I am sure that this is not the stuff of a Democratic renaissance.

The peculiar point is that many Democrats think it *will* be such stuff; surely a few are protesting out of principled adherence to privacy concerns, but calculation of political advantage looms large.

Honestly, I just don't get why the Democrats cannot see how ridiculous they look.

Would the Timesmen have defended revealing the D-Day landings or the Manhattan Project on the basis that we needed a good healthy debate?

Would the Timesmen have defended revealing the D-Day landings or the Manhattan Project on the basis that we needed a good healthy debate?

Today's bunch of Timesmen? In a heartbeat. Hell, they would've would've blown the cover off Ultra and Magic if they thought it would advance their domestic political agenda.

Ultra and Magic are great parallels, but outing them would still only have happened if FDR had been a radical Republican.

But aside from partisanship, I think that part of this is a point that OJ makes when it comes to the Democrats lack of seriousness on national security. For much of the media, Democratic party and even the American people, the WoT is yesterday's news; we've won, it's over, move on. Isn't that why so many of the objections to Iraq boil down to "Shhh, we don't what to p*** them off again"?

David--you're giving the Democrats & the media far too much credit. As another article posted here today shows, Nancy Pelosi obviously never believed that we were at war, EVEN IN OCTOBER 2001!

Nancy Pelosi wouldn't think the US was at war if Hugo Chavez invaded Florida or Texas. Her world has only two points: San Francisco and New York. Perhaps Paris - who knows?

Everyone in Congress saw the smoke from the attack on the Pentagon and we all know that the Capitol was most likely the target of Flight 93. Does Nancy care? No. Neither do probably half of the other Democrats in Congress.

It's worth reading this to see that Risen's sources weren't only anonymous but disingenuous.

More significant criticism of the pre-war intelligence was there was mountains of evidence that supported the fact that Saddam had no weapons programs, and that most of his weapons were gone shortly before or after the first Gulf War. The Bush administration cherry-picked the unreliable intelligence that said otherwise.
Don't worry, a new threat will come up, probably as a result of the War in Iraq or Afghanistan, and once again we will have to go off and kill and anger more people, who will respond, and then she swallowed the bird, to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly, but I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
The Democrats lack of seriousness in the War on Terror and national security? Howabout Bush in the first nine months of his presidency? What national security issues/policies did he concern himself with in that time period?

More significant criticism of the pre-war intelligence was there was mountains of evidence that supported the fact that Saddam had no weapons programs, and that most of his weapons were gone shortly before or after the first Gulf War. The Bush administration cherry-picked the unreliable intelligence that said otherwise.
Don't worry, a new threat will come up, probably as a result of the War in Iraq or Afghanistan, and once again we will have to go off and kill and anger more people, who will respond, and then she swallowed the bird, to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly, but I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
The Democrats lack of seriousness in the War on Terror and national security? Howabout Bush in the first nine months of his presidency? What national security issues/policies did he concern himself with in that time period?

RICK: Sam, if it's September 2001 in Kabul, what time is it in New York?

SAM: Uh, my watch stopped.

RICK: I bet they're asleep in New York. I'll bet they're asleep all over America.

Grog:

Which people in the world are angrier today than in, say, October 2000? Or October 2001?

Are you afraid of the Arab street? Should the US be?

And there are no "new" threats - just old ones like North Korea, Iran, China, and Russia - none of which have anything to do with what we have done in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

The annoyances like the Palestinians, Hezbollah, Castro, Chavez, etc., still remain. The monsters like Mugabe are still there. Why don't you ever bring your moral spotlight to bear on them?

Grog: it's likely that there was a mountain of evidence that Saddam had no WMD. There was also certainly a mountain of evidence that he did; as a trivial example, we knew he had them and used them in the past, and we knew he was doing his best to frustrate the inspection process. There were two mountains of evidence, not one, because that is what the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence produces -- a lot of data, sorted into various piles. And of course the Bush administration cherry-picked ( that is to say, they chose a pile ) because actually making a decision required them to. Ah, but it was obvious that the no-WMD pile was the bigger pile, says Grog. Well, of course it is, now. But that too is always the case. It was just as obvious in 1929 that the stock market was going to crash; in 1941 that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor; or for that matter in 1973 that the Syrians were about to attack Israel:

In the fall of 1973, the Syrian Army began to gather a large number of tanks, artillery batteries, and infantry along its border with Israel. Simultaneously, to the south, the Egyptian Army cancelled all leaves, called up thousands of reservists, and launched a massive military exercise, building roads and preparing anti-aircraft and artillery positions along the Suez Canal...Was war imminent? The head of aman (note: aman is Israeli military intelligence), Major General Eli Zeira, looked over the evidence and said he didn’t think so. He was wrong...Despite all the warnings of the previous weeks, Israeli officials were caught by surprise. Why couldn’t they connect the dots?

If you start on the afternoon of October 6th and work backward, the trail of clues pointing to an attack seems obvious; you’d have to conclude that something was badly wrong with the Israeli intelligence service. On the other hand, if you start several years before the Yom Kippur War and work forward, re-creating what people in Israeli intelligence knew in the same order that they knew it, a very different picture emerges.

Malcom Gladwell, Connecting the Dots: the Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform, The New Yorker, March 10 2003.

This is the best introduction to the idea of hindsight bias I know of. Read the whole thing, as they say.

By the way, it's also obvious that on on the morning of September 11th George Bush should have been simultaneously at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, supervising the pre-emptive evacuations. Instead he was hiding his cowardly face at some elementary school.

Jim Hamlen: I don't see Castro and Castro as problems, only for America's policy planners who might not like to see public opinion influenced by a well-functioning socialist democracy.
The Palestinians and Hezbollah are violent reactions towards a Anglo-American invasion of Israel; similar to violent manifestations of Islamic group in other regions.
I do care about Mugabe, but I also care about other tyrants, like Pinochet, that our great country has had a role installing and supporting. What to do with brutal tyrants is a sticky question, but upon careful analysis of US foreign policies you will find many glaring consistencies and inconsistencies that do not support the Bush administrations current wars.
Joe:

Democrats said the 14-page report contradicts Bush’s contention that lawmakers saw all the evidence before U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, stating that the president and a small number of advisers “have access to a far greater volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information.”

A new report looks into instances in which the Bush Administration leaked classified information to support its case that Iraq was a threat to the United States.

While that case was, of course, ridiculous and the information falsified, the leaking of it was illegal. And the leaks appear to have been part of a coordinated effort. Immediately following important leaks, top administration officials appeared on talk shows to discuss information that they could not have legally discussed had it not appeared in a newspaper that morning.

Congressman John Conyers has just released an extensive report titled "The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Cover-ups in the Iraq War." Pages 73 – 81 address the Bush Administration's claims regarding aluminum tubes allegedly acquired by Iraq for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons.

On page 78, the report notes: "Our investigation has also found that classified intelligence information supporting the Bush Administration's position regarding the aluminum tubes was leaked to the press. For example, on Sunday, September 8, 2002, the lead story in The New York Times, written by Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon, quotes 'anonymous' Administration officials as stating that 'Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.'"

The headline of that article was "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts."

Conyers' report continues: "The article goes on to source 'administration officials' for the proposition that '[i]n the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium' and that '[t]he diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program.'"

So, someone in the Administration was leaking classified information. Of course, it was false information, but that made it all the more damaging. But who was the leaker(s)?

According to Conyers' report, "Subsequent media accounts have traced the story, at least in part, to Paul Wolfowitz:

"'In the summer of 2002, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz convened a secret meeting [concerning the tubes] in his office with Francis Brooke, the I.N.C. adviser, and Khidir Hamza, a former chief of Saddam's nuclear program, who had defected to America in 1994 . . . Wolfowitz circulated his conclusions to his administration allies. A few days later, the story of the "nuclear" tubes was leaked to The New York Times, where it landed on the front page.'

"On the CNN Documentary, Dead Wrong, an anonymous source characterized the dissemination of this biased and slanted information to Miller and Gordon as 'official leaking': 'I would call it official leaking because I think these were authorized conversations between the press and members of the intelligence community that further misreported the nature of the intelligence community's disagreement on this issue.'

Of course, a front page story in the New York Times gets everyone's attention, and – if the lies are glaring enough – can lead to a reporter resigning in disgrace. But the Bush Administration has often promoted stories into the "mainstream" media by first establishing them in the super-right-wing outlets.

"The Constitution in Crisis" continues: "Our investigation has also learned that administration officials appear to have leaked classified information to the press well before the New York Times article. A July 29, 2002, article in the Washington Times, titled 'Iraq Seeks Steel for Nukes' reported:

"'Procurement agents from Iraq's covert nuclear-arms program were detected as they tried to purchase stainless-steel tubing, uniquely used in gas centrifuges and a key component in making the material for nuclear bombs, from an unknown supplier, said administration officials familiar with intelligence reports . . . U.S. intelligence agencies believe the tubing is an essential component of Iraq's plans to enrich radioactive uranium to the point where it could be used to fashion a nuclear bomb.'"

With impeccable timing, on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks, top Bush officials appeared on the Sunday talk shows to discuss the aluminum tube story that someone among them had just planted in the New York Times.

Knight Ridder explained how this worked: "[the leaks] appearance in the nation's most influential paper also gave Cheney and Rice an opportunity to discuss the matter the same day on the Sunday television talk shows. They could discuss the article, but otherwise they wouldn't have been able to talk about classified intelligence in public." ("CIA leak illustrates selective use of intelligence on Iraq [The Aluminum Tubes]," by Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers.)

And who can forget the horrifying comments that the Bush Administration made?

Castro's well-functioning socialist democracy is a horrific police state. He's currently waging war on librarians and the democrats are stuffed into the regimes prisons.

Grog:

You say Cuba and VZ are 'well-functioning democracies', and then take umbrage at being called a leftist? How delicious. How evasive.

Compare and contrast Chile circa. 1999 with Zimbabwe 2006 (26 years after the leaders took over). Gotta love your moral blindness there, eh?

Jim: We will never know what Chile could have been, when it used to be one of the most progressive and enlightened South America countries before we unleashed Pinochet.

President Mugabe and his party attempted to manipulate the media. His government essentially runs all media outlets in Zimbabwe. Consequently, coverage of his administration and his party’s campaign was heavily biased. Also, a law was enacted in November that made it illegal to practice journalism without a government-issued license, and subjected anyone guilty of this offense to a prison sentence. In February, his government barred foreign journalists from reporting on the impending election without governmental approval, which was rarely given.

Since our own election last November, we’ve learned that the Bush administration also attempted to manipulate the media. Various journalists have admitted to being paid by the government to promote President Bush’s agenda. In addition, the administration has admitted to creating fake “news” stories, with actors portraying reporters, to promote President Bush’s policies. The stories were distributed to television media outlets to use in their nightly news segments.

President Mugabe’s government attempted to disenfranchise voters. Absentee ballots were only mailed to civil servants, diplomats, and uniformed members of the military and security forces living abroad. Yet there are over one million of Zimbabwe’s citizens in other African countries. Likewise, the Bush administration took great efforts to ensure that military personnel serving abroad had every opportunity to vote. But other Americans living abroad, particularly in Europe, had enormous difficulties obtaining absentee ballots in time to vote, if at all. One report of American’s living in Rome indicated that as many as 90 percent of those who requested the ballots did not receive them in time to vote.

According to nongovernmental organizations which monitored Zimbabwe’s election, there were significant problems at polling stations. Election officers who were appointed by the Mugabe government were accused of barring the opposition party’s voting monitors from polling stations. As a result, by some reports, as many as ten percent of Zimbabweans who attempted to vote were turned away, on the grounds that they lacked proper identification, or were voting in the wrong district. Additionally, when an election complaint was lodged, there were not enough independent judges to rule on the complaints, given that most had been appointed by President Mugabe or were members of his party.

In our election last November there were various complaints of problems at voting polls. Many of these complaints occurred in Ohio. Republican polling monitors in Ohio outnumbered Democratic monitors by almost two-to-one. Consequently, when Republican monitors objected to someone attempting to vote, there were not enough Democratic monitors to refute the objection, resulting in the disenfranchisement of some voters. Also, virtually all voting complaints in Ohio were resolved by their Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was also the co-chairman of President Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio, and could hardly be regarded as independent.

Other similarities between the two elections are equally compelling. In the 2002 Zimbabwe elections, President Mugabe’s supporters were accused of killing hundreds of opponents. In order to demonstrate that the elections last week were fair, he invited hundreds of foreign observers to watch the elections. After our questionable election in 2000, the U.S. State Department, for the first time ever, allowed the United Nations to officially monitor the 2004 election.

President Mugabe’s party bused in loyal audiences whenever they held a campaign rally, in order to pack their campaign sites. Although not widely known, the Bush/Cheney ’04 Campaign never allowed the general public to attend any of President Bush’s rallies last fall. All attendees were required to have an invitation, and the invitations were only mailed to registered Republicans in the county in which Mr. Bush was speaking.

Both presidents manipulated the electorate in grotesque ways in order to win their elections. By most estimates, half of all Zimbabweans are undernourished. Starvation is a sad and common part of life in that country. But last year, President Mugabe ordered the World Food Program and Save the Children Federation to discontinue distributing food aid.

He announced that the country had become self-sufficient, and that his government would now allocate food resources. This forced Zimbabweans to rely almost entirely on the government for food. Consequently, Mr. Mugabe’s government began to distribute food only to those who had a voter registration card showing that they were members of his ruling party. In fact, the party routinely handed out food at their rallies.

Similarly, President Bush played on the fear and worries of Americans in order to ensure his re-election. His campaign relentlessly insisted that another terrorist attack was inevitable if not imminent, and that only Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney could save us. They portrayed Senator Kerry as weak on defense and confused on national security. Vice President Cheney infamously stated in a town hall meeting in Ohio last October that the greatest threat we now faced was a nuclear or chemical weapons attack in one of our cities, and that Mr. Kerry was not tough enough to prevent it.

The Bush administration, and indeed many Americans, love to hold up America as a beacon to the rest of the world. They insist that we are the ultimate democracy to which totalitarian governments, third-world nations, and banana republics should attempt to emulate. If that’s the case, Zimbabwe is already very American

I can only say that it is refreshing to read the uber-toll at work (in a breathtaking sort of way).

My goodness - I feel like I am back in college, listening to my Russian history professor tell me that George Kennan knows more about the Soviet Union than Solzhenitsyn.

Ohio as Zimbabwe - I suppose that makes Milwaukee and Philadelphia and Newark and Cook County analogous to the precincts in Baghdad for Saddam's last election, no?

It's sad that Grog spent 4 paragraphs discussing the state of journalism in Zimbabwe, and did not let his moral spotlight shine on the abject misery of the people who live there. Very sad.

Grog: I have to say that that's pretty good for off the cuff stuff, but of course your "facts" are wrong and your comparisons are nuts. The administration sends out video press releases -- a common practice shared with any number of private organizations and the Clinton Administration -- and that's the same as Mugabe unleashing an army of thugs. Not very convincing, I'm afraid.