THANK YOU COUNTERPUNCH

Now or Never

Do
We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran?

By RAY McGOVERN
Former
CIA Analyst

Why do I feel like the proverbial skunk
at a Labor Day picnic? Sorry; but I thought you might want to
know that this time next year there will probably be more skunks
than we can handle. I fear our country is likely to be at war
with Iran-and with the thousands of real terrorists Iran can
field around the globe.

It is going to happen, folks,
unless we put our lawn chairs away on Tuesday, take part in some
serious grass-roots organizing, and take action to prevent a
wider war-while we still can.

President George W. Bush’s
speech Tuesday lays out the Bush/Cheney plan to attack Iran and
how the intelligence is being “fixed around the policy,”
as was the case before the attack on Iraq.

It’s not about putative Iranian
“weapons of mass destruction”-not even ostensibly.
It is about the requirement for a scapegoat for U.S. reverses
in Iraq, and the White House’s felt need to create a casus
belli by provoking Iran in such a way as to “justify”
armed retaliation-eventually including air strikes on its nuclear-related
facilities.

Bush’s Aug. 28 speech to the
American Legion comes five years after a very similar presentation
by Vice President Dick Cheney. Addressing the Veterans of Foreign
Wars on Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney set the meretricious terms of reference
for war on Iraq.

Sitting on the same stage that
evening was former CENTCOM commander Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni,
who was being honored at the VFW convention. Zinni later said
he was shocked to hear a depiction of intelligence (Iraq has
WMD and is amassing them to use against us) that did not square
with what he knew. Although Zinni had retired two years before,
his role as consultant had enabled him to stay up to date on
key intelligence findings.

“There was no solid proof
that Saddam had WMD…I heard a case being made to go to war,”
Zinni told Meet the Press three and a half years later.

(Zinni is a straight shooter
with considerable courage, and so the question lingers: why did
he not go public? It is all too familiar a conundrum at senior
levels; top officials can seldom find their voices. My hunch
is that Zinni regrets letting himself be guided by a misplaced
professional courtesy and/or slavish adherence to classification
restrictions, when he might have prevented our country from starting
the kind of war of aggression branded at Nuremberg the “supreme
international crime.”)

Cheney:
Dean of Preemption

Zinni was not the only one
taken aback by Cheney’s words. Then-CIA director George Tenet
says Cheney’s speech took him completely by surprise. In his
memoir Tenet wrote, “I had the impression that the president
wasn’t any more aware than we were of what his number-two was
going to say to the VFW until he said it.”

Yet, it could have been anticipated.
Just five weeks before, Tenet himself had told his British counterpart
that the president had decided to make war on Iraq for regime
change and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy.”

When Bush’s senior advisers
came back to town after Labor Day, 2002, the next five weeks
(and by now, the next five years) were devoted to selling a new
product-war on Iraq. The actual decision to attack Iraq, we
now know, was made several months earlier but, as then-White
House chief of staff Andy Card explained, no sensible salesperson
would launch a major new product during the month of August-Cheney’s
preemptive strike notwithstanding. Yes, that’s what Card called
the coming war; a “new product.”

After assuring themselves that
Tenet was a reliable salesman, Cheney and then-defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld dispatched him and the pliant Powell at State
to play supporting roles in the advertising campaign: bogus
yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment,
and mobile trailers for manufacturing biological warfare agent-the
whole nine yards. The objective was to scare or intimidate Congress
into voting for war, and, thanks largely to a robust cheering
section in the corporate-controlled media, Congress did so on
October 10 and 11, 2002.

This past week saw the president
himself, with that same kind of support, pushing a new product-war
with Iran. And in the process, he made clear how intelligence
is being fixed to “justify” war this time around.
The case is too clever by half, but it will be hard for Americans
to understand that. Indeed, the Bush/Cheney team expects that
the product will sell easily-the more so, since the administration
has been able once again to enlist the usual cheerleaders in
the media to “catapult the propaganda,” as Bush once
put it.

Iran’s Nuclear
Plans

It has been like waiting for
Godot…the endless wait for the latest National Intelligence
Estimate on Iran’s nuclear plans. That NIE turns out to be the
quintessential dog that didn’t bark. The most recent published
NIE on the subject was issued two and a half years ago and concluded
that Iran could not have a nuclear weapon until “early-
to mid-next decade.” That estimate followed a string of
NIEs dating back to 1995, which kept predicting, with embarrassing
consistency, that Iran was “within five years” of having
a nuclear weapon.

The most recent NIE, published
in early 2005, extended the timeline and provided still more
margin for error. Basically, the timeline was moved 10 years
out to 2015 but, in a fit of caution, the drafters settled on
the words “early-to-mid next decade.” On Feb. 27,
2007 at his confirmation hearings to be Director of National
Intelligence, Michael McConnell repeated that formula verbatim.

A “final” draft of
the follow-up NIE mentioned above had been completed in Feb.
2007, and McConnell no doubt was briefed on its findings prior
to his testimony. The fact that this draft has been sent back
for revision every other month since February speaks volumes.
Judging from McConnell’s testimony, the conclusions of the NIE
draft of February are probably not alarmist enough for Vice President
Dick Cheney. (Shades of Iraq.)

According to one recent report,
the target date for publication has now slipped to late fall.
How these endless delays can be tolerated is testimony to the
fecklessness of the “watchdog” intelligence committees
in House and Senate.

As for Iran’s motivation if
it plans to go down the path of producing nuclear weapons, newly
appointed defense secretary Robert Gates was asked about that
at his confirmation hearing in December. Just called from the
wings to replace Donald Rumsfeld, Gates apparently had not yet
read the relevant memo from Cheney’s office. It is a safe bet
that the avuncular Cheney took Gates to the woodshed, after the
nominee suggested that Iran’s motivation could be, “in the
first instance,” deterrence:”

“While they [the Iranians]
are certainly pressing, in my opinion, for a nuclear capability,
I think they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent.
They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons-Pakistan
to the east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west,
and us in the Persian Gulf.”

Unwelcome
News (to the White House)

There they go again-those bureaucrats
at the International Atomic Energy Agency. On August 28, the
very day Bush was playing up the dangers from Iran, the IAEA
released a note of understanding between the IAEA and Iran on
the key issue of inspection. The IAEA announced:

“The agency has been
able to verify the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials
at the enrichment facilities in Iran and has therefore concluded
that it remains in peaceful use.”

The IAEA deputy director said
the plan just agreed to by the IAEA and Iran will enable the
two to reach closure by December on the nuclear issues that the
IAEA began investigating in 2003. Other IAEA officials now express
confidence that they will be able to detect any military diversion
or any uranium enrichment above a low grade, as long as the Iran-IAEA
safeguard agreement remains intact.

Shades of the preliminary findings
of the U.N. inspections-unprecedented in their intrusiveness-that
were conducted in Iraq in early 2003 before the U.S. abruptly
warned the U.N. in mid-March to pull out its inspectors, lest
they find themselves among those to be shocked-and-awed.

Vice President Cheney can claim,
as he did three days before the attack on Iraq, that the IAEA
is simply “wrong.” But Cheney’s credibility has sunk
to prehistoric levels; witness the fact that the president was
told that this time he would have to take the lead in playing
up various threats from Iran. And they gave him new words.

The President’s
New Formulation

As I watched the president
speak on Aug. 28, I was struck by the care he took in reading
the exact words of a new, subjunctive-mood formulation regarding
Iran’s nuclear intentions. He never looked up; this is what
he said:

“Iran’s active pursuit
of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to
put a region already known for instability and violence under
the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”

The cautious wording suggests
to me that the White House finally has concluded that the “nuclear
threat” from Iran is “a dog that won’t hunt,”
as Lyndon Johnson would have put it. While, initial press reporting
focused on the “nuclear holocaust” rhetorical flourish,
the earlier part of the sentence is more significant, in my view.
It is quite different from earlier Bush rhetoric charging categorically
that Iran is “pursuing nuclear weapons,” including
the following (erroneous) comment at a joint press conference
with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in early August:

“This [Iran] is a government
that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon.”

The latest news from the IAEA
is, for the White House, an unwelcome extra hurdle. And the
president’s advisers presumably were aware of it well before
Bush’s speech was finalized; it will be hard to spin. Administration
officials would also worry about the possibility that some patriotic
truth teller might make the press aware of the key judgments
of the languishing draft of the latest NIE on Iran’s nuclear
capability-or that a courageous officer or official of Gen. Anthony
Zinni’s stature might feel conscience bound to try to head off
another unnecessary war, by providing a more accurate, less alarmist
assessment of the nuclear threat from Iran.

It is just too much of a stretch
to suggest that Iran could be a nuclear threat to the United
States within the next 17 months, and that’s all the time Bush
and Cheney have got to honor their open pledge to our “ally”
Israel to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential. Besides, some
American Jewish groups have become increasingly concerned over
the likelihood of serious backlash if young Americans are seen
to be fighting and dying to eliminate perceived threats to Israel
(but not to the U.S.). Some of these groups have been quietly
urging the White House to back off the nuclear-threat rationale
for war on Iran.

The (Very)
Bad News

Bush and Cheney have clearly
decided to use alleged Iranian interference in Iraq as the preferred
casus belli. And the charges, whether they have merit or
not, have become much more bellicose. Thus, Bush on Aug. 28:

“Iran’s leaders…cannot
escape responsibility for aiding attacks against coalition forces…The
Iranian regime must halt these actions. And until it does, I
will take actions necessary to protect our troops. I have authorized
our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous
activities.”

How convenient: two birds
with one stone. Someone to blame for U.S. reverses in Iraq,
and “justification” to confront the ostensible source
of the problem-“deadeners” having been changed to Iran.
Vice President Cheney has reportedly been pushing for military
retaliation against Iran if the U.S. finds hard evidence of Iranian
complicity in supporting the “insurgents” in Iraq.

President Bush obliged on Aug.
28:

“Recently, coalition forces
seized 240-millimeter rockets that had been manufactured in Iran
this year and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups
by Iranian agents. The attacks on our bases and our troops by
Iranian-supplied munitions have increased in the last few months…”

QED

Recent U.S. actions, like arresting
Iranian officials in Iraq-eight were abruptly kidnapped and held
briefly in Baghdad on Aug. 28, the day Bush addressed the American
Legion-suggest an intention to provoke Iran into some kind of
action that would justify U.S. “retaliation.” The
evolving rhetoric suggests that the most likely immediate targets
at this point would be training facilities inside Iran-some twenty
targets that are within range of U.S. cruise missiles already
in place.

Iranian retaliation would be
inevitable, and escalation very likely. It strikes me as shamelessly
ironic that the likes of our current ambassador at the U.N.,
Zalmay Khalilizad, one of the architects of U.S. policy toward
the area, are now warning publicly that the current upheaval
in the Middle East could bring another world war.

The Public
Buildup

Col. Pat Lang (USA, ret.),
as usual, puts it succinctly:

“Careful attention to
the content of the chatter on the 24/7 news channels reveals
a willingness to accept the idea that it is not possible to resolve
differences with Iran through diplomacy. Network anchors are
increasingly accepting or voicing such views. Are we supposed
to believe that this is serendipitous?”

And not only that. It is as
if Scooter Libby were back writing lead editorials for the
Washington Post, the Pravda of this administration.
The Post’s lead editorial on Aug. 21 regurgitated the
allegations that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is “supplying
the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers
in Iraq;” that it is “waging war against the United
States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.”
Designating Iran a “specially designated global terrorist”
organization, said the Post, “seems to be the least
the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number
of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq.”

As for the news side of the
Post, which is widely perceived as a bit freer from White
House influence, its writers are hardly immune. For example,
they know how many times the draft National Intelligence Estimate
on Iran’s nuclear program has been sent back for redrafting…and
they know why. Have they been told not to write the story?

For good measure, the indomitable
arch-neocon James Woolsey has again entered the fray. He was
trotted out on August 14 to tell Lou Dobbs that the US may have
no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons
program. Woolsey, who has described himself as the “anchor
of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs,” knows what will scare. To Dobbs: “I’m
afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years;
they [Iran] could have the bomb.”

As for what Bush is telling
his counterparts among our allies, reporting on his recent meeting
with French President Nicolas Sarkozy are disquieting, to say
the least. Reports circulating in European foreign ministries
indicate that Sarkozy came away convinced that Bush “is
serious about bombing Iran’s secret nuclear facilities,”
according to well-connected journalist Arnauld De Borchgrave.

It Is Up
To US

Air strikes on Iran seem inevitable,
unless grassroots America can arrange a backbone transplant
for Congress. The House needs to begin impeachment proceedings
without delay. Why? Well, there’s the Constitution of the United
States, for one thing. For another, the initiation of impeachment
proceedings might well give our senior military leaders pause.
Do they really want to precipitate a wider war and risk destroying
much of what is left of our armed forces for the likes of Bush
and Cheney? Is another star on the shoulder worth THAT?

The deterioration of the U.S.
position in Iraq; the perceived need for a scapegoat; the knee-jerk
deference given to Israel’s myopic and ultimately self-defeating
security policy; and the fact that time is running out for the
Bush/Cheney administration to end Iran’s nuclear program-together
make for a very volatile mix.

So, on Tuesday let’s put away
the lawn chairs and roll up our sleeves. Let’s remember all
that has already happened since Labor Day five years ago.

There is very little time to
exercise our rights as citizens and stop this madness. At a
similarly critical juncture, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
typically direct. I find his words a challenge to us today:

“There is such a thing
as being too late…. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked,
and dejected with lost opportunity…. Over the bleached bones
of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too
late.'”

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990
and Robert Gates’ branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now
serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial
Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com

A shorter version of this article
appeared originally on Consortiumnews.com

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FOX hacks FARK?

By: John Amato @ 12:01 PM – PDT  

First Wikipedia and now this….Slashdot has some info…Drew Curtis believes FOX hacked him…

The first rule of hacking, after all, is “Don’t get caught.” And Fox newsman Darrell Phillipsmay have broken that rule, says Drew Curtis. Curtis, left, is the founder of Fark.com, a thoroughly juvenile, and entertaining, social news site where users pick the headlines. Phillips, to his right, is the new media manager at WHBQ Fox13, a News Corp.-owned TV station in Memphis, Tenn. And Curtis claims to have assembled all-but-conclusive electronic evidence that Phillips has tried to hack into Fark’s servers, potentially breaking several laws…read on

Filed Under: Scandals, Fox News

The Anonymous Liberal……GETTING IT DONE

Was the DOJ Kept in the Dark About Key Aspects of the NSA Program?

In response to a request from Congress, FBI Director Robert Mueller has turned over
his personal notes from the days leading up to and following the
showdown in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004. Think Progress has a
copy.

Despite
the many redactions, there are still a few noteworthy items. First,
Mueller repeatedly refers simply to “the program,” without any
additional adjectives or modifiers. For example, on the night of the
hospital showdown, he writes:

Called by DAG while at
restaurant with wife and daughter. He is at AG’s hospital with
Goldsmith and Philbin. Tells me Card and J. Gonzales are on the way to
hospital to see the AG, but that AG is in no condition to see them,
much less make decision to authorize continuation of the program.

Mueller’s
use of the phrase “the program” (particularly considered alongside his
testimony and statements by others in the know) strongly suggests that
there was only one NSA program and that the dissent within the DOJ was
about that program. In other words, Mueller’s notes are further
evidence that Alberto Gonzales lied to Congress in his testimony.

MORE AT The Anonymous Liberal

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The formal declaration:

US President George W Bush has warned Iran to stop supporting the militants fighting against the US in Iraq.In a speech to US war veterans in Reno, Nevada, Mr Bush renewed charges that Tehran has provided training and weapons for extremists in Iraq.

“The Iranian regime must halt these actions,” he said.

…

In his speech to the American Legion, Mr Bush hit back, accusing Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of funding and arming insurgents in Iraq.

And he said Iran’s leaders could not avoid some responsibility for attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.

“I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities,” he said.

The BBC’s Justin Webb, in Washington, says this looks like a conscious effort by the White House to elevate the tension between Washington and Tehran to a new level.

Such an effort might be designed to avoid the need for armed conflict or might equally be an effort to bring that conflict about, our correspondent says.

Shortly after Mr Bush made his address, Iranian officials reported that seven Iranians working for the country’s electricity ministry had been arrested in Baghdad by US forces.

Not that the Democrats will do a damned thing to stop it since they’re fully on board. And no one else will try to stop it, either.

Just thought you’d want to know.

Arthur Silber

Diebold: New name, same bad voting machines!

“Diebold
Election Systems” are three words synonymous with the aggressive
pursuit of failure. Not only did the company badly implement a dubious
concept — unverifiable electronic touch-screen voting machines — but
it did so with determined flourish, letting its code and internal
communication leak out onto the Web;
employing as a chief executive a man who declared he was “committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year”; abusing copyright law in an attempt to quell its critics; and, among many other caught-red-handed indiscretions, deleting criticism of itself from Wikipedia.

No wonder, then, that Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal
a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!

Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling
incompetence, please say “Premier” rather than “Diebold,” because
Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems.

The name change, the company says in a press release,
“signals a new beginning” and a “fresh identity” — though in the same
release the firm concedes that it will still be making and pushing the
same sorry voting machines (machines that, as Princeton computer
scientist Edward Felten and his colleagues showed last year, are actually vulnerable to a virus-based attack).

Why the name change? Well, Diebold’s got a lot of other businesses
— it makes ATMs and security systems for health firms and for the
government, and the election subsidiary has always been something of a
sideline. Lately it became an embarrassing sideline, dragging down
Diebold’s good name. That’s why, a couple of years ago, Diebold moved
to sell the unit. Shockingly, it found no takers.

Now, along with the name change, the parent company (which will
remain Diebold) is creating an autonomous corporate structure for
Premier, further distancing itself from ineptitude. David Byrd, who
headed Diebold Election Systems, will run Premier.

The company also drastically lowered its earnings expectations for
the year. Previously Diebold expected to make more than $185 million on
elections in 2007; now, due to the “rapidly changing political
environment” surrounding voting technology (read: politicians across
the land realizing that running elections on such systems is
maddeningly stupid), Diebold says sales will drop by about $120 million.

[Flickr photo by joebeone.]

Wired News’ John Borland had quite a fun story yesterday about a new tool to track down folks who are anonymously editing articles in Wikipedia.

A CalTech grad student named Virgil Griffith developed the tool, called Wikipedia Scanner, after hearing about congressional aides who were fixing their bosses’ WP entries. The service is a database of all anonymous edits to Wikipedia organized according to the Internet addresses of well-known groups: Want to know what people with Democratic National Committee IP addresses were doing on Wikipedia? Go here. (Among other things, such folks were calling Rush Limbaugh a “racist” and a “jerkoff.”) Or check out the Republican Party’s record, including this alteration of the U.S. “occupying” Iraq to our “liberating” it. [Note: Direct links to Wikipedia Scanner don’t seem to be working right now; that’s likely because everyone online is checking it out.]

Among the many other organizations whose edits you can track are Diebold, the faulty voting-machine company; Wal-Mart; ExxonMobil; Fox News; The New York Times; and Al Jazeera.

Wired’s Threat Level blog is running a search for the most shameful self-promoting Wikipedia edits uncovered by the new tool. The leading contender, now, is Diebold’s deletions of criticisms of its voting technology — but if you unearth any yourself, be sure to let me (and Threat Level) know.

Correction: I originally called Griffith an MIT grad student; he is actually a student at Cal Tech.

Special Report:
WashPo and Time Help ABC Bury Treatment of Kucinich

Following last Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate on ABC News’ This Week
with George Stephanopoulos, Dennis Kucinich’s campaign asked ABC News
to address issues it had with treatment Rep. Kucinich (D-Ohio) received
both
during the debate and afterward in ABC’s online coverage. In an email
sent out
to supporters on Wednesday, the campaign said it “submitted objections
and
inquiries to ABC News representatives on
Monday and Tuesday. ABC News representatives have failed to respond –
or even acknowledge – those objections and inquiries.” I confirmed with
the Kucinich campaign yesterday that it has subsequently been forwarded
the same response ABC News Executive Director Andrea Jones sent to The
Washington Post and Time magazine. 

ABC News representatives felt it necessary to answer the Kucinich campaign’s objections when Time magazine’s National Political Correspondent Karen Tumulty queried them. Writing on the Time
blog Swampland, Tumulty initially says of the Kucinich team’s issues
with ABC’s treatment (which included Kucinich not having a chance to
speak until 28 minutes into the debate), “These all seemed like fair
complaints to me, so I asked ABC News to respond.” Then Tumulty says,
“In an e-mail, Executive Director Andrea Jones answered him [Kucinich]
point by point.”

While I give Tumulty credit for contacting ABC News, her investigative journalism unfortunately ends there. Once
she receives the email from Jones, Tumulty slips into stenography
mode. Jones’ “point by point” response to the Kucinich campaign’s complaints does not in itself
exculpate or dispel any of ABC’s wrongdoing. Tumulty fails to assess the
accuracy and logic of Jones’ answers.

First, just so we’re all up to speed, here are the issues (an
aggregate of the thousands of complaints received during and after
ABC’s debate coverage) that the Kucinich campaign asked ABC News to
address:

* Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a “Politics Page” photo of the candidates.

* Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a
commanding lead in ABC’s own on-line “Who won the Democratic debate”
survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.

* ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.

* After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich
winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the
original survey with a second survey asking “Who is winning the
Democratic debate?”

* During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator
Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday
morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in
this second survey.

* Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.

* AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday
Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an
opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos
until 28 minutes into the program.

Now back to Tumulty commenting on Jones’ response [emphasis below is mine]:

This gist of her answer is this: She denies that Kucinich was cropped
out of any photo, noting that “there are 20 photos live on the ABC News
website, Mr. Kucinich is in a number of them and there is even one of
him and his wife. He is one of 6 candidates who got his own photo in
the slide show. As for the images, clearly nothing was cropped, the
image in question was shot by Charlie Neibergall of the AP not ABC.“

FALSE. Had Tumulty – Time
magazine’s National Political Correspondent and former member of the White House
press corps – simply located the original AP photo
(which, at most, should’ve taken a few minutes online), she would’ve
found Kucinich in it and realized the following version ABC News
prominently displayed online after the debate had, indeed, been cropped:

So Jones
either lied when she said “clearly nothing was cropped” or was
misinformed by someone on her staff. Since Tumulty seems to think her
job ends with receiving answers from an ABC News spokesperson, she
doesn’t question the veracity of Jones’ assertion, which is clearly false.

Adding to its duplicity, ABC News has now completely replaced the original
photograph in question. If you click on the link in Tumulty’s post
(which is supposed to bring you to that photo), you are now taken to a wholly different shot that includes Dennis Kucinich and is currently the default debate photo sitting on the ABC News website.

So, in case your keeping score, first ABC
disappears Kucinich from a photo by cropping him out, then denies it,
then later disappears the original cropped photo, replacing it with a
separate photo that includes Kucinich, making it appear as if nothing improper ever occurred.

Eat your heart out Fox News.

Tumulty does later post an update after she manages (she doesn’t say
how) to find her way to a page on the site Pinkraygun that shows the
original AP photo and the doctored ABC
photo side-by-side. This compels Tumulty to gingerly concede “there
does in
fact appear to have been some cropping.” First, it was either cropped
or it wasn’t. “Some cropping” gives the impression a whole
cropping didn’t occur, which it did. Second, if there was “some
cropping,” then logic follows that Jones either did some lying or some misinforming. That, in turn, means Tumulty should be doing some follow up with Jones. She does not. Third, a question for Tumulty and her editors over at Time: How
did you fail to bring this simple fact to light yourselves? You had
three main points to investigate – whether a photo was cropped, whether
a poll was manipulated and whether Kucinich was allotted a fair amount
of time. Arguably, the cropped photo was the most simple and quick of the three to
verify. Did you attempt to find this on your own? If so, what’s your
excuse for initially failing to obtain such readily available evidence? If not,
what’s your excuse for failing to pursue this evidence in the first place?

On to the poll(s):

She notes that the poll was and is live on ABC’s website. (When I checked it, Kucinich was
still winning, with Barack Obama a distant second.) She also notes the
poll’s disclaimer that it is “not a scientific survey,” which seems
like a decent reason for ABC not to treat it as a news story.

MISLEADING.
Jones’ statement circumvents the facts and the original thrust of the
Kucinich campaign’s complaint about the poll. Tumulty’s unobtrusive
reporting gives the impression the poll has always been up on ABC’s
site in clear view and at no time were changes made to it.

FACT: The original poll, prominently displayed, asked, “Who won the
Democratic debate?” Once Kucinich jumped ahead, this poll was scuttled
from its prominence on the site. As it became clear Kucinich was
trouncing his competition, ABC just happened to decide to post a new
poll asking, “Who is winning the
Democratic debate?” As the Kucinich campaign (and Tumulty) correctly cited, Barack
Obama had an early lead in this second poll; but when Kucinich pulled
ahead by a wide margin, ABC then dropped this poll from prominence,
too. (Because the Kucinich camp had difficulty finding the poll after
ABC moved it, they questioned whether ABC may have buried the poll “or
killed it entirely.” It appears ABC didn’t kill it entirely; they just
made it difficult for users work to find – which, as anyone who
knows anything about online usability, is nearly tantamount to killing
it).

Though of lesser importantance (due to the current unverifiable
nature of online polls), Tumulty still manages to mishandle Jones’
explanation of why ABC News didn’t report the poll results. This issue
is about nuance and context. Not exactly Tumulty’s and the
mainstream media’s forte.

Yes, the online poll is “not a scientific
survey”* (incidentally, it’s verboten to mention in the mainstream media that
phone surveys, many of which include leading and misleading questions,
are often far from scientific accountings as well). But since news outlets
(possibly ABC among them) have certainly noted some online polls in the
past but in context of their scientific shortcomings, and considering
ABC’s shenanigans concerning Kucinich, it seems either intellectually
dishonest or misinformed for Tumulty to give Jones the free pass “which
seems
like a decent reason for ABC not to treat it as a news story.”

Does Tumulty honestly believe it’s “a decent reason”? Or does she merely believe it’s decent enough because
the target of the question is ABC News and the questioner is the
not-so-“viable” candidate Kucinich?

I should note here that
Tumulty frames her post with the opening line: “Should the networks and
interest groups that have been sponsoring the
seemingly endless series of debates and candidate forums start limiting
their invitations to those contenders who seem, by whatever definition,
‘viable’?” She then claims to like “the idea of including candidates
from the second tier–and beyond–in these settings,” saying, “You
never know when lightning may strike, and how is an underfinanced
long-shot going to get a breakout moment otherwise?” and that
“candidates such as Dennis Kucinich often are the only ones giving
voice
to ideas–like single-payer health care and a quick withdrawal from
Iraq–that have not been embraced by the leading candidates, despite
having significant support among the party rank and file.” Yet Tumulty
seems incapable of embracing such basic tenets of a democratic
political process; instead, she reverts to entrenched media establishment dogma
to round out her post’s frame: “Still, having decided to include them, should
they be given the same amount of time and attention as the leaders in
the race?”

This is the journalist we’re going to trust to get to the bottom of
whether ABC News treated Dennis Kucinich fairly?

Finally, there’s ABC’s defense of Kucinich
receiving so little airtime during the debate
and, once again, Tumulty’s stenographic framing and conclusions [emphasis below is mine]:

As for Kucinich’s complaint that he was not given a question in the
first 28 minutes of the debate, Jones notes: “He may not have been
addressed in the first 28 minutes, but he was the only candidate
questioned in his own segment on This Week with George Stephanopoulos,
two weeks in a row, that appearance is posted online
as well. Also. Mr. Kucinich was the only candidate to address
healthcare in Sunday’s debate, and that response was immediately
clipped and posted on the ABC News website.” Her bottom line: “After
back to back appearances on ABC News’ This Week with George
Stephanopoulos, clearly their claim is not substantiated by the facts
nor by the extensive coverage of his candidacy on the ABCNews.com
website.”

First,
Jones’ “bottom line” skirts the issue at hand: she concedes ABC’s
debate moderators failed to address Kucinich in the first 28 minutes
of the forum (though she frames her concession with the words “he may
not have been addressed” rather than “he wasn’t addressed,”
incorporating shades of doubt, as if this were somehow open to
interpretation), but claims that ABC News has provided Kucinich much
airtime overall.

Yet here’s the real bottom line: In any equitable debate, no
candidate should have to remain
silent for the first 28 minutes. Period. This is not only unfair to
Congressman Kucinich, but to all American citizens
for whom news outlets such as ABC are supposed to be informing their
decision-making process instead of acting to unduly manipulate
it.

What’s more, Jones’ claim that Kucinich “was the only candidate
questioned in his own segment on This Week with George Stephanopoulos,
two weeks in a row” and that he had “back to back appearances” on this
program is blatantly misleading. (I must admit this one initially
slipped by me until, while fact-checking another element of this story,
I stumbled across the truth in a conversation I had yesterday with
Kucinich campaign spokesman Andy Juniewicz. More on that below).

FACT: Kucinich has made one appearance on This Week with
George Stephanopoulos. Jones has the audacity to count Kucinich’s
appearance at this ABC debate as his second appearance on the show in
which – breathing even new life into the word “truthiness” – he’s
received “his own segment.” Can Jones explain how a candidate receives
his own segment during a debate? What in the world is she talking
about?   

Moreover, in a statistical analysis
of the debate performed by USA
Election Polls, Kucinich was given less time to speak than any
candidate with the
exception of former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. Yet it gets worse: in
the critical first half of the debate (the time when viewers tend to be
most engaged), Kucinich received just 3.4% of airtime, the least of all
the candidates. To put
that in context, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama
combined to chew up 60.4% of airtime during the first half of the
debate.

USA Election Polls also points out:

In fact, even Chris Dodd got more air time than Kucinich which is
ridiculous because Kucinich is beating Dodd in the majority of state
polls. So if the emphasis was on giving the most time to the leaders in
the polls, then what was Dodd doing speaking more than Kucinich?

Nevertheless, Tumulty and Time
magazine show no interest in such further incontrovertible proof of the
unfair treatment to which ABC News subjected Congressman Kucinich.
Instead, Tumulty
follows up Jones’ “bottom line” by closing her post with these thoughts:

I honestly don’t know what the right balance is here when you are
dealing with such a large field of candidates, most of whom don’t have
a prayer of winning. What do you think? Was Kucinich treated unfairly?
Or should he be included at all?*

*Not a scientific survey.

Cute. But parting shot at the Kucinich campaign aside, shouldn’t Tumulty and Time
magazine provide the facts in a piece titled “Dennis Kucinich vs. ABC
News”? Instead, we’re presented with a slanted, inaccurate, misleading and
ill-researched breakdown of events that ends with Tumulty floating the question of
whether Kucinich should be allowed to attend these debates in the first
place.

And sadly, thanks to The Washington Post, that wasn’t the worst coverage of the Kucinich-ABC incident by a major news outlet.

In a post titled “Kucinich Mad at
ABC” over at The Washington Post blog
The Sleuth (oh the irony), journalist Mary Ann Akers (a former reporter for The Washington Times as well as NPR)
doesn’t try to hide her contempt for Kucinich while barreling ahead
without concern for facts or fact-checking.

She opens her post:

Don’t expect to see too many more appearances by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) on ABC News.

An apparently irate Kucinich sent out a letter to supporters
Wednesday accusing the network of ignoring him in the Democratic
presidential debate on Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

So
since Kucinich – along with, and spurred on by, thousands of other
American citizens – objected to ABC’s handling of the debate, should
we expect, and accept, that ABC has a right to actively work to further
marginalize him?

If
that’s Akers’ frame, you can guess where this is going.

Also, because she
fails to cite any source, we must assume her characterization of
Kucinich as “apparently irate” hinges not on fact but projection. And as it turns out, that is exactly the case.

Yesterday, when I contacted Kucinich campaign spokesman Andy Juniewicz, he addressed Akers unfounded assertion:

“Congressman Kucinich was not irate. Nothing in the email
communication expressed anger,” said the soft-spoken Juniewicz. “It was
just a delineation of what we were
hearing from thousands of people who contacted us, many of whom weren’t
even Kucinich supporters. We asked ABC to respond to the questions they
raised.” When I asked if Akers or someone else at The Washington Post
had spoken with anyone in his campaign about this purported
demonstration of anger, Mr. Juniewicz said, “No. No one.”

Note to Akers and The Washington Post: Before the Internets, there
was the telephone. Some news outlets, though fewer and fewer these
days, still find it handy for checking facts.

Moving right along, Akers then runs through roughly the same terrain on which Tumulty
trodded, but her condescension and bias is profligate and shameless.

Among Kucinich’s charges: he was “deliberately cropped out” of photos;
after he took a “commanding lead” in ABC’s online survey, the survey
was mysteriously “dropped from prominence on the web site”; and “as
every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday presidential forum is
aware” Kucinich was not asked a question until 28 minutes into the
program. (Everyone clocked that at 28 minutes, right?)

“Among
Kucinich’s charges” blunts the fact they’ve all been proven to be true
(something Akers apparently has no interest in uncovering or
presenting). Use of the word “mysteriously” not only mocks the
assertion that the poll was buried but conjures the mainstream media’s
favorite attack on uncomfortable truths: it must be the work of those
crazy conspiracy theorists (Akers also disregards the full story –
previously addressed above in this post – behind ABC’s bizarre and
devious manipulation of the debate’s polls). “Everyone
clocked that at 28
minutes, right?” is not only disparaging but gives the ludicrous
impression the Kucinich campaign
is contending everyone noticed the precise number of minutes
Kucinich had been shut out of the debate; rather, the campaign was
noting a simple fact: everyone watching certainly saw that Kucinich
didn’t get a chance to speak for an usually long duration of time.

We deserve more than such absurd manufactured nitpicking from
Akers and The Washington Post. Rather than chasing their tail to
portray Kucinich in a poor light, think of how much easier it would’ve
been to just present the facts. And to search them out.

But hey, according to Akers, “ABC News Executive Director Andrea Jones
addressed every charge Kucinich made.” Incredibly, Akers not only
embraces Jones’ answers without question, but also unwittingly contradicts
Jones’ claim that the photo in question was never cropped by providing
the ABC debate photo below her post. In other words, the AP photo that
ABC undeniably cropped is sitting below Akers’ post in which she
contends no cropping occurred. Again, all one needs to do is locate the original AP photo. And presto! Cropping mystery solved.

Again, too, Jones is either lying or misinformed, and Akers and The
Washington Post (along with Tumulty and Time magazine) are complicit in perpetuating this falsehood.

Escaping Akers’ notice or range of journalistic concern as well is
ABC’s wholesale swapping out of its cropped photo with an altogether
new one in which Kucinich appears alongside the rest of the Democratic
candidates. ABC News, in effect, has worked diligently to cover up this
despicable act, one worthy of Fox News and Orwell’s vision
of totalitarian media manipulation.

In their coverage of the Kucinich-ABC incident, Time
magazine’s Tumulty and The Washington Post’s Akers wind up
crystallizing the extent to which big media rigs the game against a
candidate like Congressman Kucinich. In defense of sound and equitable
journalism, it is incumbent upon both Time
magazine and The Washington Post to correct the record on ABC’s
actions, and the rest of the news media to hold ABC News accountable
for this disgraceful performance.

No news organization – especially one charged with facilitating part
of our electoral process – should be able to so grossly transgress such
basic journalistic standards and not be held to account. This isn’t a
partisan issue. Congressman Kucinich’s chances of capturing the
Democratic nomination are irrelevant to this matter.

This speaks to the viability of our national press.

At a time when the mainstream media is struggling to retain and
rebuild both its credibility and coveted market share among Americans,
it ignores ABC’s actions at its own peril.

UPDATE: I’ll be away until after Labor Day weekend
(wedding – not mine), but I first wanted to say thanks for your
additional insights, passionate (yet substantive) comments and very
kind words. To first-time readers, welcome! To everyone, by all means,
keep the conversation going while I’m away. And if you want to do something else to keep (or turn up) the heat on ABC, request that this story does not stop here. Don’t
just contact ABC or other mainstream news outlets – contact Raw Story,
Salon, Think Progress, Media Matters, FAIR.org and Truthout, and
respectfully request they cover this story. Along with Crooks and
Liars, these major alternative news outlets get the mainstream’s
attention and greatly increase the chances of forcing the mainstream’s
hand. More than anything, ABC wants this story to drop right down the
memory hole: it’s up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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A military jury acquitted an
Army officer on Tuesday of charges that he failed to properly train and
supervise enlisted soldiers involved in detainee interrogations in 2003
at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment.

In the court-martial at Fort Meade, Md., the jury of nine Army
colonels and a brigadier general found the officer, Lt. Col. Steven L.
Jordan, guilty of only one lesser offense, that of disobeying an order
to refrain from discussing the case.

Colonel Jordan, 51, was the only officer to stand trial on charges
related to the detainee-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, which led to
prolonged investigations and charges against several soldiers.

Colonel Jordan’s acquittal on most charges means that no
officers have been found criminally responsible for the abuses at the
prison. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the military intelligence officer who
ran Abu Ghraib, was punished administratively by senior Army commanders
for improperly allowing military dogs to be used during interrogations
to frighten detainees. Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general who was
the military police commander at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and
demoted.

During Colonel Jordan’s seven-day court-martial, Army lawyers
representing him argued that he was not responsible for training and
supervising the military police soldiers who abused detainees from
mid-September to late December 2004. Rather, his lawyers argued, he
served as a manager of sorts at the prison, focused on making living
and working conditions at Abu Ghraib, a notorious complex that Saddam Hussein’s government had used to torture its enemies, as accommodating as possible.

The jury members apparently were not convinced by the conclusions
of two generals who had investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal and found
that Colonel Jordan’s “tacit approval” of violent
techniques by the military police during an episode in November 2003
was “the causative factor that set the stage for the abuses that
followed for days afterward.”

For his conviction of disobeying an order to not discuss his case,
Colonel Jordan, currently on active duty with the Intelligence and
Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., faces a maximum of five years in
prison. The jury is expected to deliver a sentence on Wednesday
morning.

His lawyers, Capt. Samuel Spitzberg and Maj. Kris Poppe, declined to comment on Tuesday.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Colonel Jordan
expressed frustration at the charges against him and said he believed
that they were politically motivated, to allow the Army to assert that
it had tried at least one officer on criminal charges in connection
with the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch,
said the verdict was “a disappointment but not a surprise,”
given the meager case he said prosecutors presented to the jury of
senior officers. Mr. Sifton said prosecutors completely failed to
muster evidence, including military case law, to show that Colonel
Jordan, even if he did not participate in or know about abuses, was, as
a senior officer at Abu Ghraib, responsible for abuses that occurred
there.

“The prosecutors did not seem to understand the concept of
command responsibility as a legal issue,” Mr. Sifton said, adding
that other military officers, not just Colonel Jordan, should have been
brought to trial for their roles in commanding detention operations in
which detainees were abused.

New York Times

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