[Mb-civic] Kerry moves ahead, WhiteHouse delaying FBI investigation, Iraq a disaster

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Thanks to Ed Pearl for the following
1. Kerry slips into lead in latest poll
2. WhiteHOuse orders FBI to delay critical investigations til after Nov 2
3.  WSJ reporter agrees--Iraq a total disaster



 Kerry Pulls Ahead of Bush in Newsweek Poll
  Reuters

  Saturday 02 October 2004

  WASHINGTON - Democrat challenger John Kerry has pulled ahead of
  President
Bush in a poll published by Newsweek magazine showing Thursday's
television debate erased the lead Bush had enjoyed for the last month.

  In a two-way contest, the Kerry/Edwards ticket in the Nov. 2
  presidential
election led by 49 percent against 46 percent for Bush/Cheney, according
to 1,013 registered voters polled by Princeton Survey Research Associates
International.

  According to the poll, 61 percent of Americans who watched the first
presidential debate on Sept. 30 said Kerry won, 19 percent said Bush won
and 16 percent said they tied. The number of debate viewers surveyed was
770.

  Bush's job approval rating dropped two points from the Sept. 9-10
  Newsweek
poll to 46 percent -- a 6-point drop since the Republican national
convention a month ago. Fifty-seven percent of all poll respondents -- a
total of 1,144 adults -- said they were dissatisfied with the way things
were going in the United States now.

  Sixty percent of registered voters said Bush administration policies and
diplomatic efforts had led to more anti-Americanism around the world and
51 percent said the administration had not done enough to involve major
allies and international organizations in trying to achieve its foreign
policy goals, the poll showed.

  However, 46 percent of registered voters said they would still like to
  see
Bush re-elected, against 48 percent who said they would not like to see
him re-elected.

  When registered voters were asked who would handle issues better
  overall,
Bush led Kerry 52 to 40 percent on terrorism and homeland security.

  Kerry scored better on the economy -- 52 percent against 39 percent --
  and
health care, including Medicare -- 56 percent to 34 percent. He was also
seen to be better at handling American jobs and foreign competition -- 54
percent against 36 percent.

  For questions put to registered voters, the margin of error was plus or
minus 4 percentage points; to debate viewers, it was 4.1 points; and for
total adults, 3 points.

***

Antiwar.com - October 1, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=3680


Justice Delayed by Politics?

by Juan Cole

Several high-profile FBI investigations, in which substantial
progress has been made, may well have been put on hold by the Bush
administration for political reasons. That is, it has been alleged
to me that the White House may have leaned on the FBI - not to drop
the investigations but to postpone some key arrests until after the
November elections.

The first such case is the investigation into the leaking of Valerie
Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent to the press as a way to
undermine the credibility of her husband, Joe Wilson, who had gone
public about his warnings to the administration that the story about
the Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger was bogus.

Warning: The text below will use the word "neoconservative." In my
lexicon, a neoconservative is a person from a social group that
typically voted Democrat before 1968 but now votes Republican.
Neoconservatives include all the white southern Christian denominations,
such as the Southern Baptists, that emigrated from the Democratic Party to
the Republican Party as a result of the Nixon strategy, as well as the
Reagan Democrats (largely working-class Catholics) and Jewish Americans
who trod the same path. Neoconservatives tend to be far-right Zionists in
the Jabotinsky tradition, whether they are Jews or Christian Zionists, and
they are associated with a desire to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians
from the West Bank or at least to so circumscribe their existence there as
to render them nonentities. The latest neoconservative to enlist in the
cause is Zell Miller, and he typifies the anger, recklessness and
disregard for open, democratic values that characterize the movement.

Neoconservatives have gained allies for themselves from some
right-wing "realists," such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, to
the extent that it may well be that the latter two have been converted to
the neoconservative ideology, which is distinctive because of its
historical origins on the right of the old Democratic Party, and in some
cases on the far left (Christopher Hitchens is another example). Some have
attempted to argue that the very term "neoconservative" is a code word for
derogatory attitudes toward Jews. This argument is mere special pleading
and a playing of the race card, however, insofar as only a tiny percentage
of American Jews are neoconservatives, and only a modest percentage of
neoconservatives are Jews. The neoconservative movement is an example of
what social scientists call cross-cutting cleavages, which are multiple
loyalties and identities typical of complex urban political societies.

We now know that the Niger story involved the forgery of documents
by a man with ties to Italian military intelligence, and that,
moreover, Italian military intelligence has ties to Michael Ledeen,
Harold Rhode and Lawrence Franklin, pro-Likud neoconservatives, two
of whom had high-level positions in the Pentagon and all three of
whom were tightly networked with the American Enterprise Institute.
Franklin (a neoconservative Catholic) is being investigated for
spying on the U.S. for Israel. The nexus of Italian military
intelligence, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
and the neoconservatives in the Pentagon suggests a network of
conspiracy aimed at dragging the U.S. into wars against Iraq and
Iran. The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the war was
in some significant part staffed by young people who had initially
applied to work at the American Enterprise Institute as interns.

Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA in response to a request
by Dick Cheney that they investigate the story of the Iraq uranium
purchases, and he came to the (correct) conclusion that the whole
idea was implausible given the structure of the industry in Niger,
which was heavily under the control of European companies. The
neoconservatives around Dick Cheney, including Scooter Libby and
John Hannah, were highly committed to the Niger uranium story as a
casus belli against Iraq, and were furious when Wilson revealed
that he had shown it false in spring of 2002. They were convinced
that the CIA was behind this strike at their credibility, and that
Valerie Plame had been the one who managed to get Wilson sent.
That is, in their paranoid world, Wilson's honest reportage of the facts
was a CIA plot against the Iraq War and perhaps against the
neoconservatives around Cheney and in the Pentagon.

It has been being leaked for many months now that the FBI believes
the leak came from persons in Cheney's circle, possibly John Hannah
and/or Scooter Libby. The FBI could well be ready to move in the
case. But I have been told that it has orders from the White House
to back off until later this fall.

There has likewise been no arrest of Franklin, though one was
expected by now.

This is not, as the neoconservatives and their supporters in the
press are beginning to allege, because the case against Franklin
is weak. Rumors are flying in Washington that the FBI found a whole
cache of classified documents in his house. If this is true, it was
illegal for him to keep them there. We know that the evidence against
Franklin was so airtight that Franklin was turned by the FBI, and was
attempting to gather incriminating evidence against other neoconservatives
on their behalf. At some point the FBI as a courtesy let Franklin's boss,
Douglas Feith, know of their investigation, and apparently soon after the
story was leaked to the press.

Is it possible that Franklin hasn't been charged yet not because the
case is weak, but because the White House does not want to anger
the powerful AIPAC lobbying organization just before an election,
and does not want to risk alienating neoconservative voters in swing
states like Florida? Indeed, isn't it likely that the Franklin
investigation was leaked to the press by persons in the Pentagon
who feared they were under investigation, and who knew very well
that such a story leaked in late August before the election would
get the investigation squelched or much delayed?

***

What a Top Reporter in Baghdad Really Thinks About the War

     Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi
     confirms that she penned a scathing letter that
     calls the war in Iraq an outright "disaster." She
     also reveals that reporters in Baghdad are working
     under "virtual house arrest."

By Greg Mitchell
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp
? vnu_content_id=1000650551>

(September 29, 2004) -- Readers of any nailbiting story
from Iraq in a major mainstream newspaper must often
wonder what the dispassionate reporter really thinks
about the chaotic situation there, and what he or she
might be saying in private letters or in conversations
with friends back home.

Now, at least in the case of Wall Street Journal
correspondent Farnaz Fassihi, we know.

A lengthy letter from Baghdad she recently sent to
friends "has rapidly become a global chain mail,"
Fassihi told Jim Romenesko on Wednesday after it was
finally posted at the Poynter Institute's Web site. She
confirmed writing the letter. [See the full text of the
letter below -- moderator.]

"Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in
exchange for insecurity," Fassihi wrote (among much
else) in the letter. "Guess what? They say they'd take
security over freedom any day, even if it means having a
dictator ruler." And: "Despite President Bush's rosy
assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it
was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has
been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a
foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States
for decades to come."

After she confirmed writing the letter on Wednesday,
Paul Steiger, editor of the Wall Street Journal, stood
up for her, telling the New York Post that her "private
opinions have in no way distorted her coverage, which
has been a model of intelligent and courageous
reporting, and scrupulous accuracy and fairness."

Fassihi, 32, covered the 9/11 terror attacks in New York
for the The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. and has also
worked for the Providence Journal.

The reporter's letter opens with this revelation: "Being
a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like
being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the
reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the
world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away
lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could
make a difference. Little by little, day-by-day, being
based in Iraq has defied all those reasons.

"I am house bound.... There has been one too many close
calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it
blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing
concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but
to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay
alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a
reporter second."

Fassihi observed that the insurgency had spread "from
isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most
of Iraq." The Iraqi government, he wrote, "doesn't
control most Iraqi cities.... The situation, basically,
means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110
people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone.
The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of
health--which was attempting an exercise of public
transparency by releasing the numbers--has now stopped
disclosing them. Insurgents now attack Americans 87
times a day.

"A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City
yesterday. He said young men were openly placing
improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt
a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive,
cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can
over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped.
He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a
dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and
swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the walls
sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an
American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the
population that was supposed to love America for
liberating Iraq."

For journalists, Fassihi wrote, "the significant turning
point came with the wave of abduction and kidnappings.
Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad because
foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways
between towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a
journalist female friend at 11 p.m. telling me two
Italian women had been abducted from their homes in
broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded
this week and the Brit, were abducted from their homes
in a residential neighborhood....

"The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs
of calming down. If any thing, it is growing stronger,
organized and more sophisticated every day.

"I went to an emergency meeting for foreign
correspondents with the military and embassy to discuss
the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would
largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain
once it was determined we were missing. Here is how it
goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to
Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al
Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from
Al Qaeda to the Baathists to the criminals. My friend
Georges, the French journalist snatched on the road to
Najaf, has been missing for a month with no word on
release or whether he is still alive."

And what of America's "hope for a quick exit"? Fassihi
noted that "cops are being murdered by the dozens every
day, over 700 to date, and the insurgents are
infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that
the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to
buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them
quietly....

"Who did this war exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are
we safer because Saddam is holed up and Al Qaeda is
running around in Iraq?

"I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam
Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get
the majority of the vote. This is truly sad...."

Making clear what can only, at best, appear between
lines in her published dispatches, Fassihi concluded,
"One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond
salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to
imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its
violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos
and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a
result of American mistakes and it can't be put back
into a bottle." Greg Mitchell

(gmitchell at editorandpublisher.com) is the editor of E&P
and the author of seven books on politics and history.

===




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