Me: Frank Lynch

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Did Kerry endorse "outsourcing" on Larry King when it was happening? One of the defenses against Kerry's charge is something he said on CNN's Larry King Live on December 14, 2001. Here's what they cite:

"But for the moment, what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way."

Given the calendar, that would sound like he was endorsing the outsourcing. But let's step back in two directions for context. First, let's look at the entire exchange from the transcript, and then secondly, ask ourselves if Kerry knew as much as the decision makers did when they pursued outsourcing.

First, the full exchange from the transcript:

CALLER: Hello. Yes, I would like to ask the panel why they don't use napalm or flamethrowers on those tunnels and caves up there in Afghanistan?

KING: Senator Kerry?

CALLER: My golly, I think they could smoke him out.

KING: Senator Kerry?

KERRY: Well, I think it depends on where you are tactically. They may well be doing that at some point in time. But for the moment, what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.

KING: Congressman Cunningham, what do you think of that question?

CUNNINGHAM: I think Senator Kerry is right on the mark. To use a flamethrower, you've got to get right into the area close in. And plus, it doesn't penetrate that deep in those tunnels. You've got to go in there after him. So I think you have to neutralize that threat. And then you can get him out in a lot of different, various ways including what the gentleman spoke about.

KING: General Joulwan, what are your thoughts?

JOULWAN: Well, I think what you are seeing here are laser- designated bombs going in that are highly effective. In fact, I think much more effective than napalm will be given the extent of these tunnels. You may see some of this when the troops get in there, you have troops on the ground. But right now, I think the laser- designated bombs are doing a great job.

Kerry's main concern here is to point out the dangers to our men of using flame throwers and so on... He's not specific about what he's thinking when he says "what we are doing" — he may be referring to the overall progress of the war as much as any specific tactic. (And where were we at that point? VP Cheney, on November 29, said he/we thought OBL was in the general area of Tora Bora. News accounts didn't start talking about OBL not being in Tora Bora until shortly after Kerry made this statement. So Kerry certainly didn't know the effort wasn't going to nab OBL.)

What did Kerry know when he made these statements, which some have said endorsed the strategy? It's doubtful he knew as much as Tommy Franks did, or even the President. He was no longer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he'd moved to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and wouldn't have been receiving all the info that either Franks or Bush was getting. This Knight-Ridder article (the one I wrote about last night) makes it clear that "Franks and other top officials ignored warnings" regarding the effectiveness of the strategy. Highly unlikely that Kerry knew this when he appeared on Larry King Live.

This more or less is the same as Bush's claim that "My opponent looked at the same intelligence I looked at and declared in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat." The initial assumption, that Kerry was in the loop, is wrong. So you can't take what Kerry said as an endorsement, because even if he was talking specifically about outsourcing it, he didn't know what Bush and his commanders knew.
Link 11:19 AM Home

Kerry and Bush are again even in the Zogby poll, tied 48-48. This is a one-point gain for Bush over yesterday's release, meaning that Saturday's participants (newly included) were more positive towards Bush than Wednesday's (newly excluded), by about 3%-points. It may be the impact of the new tape from Osama Bin Laden eclipsing al Qa Qaa in voters' minds, something I'm sure the Bush campaign welcomes. Wednesday's participants were also probably thinking more about the rumored pending request for an additional $70 billion for the war. I don't know how many news events could have had that effect, but Bush is playing the tape to his advantage. Odd, that, since we might have had OBL by now if we didn't veer off the road and head to Iraq. This is the guy Bush said he's not concerned with. The other point worth mentioning is that Zogby says the undecideds are down to 2%. Turn out, people, and bring your friends.
Link 9:47 AM Home

What really happened in Tora Bora? Kerry was right. Knight-Ridder asked reporters who were there:

Their reporting found that Franks and other top officials ignored warnings from their own and allied military and intelligence officers that the combination of precision bombing, special operations forces and Afghan forces that had driven the Taliban from northern Afghanistan might not work in the heartland of the country's dominant Pashtun tribe.

While more than 1,200 U.S. Marines sat at an abandoned air base in the desert 80 miles away, Franks and other commanders relied on three Afghan warlords and a small number of American, British and Australian special forces to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from escaping across the mountains into Pakistan.

"We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora...," [Tommy] Franks wrote.

Military and intelligence officials had warned Franks and others that the two main Afghan commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman, couldn't be trusted, and they proved to be correct. They were slow to move their troops into place and didn't attack until four days after American planes began bombing - leaving time for al-Qaida leaders to escape and leaving behind a rear guard of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters.

Bin Laden may not actually have been there, as the article states. But at the time the US thought he was, based on phone conversations... And in that situation, this is the operation we launched. About a thousand al Qaeda fighters got away.

Read it all, and remember how Dick Cheney tried to "correct" the record (just like he did about Saddam Hussein reconstituting his nuclear weapons, Mohammed Atta meeting Iraqi intelligence in Prague, and so on). Really, the way the Bushies try to twist history is reprehensible. Shouldn't it be impeachable?
Link 11:45 PM Home

NOW I'll react to the Osama Bin Laden tape. I've been slow to react because I'm not sure how appropriate it is to comment on a 5-minute extract from a 13- minute tape. No one really knows what's in the remaining eight minutes, so to speculate on what he was trying to say and accomplish without knowing what else is there has struck me as pointless. (Likewise, I'm amused by those who have insisted that he must have seen Fahrenheit 9/11, based on a reference to Bush's classroom behavior, when the footage has been available on the Internet for a loooong time, and frequently discussed.)

But I will go out on a limb and say...

1. It may help neither candidate. Americans were reminded of him by Kerry in the debates, and they were well- watched.
    
2. If it were to help either side without any additional pushing from the candidates and/or their camps, I would think it would be Kerry more than Bush. My reason for this is that it's been Kerry who's been reminding America of who attacked us, not Bush, and he did it in all three debates. (Remember Debate I? Bush's defensive, "I know we were attacked by Osama Bin Laden...") Secondly, I think Americans are realizing what a debacle Iraq has turned into, and are looking to focus elsewhere in the war on terror.
    
3. If it somehow works to Bush's advantage, I think it will be to the Bush's campaign's "credit" (if you will) for playing on the news for political purposes.

On top of that, Josh Marshall offered a valuable comparison of the immediate reactions of John Kerry and George Bush to the Friday tape, and asked who sounded like the firmer leader on terror?

• John Kerry: "In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period."
   
• George Bush: "Earlier today I was informed of the tape that is now being analyzed by America's intelligence community. Let me make this very clear: Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. I'm sure Senator Kerry agrees with this. I also want to say to the American people that we're at war with these terrorists and I am confident that we will prevail."

One thing that is clear, is the Republicans are disgusting in their high-fives over the arrival of the tape. Atrios has a couple posts, one pointing out they look at it as a gift, and another where John McCain comments on its value for Bush. (Can you believe there were people who actually wanted Kerry to pick McCain as a running mate?) I'm not sure if this is whistling past the graveyard or just plain callousness: Osama Bin Laden's ongoing freedom is not a gift to anyone, and their thinking of it opportunistically is like the delay in plugging al Zarqawi just in order to have another argument to war against Iraq.

It will be interesting to see the Zogby results tomorrow. Tomorrow's results will be based on Thursday through Saturday, meaning a full day of participants who were interviewed after the release of the tape. The Saturday participants will be replacing Wednesday participants. I'm not sure that we'll see a shift in Kerry's favor, since the momentum has been pretty strong for Kerry recently (he's gained three points on Bush in two days in this poll, and that's tough to maintain). Wednesday participants were already hearing the news about al Qa Qaa, so it may be steady state.

UPDATE: The night before the election, the transcript of the full tape was released. See this post for my thoughts on it. It ain't pretty.
Link 10:51 PM Home

Question: If Iraq had been unable to account for 377 tons of high-grade weapons (sufficiently important that the IAEA was monitoring it) how would the U.S. government have reacted? Would answers like those that Larry DiRita (Pentagon spokesperson) has given this week been considered sufficient? Would the inconsistencies from day to day have been considered as forthright flip-flops as new information was learned, or would Bush have pounced on it as efforts to mislead? Time is running out.

Of course, the history of the two governments is different, and that provides important context. Saddam Hussein has a history of not being forthcoming about WMD, and Bush merely has a history of not being forthcoming.
Link 3:57 PM Home

Here's what we know about al Qa Qaa.

• The Pentagon ran a war and doesn't know what it did. Yesterday, a press conference was held by Pentagon spokesperson Larry DiRita, introducing Major Austin Pearson, a commander who says he removed munitions from al Qa Qaa. But what he removed was not under IAEA seals, and he doesn't know how much of what he removed were the weapons under question. Said DiRita,

  [W]hat I don't expect anybody will draw from what we're presenting today is that the weapons that we think we identified and destroyed from that facility constitute the universe of weapons that people are concerned about. We believe it constitutes some portion of those weapons. We believe that other units later on had responsibility to police weapons of this nature throughout the country and went about doing that. And we're learning more about that, and as we learn more about that we'll provide that information.

  Believe, of course, is not "know."
   
• Days afterwards, a television reporter from KSTP, embedded with the army, was at al Qa Qaa and went into a bunker with an IAEA seal. Inside were weapons which did not constitute WMD, but could be used in making WMD. (This conclusion comes from David Kay, former head of the group charged to find out the truth about the disposition of WMDs in Iraq.)
   
• In all likelihood, Pearson was not informed of the seriousness of the munitions at al Qa Qaa.
   
• Pearson couldn't help much in comparing his experience to what the KSTP reporter filmed. (The Pentagon hadn't shown him the video. Oversight?)
   
• This clearly represents a breakdown in the war planning, since the commander doesn't even remember seeing IAEA seals and the facility was unguarded when the unit with KSTP arrived.
   
• The dangers to our troops go far beyond what's missing from al Qa Qaa. While the Pentagon and the White House point to some 400,000 tons of munitions which have been rounded up, some 250,000 tons are unaccounted for.

In all honesty, all that yesterday's Pentagon press conference accomplished was to show that there was some attention to al Qa Qaa. But obviously not enough.

So: how's that list of Bush's accomplishments coming?
Link 1:47 PM Home

Pentagon extends duty for 6,500. Yup, not going home yet. Sorry. I know you serve proudly, and I thank you. Be sure to vote.
Link 1:04 PM Home

Will say anything to get re-elected. Bush is pushing his "whatever it takes" line to get re-elected, showing how unaware he is that it implies he'll say anything, something he charged Gore with in 2000. But even if it's seen in its intended context — whatever it takes to win the war on terror — you have to ask yourself these questions:

• How does this reconcile with relegating the hunt for OBL to corruptible warlords in Tora Bora? I know he'd like to claim it was otherwise, but the newspapers of the day have shown that Kerry's charge is on target.
   
• How does this square with a failure to take out al Zarqawi, just to have another card in the hand for the argument to war against Iraq? (The original report from NBC was confirmed by the WSJ this week, so no cries about media bias, gang.)
   
• How does this compare to all the hurdles Bush set up against the 9/11 Commission?
   
• How do you match that up with his failure to push for more port security?
   
• What about his failure to push for an extension of the assault rifle ban? The 9/11 Commission identified assault rifles as something terrorists would be happy to use against us. All he had to do was exert some leadership there (leadership counts, he's reminded us).

WHY does America feel Bush is better in the war on terror than Kerry? Bush is a proven idiot: just because there haven't been any more attacks on our soil doesn't mean he's not putting us at risk, gang.
Link 12:58 PM Home

Even if Cheney was no longer at Halliburton during the period of all these "no bid" contracts, are you trying to tell me he doesn't have friends there? Pretty small fig leaf, if you ask me.
Link 12:27 PM Home

The 9/11 Commission report is not complete, and the Bush administration (not the Commission) gets to edit the final bit. It's a reconciliation of conflicting evidence on what happened in response to 9/11, and a discussion of airline security. Safe bet you won't see it before November 2.

Jim Dwyer of The New York Times reports that it's in Bush Administration hands because when the Commission expired on August 21, so did the security clearance of its member, who could no longer discuss details with the Justice Administration, which had been asked to examine conflicts (i.e., possibility of perjury in testimony and so on). Commission member Bob Kerrey "suggested that presidential politics were behind the delay in the report's release."

In testimony before the commission, officials had described a quick response to the hijackings that narrowly missed intercepting some of the planes, but the commission's investigators later determined from documentary evidence that none of the military planes were anywhere near the four airliners.

In addition, officials at the Federal Aviation Administration testified that they had notified the military within a few minutes of each hijacking, but the investigation found that tape recordings contradicted that assertion.

The commission, in its final report, said that the true picture "did not reflect discredit" on individuals, but that unreliable testimony about the events had made it harder to understand the problems.

Besides the pursuit of the hijacked planes, the supplement, a monograph 60 to 70 pages long, revisits other subjects in the commission's final report of July - telephone calls made from the hijacked airplanes, airline security and orders issued that morning by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney - and provides additional detail or context, former commission members said.

Like you, I've been encouraged by the Bush Administration's ability to accurately report its behavior, from the way it exercises scrutiny to how it holds officials accountable.
Link 9:58 AM Home

First, read this... From the head of Human Rights Watch, issued this past January (Actually, it wouldn't hurt for you to read the whole thing, but I'll just put a concluding paragraph here):

In sum, the invasion of Iraq failed to meet the test for a humanitarian intervention. Most important, the killing in Iraq at the time was not of the exceptional nature that would justify such intervention. In addition, intervention was not the last reasonable option to stop Iraqi atrocities. Intervention was not motivated primarily by humanitarian concerns. It was not conducted in a way that maximized compliance with international humanitarian law. It was not approved by the Security Council. And while at the time it was launched it was reasonable to believe that the Iraqi people would be better off, it was not designed or carried out with the needs of Iraqis foremost in mind.

Having read that, now read this:

An estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of the March 2003 United States-led invasion, according to a new study by a research team at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

(Link for the latter seen via Eric Alterman.)
Link 1:53 PM Home

AND the economy continues to sputter. Reuters reports:

The U.S. economy expanded at a 3.7 percent annual rate in the third quarter, below expectations but still bolstered by healthy consumer spending that was accompanied by the lowest inflation in decades, the Commerce Department said on Friday.

Though the third-quarter expansion in gross domestic product -- the measure of total output within the nation's borders -- came in below Wall Street economists' forecasts for a 4.2 percent pace of growth, it still was up from 3.3 percent in the second quarter.

3.7 versus the expected 4.2: that's 12% short of only what Wall Street predicted, not compared to where a healthy economy should be. And did I mention that the 2004 employment figures will fall short of the White House's own expectations?
Link 1:24 PM Home

The issue is not the tonnage, but the process. Yes, hundreds of thousands of tons of munitions have been destroyed, and against that number 380 missing tons looks small. But the point is that the 380 missing tons didn't need to go missing if we had a better staffed war plan. (Secondly, should a soldier killed by any of the missing materiel feel "lucky"?) There's a presumption of perfect intelligence which occurred, that there would be no surprises and we could man it as skimpily as we did. So I'm surprised to read this in today's Washington Post:

"There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."

Retired Army Gen. Wayne A. Downing, who served briefly as President Bush's adviser on counterterrorism and has criticized some aspects of the administration's performance, said yesterday he considered the missing-explosives issue "bogus."

Don't they get it? You put more boots on the ground and you don't have to trade off all the priorities so much, as Scott McClellan himself said on Monday:

...when the interim government informed that these munitions went missing some time after April 9th of 2003, remember, that was when we were still involved in major military action at that point. And there were a number of important priorities at that point. There were munitions, munition caches spread throughout Iraq. There were -- there was a concern that there would be massive refugees fleeing the country. There is concern about the devastation that could occur to the oil fields. There was concern about starvation that could happen for the Iraqi people.

Was it an issue of the war plan, or were there no more troops available? If we were completely tapped out, then that speaks to the weakness of the international coalition, because in 1991 foreign countries provided a much higher proportion of the manpower.

And the overall point of the Washington Post article is also stunning, in that it puts the total tonnage of destroyed munitions into a larger context (emphases mine):

The 377 tons of Iraqi explosives whose reported disappearance has dominated the past few days of presidential campaigning represent only a tiny fraction of the vast quantities of other munitions unaccounted for since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government 18 months ago.

U.S. military commanders estimated last fall that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to 1 million tons of explosives, artillery shells, aviation bombs and other ammunition. The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown.

In the meantime, I hope you're reading more than the Washington Times on this... They're running an article by Bill Gertz which focuses on satellite imagery showing trucks outside al Qa Qaa before the fall of Baghdad, arguing it shows that the munitions were moved before the U.S. arrived. It's really a one-sided presentation, omitting a lot of the available information.

• It doesn't include an important remark from Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita: "All we are trying to demonstrate is that after the I.A.E.A. left, and the place was under Saddam's control, there was activity," he's quoted as saying in the New York Times. Hardly a definitive statement, merely a suggestion of a possibility.
   
• It continues to cite an NBC report from Monday night which said the munitions weren't seen when troops went in in early April, failing to mention Tom Brokaw's Tuesday night clarification that the troops its reporter accompanied weren't looking for munitions.
   
• Most importantly, it omits all references to video tape caught by KSTP in April 2003 when its embedded reporter visited the site. The tape clearly shows munitions still at al Qa Qaa after our troops arrived, and David Kay (former head of the Iraqi Survey Group, the agency charged with finding out the truth about WMD in Iraq — thus an authority) identifying the powders as the weapons under question. (CNN interview transcript here). Perhaps the CNN interview happened too late for Gertz's deadline, but the KSTP video was known about early yesterday.

Tell a friend!
Link 10:14 AM Home

The return of the bulge. Yes, I'm not getting enough exercise, but Salon has spoken to a digital imaging expert at NASA who has sharpened images from the first debate — accenting what's already there, but not introducing anything new — and you can see not only the bulge you've seen before but what looks like a wire running up the right shoulder, under the jacket. "This is not about a bad suit. And there's no way the bulge can be described as a wrinkled shirt." (Earlier this week, Bush had blamed it on a poorly tailored shirt. I'm telling you, everyone who has ever been in Bush's vicinity will be blamed by him for something at some point.)
Link 9:19 AM Home

al Qa Qaa must be having an effect on the national polling, because Kerry has pulled even with Bush in the latest release of the Zogby-Reuters poll. Representing a two-point improvement for Kerry, it means that Thursday's particpants were six points more positive for Kerry than Monday's were.

As I've noted before, Zogby collapses across three days' data in every release. This morning's release includes surveys from Tuesday-Thursday, and yesterday's release included surveys from Monday-Wednesday. Tuesday and Thursday were common to both data sets, so the difference we see is a result of the difference between Monday's participants and Thursday's. And since the reported difference is a two point shift for the three days as a whole, it's probably a six-point difference between the two uncommon days. That's a pretty big shift, but it's because the data can be unstable that Zogby collapses across three days.
Link 8:25 AM Home

A little levity for a better world. Here's the scenario. You mail your friend a disposable camera built into a postcard, on which you've written instructions to the mailman ("person" if you prefer), instructing him/her to take pictures of colleagues and so on as they choose.

Brilliant results? No.

A brilliant idea? Yes. (Click the image for results.)

Might something better result in the future? Yes.

Might monkeys type "Hamlet"? Yes.

Does it matter?                . (Please fill in the blank.)
Link 9:38 PM Home

Bush campaigns for Kerry again. Today, Bush called Kerry "the wrong man for the wrong job." Does that mean that Bush is the right man for the wrong job? Or that Bush is the wrong man for the right job? WTF?
Link 4:40 PM Home

Don't get distracted by the "this is an October Surprise media conspiracy" talk, it's irrelevant. The only way it should have any impact on your vote is if you think that voting for Bush will help erode the freedom of the press. Is that a reason to vote for someone? Not if there are any amendments in the Bill of Rights which you cherish, because your favorite could be next.

Think about all this, whether or not it has anything to do with al Qa Qaa... You can't blame it all on the media.

9/11, BEFORE AND AFTER:

1. Prior to 9/11, Bush signed a Presidential Order (at the end of June) reasserting al Qaeda's continuing interest in attacking US citizens and interests. On August 6 he received a Presidential Daily Brief, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US" which not only mentioned the ongoing interest but also talked about the examination of targets, including Federal buildings in lower Manhattan. The 9/11 Commission uncovered no evidence that this PDB sparked any high-level meetings in the White House prior to 9/11.
    
2. You would think that when 3,000 innocent Americans die on your watch, you'd want to move mountains to make sure it didn't happen again. Yet Bush seemed to exert more energy in obstructing a commission to investigate what happened — so long as the political pressures weren't overwhelming. First, he resisted setting the commission up; then, he tried to keep its life span as short as possible, and wouldn't support efforts to extend its deadline. He also resisted efforts to get him to testify, and put word out that he might have an hour, less time than he'd spent at a rodeo. He also didn't want his National Security Advisor to testify. And when he finally agreed to personally testify, he insisted that he needed to do it with his VP there at the same time. Can you imagine Harry "The Buck Stops Here" Truman trying that? Heck, Clinton didn't need Gore there when he gave his deposition.
    
3. When the 9/11 Commission issued its recommendations, his first move was to half bake one of them, by setting up an intelligence head with no budget authority (and hence no power), flying in the face of their insistence that the intelligence head have genuine power.

IRAQ:

1. We were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that we couldn't "afford to let the smoking gun come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Bush said that, in Cincinnati. There were no WMDs in Iraq.
    
2. Bush resisted all efforts to determine what went wrong with the intelligence on WMDs in Iraq, and only formed a commission that would investigate it when political pressure was overwhelming.
    
3. The Pope said the war was unjust; Human Rights Watch, whose reports of atrocities had been used as justification on humanitarian grounds, declared the war could not be justified on humanitarian grounds because the abuses had largely stopped.
    
4. Condoleezza Rice appeared on Wolf Blitzer's CNN show in the fall of 2002, and overstated the threat represented by some anodized aluminum tubes which Iraq had ordered and the US had intercepted. Although the US government's authorities had long before concluded that the tubes were unsuitable for uranium refinement — a step in making nuclear weapons — due to their anodized coating and dimensions, and most likely intended for rockets, she stated flatly that they could only really be used for uranium refinement.
    
5. VP Dick Cheney was on NBC's Meet the Press in March of 2003 and stated that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons. The statement was widely reported, and though Cheney later claimed it was merely a "misstatement," he didn't do so until September, 2003, long after we'd invaded.
    
6. Our troops were sent off to war without the proper equipment. This led to the unnecessary death and maiming of many of our soldiers.
    
7. The Administration talked about 9/11 and Saddam Hussein together so frequently that the American people were led to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Some within the Administration (such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz) actually argued for bombing Iraq after 9/11. This was in spite of no evidence; and Bush didn't correct the record of a lack of connection until September 2003, long after the war against Iraq had started.
    
8. All the post war planning which the State Department had done — warning of the problems we now face — was thrown out by the White House.
    
9. The abuses of Abu Ghraib were not isolated. They were rooted in White House queries regarding whether or not the President was even bound by the Geneva Convention, thus throwing out 50 years of international law and endangering our trips in the future should they ever be imprisoned.
    
10. Bush has overstated the progress in Iraq regarding self-security. It's not nearly as rosy as he claimed during the debates. It surely won't be helped by this week's slaughter of 50 unarmed recruits, presumably due to an infiltration in the ranks by insurgents.
     
11. Although an official of the State Department (Andrew Natsios, appearing on ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel) had claimed that the total cost of reconstruction would be $1.7 billion, costs are actually much higher. This week the Washington Post reported that the White House will soon be asking for an additional $70 billion, bring the total cost of the war and reconstruction in Iraq to $225 billion. Because Bush insisted on his tax cuts (and threatened to veto an $87 billion bill to support the troops which called for withdrawing tax decreases which had been handed to the rich), these costs are going to be handed on to generation after generation. Your kids didn't get to weigh in on this, did they?

THE ECONOMY:

1. I'm sure you've heard that there's a net loss in jobs under Bush. Some fact-checkers question Kerry's figures and say, "he's not including all the jobs which the government has created." Even when you do, though, there's still a net loss in jobs. And personally, I don't take the growth in government as an argument for a healthy economy.
    
2. Bush can't blame slow job creation on 9/11 and the recession. Why? Because every year he issues an economic forecast, and this February's (three years since the recession, and two years since 9/11) should have taken that into consideration. The February forecast for jobs in 2004 is way over-stated. To meet it at this point, the job growth rate in the fourth quarter has to be four times as great as what we saw in September. (We'd need over a million jobs in the final three months, and September only saw 96,000 created.) So don't let him whine about the recession or 9/11, and don't let him trumpet the number of jobs which have been created in just over a year, because he's not meeting his own goals.
    
3. Bush has flip-flopped on his own economic programs. While claiming to pursue free trade, he pursued protectionism for the benefit of U.S. steel workers; and when he saw that that was increasing manufacturing costs and hurting the jobs in the manufacturing sector, he reversed himself. (He'll try anything to get elected.)
    
4. Household incomes have declined for two years in a row under President Bush, the first time since World War II.

TAXES:

1. In 2000, candidate Bush insisted that "by far, the vast majority" of his tax cuts would go to those in the lower half. Not only has the bulk of them gone to those in the top 20%, but wealthier Americans actually saw their post-tax income go up by a higher percentage. Their taxes were decreased at a higher rate.
    
2. Bush did everything he could to defend his tax ideas, even citing a "blue ribbon panel" which said our economic growth depended on his tax breaks. This was not true: the panel he cited expected growth, but didn't relate it to his tax cuts. So Bush went out and got his own "economists" to endorse his plan. (Many weren't economists.)
    
3. To sell his tax cuts, Bush talked about an "average family," a misleading statistic, since the bulk of the benefits were going to a small group at the top. The value for the median family was much less, and he didn't want you to know that.
    
4. At one point Bush suggested we needed the tax breaks to support the troops, to ensure they'd have jobs when they got back from war. This was a shameless manipulation of patriotic fervor, because by law reservists have to have their jobs waiting for them (their companies are obliged to have their jobs waiting), and those in the active military had jobs in the military.

HEALTH CARE:

1. Health care costs continue to rise while incomes decrease, and Bush thinks reforming jury awards is the answer. In fact, the effect of jury awards is less than 1% of the cost rise; Bush really wants that reform to protect big corporations. The cost of health insurance is actually rising because the insurance companies' investments haven't been doing well.
    
2. In the effort to pass the new Medicare bill, the department of Health and Human Services (yes, the Administration) withheld cost estimates from Congress, and threatened one of its actuaries with his job if he shared them with Congress.
    
3. The bill — which Bush lists as an accomplishment — lines the pockets of drug companies at taxpayer expense. The US Government is expressly forbidden from negotiating drug prices for the program. (By the way, unusual steps were taken on the House floor to obtain passage: where voting on a bill is typically held open for only 15 minutes, it was held open for 3 hours on this effort while pressure could be exerted; one member said his vote was pressured through a bribe, a promise of campaign money for his son.)
    
4. In order to promote perceptions of the new bill, HHS sent out public relations reels to local television stations to run on their news shows; the reels were packages as if they were news, and not PR.

SOCIAL SECURITY:

1. Bush has shown an interest in grappling with its future problems without discussing how he would pay for the changes he wants to make now. The individual savings accounts he talks about for younger workers will cut off a cash flow which currently goes to our senior citizens. This doesn't necessarily mean seniors won't get their checks, it just means the money has to come from somewhere else: such as higher taxes, or budget deficits, or spending cuts. That's it, no other options. He's playing a shell game.

What else do I need to talk about? Wanna blame reality on the media, or do you want to stick your head in the ground and say "all this is old news, it's been dealt with before"?
Link 2:51 PM Home

Can the Pentagon even show how guarding the al Qa Qaa munitions dump entered into its plans? That should be easy at least: if there were orders to guard it or inspect it, produce them.

Meanwhile, Iraqi witnesses are describing the looting that happened there after the fall.

The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.

But the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it.

Don't blame Russia yet. (Those of us with longer memories will recall that Russia actually tried to stop us from this embarrassing chapter in our history.)
Link 9:07 AM Home

Kerry was not denigrating the troops, Mr. President: he was denigrating you. Yesterday on the campaign trail, Bush tried to deflect charges on the missing Iraqi munitions by changing the subject:

Bush, breaking two days of silence on the issue, told supporters at a rally here that Kerry was making "wild charges" about the missing munitions and was "denigrating the action of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts."

"Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site," Bush said, adding: "A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."

Denigrating the troops? Kerry said nothing about the troops. What he's said s that this is another example of your failures, Mr. President. The troops can't go looking for munitions they haven't been told about.

Really, Bush's reactions yesterday seemed reminiscent of his sputtering and fuming during the first debate: remember how he changed the subject from September 11 to Saddam Hussein, until Kerry pointed out that we were really attacked by Osama bin Laden? Remember that sleight of hand Bush tried to pull off, even during the debate?

Bush is also now offering yet another reason for the invasion (same article), making it obvious that this is now a settled White House line, since McClellan said practically the same thing:

To quiet audiences on Wednesday, Bush sought to use the missing munitions to his advantage by suggesting their existence, though conventional, confirmed the case for war. "After repeatedly calling Iraq the 'wrong war' and a 'diversion,' Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq was a dangerous place full of dangerous weapons," he told supporters. "The senator used to know that, even though he seems to have forgotten it over the course of the campaign. But after all, that's why we're there."

We didn't go into Iraq merely because he was dangerous, Mr. President. You took us there because you thought he had weapons of mass destruction. There's a difference.

Years ago, there was a guy in New York City named Bernhard Goetz. Almost 20 years ago, he shot four people on a subway train because he'd been asked for money and he felt threatened. He shot one of them in the back, allegedly saying "you don't look so bad." He shot them, although they were armed with nothing more than screwdrivers. Bush's pointing to this weaponry now as an excuse for war reminded me of this because of a line I heard from comedian Bob Goldthwait back then: "Whaddid they say to you, Bernie? 'Give us all your money or we're going to make your eyeglasses really wobbly...'"

You can't go to war merely over munitions, it has to be more serious. Bush is showing his desperation by grasping at yet another straw.

Vote Tuesday.
Link 8:19 AM Home

The White House lies on the facts. Again. In today's gaggle, McClellan said:

I have found one aspect of this debate interesting. Senator Kerry's own advisors, Senator Kerry's own senior advisors have now been forced to admit that they don't know the facts. Richard Holbrooke said, I don't know the truth. And Jamie Rubin made similar comments to that effect. I think it is part of the pattern by Senator Kerry, even when he does not know the facts, to say anything that will give him a political advantage.

You know, the fact is there is an investigation that is ongoing to get to the bottom of this. Our military does not know what happened to those munitions, and neither does Senator Kerry. Yet, he is willing to -- well, Senator Kerry is someone who does not want to let the facts or the truth stand in the way of his campaign. He fails to talk about the fact that more than 400,000 tons of munitions have been seized or destroyed by coalition forces; more than 10,000 caches have been cleared. And let's remember the facts. This was a dangerous regime that had munitions literally spread throughout the country. Senator Kerry, with less than a week to go before the campaign, now suddenly believes that Iraq was a danger.

OK, here we go:

• Kerry doesn't know the facts because he's not the President of the United States. Ask the President why he doesn't know the facts.
   
• Our military should know what happened to them. Remember? Rumsfeld said, "we know where they are..."
   
• Kerry is talking about it because the President screwed up, and voters can't depend on the President to go on television and say, "I screwed up."
   
• We didn't go to war because Iraq had munitions, we went to war because the Bush regime said Iraq had WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. We were supposed to find WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, and it's MUNITIONS which are killing our troops.
   
• As for being "spread throughout the country," this was a known location, thanks to the IAEA. We knew about it beofre the war began, and should have been able to secure it.
   
• Kerry has never said that Iraq wasn't a danger. In fact, he's been quoted as saying Iraq was a threat. What he's said, Scotty, is that it shouldn't have been handled the way Bush did. There's a difference.

(Not to detract from the seriousness, on a humorous note the White House transcript has an Emily Latilla element to the White House transcript as it currently stands. Instead of "munitions," it frequently says "musicians [sic]," as in "What's all this fuss I hear about missing Iraqi musicians?"
Link 9:24 PM Home

An outline of how conservatives leapt to an NBC report as if it were a life preserver on the al Qa Qaa missing munitions has just been put up at Media Matters. It's hopeless, of course, unless the Pentagon can come up with some concrete evidence that the munitions were really gone before the fall of Baghdad. So far they haven't.

What I find pitiful is the cries of "no fair" I'm hearing, suggesting this is all just final week electioneering — as if either the New York Times or CBS was going to rush a story it hadn't checked out. Excuse me, but didn't the conservative bloggers just spend weeks criticizing CBS for its failure to properly vet the story on Bush's National Guard time?

I have some food for thought for all those who feel beleaguered by the timing:

• Be grateful that it's about something substantive, which happened under his watch. How would you react if this had been about that photo of Bush sucker-punching the opponent in the soccer game, with this same volume?
   
• Be grateful that it's not about something indicating mere dishonesty, like his recent claims that he got into the Texas Air National Guard without any favoritism being exerted in his behalf.
   
• And lastly, in 2008, try to nominate someone competent. This is a horrible oversight in the planning, and the Administration which wants credit for a smooth war deserves blame for a poorly run occupation.

Capiche?
Link 8:05 PM Home

A New York Times columnist reveals a really low bar for acceptably misleading the public, and the Daily Howler runs him through the meat grinder for it. Appropriately, I might add. Larger truths need to be supported by smaller truths, not small lies.
Link 2:37 PM Home

Bush-Cheney stiff-arms the rest of the world again. Imagine going to the Bush-Cheney web site and seeing this message:

Scary, huh? The BBC reports that the website is blocking international traffic, apparently as some measure to reserve bandwidth for its primary target, voters in the US. It may be a cost-cutting measure, which would be a nice sign if they need to. As the BBC points out, it also blocks US residents overseas who may be trying to decide who to vote for.

But isn't that a horrible way to tell a visitor they can't get in? "Not authorized." There are better ways to handle it: on 9/11, many web sites experiencing very high traffic set up much slimmer home pages. (This happened not just with news sites, but also corporations in the vicinity of the World Trade Center, such as American Express.) It could certainly afford some slimming: it's over 300k, and takes someone with a 56k modem about 47 seconds to load it (according to a measure I just took through NetMechanic.) Wouldn't that be a lot better way to handle it than "you are not authorized..."

There really is a lesson here, if you think about it. The Bush administration has a reputation for stiff-arming the rest of the world, and this is another symptom of it. It really isn't difficult to make this nicer. The fact that they don't is revealing, isn't it?
Link 2:13 PM Home

Perhaps it's the missing munitions story, but Kerry gained two points on Bush in the latest Zogby- Reuters poll, whittling Bush's lead down to a single point. As I've pointed out before, this didn't happen all in one day: yesterday's participants replaced Saturday's participants in the rolling three-day reporting.

(Late addition: Tuesday's participants must have been much more Kerry-positive than Saturday's. In order for a candidate to have a two point change in a three-day rolling tracker means that the difference between the new day [Tuesday] participants and the replaced [Saturday] participants has to be much more than two points, six points in all likelihood, since the new day and the old day were both reported in combination with two other days at the same time, in this case Sunday and Monday.)

If you really want to follow state-by-state polls closely, I recommend you check out this page. It's special because it doesn't assign all of a states electoral college votes to one candidate or another based on current polls, but allows for sampling error due to the nature of surveys, and basically projects the probabilities that states will go one way or the other — based on the difference and the margin of error. Candidates basically get as many of the state's electoral votes as the probability suggests. (This is not the same as apportioning them according to popular vote totals.)

That's the basic explanation (if you want more, think "Monte Carlo simulations"). The value is that it's more stable than confidently assigning electoral college votes on the basis of 1%- point differences, as is done at the Current Electoral Vote Predictor.

And yet, there's still room for improvement, in spite of all this. One improvement I can imagine is this: if a state has consistently shown a 1%-point advantage for a candidate, the margin of error for the most recent poll may overstate the uncertainty, since it's calculated on just the most recent poll. That is, a small difference in the polls which is consistently there may lead to too many electoral college votes for the underdog candidate in the estimates. How you'd go about changing it, I dunno. I took a lot of statistics classes in grad school, and have spent my time since then in applying statistics, not developing them. (And I honestly don't know how many times this may/not be an issue, either.) By the way, a thanks to Mike at Ishbadiddle for leading me to this last week; I wanted to watch it a bit before linking it.
Link 11:16 AM Home

Did you see PBS's "Frontline" last night? It was about Rumsfeld's restructuring of the Pentagon and how he intimidated the military into supporting his vision of streamlined warfare. In doing so, he undid the Powell Doctrine — use overwhelming force and be surer of victory, rather than get involved in another quagmire like Vietnam — and got us into this understaffed initiative in Iraq. It talked about his political battles with the "more moderate" Henry Kissinger under Ford, his sponsorship of Cheney, the freezing out of those who disagreed with him when they called for hundreds of thousands to secure the peace. At the link there's plenty of program information, links to live chats today, and a link to a web stream of the program (starting tomorrow, October 28.)

If you think we had enough people on the ground, you might consider these points:

• Just this past Monday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan tried to deflect charges on the missing 380 tons of munitions by citing all the priorities which needed minding. (See this discussion.)
   
• Paul Bremer said the absence of enough troops led to an atmosphere of lawlessness, and that we've "paid a big price" for it. (Bremer was asking for more troops as early as June, 2003.)

Got it? Vote on Tuesday!
Link 10:54 AM Home

While the White House is claiming that the missing munitions in Iraq were already missing before Baghdad fell, a unit commander whose unit was there and was thought to have noticed the absence has contradicted the White House fig leaf:

But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.

"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."

Let's keep this going: as my eleven year old said yesterday, "I'm really sorry this all happened, but I'm glad it happened on Bush's watch."
Link 8:13 AM Home

A pack in denial. The U.S. has said there's no need for the U.N. to get involved in helping find the hundreds of tons of missing weapons material in Iraq. And yet, do you remember how in the weeks after the invasion we were told that we would have to be patient in the search for WMDs, that Iraq was the size of California? "The size of California" and "be patient" almost became a mantra...

• Bush, in December, 2003: "As you notice, when there's a hole in the ground and a person is able to crawl into it in a country the size of California, it means we're on a scavenger hunt for terror, and find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data. And we're on it. Our military is responding. And our intelligence services are doing very good work. It's just a long process that requires patience and perseverance."
   
• From a briefing by the Coalition Provisional Authority in February, 2004: "We aren't going to finish this effort on the Iraq Survey Group mission's effort in a matter of days, a matter of weeks, a matter of months. It takes time to search a country the size of California, a country this large, to find continued evidence, but we've already discovered some."
   
• ...and plenty more here, if you scroll down to "IRAQ, A COUNTRY THE SIZE OF CALIFORNIA."

So when the politics of not being able to find any WMDs meant "stall," we were told to be patient, Iraq's a big place. Why should we now be so patient, so confident, as to not accept the U.N.'s help, when the insurgents could be getting ready to deploy this stuff against our troops? Our troops, Mr. President. As you said, "There is nothing complex about supporting our troops."
Link 6:32 PM Home

I really wish CNN had the nerve to refuse a guest access to its audience when they're going to lie like they just did on Crossfire. I heard all the rhetoric and lies which have already been debunked over and over and over:

• that Kerry didn't support the troops because he voted against the $87 billion bill (he voted for an alternative which only differed on how the money was paid for, which Bush threatened to veto);
   
• that medical costs are skyrocketing due to law suits (the effect of lawsuits is perhaps only 1%, when costs have risen 40%);
   
• that the failure to add jobs is due to a recession inherited from Clinton (the recession happened after Bush took office, and the Bush administration has also touted it as one of the shortest in history; it also happened over three years ago, and Bush isn't meeting jobs forecasts he released just this past February, so it's not like his team hadn't heard about 9/11 or the 2001 recession at that point).

It just went on and on and on, and it was really pathetic. Here we are a week away from the election, and this is all the republicans have to say? Repetitions of this trash?
Link 5:12 PM Home

Brian Arner has a fine post on when to trust juries and what it says about you. Or what it says about a sometimes-resident of the White House.
Link 2:03 PM Home

Increased cost of the war in Iraq. The Washington Post reports that the administration is about to ask for an additional $70 billion for the war in Iraq. If you're counting, that brings the current tally to about $225 billion. But I laughed when I read this post from Megan McArdle, a guest blogger at Instapundit:

A HEARTENING SIGN FOR HAWKS The administration is apparently planning to ask for $70 billion more for the war in Iraq, which will bring the total price tag to about $225 billion. Yes, that's a lot of money, but on the other hand, remember when folks like Eric Alterman were telling us it was going to cost trillions?

The war has cost more than I think I thought it would (I don't remember ever assigning it an exact price tag), but if it succeeds in building a democracy in the middle east, it will be well worth the cost. And the administration's willingness to throw around a big figure like this the week before the election shows me that they're taking it seriously--and compares very favourably to John Kerry's political opportunism on the issue.

This is a silly post for at least two reasons. For one thing, McArdle recognizes the $225 billion, but doesn't remind herself that that is the cost so far: it ain't over yet, and may still rise to the long term trillions cost which Alterman projected in the linked article.

Secondly, McArdle has deftly failed to mention that even if the current $225 billion never rises to a trillion, it's far far more than the $1.7 billion which a State Department official forecast for the total reconstruction costs when appearing on ABC's Nightline. (It was Andrew Natsios, who heads a State Department agency called USAID. You can find the transcript here.)

Now let me ask you this: if you hear cost estimates from someone in the government vs. someone in the press, who are you going to trust, and why?

UPDATE: A third issue is her claim that we can tell something from "the administration's willingness to throw around a big figure like this the week before the election." It's not the White House that's throwing it around, though: the Washington Post says the figure is coming from sources in the Pentagon and Congress. The Pentagon is part of the administration, but as you move closer to the White House, you get the sounds of hesitation, and the chief of staff of the Appropriations Committee says the White House isn't forthcoming on its figures.

The White House is scared, and apparently held back as long as it could for political purposes, to the endangerment of our troops. Remember what Bush said: "There is nothing complex about supporting our troops."
Link 1:05 PM Home

Buffoonery from Jeff Greenfield on CNN? Appearing on Wolf Bliltzer's noon program, Greenfield was analyzing Bush popularity among various subgroups, and regarding the 18% of African Americans who prefer Bush — up from the 8% Blitzer said voted for Bush in 2000 — Greenfield went off in terms of church behaviors of African Americans and how Bush appeals to them on conservative religious grounds. Greenfield didn't support this with any research, maybe he really does have some, but I found it odd: he was looking at them as African Americans, as if the concerns which many people have about terrorism (and seeing Bush as the stronger candidate on that dimension) was irrelevant. That is, Greenfield seemed to be denying them a major tendency of the population as a whole. Made me queasy that someone would do that. Am I wrong?

UPDATE: Here's what Greenfield said:

These numbers, if they're right, may reflect the fact that there are -- there are a number of African-American voters strongly tied to churches. Bush has been a big supporter of faith- based institutions. There's been help given from the Bush administration into that community, and some of the socially conservative stands that the president takes -- and there are a good number of people in the African-American community who agree with that, on things like abortion, on traditional values.

No mention of any other issue like terror, the issue which, last I checked, was the issue where Bush's perceived strength is supposedly the greatest:

What explains Bush's advantage? For one, terrorism is tied with the economy as the issue voters say is most important to them. And when asked which candidate would best handle the war on terror, voters prefer Bush over Kerry by 19 points--56% to 37%--up from just 11 points a week ago. The President has widened his lead on all the so-called hard issues of national security: whether it's providing leadership in difficult times, preventing the spread of WMD or being Commander in Chief, voters choose Bush by double-digit margins.

Can't African Americans be just people, Jeff?
Link 12:29 PM Home

Who will Bush blame next? This time, he blames his tailor for the bulge on his back in the first debate. (Now for the really radical left wing comment: this guy can afford tailored shirts. Can you? Maybe you could by now if Gore were President.)
Link 12:12 PM Home

Another drop in consumer confidence. How soon will Ridge raise the threat level?
Link 11:26 AM Home

Claims that the really serious weaponry was already gone from al Qaqaa don't really hold much water, according to Josh Marshall, for a number of reasons, among them that the soldiers who were supposed to have examined the cache in April of 2003 and reached this conclusion probably didn't have the necessary expertise to make such a judgment.

Aside from that, you really have to wonder about the way the White House handled this. Why does the WH always respond to what the press says as if it's true? Why doesn't Scotty ever say, "I'll be honest with you, I need to find out more before I can comment." They commented on the Dan Rather-National Guard papers as if they were the absolute truth, too.
Link 10:35 AM Home

The stupidity, and hypocrisy, of attacks on Teresa Heinz Kerry. From Michael Kinsley.
Link Home 5:24 PM Home

...and O.J. wants to find the real killers, too. You probably know about the 380 tons of explosive material found missing in Iraq. CNN reports...

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush wants to determine what went wrong.

McClellan, on Air Force One, stressed that the missing explosives were not nuclear materials, and said the storage site was the responsibility of the interim Iraqi government, not the United States, as of June 28, when the United States turned over the nation's administration to the Iraqis.

What's the time line on this? In his press gaggle today, McClellan obliquely refers to Operation Iraqi Freedom...

MR. McCLELLAN: Maybe the best way to do this is kind of walk you through how we came to be informed about this. The Iraqi Interim Government informed -- told the IAEA -- the International Atomic Energy Agency on October 10th that there were approximately 350 tons of high explosives missing from Al Qaqaa in Iraq. And they informed the IAEA because these munitions were subject to IAEA monitoring, because they were considered dual-use materials. And the International Atomic Energy Agency informed the United States mission in Vienna on October 15th about these — this cache of explosives that was missing because of some looting that went on in Iraq toward the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, or during and toward the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Remember that looting? That was over a year ago, long before the interim Iraqi government was formed. Why does McClellan bring them up? Having said it occurred "during and toward the the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom," there's this later in the gaggle:

Q Scott, did we just have enough troops in Iraq to guard and protect these kind of caches?

MR. McCLELLAN: See, that's -- now you just hit on what I just said a second ago, that the sites now are really -- my understanding, they're the responsibility of the Iraqi forces. And I disagree with the way you stated your question, because one of the lessons we've learned of history is that it's important to listen to the commanders on the ground and our military leaders when it comes to troop levels. And that's what this President has always done. And they've said that we have the troop levels we need to complete the mission and succeed in Iraq.

Q But you're saying this is the responsibility of the Iraqi forces. But this was our responsibility until just recently, isn't that right? Weren't these -- there is some U.S. culpability, as far as --

MR. McCLELLAN: You're trying -- I think you're taking this out of context of what was going on. This was reported missing after -- when the interim government informed that these munitions went missing some time after April 9th of 2003, remember, that was when we were still involved in major military action at that point. And there were a number of important priorities at that point. There were munitions, munition caches spread throughout Iraq. There were -- there was a concern that there would be massive refugees fleeing the country. There is concern about the devastation that could occur to the oil fields. There was concern about starvation that could happen for the Iraqi people.

So -- and obviously there is an effort to go and secure these sites. The Department of Defense can talk to you about -- because they did go in and look at this site and look to see whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction there. So you need to talk to Department of Defense, because I think that would clarify that for you and set that record straight.

So he's saying there were all these priorities: isn't that an argument that we would have been better off with more troops on the ground? I can understand complaints that the military is not good at establishing new governments, but guarding things ought to be something our soldiers are eminently qualified to do; more soldiers would certainly have helped on this.

McClellan also adopts a "this is a drop in the bucket" defense:

Now, if you go back and look at the Duelfer report that recently has come out, according to the Duelfer report, as of mid-September, more than 243,000 tons of munitions have been destroyed since Operation Iraqi Freedom. Coalition forces have cleared and reviewed a total of 10,033 caches of munitions; another nearly 163,000 tons of munitions have been secured and are on line to be destroyed. That puts this all -- that puts this all in context.

How many times have you heard Bush or Cheney raise the specter of an attack through the "they only have to get lucky once" line? So now all of a sudden we're not supposed to be concerned about this? And do they want to try and tell us now that we properly manned the war? And we were warned about this: the IAEA was watching this before the war, and we didn't have the sense to take care of it afterwards.

Of course, Bush's staff knew to inform him immediately:

Q One last one on the tick-tock. These notices from Iraq to IAEA to U.S. to Condi to President happened over days as opposed to hours. Was there just no sense of urgency that what they had discovered here was really an important --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, just -- no, I think that this has all happened in a -- just the last few days. We're talking about the last 10 days.

Q As opposed to hours. Right. But does that mean folks believed that this was not an urgent, serious matter?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, because the Pentagon became informed -- you can check with the Pentagon when they were informed about it and the coalition forces. Absolutely not.

Q This was an urgent matter, as far as U.S. government was concerned?

MR. McCLELLAN: It's something that's being looked into now. So I don't know how you can characterize it as not. I mean, it's something that the Pentagon, upon being informed about it, immediately directed the multinational forces and Iraq Survey Group to look into this matter, and that's what they're doing.

So it was okay if days passed before the President heard because the Pentagon knew. And they want to complain about Kerry's senate absences?

Make sure you vote on Tuesday, and make sure all your friends do, too. Don't be deterred by long lines, and if you can vote early you might find it more convenient.
Link 2:56 PM Home

Economic pessimism? Quick question: have you ever heard the President talk about careers instead of jobs?
Link 12:42 PM Home

Fire the bums. Might this have anything to do with the under-forcing of the war? Weapons dumps were unprotected (you can't blame that on "catastrophic success," Mr. President) and now...

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons — are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.

Let's be clear about this: if Cheney is being truthful that we need to engage the terrorists over there, it's because the White House screwed up. Fire the bastards: no wonder they haven't had the nerve to go to a single soldier's funeral.
Link 11:03 PM Home

Crying "wolf." I haven't commented yet about the new Bush-Cheney ad comparing our terrorist enemies to a pack of wolves that will pounce when it senses weakness. Of course it's a scare tactic; but when I read of the scare tactics Cheney continues to use on the campaign trail, it occurs to me that one of the major problems we face is warning-fatigue. We need an administration we can believe, and Bush and Cheney have already failed that; ulterior motives are too obvious. Cheney himself cried wolf on NBC's "Meet the Press" in March '03 when he said that the US believed Saddam Hussein had "reconstituted his nuclear weapons." A mere slip of the tongue, he claimed six months later on the same program, well after we'd invaded Iraq. In March, rallying the country to the war cry was ample reason to "misspeak," and the fact that he waited so long to correct it shows that he didn't really misspeak. How are we to really know the dangers when our Administration not only lacks credibility aborad, but also here?
Link 9:46 PM Home

John Kerry has pulled even in Arkansas in a new poll. Gore didn't take the state in 2000, and this would be a nice pick up if it sustains. A little help from Clinton (live or by video hook up) would be a nice difference, and it could force the President to scatter precious resources. (Of course, Clinton may have bigger fish to fry.)
Link 9:27 AM Home

Maybe the jobs of the 21st Century are going to be in law enforcement, and we're just going to have to accept paying higher local, state, and federal taxes to accommodate it. If you think about it, with the FBI changing its mission to include a greater antiterrorism role, that means fewer agents to solve crimes in the FBI's traditional arenas of organized crime, kidnaping, and so on. Similarly with the DEA and INS and so on. There's slack: the traditional criminals aren't exactly doing their patriotic duty of giving us all a break. (Thoughts occurring to me after reading an article in the New York Times on identity theft. It's a huge drain on the resources of victims and law enforcement, with over 27 million victims in a recent five year period, and a third of them in the last year of that 5 year period [9 million in one year].)

And the President's failure to push for a renewal of the assault weapons ban surely didn't help. I can only hope that that will be a post November 2 move.
Link 9:07 AM Home

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