Be Like Rove

What is it like to have the power of Karl Rove where you can manipulated the Resident of the United States with just a flick of the hand (or a timely mouse click!)

Check this out. I find the free-fall (click him and send him flying, and then let off the mouse) someone satisfying.

http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm

(or click the title of the blog entry)

Born-Again Taxation

Though I support taxation of churches that indulge in profit-making enterprises outside its boundaries of faith (the First Baptist Church of Dallas owns business offices and downtown parking lots; the Mormons operate an insurance company), I do find the Bush administration's personal attack on non-conservative churches beyond the pale.

Here is a New York Times editorial addressing the issue. It is shocking and scary as well the level of fascism this administration has introduced in the last five years.

Taxing an Unfriendly Church
Published: November 22, 2005
Shortly before the last election, a former rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif., gave a fiery antipoverty and antiwar sermon. He did not endorse a presidential candidate, but he criticized President Bush's policies in Iraq and at home. Now the Internal Revenue Service has challenged the church's tax-exempt status. It's important to know just how the tax police have chosen this church - and other congregations - to pursue after an election that energized churchgoers of most denominations.

I.R.S. officials have said about 20 churches are being investigated for activities across the political spectrum that could jeopardize their tax status. The agency is barred by law from revealing which churches, but officials have said these targets were chosen by a team of civil servants, not political appointees, at the Treasury Department. The I.R.S. argues that freedom of religion does not grant freedom from taxes if churches engage in politics.

That should mean that the 2004 presidential campaign would be an extremely fertile field. While some churches allowed Democrats to speak from the pulpit, the conservative Christians last year mounted an especially intense - and successful - drive to keep President Bush in office. Some issued voter guides that pointedly showed how their own religion was allied with Mr. Bush's views. Several Roman Catholic bishops even suggested that a vote for John Kerry would be a mortal sin. Since the election, Republicans have held two openly political nationally televised revival meetings at churches to support Mr. Bush's judicial nominations.

If the I.R.S. is pursuing any of those churches, we certainly have not heard from them about it. All Saints in Pasadena has released copies of the letter from the I.R.S., along with tapes of the sermon and a defense of the church's antiwar mission going back to the days when church leaders protested internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The I.R.S. letter stated that the agency had "concerns" about a sermon by the Rev. George Regas that The Los Angeles Times called "a searing indictment of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq."

Church leaders have hired lawyers and refused to agree to a settlement that requires them to admit that the sermon was over the line drawn by the I.R.S. The Rev. J. Edwin Bacon, the rector of All Saints, told parishioners that the church would continue to resist the government's efforts. That sounds right. With the feverish courting of religious voters these days, the I.R.S. does have the daunting task of separating politics from church policy. Still, it would seem to be hard to justify picking on a church that has a long record of opposition to wars waged by leaders from both parties.

Our Sunshine Patriots

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt
The Loyal Opposition
To George III

Shallow Throat

What a career arc. Your intrepid reporting helps bring down a morally corrupt administration in the 70s, and then your stenographic reporting helps perpetuate another morally corrupt adminstration some 30 years later.

Bob Woodward, where did your soul go?

How did you fall into the access journalism trap?

How did you evolve into a morally bankrupt hack writer that seemed "surprised" by the concern about the Valerie Plame affair, but felt compelled to go on television to denegate the investigation?

Bob Woodward, where did your soul go?

I can't even begin to understand this sad affair. At what point in your storied career did you decide that it was more important to be adored by the Bush Administration and its hawks than by serving the American people by investigating the truth?

How could you do this? That zsst sound you hear is your reputation leaving the inflated balloon of your ego.

Are you proud of yourself? Is this new reputation one you want to be remembered by? Is this something your family will relish in future years?

I am so disgusted and so saddened by this whole affair.

Bob Woodward, where did your soul go?

Bush the Liar; Cheney the Denizen from Hell

This will not come as a great shock to those of us who have watched President Bush lie over the years. One cannot have Karl Rove manipulating the strings without a lie or two along the way. But it is reassuring that the mainstream media are now coming to the same conclusion.

The Credibility Gap, to bring up an old term from the '60s. It was what soon-to-be President Kennedy coins for the Republicans who were in denial that the Soviet Union was not only on par with us technologically, but perhaps surpassing us in missiles.

The Credibility Gap, again brought up to illustrate the cognitive dissonance of hearing that all was A-OK in Vietnam while watching just the opposite on evening TV.

And now we have another Credibility Gap. George W. Bush is totally redefining the term.

From the New York Times editorials:

To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.

Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.

It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.

•

Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.

Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old.

•

The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.

Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

When the roll is called up yonder . . .

From the Nation:

The Nation therefore takes the following stand: We will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq a major issue of his or her campaign. We urge all voters to join us in adopting this position. Many worry that the aftermath of withdrawal will be ugly, and there is good reason to think they are right. But we can now see that the consequences of staying will be uglier still. Fear of facing the consequences of prolonging the war will be worse.

We firmly believe that antiwar candidates, with the other requisite credentials, can win the 2006 Congressional elections, the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and subsequent national election. But this fight, and our stand, must begin now.

An interesting point, and frankly one that I have been reluctant to endorse because I thought it was more important to get Democrats - any Democrats - elected in place of Republicans.

But times indeed are a-changin' (thanks, Bobby).

Hillary, if you want my support, you will need to take a stand. Admit that your vote was wrong and that you have seen the error of your ways. John Kerry, stop pontificating about mixed messages on intelligence and admit it - you voted for the war because you thought you could not be elected with a "nay" vote.

It's time to total the tally. I will not support any Democrat who continues to support this illegal, this dreadful and society-killing war.

Get Out Now! - and if possible, bring to trial the war criminals who got us into it.

Just when you thought it was safe to go out alone into the night . . .

Attached is a product of the unhappy marriage of Fundamentalist Christianity and the American Right Wing. Like the marriage of first cousins, you always risk cretinism or worst. This from the Topeka Journal-Constitution letters to the editor:

Thank the liberals

I'd like to take a few minutes to thank you liberals for some of the things you've accomplished for our country.

You're doing your best to destroy any and all religious holidays. Let's see, Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of Christ. Now we're supposed to say, "Happy holidays." We're not supposed to say the words "under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance. It won't be long before the mere mention of God in public could get you arrested.

You undermine our country while we're at war every chance you get, all the while pretending to support our troops. If you support them, then shut up and let them do their jobs.

You can't get your candidates elected. So you've stooped to trying to destroy them in court with trumped up charges.

You murdered Terri Schiavo while her parents were begging for her life. I'm still having trouble with that one.

But the crown jewel of your accomplishments would have to be Roe v. Wade. Since you so courageously won the right to abortions, you've murdered some 43 million babies.

You're so quick to defend a terrorist who wants nothing more than to destroy us all. Who's defending unborn children?

I believe there's a special place in hell for everyone responsible for this.

KEVIN McGINTY, Topeka

It's Midnight in the Garden of Evil. Who serves the tea?

I must share this wonderful Washington Post Op-Ed piece from Christopher Buckley. I see a book on the subject in the near future.

Remedial Ethics
By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
Published: November 10, 2005
"Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings; White House Counsel to Give 'Refresher' Course"

"GOOD morning, everyone."

"Good morning, Mr. Bonhoeffer."

"I hope everyone had an ethical weekend. I thought we'd start this morning with a situational exercise. Karl, suppose a reporter called you and said, 'I will write a very favorable article for my paper and make you look really good if you will tell me a super-duper classified national secret.' What would the correct thing to do be?"

"Tell him, 'Let me get back to you on that?'"

(Laughter)

"All right, settle down, everyone. This is no laughing matter. Anyone?"

"I would tell the reporter, 'I could, but that would be wrong.'"

"Thank you, Nicole. Technically fine, but can you tell us who in the White House first said that?"

"Bill Clinton?"

"I don't think he ever said that."

"Eleanor Roosevelt?"

"No. Anyone?"

"Spiro Agnew?"

"You're getting warmer. Karl, please put away your Blackberry. Can you tell us?"

"Richard M. Nixon, 37th president of the United States. Three-hundred-and-one electoral votes to Humphrey's 191."

"Very good. And what happened to Mr. Nixon?"

"He retired, wrote influential books and became a senior statesman."

"No, Karl, he resigned. Or didn't you have television and newspapers in Salt Lake City?"

"I went to the Nixon Library on a field trip once. They didn't say anything about any stupid resignation."

"Let's move on. Now suppose - yes, Mr. Cheney?"

"I have to go. I have a meeting."

"Please sit down. This is important."

"So's my meeting."

"Perhaps you'd like to share with us what it's about?"

"Torture."

"Thank you. I was planning to talk about that tomorrow, but since you've brought it up, let's talk about it now. Would you give us all an example of when you feel it is ethical to torture someone?"

"If that someone was about to launch an attack on the United States. Or making me late for a meeting. I think that under those clearly defined circumstances, tearing out their fingernails or immersing them in boiling oil would be, yes, a reasonable policy."

"I'm glad you brought up the subject of oil. Let's suppose there was an energy-related company. And a high government official, say, used to work for it. Now let's say that his country - call it Country A - went to war against Country B. And the energy-related company then got a very lucrative contract to rebuild Country B. Now let's say that the high government official agitated - indeed, pushed - his government to invade Country B in the first place. Do you see any potential conflict there?"

"None at all."

"Anyone? Yes, Harriet?"

"The vice president is the second most brilliant person I have ever met, and if he says it's O.K. to pull out people's -"

"Harriet, we're not discussing whether someone is smart."

"Sorry. I withdraw."

"I'm out of here."

"Mr. Vice President, class is not over until I - what is it, Karl? I asked you to put away your Blackberry."

"It's Tim Russert. What if he's calling to reveal the name of another undercover C.I.A. operative?"

"Then you put your hands over your ears and say loudly, 'Not listening! - La la la la la la la!' This is what Aristotle advises in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. Why don't we end there for today? Don't forget the assigned reading. And a few of you still owe me papers!"

Christopher Buckley, the editor of Forbes FYI magazine, is the author, most recently, of "Florence of Arabia."

This Century's Rasputin

What evil lurks in the hearts of men . . . Dick Cheney knows.

As awful as three-more-years-of-Bush seems, three more years of Cheney seems 100 times more dreadful. Can our nation sustain such evil in its second highest elected office?

From the Boston Globe:

Deconstructing Cheney
By James Carroll | November 7, 2005

THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States.

He began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's ''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two set out to gut the program -- the beginning of the Republican rollback of the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.

When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age. Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war against Panama.

As Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the nonviolent dismantling of the Soviet Union, Cheney warned Bush not to trust it. When the justification for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler.

Against Cheney's own uniformed advisers (notably including Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell), he forged Washington's choice of violence over diplomacy. The first Gulf War, remembered by Americans as justified, was in fact an unnecessary affirmation of military might as the ground of international order, just as an historic alternative was opening up. US responses in that period, mainly shaped by Cheney, stand in stark contrast to Gorbachev's, who, refusing to call on military might even to save the Soviet Union, was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks. The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda.

With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as vice president) showed itself for a moment.

The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.

At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war!

He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor.

He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it.

To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.

Bringing Christianity Back into the Classrooms

For any of you out there who actually believe that Intelligent Design is about "science" and NOT about putting rightwing-nut religion back into the classrooms, read on.

In Intelligent Design Case, a Cause in Search of a Lawsuit

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 4, 2005

HARRISBURG, Pa., Nov. 3 - For years, a lawyer for the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan visited school boards around the country searching for one willing to challenge evolution by teaching intelligent design, and to face a risky, high-profile trial.

Intelligent design was a departure for a nonprofit law firm founded by two conservative Roman Catholics - one the magnate of Domino's pizza, the other a former prosecutor - who until then had focused on the defense of anti-abortion advocates, gay-rights opponents and the display of Christian symbols like crosses and Nativity scenes on government property.

But Richard Thompson, the former prosecutor who is president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Center, says its role is to use the courts "to change the culture" - and it well could depending on the outcome of the test case it finally found.

Lawyers for the center are to sum up their case on Friday after a six-week trial in which they have been defending the school district in the small Pennsylvania town of Dover. The school board voted last year to require that students in ninth grade biology class be read a statement saying that "Darwin's theory" is "not a fact" and that intelligent design is an alternative worth studying.

At issue in the Dover lawsuit, brought by 11 parents in Federal District Court, is whether intelligent design is really religion dressed up as science, and whether teaching it in a public school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

The More center's lawyers put scientists on the witness stand who argued that intelligent design - the idea that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them - is a credible scientific theory and not religion because it never identifies God as the designer.

Still religion is at the heart of the case's appeal for the center, say its lawyers and the chairman of its board.

The chairman, Bowie Kuhn, the former baseball commissioner, said the board agreed that the center should take on an intelligent design case because while it is not necessarily based on religion "it is being opposed because people think it is religious." And that was enough for a group whose mission, as explained on its Web site, is "to protect Christians and their religious beliefs in the public square."

"America's culture has been influenced by Christianity from the very beginning," Mr. Thompson said, "but there is an attempt to slowly remove every symbol of Christianity and religious faith in our country. This is a very dangerous movement because what will ultimately happen is, out of sight, out of mind."

The legal group was founded in 1999 by Mr. Thompson and Thomas Monaghan, the former chief executive of Domino's pizza. At the time, Mr. Thompson had just lost his re-election campaign for prosecutor in Oakland County, Mich., defeated by voters disenchanted by his pursuit of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the retired pathologist who attended numerous assisted suicides.

In earlier cases, the center defended an enormous cross placed on a hill outside San Diego and Nativity scenes in Florida and New York. It sued the Ann Arbor schools for providing benefits for same-sex partners. And in one of its most controversial cases, it defended an anti-abortion group that ran an online list of doctors it said should be stopped from providing abortions. The doctors said the group was threatening them and their families. Mr. Thompson said in an interview it was "a very important free speech case."

To find its first intelligent design case, the lawyers went around the country looking for a school board willing to withstand a lawsuit. In May 2000, Robert Muise, one of the lawyers, traveled to Charleston, W.Va., to persuade the school board there to buy the intelligent design textbook "Of Pandas and People" and teach it in science class.

Mr. Muise told the board in Charleston that it would undoubtedly be sued if the district taught intelligent design, but that the center would mount a defense at no cost.

"We'll be your shields against such attacks," he told them at a school board meeting, a riff on the center's slogan, "The Sword and Shield for People of Faith." He said they could defend teaching intelligent design as a matter of academic freedom.

John Luoni, the former president of the Charleston school board, said he remembered listening to Mr. Muise and concluding: "It's not really a scientific theory. It's more of a religious theory. It should be taught if a church or a denomination believes in it, but I didn't think that religious viewpoint should be taught as part of a science class."

The board in West Virginia declined the center's offer. So did school districts in Michigan and Minnesota and a handful of other states, Mr. Muise and Mr. Thompson said.

But in Dover, the firm found willing partners when it contacted the school board in the summer of 2004 and promised it a first-class defense,

The Dover school board proceeded despite a memo from its lawyer, Stephen S. Russell, warning that if the board lost the case, they would have to pay its opponents legal fees - which according to the plaintiffs' lawyers exceeds $1 million. In the memorandum, revealed in court on Wednesday, Mr. Russell advised that opponents would have a strong case because board members had a lengthy public record of advocating "putting religion back in the schools."

Some of the proponents of intelligent design are also unhappy that the case went to court, and fear it could stop the movement in its infancy because some board members had a public record of advocating creationism, which the Supreme Court has twice ruled cannot be taught in public schools.

"The school district never consulted us and did the exact opposite of what we suggested," said John G. West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an organization in the forefront of the intelligent design movement. "Frankly I don't even know if school board members know what intelligent design is. They and their supporters are trying to hijack intelligent design for their own purposes. They think they're sending signals in the culture wars."

Mr. Thompson, the Thomas More Center's chief counsel, said the case appealed to him because of its "national impact." Four months before the trial started, he said, he watched the movie "Inherit the Wind," a drama about the Scopes evolution trial 80 years ago that helped turn the country against religious creationists and fundamentalists.

"It's only when you take the cases that are on the borderline that you can change the law," he said.

No matter how the Dover case turns out, the center is considering defending several teachers who are defying their school districts by teaching intelligent design.

"We're developing all this expertise in intelligent design," Mr. Thompson said. "We hope to use it."

The Arrow is Pointed Down

One of the more poignant moments during the John Fitzgerald news conference came while explaining why the investigation had taken two years. Fitzgerald responded by saying if certain reporters had not been less than forthcoming (or completely stonewalled) regarding where they got their information about Valerie Plame, "this investigation would have been completed in October 2004 instead of October 2005."

Think about that a moment, and then look at these latest polls:

A new CBS News poll shows Bush's approval rating dropping to a shockingly low 35 percent -- with 51 percent of those polled saying they consider the leak case a matter of great importance to the nation.

Cheney's favorable rating is down nine points this year to just 19 percent. Hell, you wonder why it's even that high!

John Roberts reports on the CBS Evening News: "The plunging poll numbers is another dose of bad news for a White House mired in it. The only recent president lower at this point in their term was Richard Nixon."

The poll shows the public considers this the most important political scandal since Watergate, surpassing Clinton-Lewinsky, Whitewater and even Iran-Contra.

It also shows that only 32 percent of Americans think that before the war, the Bush administration was telling all or most of what they knew about weapons in Iraq, compared to 38 percent who feel they were hiding important elements and 26 percent who think they were "mostly lying."

Now, back to the question at hand: if the New York Times had insisted that they review their reporters notes, and if they had insisted that they know who told her what, when and where . . . . and if the Times had insisted that she accept Scooter's "OK" to testify, then what would have happened?

Possible answer: John Kerry would have been president of the United States and we would be having a REAL investigation about how this Administration manipulated intelligence to draw us into a war.

Bush and Cheney: War Criminals. It has a nice ring to it.

White Rabbit

I share with you the latest column from Joe Galloway, fellow Texan and fellow UPI Downholder Club member, on his recent visit to the Pentagon. He did lunch with Rummy.

By Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON _ It was a slide down the toad hole that ended with a bump as I landed in Wonderland: The E Ring office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld where the great man waited to do battle with me.

The occasion was an invitation to a private lunch with the secretary, and I knew I was not there to receive the Defense Distinguished Service Medal or a pat on the back. My recent columns on the state of the Army and the conduct of the war in Iraq have not been well received at the uppermost levels in the Pentagon.

The surprise was that four others were joining us: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace; the vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Richard Cody; the director of the Joint Staff, Lt. Gen.Walter Sharp;and acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita.

Good! Five to one. I had them surrounded.

Rumsfeld was working at his stand-up desk when I entered. He was cordial and smiling and remained so throughout. He did a fast count and informed me that I was outranked by a grand total of 11 stars on the three generals he had brought in.

Then the battle was joined: "I'm not hearing anything like the things you are writing about," Rumsfeld said.

I responded that it had been my experience that information coming up the chain to someone with Rumsfeld's reputation was often not the whole truth.

Him: "Oh, I know that but I talk to lots of soldiers all the time. Why, I have given over 600 Town Hall meetings and anyone can ask me anything."

Uh-huh.

He suggested that perhaps my sources were all retired general officers who had been too long away from what was happening today. I told him that in fact about half my sources were active duty officers and NCOs.

"How about 70-30 or maybe 80-20?" Rumsfeld countered.

No, not really, I said. In fact many of them are not only active duty but work in the Pentagon - perhaps some even on his staff.

The debate took us to questions of whether the Army was broken, or not. Rumsfeld said, in his opinion, the Army was "light years better than it was four years ago."

I asked whether our strategy and tactics in Iraq made any sense at all when we cannot figure out some better way of fighting than sending the finest troops in the world down the same roads to be blown up by ever improving terrorist bombs. That by so doing we were playing to the enemy's strong suit in this asymmetric war. Rumsfeld emphatically agreed, saying he had ordered the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, to begin shifting away from that focus on patrolling to a big push to stand up an effective Iraqi defense force last January, and this was now being done.

Rumsfeld said he had told Iraqi leaders that the American forces needed to begin stepping back because the growing casualties were having an impact on American public support for the war "and they understand that and agree with it."

When I asked why would the Army sent bill collectors out to pursue soldiers who lost limbs to a bomb or mine because they didn't check in their armor and the equipment on leaving Iraq or Afghanistan, or were dunned or their paychecks docked for overpayment of combat pay and benefits, Cody and Rumsfeld spoke of a Pentagon computer system that had been running on automatic.They said weeks or even months passed before a wounded soldier shipped back to the U.S. for treatment was marked down as having left Iraq and thus was no longer eligible for combat pay and benefits. Then it automatically began billing that soldier or deducting money owed from his pay.

Now, Rumsfeld said, there is someone at the Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany and at Walter Reed Army Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital who checks every patient into the computer upon arrival so records are accurate.

Pace said he agreed totally with one recent column that decried the apparent return to the use of enemy body counts in Iraq.

Rumsfeld said flatly: "We are NOT going to do body counts."

Me: But you ARE doing body counts and releasing them; been doing it for a year and the frequency is growing. If you don't want to do body counts then stop doing them.

Throughout the discussion the defense secretary took notes when he thought he heard a valid point or criticism. Others at the table winced. They had visions of a fresh shower of the secretary's famous "snowflakes,"memos demanding answers or action or both.

An hour and a bit later as I headed for the door, Rumsfeld detoured me by a small room in his suite of offices. He wanted to show me a letter he found in his late father's belongings, now framed. It was written by Defense Secretary James Forrestal to the elder Rumsfeld, thanking him for his service in the Navy in the Pacific War.

Rumsfeld told me: "My dad was over-age but volunteered for the Navy. A year later he was the deck officer on an aircraft carrier fighting the war in the Pacific."

On the way out the defense secretary said, in parting: "I want you to know that I love soldiers and I care about soldiers. All of us here do."

I replied that concern for the troops and their welfare and safety were my only purpose "and I intend to keep kicking your butt regularly to make sure you stay focused on that goal."

He grinned and said: "That's all right. I can take it."

It Just Won't Leave Us, Will It?

The single worst events of my young life:

1. The John F. Kennedy Assassination
2. The Vietnam War
3. The election of Richard M. Nixon
4. The election of George W. Bush
5. The second Gulf War, the Iraqi Intrusion

It seems that No. 2 will never, never go away.

NSA article raises questions about Vietnam War

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency has been blocking the release of an article by one of its historians that says intelligence officers falsified documents about a disputed attack that was used to escalate the Vietnam War, according to a researcher who has requested the article.
Matthew Aid, who asked for the article under the Freedom of Information Act last year, said it appears that officers at the NSA made honest mistakes in translating interceptions involving the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers that helped lead to President Johnson's escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Rather than correct the mistakes, the 2001 article in the NSA's classified Cryptologic Quarterly says, midlevel officials decided to falsify documents to cover up the errors, according to Aid, who is working on a history of the agency and has talked to a number of current and former government officials about this chapter of American history.

Aid draws comparisons to more recent intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

"The question becomes, why not release this?" Aid said of the article. "We have some documents that, from my perspective, I think would be very instructive to the public and the intelligence community ... on a mistake made 41 years ago that was just as bad as the WMD debacle."

The NSA is the largest spy agency in government, responsible for much of the United States' codebreaking and eavesdropping work. In spy lingo, the agency collects and analyzes "signals intelligence" — or "SIGINT."

The article, written by NSA Historian Robert Hanyok, and the controversy over its release were first reported in The New York Times on Monday.

In a written statement, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency had delayed releasing the article "in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective." He said the agency plans to release the article and related materials next month.

"Instead of simply releasing the author's historical account, the agency worked to declassify the associated signals intelligence ... and other classified documents used to draw his conclusions," Weber said.

Aid has been told that Hanyok's article analyzes problems found in interceptions about the events. He said the nature and extent of the mistakes remain unclear, and some senior officials at NSA who were not involved with the errors have taken issue with the journal article.

Many historians believe that Johnson would have escalated U.S. military action in the region anyway.

Yet Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on secrecy, said events of the Cold War cannot remain off limits, effectively a secret history.

"A lot of what we think we know of our recent history may be mistaken," Aftergood said. "It is a disgrace that it should be so in a democracy, but it is."