The Numbers Speak Volumes

I've often been skeptical recently about how Google News comes up with their headline stories. Back in the week or so leading up to the Libby indictment announcement on Friday (God blast his lying soul), for example, often the first or second main story in the US section was on some ultra-irrelevancy--like a surfer getting bitten by a shark in NJ--while the day's news about Treasongate would be shunted down to the bottom among the "More Top Stories."

I've puzzled and puzzled over this apparent discrepancy in newsworthiness. And thinking that Google was automatically generated, I've tried to figure out the rationale. One bit of information they provide is how many related news stories are currently available on the web. So perhaps, I've thought, it goes by how many news outlets are picking up and running with the story. This would make good sense. But alas, just as often stories of very low occurrence--like the shark-bit surfer--would trump stories of much higher occurrence--like politically motivated treason at the heart of the US government.

So occurrence doesn't seem to be the key to the Google News equation. Perhaps audience popularity of the stories factors in? Perhaps, but Google doesn't give us any info on that. Yet over at Yahoo News (which I am beginning to trust more and more, at least compared to Google News), where they do show a list of "most popular" stories, the Plamegate stories of the day were consistently in the lineup, usually number one or two. So unless the Google News users are just more interested in idiot trivia like the bitten surfer, popularity doesn't seem to account for the curious criteria for newsworthiness of Google News either.

But ever since the indictment on Friday, Libby's slow legal simmering has been up-front and center at the very top of Google News. Moreover, it has consistently had related stories in the high 3000s or, as now (Sunday morning) over 4300 related stories. Here's a story "with legs" as they say.

What is funny to watch is what has been going on in the US top stories section. After the shamefaced Miers withdrawal the White House has been reeling to pick back up the pieces and put a good show on the Supreme Court pick situation. Indeed, it seems that they have been trying to play the new pick story off of the Libby indictment, trying to deflect attention. They haven't done bad, I must confess. All weekend it has been almost--not quite--neck and neck between the stories on Libby at the top and the stories on the Miers fallout and the possible new candidate at the top of the US list. After yesterday's closest point when the Libby stories were in the 4000s and the Supreme Court stories were in the 3000s, the latter has slipped somewhat and now has only some 2700 stories.

Of course not all those stories are positive for Bush. So this is only a good news story by the maxim of "no press is bad press."

Many of these stories are positively brutal. Like the backhanded Boston Globe article that, yes, currently tops the list of Miers stories, "Grand Old Crackup?"--a long story reading the tea leaves of conservative movement dislocation as of late.

Finally, both fueling my suspicions about how Google News picks its stories, and proving the point that the Bush spin machine is suffering immensely in the wake of the Libby deepfry, Bush's specifically spindoctor message for the day, about "staying the course" to Iraq victory, has slipped just now from the number 2 US stories spot to number 3 (now it is falling behind the Arnold Schwarzenegger story of the day (how the Terminator's popularity is getting terminated).

Arnold's story du jour has been picked up and varied by around 375 media outlets.

Poor old W's radio address story has only got 73 paltry stories to cover it.

Even this 73 has a great deal of negative in it. Several of these stories are about the 2,000 dead in Iraq. Many of them are letters to the editor sharply criticizing BushCo's war of disastrous adventure.

But spinning out the ultra-stale rhetoric of "more resolve" and "honoring the commitment" and "staying the course to victory" is not even playing well in the heartland anymore.

The Herald News Daily of North Dakota, for example, ran an AP writeup on the radio address under the headline "Bush says progress is being made in Iraq" (how many times have we heard that lie?)

But the story is brutal and scathing. It begins with the mountain of American corpses that Bush is trying to scream over the top of:

"With the American death toll above 2,000, President Bush said Saturday that the war in Iraq has required "great sacrifice," but that progress is being made and the United States must remain steadfast...."

Then it bookends one more short line from the radio address with another sinkhole fact: the poll numbers.

"Public support for Bush‘s handling of Iraq is at its lowest point, 37 percent, roughly where it has been since early August, according to AP-Ipsos polling."

Then the story moves to, of course, Libby and the indictment, and ties it and him to the war (right where it belongs):

"Libby was a driving force behind the administration‘s march to war against Iraq and helped assemble evidence — later proven false — asserting that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which became the rationale for the U.S.-led invasion. "

Then it reminds us that the White House's "comfort" that Rove escaped indictment is only temporary and that he "remains under investigation."

It then veers back to the radio address--the putative focus of the story--to quote empty Bush platitudes about Iraqi's expressing their freedom in elections, etc.

Finally, in a complete non sequitur, the story closes out of the blue with a single sentences on Miers' withdrawal:

"In accepting her withdrawal, Bush said Miers would resume her duties helping to review candidates for judicial openings."

So there you go. There is currently no way for Bush to escape media focus on the stewed ducks in his administration. Try as he might, even the feeble attempts at positive propaganda, like his radio address, cannot evade the dying elephant in the room, or more importantly, the graveyard of fallen sons and daughters.

Buyers' Remorse--Returning the Shoddy Merchandise of War

Any hour now we should know who has been targeted with indictments by Fitzgerald in the CIA leak investigation. Thus things are looking as good as they possibly could for the hope for some measure of accountability and restoration in the post-Bush America, a nation that has been hijacked by a cabal of militant zealots, whose "insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy."

Yes, that's right, more like a dictatorship than a democracy. These are the words in the op-ed piece in yesterday's LA Times not by some leftist Bush-hating fanatic but by the former number 2 guy in the Colin Powell State Dept., Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Far from backing off from his statements made in a public address last week, Wilkerson followed it up with a written statement to the same effect, that a small "cabal" has overtaken the formal executive decision-making process in the United States, and that the result has been an unmitigated disaster.

"Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38% and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White). It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time."

Note that the "frustrating bureaucracy" Wilkerson refers to is not Congress and its oversight--though I am sure he would certainly favor that bureaucracy operating effectively as well--but the already close-knit advisory group of the NSC, National Security Council. It is this executive bureaucracy established in 1947 that Wilkerson saw being manipulated and ignored, its cumbersome inefficiency being used as a mask for the smaller cabal of zealots lead by Cheney and Rumsfeld to push through, by force and guile, their narrow and narrow-minded agenda.

But the leak investigation is now reaching the explosive stage. It is becoming increasingly clear that we have an international conspiracy on our hands. The connections to the Italian Niger Embassy break-in and the forged documents bought by the Administration when the CIA wouldn't have them, as reported by the Reppublica in Italy (see here for links and discussion in English)--this is the wildcard that threatens the entire BushCo elite with the ride-out-on-a-rail treatment.

The key to the entire widening investigation is the timing between the forged Niger documents and the WHIG committee--which might as well be identified as Wilkerson's "cabal" under another name. The White House Iraq Group reportedly formed in August 2002, seven full months before the big show "Bombs over Baghdad" premiered on the privatized government propaganda networks of CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX.

By the way, Dennis Kucinich is leading the charge for a resolution of inquiry into WHIG by Congress, an effort that can use and profit from grassroots activist support.

Long story short for now, Stephen Hadley was a member of the WHIG cabal. It is being reported that he met secretly with Italian intelligence in Washington on September 9, 2002, just after the formation of WHIG. It was around this exact time that the infamous media blitz began, in which the WHIG cabal put on its best ad-man con face and sold the "imminent Iraqi threat of WMD" to the American people and Congress. Why it began after Labor Day was in accord with advertising wisdom; as Andrew Card said at the time, "From a marketing point of veiw, you don't introduce new products in August."

The cynicism of that statement has come home to roost. This "product" marketed so zealously and successfully, has netted 2,000 American dead and counting, and not forgetting the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead.

America has buyer's remorse. This investigation is about returning the shoddy merchandise of war. Let's hope Fitzgerald has all his arguments and evidence in a row when he finally reaches the customer service counter--and that he insists on all our behalves that the WHIG Co. take back their defective goods and pay for the damage they've done.

Bleak but Hope-Streaked Weekly Roundup

The Iraq oil-for-food program is coming home to roost. On Friday a US Attorney and the FBI in New York arrested Houston oil executive Oscar Wyatt on a solid indictment of illegal kickbacks to Saddam during 2000-2002. The indictment and arrest of Wyatt, along with indictments of two others in Switzerland, follows upon a trifecta of related indictments in April involving the same company, Bayoil, and two other foreign associates. In the earlier case, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigatioons followed up the case and found Chalmers and Bayoil to be deeply involved in illegal payments to Saddam, as reported in this Houston Chronicle piece. The next day (May 17, 2005) the Washington Post delved further into the Senate Committee's investigation findings, which sheds negative light on the early Bush Treasury, whose Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was responsible for monitoring the oil imports. (The OFAC is the chief govt. office responsible for overseeing and implementing trade sanctions " based on US foreign policy and national security goals.") The Senate report also blasted the State Department and the navy for apparently aiding and abetting the smuggling of millions worth of oil in seven supertankers into Jordan just prior to the war. The State Dept. and the Pentagon refused to answer Senate queries or turn over any documents to the committee. The Post article goes on to relate how in July 2001 the UN asked the US to look into Bayoil's possible abuses, since Bayoil had refused to respond to UN queries. The State Dept. took a month before contacting the Treasury's OFAC, asking them to urge the company to respond to the UN. The OFAC in turn stalled and delayed for a full eight months--that would be until around April 2002--before contacting Bayoil, and then they never shared Bayoil's response with the UN. (The Post article does not mention what the substance of their response might of have been.)

Robert Werner became OFAC director on Oct. 1, 2004, an appointee of Treasury Secretary John Snow. Werner testified before the Senate Committee on May 17, 2005 (the day of the Post article just discussed). His testimony is here. Werner replaced Richard Newcomb, who had headed OFAC for 17 years. By virtue of his office Werner has become a key federal agent in the war on terror. (See for e.g. the Oct. 3 announcement of OFAC's action against 7 alleged Egyptian Jihadists.)

Long-time OFAC director Richard Newcomb was sued in his official capacity, along with the Office itself and John Snow, on September 27,2004, by a group of American publishers, in allegations that the OFAC was violating First Amendment rights in forbidding publication of books by authors in Cuba, Sudan, and Iran.

More specifically, the plaintiffs charged, the OFAC was in direct violation of the Berman Amendment and the Free Trade in Ideas Amendment, which "exempt information and publications from U.S. economic sanctions programs," that the OFAC has "eviscerated" these exemptions by applying new rules that forbid American publishers to make book deals with authors in these countries, block after-publication activities like translations and editions, and forbidding any marketing of such books.

(In Dec. 2004 the Treasury revised its regulations, effectively reversing its attempts at new control, in response to the pressure of the lawsuit.)

There is another interesting suit filed in August 2004 against OFAC and Newcomb, concerning their alleged overstepping of authority and improper handling of fines and charges relating to the Iraqi sanctions program. Ryan Clancy, the plaintiff, was a record-store owner in Wisconsin who went to Iraq in February 2003 as part of the Voices in the Wildnerness Human Shield effort.

The plaintiff's lawyers conclude, after a 13 page discussion of the case that "The United States Constitution protects Mr. Clancy’s travel to Iraq to express concern for innocent victims of armed conflict and voice his objection to the impending war. The OFAC regulations impermissibly restrict his constitutional rights to speech, information, and travel. They also exceed the authority Congress conferred in the Iraqi Sanctions Act and violate international law. OFAC’s implementation of its Regulations, moreover, violates Mr. Clancy’s privilege not to incriminate himself and his right to due process of law before a deprivation of his property."

So it would seem that when Newcomb resigned, he was coming under fire for improprieties in its zealous execution of the war on terror. In particular, it looks like his office was vindictively punishing citizens for voicing opposition to the war that would soon erupt in Iraq.

It seems that the OFAC was too busy with the Administration's greatest priority of squashing dissent and manufacturing patriotic consent to do its real job of pursuing and punishing the real violators of sanctions, the oil companies that were kicking back millions to Saddam in order to play in the game of Oil-for-Food.


So the oil-for-food indictments now trickling in are a positive sign that the slow, rusty wheels of justice are at least still turning. And make no mistake about it, as the above dossier of events and characters at the OFAC establish, the oil-for-food corruption relates directly to the Bush Administration and its placing of greater priority on monitoring and punishing domestic dissent than in carrying out international sanctions against a corrupt and abusive regime and its oil industry cronies that did business with that regime.

2) The critiques of and intimations of crime by the Administration are picking up the pace this week, from the prewar planning and selling to the post-invasion handling. To wit. Colin Powell's chief of staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson called Cheney and Rumsfeld the heads in a "cabal" that "hijacked" American foreign policy. (see also here and here)Brent Scowcroft is now blasting the Bush Administration for ideology-driven folly in the Iraq War. (see also here) Scowcroft has called VP Cheney "a real anomaly." "I consider Cheney a good friend," he says, "but Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

Robin Raphael, the coordinator for Iraq assistance at the State Dept., said that the war's timing was driven by "clear political pressure," and that after the invasion US attempts to run the country were an "amateur hour."

So things are not looking good for the Right Establishment right now. And none of this is even coming from opposition voices.

3) Finally, just thought I should take note of other GOP indictment situations going down right now. Former Republican Governor of Illinois George Ryan, indicted by none other than Patrick Fitzgerald's office in Dec. 2003 and whose trial on 18 (or 22, reports differ) counts of corruption and fraud was announced in mid-September), is now standing trial. Ryan was the 66th person to be swept up into a massive Justice Dept. probe into political corruption under the Republican Governor from 1998-2002. (see the DOJ's release on the indictment from Dec. 2003).

If the Ryan trial is any indication for the Plame affair, Fitzgerald is a prosecuting tiger and the Plame outers have very good reason to be fearful--and we, in turn, every reason to be hopeful.

Kentucky’s Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher is also becoming increasingly embroiled in a very real and serious investigation into hiring practices during his tenure. (see here for the latest this week in a long ongoing drama).
And Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition architect and wannabe lieutenant governor in Georgia, is also coming under scrutiny, in the press at least, for his intimately close ties to now-blackened uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

So it is looking like a very bad week for the GOP across the board--and I haven't even mentioned Harriet Miers!
Finally, Frank Rich in the New York Times today has published a bold, sure-to-be-reviled-at-the-White-House piece on the lies and whys for war in Iraq. He puts together a compelling case with timeline for Rovian domestic political agenda combined with Libbyan neocon ideology/oil agenda being the real backstage story to the front-page wag of WMD and Iraqi-al Qaeda links. Worth the read.

Foreign Policy Hijacking, Update

The waves from Wilkerson's talk, on which I posted earlier, are starting to spread across the net. Here is the link to the full transcript of his talk, at thewashingtonnote.com.

and other links available at the home page there

This is big. Or rather, should be, but we'll see what comes of it....

Foreign Policy "Hijacking"

A propos of my post yesterday on our illustrious new military dictatorship, the Financial Times is reporting today on the recent whistle-blowing of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff during his Sec. of State tenure.


“What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.”

A "cabal" eh? Of the two corporatocratic Defense hawks. In other words, military coup d'etat.

"I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.” Wilkerson said, speaking at the New America Foundation (a scholarly think-tank founded in 1999 that, if anything, can perhaps be described as center-right on the political spectrum).

One other place our corporate-military cabal has courted disaster is in China. As Bob Burnett blogs today from Bangkok, China is growing increasingly bemused by the imbecilic coaching they are recieving from American economic advisors like Snow and Greenspan. The US is still pretending they are playing from a position of economic strength with China.

Alas, this is hardly the case. And while we are all riveted to our monitors watching the perfect storm of Plamegate/DeLay indictment/Miers backlash/Frist SEC inquest/etc. etc. unfold, the economic flip-flop and potential implosion that we were hearing so much more about this summer is still, steadily but surely, tightening its coil ready to explode.

One other thing deserves as much cross-posting as it can get today. Diebold is slipping into deep deep water in Florida.

As reported today in Cleveland SCENE, the Leon Co., FL, supervisor of elections allowed hackers to put the Accuvote to the hack-test--and, surprise surprise, it was easy as pie to register 10,000 hacked votes for the candidate of choice!

Hmmm....

check out Brad Blog on more of same today.

Viva la contra-revolucion.

America's Coup d'Etat

With the end of the Cold War in 1989 the United States became the strongest country in the world. Since 2000, the United States has boldly and swiftly been taken over by a military coup d’etat. These two facts, that the U.S. is the mightiest state power on the planet, and that it has become a de facto military dictatorship, must become the basis of all reasoning about American culture and politics. The two facts are especially salient to all progressive thinking in particular.

To be sure, the USA retains many trappings of its traditional democratic legitimacy. We still hold elections. We still pretend, at least, that we retain the freedoms of speech, of assembly, of conscience and religion, and the rights to a speedy and fair trial by our peers, to know and face our accusers, to hold silent as a witness rather than incriminate ourselves, to protect our families and property against violence and fraud whether from other individuals or from government itself.

But let us not delude ourselves about the current state of affairs. The America we are taught to love—and it is, admittedly, a lovable place, worthy of admiration and awe—is only an idea, a utopia of the mind, existing no place except as an ideal, a dream to be aspired to and worked toward.

We might usefully distinguish between America and the United States, the one the aspired-to myth of freedom, justice, equality and prosperity (however one defines these lofty but generic ideals), the other being the reality “on the ground,” the vast geographic expanse and complex network of political systems, the military industrial complex, the globalizing capitalist economy, the diverse population of rich and poor, black, white, brown, red, yellow, Native, Euro, and Asian, labor and management, educated elite and the illiterate marginalized, and everybody in between.

America, as the shining ideal it has always been, is still sound, still worth the striving, still an inspiration to the world, able to inspire greatness and draw shudders and tears of respect, envy, and admirable pride.

The United States, on the other hand, has become a global military-capitalist tyrant, a cynical machine bent on vindictive strikes and acquisitive conquest and, indeed, the suppression of everything good, noble, and true that America is, has sometimes been, and should always stand for.

The United States is destroying America. That is what must be understood clearly. That is what demands our sharp focus. It ought to become our rallying cry.

What is worse, the United States is cynically manipulating the spiritual, intellectual, and moral strengths of America in order to accomplish its destructive ends. To further its imperial ambitions the United States is cloaking itself in the proud mantle of America. To satisfy its thirst for power, geopolitical sway, and unfettered access to limited world resources, the United States is depleting America of its precious youth, its good will and spiritual optimism, its charitable benevolence, its eager willingness to reach out and help others less fortunate, its vital reserves of ingenuity and technical know-how.

In more concrete terms, the military regime now running the United States is literally bankrupting America’s future, funneling all its hard-earned public funds—the tax being the economic coin of the social contract whose only legitimacy is to serve the common good—into foolish, ill-planned wars of aggression and greed, while taking care on the domestic front only of those who already have much, turning a cynical and cruel blind-eye to the “middle class” and all the millions of others whose incomes increasingly fall short of their monthly bills.

The United States has lost, thrown away, its legitimacy. Nevertheless, America still longs for the protection of public institutions run by publicly elected good men and women for the benefit not of the select few but of one and all. America deserves such public institutions. In fact, America requires them. America is ill-served by the United States military dictatorship, and for America to survive it must oust the current rulers and transform the United States into a machine geared toward its ideals.

Of course, this is easier said than done. The military power elite have done their job well. Their coup d’etat has been remarkably successful. They have brilliantly manipulated all the resources available to create the military dictatorship without the many noticing it happening and without much ado. They have done so, in fact, with widespread popular support, fanfare, and praise. Large swaths of America have, alas, strongly embraced the military dictatorship vision of the United States. For much of this time they have relied on a complacent and complicit media machine to deliver faithfully its propaganda and spin.

But they do have weaknesses, and these are becoming more transparent day by day. First of all, their arrogance is getting harder to mask with jocular fake populism and gung-ho patriotism. The cronyism and greed at the heart of the regime’s machine is, somewhat surprisingly, becoming a media byword. The media, thankfully, has begun to wake up and smell the odor of corruption. Arrests, indictments, and investigations at high levels (David Safavian, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Bill Frist) are actually making the front pages of the print news magazines like Newsweek, where millions of otherwise news-clueless TV-drone Americans are getting their first lessons in the “cronyism” revolution that has taken over the United States.

These are some of the thoughts I’ve been thinking lately. I could—and probably should—go on, but I am going to post this as is. Meantime, I caught sight of a good looking book over at zFacts.com, conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke’s America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. I’m checking it out at Amazon, and will probably pick it up soon. They parse the neocon coup d’etat in non-minced terms, stating their conclusion from the get-go:

“the neo-conservatives have taken American international relations on an unfortunate detour, veering away from the balanced, consensus-building, and resource husbanding approach that has characterized traditional Republican internationalism—exemplified by Secretary of State Colin Powell—and acted more as a special interest focused on its particular agenda.”

This is just the beginning. It gets way better (or rather, worse). These two conservatives seem to agree wholeheartedly—if reluctantly—with everything I’ve written above. They try to remain optimistic, but it is clear they see the neoconservative regime as a threat to America and world order:

“Providing that the normal democratic checks and balances remain effective and providing that the American people in general and mainstream conservatives in particular see neo-conservatives for the aberration they are and demand a restoration of balance to the nation’s affairs, the neo-conservative influence will gradually dwindle.”

But these, to me, seem like BIG “providing thats.” I’m optimistic too, by nature. But not naïve or rosy-eyed about the fights that will have to be fought to get that influence to “dwindle.”

Incredible Terror Threats

Does anybody else find it curious that on the day that the President's talking point--in order to distract from the dire GOP scandals going down on several fronts, but especially the hot water Rove is in on the Plame investigation--is (as the NYTimes headline has it)
Bush Stresses Terror Threat and Urges Support for Iraq War

later in the afternoon the New York police and Co. drop the fear-tactics bombshell that there is a "credible threat" of a 19-person coordinated bomb attack on the New York subway?

Or is the threat, in fact, credible? To judge from the mass media reports, it's hard to tell. ABC says that according to Dept. of Homeland Security sources " they are very doubtful the threat information is credible," but nonetheless, "NYPD sources said the information continues to come in and is disturbing."

This is not the only detail in the reports about this "credible threat" that raises eyebrows and question marks. So information "continues to come in", eh? But according to the same article, the information came out during the arrest several days ago of three "Iraqi insurgents" during an FBI-CIA raid (presumably in Iraq? the report does not say). So was the information obtained in the past, and now they have found further real evidence of its credibility? Or is it even now "coming in" and from where?

(I suppose we are to imagine the details--CIA beating the three insurgents to bloody pulps as they reveal, or make up, more corroborating evidence....)

Still, Repub. Rep. Peter King of NY (toeing today's party line) insists that "Obviously, this is a significant threat."

The FBI seem to want to have it both ways. "The investigation has helped stop the plans," ABC reports. "The encouraging news is that classified operations have in fact partially disrupted this threat" Mark Marshon of the FBI is quoted as saying.

Forgive the question, but has it or hasn't it "disrupted the threat"? What does that "partially" mean? Do they have suspects with bombs in backpacks, but 10 (or 17, or whatever) are still at large?

And let me backtrack to the beginning of the article, which describes the threat as "while the source is credible, the information has not been verified." Does this mean not even by the FBI and those investigating it? So how, pray tell, has a threat that has not even been verified get (even partially) disrupted?

Nobody says. Nevertheless, Mayor Bloomberg "added that he will continue to ride the subways."

Thank God.