterizes other legislative panels…
Its activities have been harshly criticized by some in the intelligence community. The office has come under closer scrutiny on Capitol Hill since defense officials acknowledged this year that representatives from Special Plans met with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile and discredited figure involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
At the time, officials said Ghorbanifar was part of a group claiming to have information that might be helpful to the U.S. in the war on terrorism, and that Pentagon officials agreed to the meeting merely to assess that information. Asked to explain the matter during an August news conference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that “people come in offering suggestions or information or possible contacts, and sometimes they’re pursued.”
But the contacts aroused suspicion on Capitol Hill. According to congressional testimony from the 1980s, Ghorbanifar was among those proposing that money from the Reagan administration’s arms-for-hostages deal with Iran be diverted to aid the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Even before that scandal, Ghorbanifar was a notorious figure in the intelligence community. The CIA had issued a “burn notice” to other agencies advising them to have nothing to do with him.
Former CIA Operations Chief Says Shrub Administration Outed Agent On Purpose
Naming of Agent ‘Was Aimed at Discrediting CIA’
By Edward Alden for The Financial Times.
The Bush administration’s exposure of a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency operative was part of a campaign aimed at discrediting US intelligence agencies for not supporting White House claims that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme, former agency officials said yesterday.
In a rare hearing called by Senate Democratic leaders, the officials said the White House engaged in pressure and intimidation aimed at generating intelligence evidence to support the decision to make war on Iraq…
Vince Cannistraro, former CIA operations chief, charged yesterday: “She was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear programme.”
The leak was a way to “demonstrate an underlying contempt for the intelligence community, the CIA in particular”.
He said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the White House had exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to find evidence that Iraq had links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb.
While the intelligence agencies believe their mission is to provide accurate analysis to the president to aid policy decisions, in the case of Iraq “we had policies that were already adopted and they were looking for those selective pieces of intelligence that would support the policy”, Mr Cannistraro said.
In written testimony, he said that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top aide Lewis Libby went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claim. Mr Cheney, he said, “insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence”. Mr Cannistraro said his information came from current agency analysts…
The administration has refused to appoint an independent special counsel on the leak investigation, and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said this week that John Ashcroft, attorney-general and close political ally of President George W. Bush, was involved in the investigation.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who said he voted for Mr Bush and contributed to his campaign, said the White House needed to authorise a more independent investigation. “Unless they come up with a guilty party, it will leave the impression that the administration is playing politics.”