Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (87974)	8/12/2005 1:38:51 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal editorandpublisher.com <<... In an article in the September issue of Vanity Fair (not yet online), Michael Wolff, in probing the Plame/CIA leak scandal, rips those in the news media -- principally Time magazine and The New York Times -- who knew that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would have been “one of the biggest stories of the Bush years.” Not only that, “they helped cover it up.” You might say, he adds, they “became part of a conspiracy.” If they had burned this unworthy source and exposed his “crime,” he adds, it would have been “of such consequences that it might, reasonably, have presaged the defeat of the president, might have even -- to be slightly melodramatic -- altered the course of the war in Iraq.” In doing so they showed they owed their greatest allegiance to the source, not their readers...>>

To: JohnM who wrote (87974)	8/21/2005 11:15:26 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Tom Hayden has some interesting comments on the Iraq War guru Ken Pollack... huffingtonpost.com More Mothers Doing Great! (23 comments ) By Tom Hayden 08.19.2005 <<...It was wonderful to hear all those additional mothers on Amy Goodman this morning. Cindy's been doing a great job handling the media mobs but more voices make it more threatening to Bush and impressive to the American people. The grieving mom's elemental demand to know the "noble mission" for which their children died has met with a resounding silence, not only from the President but from the Democratic Party, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the networks, the "best and the brightest" architects of this madness. Here's one, for example, who makes undisclosed bucks as a pundit, Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution. You've seen him everywhere ever since the invasion. Now he writes for the New York Times that "it's time for the Bush Administration to bite the bullet." Does he mean meet with the grieving moms? No, Pollack means deploying more troops to Iraq [those four hands clapping are Hillary and Biden]. Pollack even calls for "a rationale that the American people would buy." Having searched for weapons of mass destruction, now these people are searching for an American purpose to market. Maybe that's why the meeting with Cindy is put off, the focus groups are still staring blankly at their moderator. Pollack is a good example of the delusional expert mentality that brought us to this point. He wrote last month that the Pentagon needs to "relearn the lessons that the marines and Green Berets learned in Vietnam and the British learned in Northern Ireland, [that] American troops need to be on the streets patrolling on foot with the Iraqis to reassure civilians." First, the US forces were forced to withdraw from Vietnam, and the British troops are barracked in Northern Ireland while the IRA retired soldiers are leafletting for Gerry Adams. Allowing American troops to walk the streets like sitting ducks for the next three to five years [Pollack's estimate] will only multiply the Cindy Sheehans by thousands more. It could be very painful "politically", says Pollack reassuringly. And if the counter-insurgency tactics fail, he has another plan: "buy off the Sunni sheiks" by "paying them protection money." He goes on: "Buying your enemies may sound un-American, but it is a time-honored tradition in Iraq." Good to know. But if one billion dollars a week for another three years is not enough...well, Pollack will have more comments then. Few Americans have heard of Kenneth M. Pollack. But this is the kind of insight that is highly-prized, not to mention well compensated, as "expert opinion" among the war planners and war correspondents. That is why people like Cindy Sheehan, not the experts, have to bear so much of the burden of ending the war...>>

To: JohnM who wrote (87974)	8/21/2005 11:42:25 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Congress Must Probe Whether President Lied Us into War by Gilbert Cranberg Published on Sunday, August 21, 2005 by the Des Moines Register _______________________________________________________ As polls show that Americans increasingly believe the war in Iraq to have been a mistake, so, too, do they show a growing conviction that the Bush administration lied the country into war. To be sure, pollsters do not use such blunt-edged words as "lie." Instead, they ask, as the Washington Post-ABC News poll did recently, "In making the case for war with Iraq, do you think the Bush administration told the American people what it believed to be true, or intentionally misled the American public?" "Intentionally Misled" topped "What It Believed to Be True" 52 percent to 48 percent. When the poll substituted "intentionally exaggerate" for "intentionally misled," 57 percent said in substance that the case for war was deliberately overblown. Each version of the question has been asked three times since 2004, and in each subsequent poll, ever-greater percentages said, in effect, that they had been duped. The Gallup organization had the same experience the five times it asked whether the administration "deliberately misled" Americans about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Only 31 percent believed in 2003 there had been deliberate deception, but that had climbed to 50 percent by last April. A lie is a knowing mizsstatement of fact. "Intentionally misleading" and "intentionally exaggerated" simply are euphemisms for the same thing, and it is clear that a large chunk of the public believes it was lied to by the administration. Just because many people believe something, of course, does not make it so. But neither can it be ignored. Yet the administration seems to be doing exactly that. When it created the Commission on the Intelligence Capability of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, in February 2004, it carefully walled it off from any investigation of possible misuse of intelligence by the administration. Instead, the commission was told to examine only the "intelligence community." At about the same time the president established the commission by executive order, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a press release that appeared to say the committee would explore the very issue Bush had barred his commission from investigating. The Senate committee said it would examine whether "public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information." To eliminate any ambiguity, the committee's vice-chairman, John Rockefeller, announced, "We will address the question of whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused . . . " Except it didn't; the committee got cold feet and quietly let it be known recently that it would not look into the misuse of intelligence. So the American people are left to figure out for themselves whether the administration lied. Increasingly, they are deciding that it did. The mainstream press may be beginning to find its voice with the same conclusion. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for one, editorializing May 30 about Iraq, declared, "President Bush and those around him lied . . . Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes." The editorial-page editor describes reader reaction as generally supportive. Whether the Bush administration lied is immensely important, not only because of the lives and limbs lost, but because reliable, accurate information is a bedrock of democratic government. Aldous Huxley warned, "The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information." A public fed a heavy diet of misinformation cannot make the adequately informed decisions democracy requires of them. President Bush says the mission in Iraq is to spread democracy in the Middle East. It would be bizarrely ironic if the administration knowingly hoodwinked Americans and thereby subverted a basic tenet of democracy in the name of advancing it. The widespread belief by Americans that their government deceived them makes it urgent that Congress quit ducking the questions the Senate Intelligence Committee promised the country to address. © 2005 Des Moines Register commondreams.org

To: JohnM who wrote (87974)	8/22/2005 1:10:28 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Other good polling news from www.surveyusa.com... The top three LEAST popular senators who are up for re-election in 2006 are ALL Republicans … 1. Rick Santorum (R-PA) Approve 42 Disapprove 46 2. Mike DeWine (R-OH) Approve 42 Disapprove 43 3. Conrad Burns (R-MT) Approve 48 Disapprove 42 surveyusa.com The question is, will the Dems run strong candidates against them?

To: JohnM who wrote (87974)	8/22/2005 1:19:29 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

"The responsibility for this war lies with the Republican party"... dailysandwich.blogspot.com <<...The responsibility for this war lies with the Republican party. They made the decision, they walked in lockstep with the adminstration, and they're the ones who have the power to change our policy. Our job as the opposition party is to oppose, and that's what the blogosphere is doing. The DLC's job seems to be squelching the call for Republican accountability. Which is weird, given the low ratings for the president, Congress, the war, privatization, overturning Roe v Wade, drug prices, conservation, et al. But that's a bureaucracy for you...>>