konane's Blog

"Department officials were actively interfering with the probe and even conducting surveillance of Barrett and his office. Worse, there were indications that Team Clinton was using key players at the IRS and Justice to harass, frighten and threaten people who somehow got in the former president's way.

The pattern was set early on, when the White House sicced the FBI on Billy Dale, who had served as the director of the White House Travel Office since the days of John F. Kennedy. They mounted a baseless probe of Dale's finances, while chasing after his daughter, his sister and others. Dale was guilty of holding a job coveted by presidential pal Harry Thomasson. But rather than simply firing Dale, the Clinton White House chose to destroy him.

By all accounts, the 400-page Barrett report is a bombshell, capable possibly of wiping out Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential prospects. At the very least, it would bring to public attention a scandal that would make the Valerie Plame affair vanish into comical insignificance.

Democrats know this. Using provisions in the independent-counsel statute that permit people named in a report to review the allegations against them and file rebuttals, attorneys close to the Clintons have spent the better part of five years reviewing every jot and tittle of the charges arrayed against their clients and friends.

This careful and continuous monitoring of the report explains why Sens. Byron Dorgan, Dick Durbin and John Kerry took the highly unusual step earlier this year of trying to slip into an Iraq-war spending bill an amendment to suppress every word of the Barrett report. (Every other independent counsel finding has been printed in its entirety, with the exception of small sections containing classified material.)

Alert Republicans, pushed by talk-radio listeners and bloggers, managed to short-circuit that effort, but Democrats patiently pursued their goal. They got what they wanted recently, when the House and Senate met to iron out differences in yet another appropriations bill. Democrats inserted language that would prevent public release of the 120 pages of the report listing the Clinton transgressions. They offered what may have looked like a good deal. They promised not to object to letting Barrett continue with any prosecutions already underway.

Republicans negotiators, led by Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., and Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich, took the bait. They agreed to keep the public in the dark about the important stuff in exchange for a big, fat nothing. Unbeknownst to Bond and Knollenberg, Barrett shut down his grand juries three years ago.

The move represents more than just boneheaded politics. It's grossly irresponsible. If the report contains the kind of bombshells that have been hinted at in reports published by The Wall Street Journal and National Review, among others, the public not only has a right to know, Congress has a duty to investigate.

If Barrett has found evidence that officials at Justice and the IRS served as a praetorian guard, that means some bureaucrats felt it appropriate or beneficial to ignore their duty to the public and instead to perform dirty work for the people who oversee their budgets.

Another big "if": If such behavior were covered up, the malefactors would conclude that they may do the same thing again for other presidents.

Something stinks, and the only way to get at the truth is to release the full report. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who fought a lonely battle to ensure the document's publication, is furious. So is House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. The question is whether Republican leaders Bill Frist and Denny Hastert will step in and ensure the report's publication, or whether they'll just sigh and look the other way."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,178223,00.html 

The site is made up of two principal data elements along with a powerful search engine to locate and explore the information stored. The first of these elements is a database of PROFILES of individuals, groups and institutions, which can be accessed through the heptagram on the home page, or the DTN DIRECTORY on the navigation bar. The PROFILES provide thumbnail sketches of histories, agendas and (where significant) funding sources. More than 1,500 such groups and individuals have already been delineated in the PROFILES sections of this base. The information has been culled from public records readily available on the Internet and other sources, whose veracity and authenticity are easily checked." ............................

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Earth Liberation Front

• Environmentalist, anti-capitalist, eco-terrorist organization established in 1992 by radical members of the group "Earth First!"
• Advocates "economic sabotage and property destruction" designed to "halt the destruction of the environment"
  
• Has declared war against "greedy capitalists" and "rich scum"
  
• Responsible since 1997 for more than $95 million in property damage
  
• Has been declared America's top domestic terrorism threat by the FBI
  
• Former ELF spokesman Craig Rosebraugh has stated: "Terrorismcan be O.K., can be justified. . . . It can be effective."
  
• Rosebraugh described a 1998 arson of a Vail, Colorado ski resort "not an act of ecoterrorism, but an act of love" aimed at saving the environment from "greedy capitalists."
  

Congressman John Murtha, the veteran who turned against the Iraq War, has become a household name. But odds are you haven't heard of Thomas L. Bock. He's a veteran who is critical of media coverage of the war. He says controversial things like "Today's media-hungry war-protest movement is an anti-freedom movement."

Actually, Bock is more than a veteran; he's National Commander of the American Legion, the largest veterans organization. Bock is also a Blue Star dad. His son, Adam, is an Army CH-47 helicopter pilot currently serving in Iraq.

In an editorial appearing in the December issue of the American Legion magazine, Bock writes that "The call to prematurely withdraw U.S. troops from the war on terrorism will quite likely—as public opposition to the Vietnam War showed us—have the unintended consequence of prolonging the fight. Ho Chi Minh described the antiwar movement in the 1960s as a second front in his march to relieve South Vietnam of its freedoms."

Last summer, Bock noted, the Legion adopted Resolution 169, urging veterans to speak out for freedom and "counter a movement that discredits those now serving in harm's way."

A strong voice against the Murtha position comes from Col. Brett Wyrick, a surgeon deployed in Iraq. He says, "I wish there was not a war, and I wish our young people did not have to fight and die. But I cannot wish away evil men like bin Laden and al-Zarqawi…The last thing we need here in Iraq is an exit strategy or some damn time table for withdrawal. Thank God there was no timetable for withdrawal after the Battle of the Bulge or Iwo Jima. Thank God there was no exit strategy at Valley Forge. Freedom is not easy, and it comes with a terrible price." 

Our media enjoy that freedom. They use it to run phony Koran-in-the-toilet stories that kill people and make it harder for our troops to win.

My visit to a local gun show found one booth full of photos from Iraq that were described as being censored by the U.S. news media. They show American soldiers assisting the Iraqi people, especially children. You can view them at the site ( http://www.kcentv.com/1stcav-arch.html )  of KCEN-TV of central Texas.  The sponsor of the booth said he had five members of his family in the Armed Forces, including two sons in Iraq. The sign over the photos said, "The traitors in the media and Congress want to repeat Vietnam. Don't allow it."

Judging by the number of people viewing the exhibit, there is public interest in what the media are not telling us.

Another message posted on the exhibit said, "The media want Hillary elected. They want you to think the war is bad so you will turn against President Bush."

I purchased a bumper sticker at the booth. It said, "Freedom of the press does not mean the right to lie." Perhaps the public can help stop the lies."

http://www.aim.org/media_monitor_print/4197_0_2_0/

An entire site devoted to media bias and deliberate omissions.

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"Bush Quotes Fallen Marine's Letter -- the Part the NYT Left Out
 

    On Wednesday afternoon, the Washington Post filed to its website a quick take on Bush's speech to the Naval Academy, including the president's emotional quotation from  a letter found on the laptop of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Starr, six months to the day after his death in a firefight in Ramadi.

    "Reading from a letter written by a U.S. soldier on his lap-top computer before his death, an emotional Bush said America owes those who have died in Iraq to 'take up their mantle, carry on the fight and complete their mission.'"

    By contrast, the New York  Times' similar online story from Christine Hauser made no mention of Starr's letter.

    Perhaps one reason why: As Michelle  Malkin first learned last month, the New York Times quoted Starr's letter but managed to miss the point, leaving off the very part Starr's family and President Bush found significant.

    An October 26  story by reporter James Dao quoted only part of Starr's letter, truncating it to make it fit Dao's deadly storyline (the "grim mark" of the 2000th fatality of the Iraq War). The portion of the letter run by the Times captured Starr's fear of death, but not his belief that his sacrifice was worth the goal of securing freedom for Iraq.

    This is the part the Times ran on October 26: "Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I'm writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I'm pushing my chances."

    But as Times  Watch and others noted, Dao left off the rest of Starr's letter, which explains why he felt his sacrifice was worthwhile:

    "I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me. I'm here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.'"

    The New York  Post has the positive reaction by Starr's family, who originally released their son's letter to the New York Times: "But the Times published only part of the five-paragraph letter, which the family felt distorted Jeffrey's message and made him appear to be a fatalist questioning the war -- when in fact he strongly supported it."

    Neither the New York Times or the Washington Post mention Starr's letter in their Thursday morning hard-copy editions.

You can comment on the paper's treatment of Cpl. Jeffrey Starr's last letter at the MRC's blog NewsBusters.

http://www.timeswatch.org/twarticles/2005/20051201.asp

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CBS: Most Want "Timetable," But Skip
Most See Pullout "Disaster"

    While CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer on Wednesday night highlighted how, in a fresh CBS News/New York Times poll, President Bush's approval rating has risen five points since October, he pointed out just one other survey finding -- one which matched a Democratic agenda item -- that "58 percent of those questioned said the U.S. should set a timetable for troop withdrawal; 39 percent said no." But Schieffer skipped how the survey also discovered that the public agrees with Bush and rejects the policy urged by Congressman John Murtha and left-wingers, such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DNC Chairman Howard Dean. As reported in the CBSNews.com summary of the poll: "Six in 10 say they would agree with President Bush's statement that removing U.S. troops from Iraq now would be 'a recipe for disaster.'" Specifically, 61 percent responded "yes" compared to 34 percent who replied with a "no" -- a nearly two-to-one ratio.

    [This item was posted Wednesday night on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org. To share your views, go to: newsbusters.org ]

    Over graphics with the poll numbers, Bob Schieffer announced on the December 7 CBS Evening News:
    "Now to Iraq, and President Bush's campaign to bolster Americans' support for the war. A new CBS News/New York Times poll shows that, so far anyway, the President is not making much headway. On the question of bringing the troops home, 58 percent of those questioned said the U.S. should set a timetable for troop withdrawal; 39 percent said no. Still, the President is getting a better grade on his overall job performance. He's now rated at 40 percent approving now, up from 35 percent in October, 53 percent still disapprove. We have more on the President and the war now, from John Roberts."

    Roberts then began his story on President Bush's admission of setback in the reconstruction effort: "There's another poll number the White House is worried about. Only a third of Americans think President Bush is accurately describing what's going on in Iraq...."

    For CBSNews.com's summary of the poll: www.cbsnews.com  "

http://www.timeswatch.org/twarticles/2005/20051201.asp

The Associated Press has caused some U.S. soldiers to lose their lives. The terrorists know they cannot defeat us militarily. They understand the only way they can win is if our military withdraws because the American people stop supporting the war. 

Terrorists are trying to get their message across to us, but instead of issuing press releases, they are killing our troops.

We know how important the will of the American people is regarding the war. Doesn’t the will of the terrorists matter also? If their cause looks lost, they will attack less. If they think they have a chance to win, they will attack more. The irresponsible, antiwar-biased reporting from the Associated Press over the last four months can only have encouraged our enemy to keep trying. Terrorists may have been given the false hope that all is not lost for them.

The facts:

The Rasmussen Poll taken July 13th and 14th indicated 44% of Americans thought the U.S. was winning the War on Terror. 

Meantime, the AP’s August coverage of Cindy Sheehan had an extreme antiwar bias. AP reporters propped up Sheehan and issued dispatches that looked more like editorial commentary than news. Like the terrorists, the antiwar movement was motivated to act based on the prospect of getting press coverage. The AP and the mainstream media claimed people rallied to support Sheehan, but they actually scampered down to Crawford because they knew receptive reporters were waiting to greet them. A news cycle friendly to the antiwar movement was in place, and like moths to a flame, the antiwar zealots flew to Camp Casey. 

The antiwar campaign worked. The Rasmussen Poll taken August 10th and 11th indicated a 6% drop down to 38% of respondents who thought we were winning the war. Knowing he had to respond, the president planned an aggressive push for his message. Unfortunately, the hurricanes blew the news cycle in a different direction, and President Bush was forced to wait to make his case.

The president’s speech on October 6th at the National Endowment for Democracy marked the beginning of the administration’s attempt to counter the damage caused by antiwar reporting in August. The speech was followed by the release of an intercepted letter from our enemy’s leadership. A couple of days later, on October 13th, President Bush had a video teleconference with troops in Iraq. The AP did not report anything of substance about the message contained in these three events.  Instead, they created a false news cycle regarding the supposed staging of the teleconference. 

The effect of AP’s antiwar emphasis showed up in the Rasmussen Poll taken October 15th and 16th. There was only a 1% recovery in the numbers: 39% of Americans thought we were winning the war. In early August, Sheehan’s antiwar message was packaged for maximum impact, and poll numbers went down. In early October, the president’s message was not reported and poll numbers stayed down.

In the coming months, the message of congressional Democrats and the antiwar movement were given maximum media attention. The Senate shutdown, Rep. John Murtha's comments, and constant updates of the U.S. death toll, etc. were touted. Conversely, the AP stifled the president’s message. President Bush’s October 25th speech, approval of the Iraqi constitution, President Bush’s Veterans Day speech, Congress’ vote against Murtha, Sen. Lieberman's positive reports from Iraq, etc. were ignored or reported with negative antiwar-bias.

In total, a false impression, a much more negative impression, of American support for the war was conveyed to our enemy. The truth, which could not be ignored, is reflected in President Bush’s powerful speech on November 30th. What did the AP think of the speech? “[The] speech did not break new ground or present a new strategy.” What did the American people think of the speech? The Rasmussen Poll taken November 30th and December 1st indicates 48% of Americans now believe the U.S. is winning the war. The best explanation for the nine-point bounce from the October poll is clearly that the speech provided new information to a large portion of the population.   

Anyone who looks at the events, the news coverage and the Rasmussen polling information must conclude the American people were misinformed about the war.  Ironically, if another industry were to under deliver to this extent, it would be news.  The AP would be all over it and newspapers would print it.

Newspapers are in a position to hold the AP accountable to objectivity. Even if they are rooting for the terrorists to win, you think they would at least be concerned about the credibility of their product. For some reason, the newspaper industry does not care that the AP is biased. Newspaper editors are like ostriches with their heads in the sand.

I asked Scott Bosley, the executive director of American Society of Newspaper Editors, what he thought about the Associated Press’ antiwar bias. Bosely’s opinion:

“The AP is not biased. It covers stories episodically, attempting to put them in context.”

THE CIA'S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America's foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency's agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal.

Recent events indicate that the CIA might even be willing to compromise the effectiveness of its own covert operations, if by doing so it can damage the Bush administration. The story began last May, when the New York Times outed an undercover CIA operation by identifying private companies that operated airlines for the agency. The Times fingered Aero Contractors Ltd., Pegasus Technologies, and Tepper Aviation as CIA-controlled entities. It described their aircraft and charted the routes they fly. Most significantly, the Times revealed one of the most secret uses to which these airlines were put:

When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job.

The Times went on to trace specific flights by the airlines it unmasked, which corresponded to the capture of key al Qaeda leaders:

Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.

 

A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.

Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.

Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show. The Times reported that its sources included "interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots." It seems difficult to believe that the information conveyed in those interviews was unclassified. But if the agency made any objection to the Times's disclosure, it has not been publicly recorded. And the agency's flood of leaks to the Times continued.

 

The other shoe dropped on November 2, when the Washington Post revealed, in a front-page story, the destinations to which many terrorists were transported by the CIA's formerly-secret airlines--a covert network of detention centers in Europe and Thailand:

 

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

 

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The Post's story caused a sensation, as the "current and former intelligence officials" who leaked the classified information to the newspaper must have expected it would. The leakers evidently included officials from the highest levels of the CIA; the Post noted that the facilities' existence and location "are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country." Further, the paper said that it "is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials." So this top-secret leak was apparently not a rogue operation. On the contrary, it appears to have been consistent with the agency's longstanding campaign against the Bush administration, which plainly has been sanctioned (if not perpetrated) by officials at the agency's highest levels.

 

Both the Post and the leaking officials knew that publication of the secret-prisons leak would damage American interests:

 

[T]he CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

 

The damage foreseen by CIA leakers quickly came to pass. Anti-American elements in a number of European countries demanded investigations into the use of their countries' airports and air space by civilian airlines that are known or suspected CIA fronts. In Spain, the foreign minister testified before a parliamentary committee that no laws were broken in what allegedly were CIA-linked civilian landings in Majorca. But that site will be closed to the agency in the future:

 

[H]e said the government would immediately step up checks on civilian aircraft that flew over or stopped in Spanish territory to make sure they were civilian flights. If necessary, the government would implement more exhaustive checks inside aircraft, he said.

 

Similar outcries and investigations occurred in the Canary Islands, Portugal, Norway, and Sweden.

The twin leaks to the Times and the Post have severely impaired the agency's ability to carry out renditions, transport prisoners, and maintain secret detention facilities. It is striking that top-level CIA officials are evidently willing to do serious damage to their own agency's capabilities and operations for the sake of harming the Bush administration and impeding administration policies with which they disagree.

The CIA is an agency in crisis. Perhaps, though, there is a ray of hope: the agency has referred the secret-prison leak to the Post to the Justice Department for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. It is a bitter irony that until now, the only one out of dozens of CIA-related leaks known to have resulted in a criminal investigation was the Valerie Plame disclosure, which was trivial in security terms, but unique in that it helped, rather than hurt, the Bush administration.

 

John Hinderaker is a contributing writer to THE DAILY STANDARD and a contributor to the blog Power Line.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/417aldhj.asp?pg=2