Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Bush's Worst Mis-Speak of His Career, Or the Biggest "Flip-Flop" of the New Century?

Is he back on the sauce or has he suddenly found virtue in plain-spoken honesty--a Texas trait he has touted but never practiced. I will not speculate too deeply this early in the aftermath of bush's shocking answer to a question Matt Lauer asked him on Monday's "Today" show. There will be days of fallout on this with talking heads analyzing it every which way but loose. Here, I will simply excerpt some key graphs from today's The New York Times in which we learn that the "War President" doesn't think the war against terrorism--a phrase he placed into the public's consciousness--can be won:
NASHUA, N.H., Aug. 30 - President Bush, in an interview broadcast on Monday, said he did not think America could win the war on terror but that it could make terrorism less acceptable around the world, a departure from his previous optimistic statements that the United States would eventually prevail.

In the interview with Matt Lauer of the NBC News program "Today," conducted on Saturday but shown on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, Mr. Bush was asked if the United States could win the war against terrorism, which he has made the focus of his administration and the central thrust of his re-election campaign.

"I don't think you can win it," Mr. Bush replied. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

As recently as July 14, Mr. Bush had drawn a far sunnier picture. "I have a clear vision and a strategy to win the war on terror," he said.

At a prime-time news conference in the East Room of the White House on April 13, Mr. Bush said: "One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we are asking questions, is, 'Can you ever win the war on terror?' Of course you can."

It was unclear if Mr. Bush had meant to make the remark to Mr. Lauer, or if he misspoke. But White House officials said the president was not signaling a change in policy, and they sought to explain his statement by saying he was emphasizing the long-term nature of the struggle.

Taken at face value, however, Mr. Bush's words would put him closer to the positions of the United States' European allies, who have considered Mr. Bush's talk of victory simplistic and unhelpful.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One that Mr. Bush was speaking about winning the war "in the conventional sense" and that his comments underscored the reality that ridding the world of terrorists would take decades.

"I don't think you can expect that there will ever be a formal surrender or a treaty signed like we have in wars past," Mr. McClellan said. "That's what he was talking about. It requires a generational commitment to win this war on terrorism."

Mr. Bush's comment came only a few days after an interview with The New York Times in which he acknowledged a "miscalculation'' about the evolution of the insurgency in Iraq, saying no one could have anticipated that a swift military victory would allow forces loyal to Saddam Hussein and others to melt into the cities and attack American forces.

But Democrats clearly saw those comments, and the one broadcast Monday, as missteps they could exploit, much as Mr. Bush has attacked Mr. Kerry's remark that he would have authorized the president to invade Iraq if he had known then what he knows now about Iraq's weapons.

"After months of listening to the Republicans base their campaign on their singular ability to win the war on terror, the president now says we can't win the war on terrorism," Senator John Edwards, Mr. Kerry's running mate, said in a statement. "This is no time to declare defeat. It won't be easy and it won't be quick, but we have a comprehensive longterm plan to make America safer. And that's a difference."

Mr. Edwards elaborated on his criticism in an interview Monday with the ABC program "Nightline.'' Mr. Edwards said the battle against terrorism was "absolutely winnable" with the right leadership.

"Now, in order to win it," Mr. Edwards said, "we have to do the right thing, which includes some of the things that I spoke about today: reform our intelligence operations, more human intelligence inside these terrorist cells, being more aggressive about the developing nuclear threats in North Korea and Iran, and different plans - a more effective plan in Iraq, a more effective plan in Afghanistan.''

Mr. Kerry, who has limited his campaigning this week, was asked at his vacation home in Nantucket whether the war on terror could be won. He replied, "Absolutely."
There is a whole lot more of this article in The New York Times
 

9:32 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments  




Murdoch So Far Right He Won't Even Take Ad Money From The Left

I like nothing about Rupert Murdoch. Forgive me, that wasn't an honest statement. I despise everything the man stands for--or better yet, stoops to--but I must give the Devil his due for stubbornness: The man won't accept commercials on his Fox News aberration of a cable TV news network from the oldest political magazine in America, the venerable, but unashamedly liberal weekly, The Nation.

It isn't often that The Nation has enough money in their ad budget to pay for television commercials. Recently, though, an unnamed, deep pockets individual with a good liberal heart made a sizeable donation of dollars for the little mag that can to go big-time on TV during the RNC in New York. But Rupert said their money wasn't good enough for his empire's clean hands of righteousness, basically telling them to go elsewhere to spend their ill-gotten leftist bucks.

But get this: He is happy to spend his money advertising in their pages. Go Figure. I am not making this up! Read it here, in The New York Times :
The Fox News Channel, the highest-rated cable news network in the country, arrives this week at the Republican National Convention with an opportunity to serve up ample red meat for its core constituency.

A growing number of advertisers would like a piece of that audience, but The Nation, the left-leaning political magazine, will not be among them. Ten days ago, the ad agency for The Nation sent a 60-second commercial to the cable network promoting its brand of political news and commentary as free of White House influence and corporate agendas.

"Nobody owns The Nation. Not Time Warner, not Murdoch. So there's no corporate slant, no White House spin. Just the straight dope," the commercial says.

While the ad will appear on Time Warner's CNN, as well as NBC Universal's MSNBC and Bravo, it will not appear on Fox News, a division of the News Corporation whose chairman and chief executive is Rupert Murdoch.

"They rejected it out of hand," said Arthur Stupar, senior vice president for circulation at The Nation. "I find it ironic. They are the G.O.P. cable station, a champion of free markets, and they got spooked at the thought of running an ad that doesn't publish spin or serve the agenda of corporate conglomerates."

A spokesman for Fox News, which has always rejected the charge that it brings a partisan bias to news coverage, said, "We reject ads all the time," and declined further comment.

Executives at The Nation were hoping that Fox News would be more accommodating, especially because the network has bought an ad in the newest issue of The Nation, which will be coming out during the convention.

And last year, Fox News purchased a back-page ad in The Nation, an action that prompted 50 readers to cancel their subscriptions in protest of the magazine taking what they considered tainted money. After reading of the controversy, Fox News promptly purchased another.

Mr. Stupar of The Nation said that the ad was not specifically constructed to antagonize Fox, but allowed that the specific mention of Mr. Murdoch may have been something of a problem for the cable network.

"Yes, we mention him by name, but we mention Time Warner as well and CNN didn't have a problem with that," he said.
The New York Times
 

4:50 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments  




Ethical Journalism and The Swift Boat Story

I do not know how many of my readers are also colleagues--professional journalists. It is probably a safe bet that a preponderance of you are at least bloggers, working journalists or not. I bring this subject up because, journalist or not, blogger or not, it can do you no harm and most likely a lot of good, if you visited the Talk About Ethics column/weblog at Poynter Online, the Internet home of the Poynter Institute, one of the two or three most important organizations in the constant struggle to keep journalism and journalists worthy of the sacred trust implied by the term The Fourth Estate.

Of course, many if not most folks believe that journalism and journalists forfeited any claim to trust at all, forget worthy, years ago. I disagree--in principle--and I do so because of organizations such as the Poynter Institute that are fighting the good fight to train journalists, young and old, student and veteran, how to conduct their work in a fashion that will begin to restore the public's trust in the profession tasked with telling it the "news." Please pay a visit to the site linked below; I believe you will find it informative as well as relevant:
The Swift Boat Genre: A 9-Point Checklist Journalists need to put the facts of the controversy in the kind of context that helps explain what it all means.

By Aly Colon
Poynter Online
  

2:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  



Monday, August 30, 2004

When Will They Ever Learn...?

Frankly, when it comes to Japan and its militarist past, I do not believe the nation collectively will ever honestly confront the genocide its military forces perpetrated everywhere they went between 1930 and 1945. By many estimates, the Imperial forces of Japan tortured and exterminated upwards of 30 million people during a decade-and-a-half spent invading and occupying virtually all of east Asia.

The government certainly doesn't want its children to grow up knowing the truth of what their grandfathers routinely did to living human flesh that was not Japanese. Consequently, how can Japan's neighbors ever really trust the land-strapped island nation not to return to its expansionist goals of only a few decades past? To rewrite history effectively, one needs only to rewrite elementary textbooks, which Japan has already done:
The issue of Japan's interpretation of history has angered China again after a Tokyo school agreed to use a history text book heavily criticised for glossing over Japan's military past.

A statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency says right-wing elements are launching fraudulent attempts to present their view of the past.

It says the Japanese rightists' distort history and impart to younger generations an erroneous or even reactionary view of history through textbooks.

China is extremely sensitive about its invasion and occupation by Japan and is a vocal opponent of right-wing elements associated with agressive Japanese imperialism.

The Tokyo school became the first in the capital to adopt the controversial book, issued by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform in 2001.
RADIO AUSTRALIA
  

2:45 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments  




Apocalypse Redux: The Debate the Right Wingers Won't Touch With a Ten-Foot Swift Boat Gaff

Readers of these pages know well that I believe the no-quarters-asked conflict raging between the supporters of bush and the supporters of Senator Kerry is really a rematch of the counter-culture versus the establishment social revolution of the 60's. Only revisionist historians will argue that the counter-culture forces did not win that struggle decisively, changing the American social and political landscape substantially. That defeat has bitterly chafed the right ever since.

As you may have noticed, in the present campaign sniping of who did or did not do what in Vietnam, that is the only issue in hot dispute--individual or even collective deeds, not the real Vietnam issue that polarized and paralyzed America for more than a decade: The morality of the war itself. The rightness or wrongness of the American military mission in a civil war over sovereignty in an arbitrarily divided country where America's only national interest was ideological, not strategical. That issue is loudly silent in the ugly debate between the "Swift Boaters," their zealous supporters, and the backers of John F. Kerry.

I have made this argument in other words in other posts in these pages. I am certain, however, that I have not done so as persuasively as does Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic. His essay on this matter is in the current issue of TNR; because it is a paid subscription service, I am reproducing it in full below.
Apocalypse Redux

Put aside the claims that John Kerry doesn't deserve his Vietnam medals--claims debunked in newspaper after newspaper, claims that, as the Los Angeles Times recently editorialized, "no informed person can seriously believe." Put aside the question of whether John Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968, as he has (probably incorrectly) claimed. As Slate's Fred Kaplan notes, Kerry's diaries say he was "patrolling near the Cambodian line" on that day. (At least one of his crewmates says it was "very hard to tell.") Does that distinction really constitute an important campaign issue?

The medals and the Cambodia charges are partisan hack stuff, cynically repeated in service of the greater Republican good. What genuinely upsets conservatives--including conservative veterans--is something different. First, conservatives think it's hypocritical for Kerry, who denounced the war, to now take credit for having fought in it. As The Wall Street Journal editorialized this week, Kerry has "managed the oxymoronic feat of celebrating both his own war-fighting valor and his antiwar activities when he returned home." But what's oxymoronic about that? What Kerry "celebrates" is that he volunteered for Vietnam--and served heroically--when elites (including Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle, and George W. Bush) were finding ways not to go. That's noble, even if Kerry thinks the war itself was not. And, if Kerry is a hypocrite for having served in a war he opposed, what about Dick Cheney--who avoided serving in a war he supported?

The second thing that genuinely angers conservatives--including some of Kerry's fellow swift boat captains--is that he called the war immoral. Kerry began his famous 1971 Senate testimony by recounting the recent Winter Soldier Investigation, in which soldiers spoke of atrocities they had committed. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's latest anti-Kerry ad intersperses his graphic descriptions of those atrocities (without explaining that he was paraphrasing firsthand accounts) with outraged veterans saying his testimony "betrayed us" and "dishonored his country."

What the ad doesn't argue, however, is that Kerry's charges were false. It merely suggests he was unpatriotic for leveling them. That's consistent with the way conservatives have discussed Vietnam throughout this campaign. In February, when Tim Russert asked whether he had supported the war, President Bush replied, "I supported my government"--as if supporting the war was a matter of loyalty rather than judgment. Mackubin Thomas Owens's influential May National Review article about Kerry's antiwar testimony accuses Kerry of "'Americaniz[ing]' Soviet propaganda"--suggesting that, by calling war crimes widespread, Kerry was serving the enemy. In the new ad, one veteran says, "Kerry gave the enemy for free what I, and many of my, uh, comrades in North Vietnam, in the prison camps, uh, took torture to avoid saying."

Calling Kerry unpatriotic is a useful way of delegitimizing his allegations without disproving them. Some of the organizers of the Winter Soldier Investigation have been discredited, but most of the testimonies themselves have not. Miami University Professor Jeffrey Kimball, one of the most respected Vietnam historians, says, "On the whole, the Winter Soldier Investigations established that some Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam. Claims that their testimony has been discredited are unwarranted." Another prominent historian of the war, Wayne State University's Mel Small, says, "Most of the evidence of atrocities presented by the [Winter Soldier] vets remains unchallenged to this day."

On the question of atrocities more broadly, Kerry's claims also find widespread academic support. The University of Kentucky's George Herring, author of America's Longest War, says, "The atrocities that took place are pretty much those described by Kerry in 1971." In a recent interview with The Boston Globe, Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, also said Kerry got it right. Even Robert McNamara himself has stated that "there were atrocities, without any question. ... I don't think enough attention was paid to it by the chain of command."

Conservatives have taken special umbrage at Kerry's statement, in a 1971 "Meet the Press" interview, that he "committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers." What they generally ignore is that Kerry was referring to the fact that he "took part in shootings in free-fire zones"--zones where the U.S. military designated any Vietnamese who did not evacuate as combatants. And Kerry was right: The free-fire zones violated the fourth Geneva Convention, which outlaws indiscriminate attacks against areas in which civilians are present.

In the end, though, Kerry's claims about American atrocities can't be separated from his claims about the war itself. "There is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States," he told the Senate in 1971. Most Vietnamese, he argued, wanted "this foreign presence of the United States of America to leave them alone in peace." It was because the war lacked any strategic or moral justification that Kerry deemed the atrocities committed in its name to be so indefensible.

It is that fervent moral opposition to Vietnam that so galls conservatives today--and that, they claim, undergirds his supposed hostility to American power ever since. And yet, conservatives want to discredit Kerry for being against the war without defending it themselves. In the August 30 Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol wrote that "John Kerry was hostile, to say the least, to the exercise of American power in 1971." Does Kristol think the further exercise of that power in Vietnam would have been wise? The Wall Street Journal editorial page recently chastised Kerry for urging "retreat ... when Vietnam became difficult." Do they think America should have charged ahead? Do they think America could have defeated the communists? And at what cost?

Kerry's detractors are trying to have it both ways. They want to denounce him for calling the war immoral without explaining why they disagree. So instead they call his opposition disloyal, weak, a character flaw--just like Richard Nixon's men did three decades ago.

Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR.
The New Republic
  

1:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  



Saturday, August 28, 2004

Is General Sanchez "Culpable," "Responsible," or Just a "Good German" in Rumsfeld's Anti-Insurgency Solution?

Round and Round the Reports go, where the Buck stops nobody knows. The questions is: Does anyone in the administration care? Does the American public care? After all, the Iraqi men and women "tortured" and "abused" were detained as enemies of the Coalition--which at the time and place consisted almost exclusively of American soldiers. I suppose it all comes down to individual opinions of what being a "Good American" is.

Today The New York Times published classified information that was excluded from the public version of the report released by the Army. Excerpts are below:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 - Classified parts of the report by three Army generals on the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison say Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, approved the use in Iraq of some severe interrogation practices intended to be limited to captives held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

Moreover, the report contends, by issuing and revising the rules for interrogations in Iraq three times in 30 days, General Sanchez and his legal staff sowed such confusion that interrogators acted in ways that violated the Geneva Conventions, which they understood poorly anyway.

Military officials and others in the Bush administration have repeatedly said the Geneva Conventions applied to all prisoners in Iraq, even though members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo did not, in their estimation, fall under the conventions.

But classified passages of the Army report say the procedures approved by General Sanchez on Sept. 14, 2003, and the revisions made when the Central Command found fault with the initial policy, exceeded the Geneva guidelines as well as standard Army doctrines. ...

The techniques approved by General Sanchez exceeded those advocated in a standard Army field manual that provided the basic guidelines for interrogation procedures. But they were among those previously approved by the Pentagon for use in Afghanistan and Cuba, and were recommended to General Sanchez and his staff in the summer of 2003 in memorandums sent by a team headed by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a commander at Guantanamo who had been sent to Iraq by senior Pentagon officials, and by a military intelligence unit that had served in Afghanistan and was taking charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib. ...

The passages involving General Sanchez's orders were among several deleted from the version of the report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay that was made public by the Pentagon on Wednesday.

Classified parts of the 171-page report were provided to The New York Times by a senior Defense Department official who said fuller disclosure of the findings would help public understanding of the causes of the prisoner abuse scandal. ...

The classified sections of the Fay report reinforce criticisms made in another report, by the independent panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, the former defense secretary.

That panel argued that General Sanchez's actions effectively amounted to an unauthorized suspension of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq by categorizing prisoners there as unlawful combatants.
There is a great deal more of this sordid story at: The New York Times
 

3:13 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  



Friday, August 27, 2004

Best political blog contest, blogs about politics and elections...

This might be fun. The Washington Post is having a Best Political Blogs contest. The inormation is below:
Right wing. Left wing. Indifferent. Irreverent. There's a blog for every taste, opinion and attitude. washingtonpost.com's 2004 Best Blogs - Politics and Elections Readers' Choice Awards is your chance to speak out and vote for your favorite politics and election blogs.

From now until September 3, we'll be taking nominations from the blogosphere on the best weblogs from this political season. Whose rants could give Dennis Miller a run for his money? Who's making the best use of the technology? Who will be around long after the hype has died down?

For more details on Best Blogs - Politics and Elections including special information for bloggers click here.
Mark your calendars
Nominations begin: July 26, 2004
Voting begins: September 27, 2004
Winners announced: October 25, 2004

washingtonpost.com - Best political blog contest
  

5:37 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  




American Journalism, Asleep at the Keyboard

The editors at The New Republic take journalists to the woodshed for a spanking we all deserve for showcasing the unseemly "Swift Boaters" versus John Kerry mud-and-bile-wrestling spectacle as legitimate news. The New Republic is a paid subscription service; therefore, the editorial is re-produced in full below:
Matter of Fact
by the Editors

Just how dishonest must a smear campaign be for American journalists to say so plainly or, better yet, to ignore altogether? That's the only real question still unanswered in the controversy sparked by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth over John Kerry's service in Vietnam--although even to use the word "controversy" affords the issue's protagonists too much dignity. The veterans featured in the organization's TV ad claim to have "served with Kerry," but none actually served on the same boat. (Yes, we've been reduced to arguing over what the definition of "with" is.) Several of the charges are based on recollections by veterans who, years earlier, had praised Kerry for the very same actions.The accusation that Kerry faked one of his injuries turns out to come from a thirdhand account. Most important of all, the surviving crewmembers from Kerry's boat--as well as Navy records--back Kerry's version of events. As the Los Angeles Times editorialized this week, citing one of its own reporters' fine work debunking the Swift Boat Veterans, "no informed person can seriously believe that Kerry fabricated evidence to win his military medals."

Unfortunately, even as reporters eviscerated the Swift Boat Veterans' essential claims, the conventions of evenhandedness (at least on news, as opposed to editorial, pages) prevented them from stating their findings in bald, unvarnished terms. And so writers for papers like The Washington Post repeatedly played the dispute as a he-said, she-said campaign argument, seizing on the relatively minor discrepancies in Kerry's story (chiefly Kerry's questionable claim that his boat had gone into Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968) and then balancing those against the far more egregious distortions they had found in the swift boat ads."Both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place," read the key passage from a lengthy front-page story in Sunday's Post. "But although Kerry's accusers have succeeded in raising doubts about his war record, they have failed to come up with sufficient evidence to prove him a liar." And, while careful readers could parse the truth, more casual readers were left to take their cues from headlines like "Veterans Battle Over the Truth" or "Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete," which compounded the misimpression that there was something ambiguous, if not downright suspicious, about Kerry's military record.

But it wasn't primarily the print media that kept this story alive. It was television, particularly cable news, with all of its now-familiar pathologies. Predictably, Fox News hyped the story, weaving it seamlessly into a larger narrative about Kerry's character flaws. (Here's Brit Hume, Fox's analogue to Peter Jennings or Dan Rather: "There's a thread here that one might trace through the criticisms of John Kerry and his behavior, even in this campaign, and that is the sense of somebody who is an absolutely incorrigible opportunist.") And the less ideological CNN and MSNBC did their parts to sustain the controversy by running the Swift Boat ads repeatedly during their news segments, then giving the same old discredited Kerry critics a platform to continue spewing their same old discredited arguments.

The effect was to spread lies rather than scrutinize them, in a precise perversion of journalism's supposed purpose. More than half of the respondents to a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center said they had seen or heard of the Swift Boat ad, which initially ran in only three swing states. And the polling firm HCD Research found that 27 percent of independent voters who saw the ad and "who [had] planned to vote for Kerry or leaned pro-Kerry" were "no longer sure they'd back" him.

Journalists, in short, became accomplices to fraud. And they should have known better. In 2000, Bush and his right-wing allies learned that the way to win political arguments is to launch rhetorical attacks based only loosely--if at all--on the facts and then depend on reporters to spread them as credible perspectives on the truth. And, ever since, this White House has conducted its business the very same way, shamelessly peddling lies about everything from budget projections to weapons of mass destruction without the slightest fear of retribution.

A few days ago, cable news had a rare moment of clarity when an unlikely voice of reason, MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews, lashed out at conservative pundit Michelle Malkin for suggesting that Kerry had shot himself to win a Purple Heart--an accusation even more farfetched than the swift boat ad's. As Matthews later told columnist Lloyd Grove, "If someone is saying something that factually can't be proved, it's my job to call them on it." He's absolutely right. How sad that he's largely alone.

THE EDITORS
The New Republic Online
 

3:22 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  



Thursday, August 26, 2004

Nasty Politics Good For the Nation...the Magazine, that is

Another tidbit from Poynter Online - Romenesko. This one is sure to rile up the wing-nuts at NRO and The Weekly Standard:
The Nation's ad chief says business is great these days
Village Voice
Credit Bushwhacking? "I hardly get a chance to prospect because there is so much business coming in," says The Nation's Ellen Bollinger. "I have to scramble just to stay on top of the people who want to buy ads -- knock on wood." Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: "With the Internet wind at their backs, and partisan rage peaking, could we see growth for liberal magazines of previously unimaginable proportions? Don't bet on it."
Poynter Online - Romenesko
  

11:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  




The Rapidity, Diversity & Nastiness of Today's Attack-Dog Politics Creating Dilemma For Mainstream Media

Poynter Online - Romenesko, the prestigious journalism institute's Media Blog, has an interesting post highlighting the problems that the mainstream media is having due to the ferocity of this presidential campaign, cable TV, bloggers, and right-wing radio talk shows:
Cable TV, talk radio forced papers to cover swift boat flap?
Editor & Publisher
"I'm not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into it," says New York Times deputy national editor Alison Mitchell. Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea tells Joe Strupp the swift boat controversy may be an instance of a growing problem for newspapers in the expanding media world -- being forced to follow a questionable story because non-print outlets have made it an issue. "There are too many places for people to get information," says O'Shea. "I don't think newspapers can be the gatekeepers anymore -- to say this is wrong and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why."
> Stanley: Kerry flap shows how confusing TV news coverage can be (NYT)
> Jacoby: Press pursues GWB's Guard records, passes on Kerry's history (BG)
> Tomasky: Why did WP devote 2,700 words to swift boat saga? (AmerPros)
Romanesko - Poynter Online
  

10:59 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  




How Many Wars Will it Take...?

How many wars can the American spirit and soul fight at the same time before hemorrhaging into civil disorder and widespread maliase? There is the war--now some 30-plus years-old--in Vietnam that never really ended in America's collective body politic, evidenced by the fierceness of the battle raging over Senator John Kerry's service in that longest, most unpopular of American wars, and his passionate attack against that war--and the atrocities that beyond doubt did occur, as they have in every war ever fought, committed by all sides--when he came home from that war. There is the war in Afghanistan that appears headed towards its 4th year of "low intensity combat"--low that is unless it's your family member sent home in a body bag or a wheelchair. And there is the hot war still raging in Iraq.

Of the two active wars, not only is there popular contention over the why's, how's and what-for's of both, we are having to stare into the mirror and see not only "atrocities" staring back at us but a much more troubling, ugly incarnation, TORTURE. For a number of months now we have dealt with the Abu Ghraib accusations in speech or type using the much less nasty term "abuse." That other word? Goddamn, that's not us!

Officially, though, it is, the Pentagon and its many generals today tell us that despotic word is indeed now a U.S. phenomena--and they tell us it is not even an isolated phenomenon.

Somebody, several somebodies, from top to bottom have to go. If not, how do we tell people in other lands that this really isn't tolerated in the American scheme of things. Or...maybe it is now, and we have to own up to it--come down from our moral high-horse?

No! We cannot. I will not! Even to my last breath, if it ever comes to that, I will tell everyone I can overseas that we are not, as a people, that morally bankrupt. I am too much of an emotional coward to accept any truth but that.

If you are an American, or perhaps an admirer of America, read the words below, and weep a little, please:
WASHINGTON - An Army general acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that U.S. forces tortured Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison, and his report said a colonel who headed the military intelligence unit at the prison could face criminal charges.

"It's a harsh word, and in some instances, unfortunately, I think it was appropriate here. There were a few instances where torture was being used," Maj. Gen. George Fay said at a briefing at the Pentagon on the Army's investigation into the role of military intelligence personnel in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Defense Department leaders and Bush administration officials had previously steered clear of describing the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners as torture. Fay did not specify the actions he considered torture.

"We discovered serious misconduct and a loss of moral values," said Gen. Paul Kern, the head of the investigation.

The findings, by Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, came a day after an independent panel released a report blaming senior leaders, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for lax oversight and inattention to the issue of military-run prisons in Iraq. This contributed to the chaos at Abu Ghraib, said members of that panel, led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger.
FULL ABU GHRAIB REPORTS
Read the Army report (PDF)
Read the independent report (PDF)
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Wednesday that civilian leaders in the White House and the Defense Department should be held accountable for the abuses.

"Harry Truman had that sign on the desk, and it said, 'The buck stops here,'" Kerry said in Philadelphia. "The buck doesn't stop at the Pentagon."

As he has several times before, Kerry called for Rumsfeld to resign. He also called for President Bush to appoint an independent commission to investigate "all of the chain of abuses that took place, and why they took place, including the civilian side."

46 could be charged
Investigators referred Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade at Abu Ghraib, to Army authorities for possible disciplinary action, which could prompt criminal charges.

In all, the report referred 46 names for possible charges. In addition to Pappas, four other Army officers, 29 more military intelligence soldiers, four military police soldiers and two medical personnel were forwarded. On the civilian side, the names of six private contractors were sent to the Justice Department for possible legal action.
There is a lot more to this ugly story, including graphics and sidebar information at: MSNBC
  

4:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  




"Read my lips...read Scott McClellan's lips!...huh? Oh...Never mind. Huh? Yeah. Read Ginsberg's lips!"

"Absotively, posilutely...those 'Swift Boat' fellas have no connection whatsoever to the White House or to the campaign." Ah, it depends on what "connection" means, is that the skinny? "Yep, you got it...course, now it really is all 'bout those 527s, which this administration is strongly on the record against." Right...so, what's the dope on the Abu Ghraib 'connections' to Rumsfeld's office? "No more questions today, folks..."
The Bush campaign's top outside lawyer, who said on Tuesday that he had given legal advice to the group of veterans attacking Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record, said today that he was resigning from the campaign because his activities were becoming a 'distraction' to Mr. Bush' re-election efforts.

The lawyer, Benjamin L. Ginsberg, said that the group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, called him last month to ask for his help and that he had agreed. The group has criticized Mr. Kerry's war record and his antiwar activism in a book, television commercials and appearances on various news programs, especially on cable.

"I cannot begin to express my sadness that my legal representations have become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election," Mr. Ginsberg told the president in a letter distributed today by the Bush-Cheney campaign. "I feel I cannot let that continue, so I have decided to resign as national counsel to your campaign to ensure that the giving of legal advice to decorated military veterans, which was entirely within the boundaries of the law, doesn't distract from the real issues upon which you and the country should be focusing."

The Kerry-Edwards campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, said today that Mr. Ginsberg's resignation "confirms the extent of those connections."

"Now we know why George Bush refuses to specifically condemn these false ads," she said. "People deeply involved in his own campaign are behind them, from paying for them, to appearing in them, to providing legal advice, to coordinating a negative strategy to divert the public away from issues like jobs, health care and the mess in Iraq, the real concerns of the American people." ...

Mr. Ginsberg, a prominent elections lawyer, was a senior lawyer for the Bush organization in the Florida recount after the 2000 election and was once general counsel to the Republican National Committee. He said he had no involvement in the message or strategy of the Swift boat group and said he had no reason to believe that Mr. Bush knew of his involvement.
There is a great deal more to this story at: The New York Times
  

10:37 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  



Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Fat-Cats Save bush Bacon Again? And Again? And Again...?

There is a definite pattern to shrub's adult life: fail, and a rich friend of the family--American or Saudi--suddenly appears with a sack of cash and junior's back in business, briefly. Then another failure, a fat-cat arrives...the kid's got a new title, a new company name...it has been an endless cycle of this failure's life. It is happening again, and the stakes have never been higher. Read this excellent analysis of this peculiarly bush cycle of failure and salvation from it:
Before he got into politics, George W. Bush was in the oil business, a tricky industry in which he excelled at raising money, using the power of his name, but flopped at finding oil.

He drilled a lot of holes in the ground of West Texas, and never made a big score. More than once, he was rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by a few rich men.

This is an old story, mentioned here not to revisit a well-known weak spot in Bush's resume but to suggest an analogy that might explain the recent role of the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in Bush's re-election campaign.

In politics, too, Bush digs holes and needs rescuing from them.

The Swift Boat group has attacked Bush's opponent, John Kerry, these past few weeks with ads that paint Kerry's war record as a sham. Kerry, according to official Navy records, is a bona fide Vietnam War hero, winner of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

But with money raised from several big Texas Republican contributors, and supposedly off the grid of the official Bush re-election campaign, the Swift Boat group has peddled the story that Kerry spent his 1969 tour of duty in Vietnam lying, running from danger and acquiring self-inflicted wounds.

It's a story filled with holes and, you'll excuse the expression, flip-flops by some veterans who in the past have praised Kerry's bravery and now dismiss it. George Elliot, one of the members of the attack group, was campaigning with Kerry in 1996. Another member of the group, retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, told an interviewer two years ago that Kerry was "a good man," and that his actions in winning the Silver Star "took guts." Now both say Kerry is a fraud.

Bush denies any connection with the Swift Boat group. But these ads have been the best thing to happen to his campaign in a year.

His war in Iraq has gone from bad to worse, the economy has refused to bounce, and he is trailing in several polls. But these slurs against Kerry - not to mention the slurs they imply against the dozen of his crewmates who lend eyewitness accounts of Kerry's bravery to his campaign - buoys Bush's poll numbers by double digits among a crucial voting group, veterans.

In many ways, the Swift Boat group has done for Bush's flagging presidential campaign what Republican contributors did for his flagging oil company, Arbusto Oil, back in the 1980s.

Like his oil ventures, Bush's presidency has yet to make a big score - not on the economy or against terror or on any front except the budget deficit, which he has increased profoundly.

And just as happened at the lowest ebb in his entrepreneurial days, when his first company was unable to pay its debts, along comes an infusion of support bankrolled by Texas Republicans.

In the 1980s, they were businessmen eager to curry favor with W.'s father, then-Vice President and future President George Bush. (Brokered by Texas oilman James Baker, the father's future campaign chairman and secretary of state, a deal was struck whereby W. merged his failing oil enterprise with a profitable one, and became president of the new company.)

In the recent Bush rescue, the bankrollers were businessmen of the same provenance who helped the Swift Boat group get together.

One was Texas commercial real estate executive Harlan Crow, an old friend of the Bush family and a member of the board of trustees - along with Baker and former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay - of George H.W. Bush's presidential library foundation.

The other is Texas home builder Bob J. Perry, a close friend of President Bush's political guru, Karl Rove. Each man gave more than $100,000 to the Swift Boat group.

Whether or not the dirtiest episode in the 2004 presidential campaign so far was born in the White House, its bankroller-midwives are no strangers there. And their role as behind-the-scenes helpers to a W. Bush in distress is nothing new in the president's story.

Yesterday, Bush said he was disavowing the Swift Boat ads. He stopped far short of criticizing them, and lumped them together with far less scuzzy campaign ads run by independent groups backing Kerry.

But it was a start toward dropping the attack. And Bush's timing has always been good.

Previously silent eyewitnesses have been coming forward steadily in the past few days to back Kerry's version of his Vietnam experiences. The Swift Boat critics have been caught in a number of contradictions and deceptions.

The story has done its damage. Like a stock at its peak value - something Bush recognizes, as he did when he made controversial sales in the late 1980s of his own Harken Energy oil company stocks, just weeks before reported financial losses would cut their value 75 percent - this would be a good time to cash out.

The negative ads may have flopped in finding dirt, but Bush, once again, seems poised to make out like a bandit on a dry hole.
Newsday.com
  

5:51 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  




Say What You Will About Its Politics, You Can't Fault China On Being Civilized & Civil On Matters of Great Human Import

The short article below needs little or no comment; so I shan't say much other than "Ya gotta love this country!" And of course I do, and not at all for reasons relevant to the phenomenon reported below--it was, in fact, news to me.
NEW YORK (AFP) -- Chinese are world leaders in tolerating extramarital affairs, according to a new survey that also reveals that Americans are most likely to let religion influence their sex lives.

Twenty-three percent of Chinese believe it is all right to have an affair, especially one in which "nobody gets hurt", according to the survey released by Euro RSCG, a marketing communications agency.

The company asked people in five countries and said only 11 percent of Britons and nine percent of Americans approved of affairs.

Euro RSCG said the French and German samples were close to the Chinese level.

In all countries except Britain, more men than women would allow affairs.

In China, it was 27 percent of men against 14 percent of women, Germany 28 percent to 16, and in the United States, 13 percent of men against four percent of women.

But among Britons, 11 percent of both sexes said an affair was OK.

Only France came close, with 20 percent of men and 17 percent of women agreeing.

Despite their liberal attitude, Chinese are also more likely to believe monogamy is the best way: 70 percent of them agree, compared with 57 percent of Americans but only 44 percent in France, 42 percent in Britain and 40 percent in Germany.

The Chinese are also the least likely to consider it normal for somebody aged about 30 to have had 10 or more different lovers during his or her single years.

Just 17 percent of Chinese agreed, compared with 30 percent of French, 49 percent of Americans, 52 percent of Germans, and 59 percent of British.

Euro RSCG said its Prosumer Pulse 2004 survey asked 1,982 Americans, 2,127 British, 2,000 French, 3,158 Germans, and 2,079 Chinese about attitudes to sex, finance, technology and commerce.

The survey also delved into how much religion affects sexual behaviour.

Thirty-nine percent of Americans said it did. But only three percent of French agreed.

In between there was Britain on 16 percent, China on 15 percent and Germany on six percent.
Manila Bulletin Online
  

5:01 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  




The Daily Mis-Lead Up-Dates bush Campaign's Connection To "Swift Boat Liars"

The good folks over at The Daily Mis-Lead post an up-date--with linked sources--on the bush re-election campaign's direct connection with those "Not-so-Swift Liars" attacking John Kerry's military record. If you think I am perhaps obsessing on this matter, I shan't deny it. I will offer in defense the fact that according to recent polls the smear campaign of bush & twigs is working; American swing voters (registered independents and undecideds) are buying into the smear. In my meager way, I must do everything I can to try and counter that--America and the world is in danger if bush gets four more years. Please bear with me; and spread the truth wherever you can:
BUSH MISLEADS ON CONNECTION TO SMEAR CAMPAIGN

President Bush has adamantly denied any connection to discredited and unsubstantial attack ads, run by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), a group that aims to smear John Kerry's record of honorable military service. On Friday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that the White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign "weren't involved in any way in these [SBVT] ads."[1] McClellan neglected to mention that Kenneth Cordier, who appears prominently in the SBVT ads, was a member of the Bush/Cheney veterans steering committee.[2]According to the campaign website, members of the veterans steering committee "serve as messengers for the President's re-election campaign."[3] After the Kerry campaign exposed Cordier's
involvement, a spokesman for Bush, Steve Schmidt, announced Cordier would "no longer participate" in the campaign.[4] According to Schmidt, the campaign had no idea that Cordier was involved in the SBVT ads - which have been a major issue in the campaign for weeks and replayed repeatedly on national television. Also skipped over by McClellan: The primary financial backer of the SBVT is Bob Perry - the top donor to Republicans in the state of Texas.[5] Perry has also been a friend of Karl Rove, Bush's top political advisor, for nearly 20 years.[6] Perry ponied up $46,000 for Bush's gubernatorial campaigns and contributed generously to Bush's presidential races.[7]

Sources:
1. "Press Gaggle by Scott McClellan," The White House, 08/20/04, style="font-family:arial;">http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2413863&l=51503.
2. "Bush Campaign Drops Swift Boat Ad Figure," The Washington Post, 8/22/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2413863&l=51504.
3. "U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons Announces Nevada Veterans for Bush Leadership Team," GeorgeWBush.com, 8/20/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2413863&l=51505.
4. "Bush Campaign Drops Swift Boat Ad Figure," Washington Post, 8/22/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2413863&l=51504.
5. "Ad Wars: Behind an Attack on Kerry," InternationalHerald Tribune, 8/20/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2413863&l=51506.
6. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2413863&l=51506.
7. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=2413863&l=51506.

Visit http://www.misleader.org/ for more about Bush Administration distortion.


 

11:01 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  



Monday, August 23, 2004

"Who are ya gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes!?"

Another shoe drops; and with it another nail is driven into shrub & company's mendacity burial box--made of knotty Texas yellow pine. Below is an article in the Washington Post reporting more of the details about the "Swift Boat Liar" TV villain found working inside the bush campaign. The campaign that has sworn six ways from Sunday that it had nothing to do with the infamous ads. Who will be next? How high up the re-election committee ladder will this go--Mr. Rove?
CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 21 -- The Bush campaign said late Saturday that it dismissed an adviser on veterans issues after learning that he is part of an independent group that has been running anti-Kerry ads.

The Bush campaign said Kenneth Cordier, who appears in a new advertisement to be aired by the anti-Kerry group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, will no longer serve in his voluntary position on Bush's veterans steering committee. A Bush spokesman said Cordier had not previously informed the campaign that he had been involved with the group, but the Kerry campaign said the matter provides evidence supporting its complaint to the Federal Election Commission alleging illegal cooperation between the campaign and the independent group.

"Col. Cordier did not inform the campaign of his involvement in the advertisement being run by a 527 organization," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt wrote in a statement, referring to the technical name for independent groups such as the Swift boat organization. Schmidt said Cordier "will no longer participate as a volunteer for Bush-Cheney '04."

Cordier's connection to the Bush campaign was made public yesterday by the Kerry campaign, which found that Cordier had been named on the Bush Web site earlier this month as a member of the veterans committee but that his name had subsequently been removed. A Bush aide said Cordier, who spent six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and was a Bush supporter in 2000, called the campaign to disclose his involvement on Friday and was told he could no longer serve as an adviser to the campaign. ...

Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton said the Cordier matter added more weight to its complaint filed last week with the FEC. "This is another brick in the wall of evidence that the Bush campaign is behind this smear," he said. "No wonder the president won't condemn the ads."

Under law, political campaigns cannot coordinate with the 527 organizations, which are funded with unregulated "soft" money and have proved to be an enormous loophole in the new campaign-finance legislation. Bush aides have said there has been no coordination with the Swift boat group. "We've already said we weren't involved in any way in these ads," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last week. "We've made that clear."
Yes, it's very clear, Mr. McClellan, very clear indeed.

For the rest of the article, go to:The Washington Post
  

2:33 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  




A Batboy Takes One For The Losing Team

A sacrificial nobody is offered up by the shrub camp--jiminy, he's not even a paid-staffer! That's really making a statement, Dubya. Of course, it does add another brick to a Shrub mendacity scale already into minus digits. This fool was actually in the TV ad, and he's working in the campaign office? Golly damn, Bush-Republicans must take stupid pills.
CRAWFORD, Texas -- The Bush campaign said late Saturday that it dismissed an adviser on veterans issues after learning he is part of an independent group running anti-Kerry ads.

The campaign said Kenneth Cordier, a retired Air Force colonel who appears in a new ad to be aired by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, will no longer serve as a volunteer on Bush's veterans steering committee. The campaign said Cordier had not made his involvement known until Friday.
Chicago Tribune
  

2:49 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments  



Sunday, August 22, 2004

A House of Lies Built On Shifting Sand...

...and it all comes tumbling down. I only know William Rood, an editor at the Chicago Tribune, by reputation. During my time with the Chicago Cubs, owned by the Tribune Company, we did not chance to meet. However, to my knowledge, his veracity as a journalist and citizen has never been at issue. Consequently, Mr. Rood breaking his "long silence on Kerry['s] record" is of substantial weight and deals a heavy blow to the "Swift Boat Liars'" credibility, many of whom had unblemished records of truth-telling before their anger was stirred by a discredited former admiral with a very large axe to grind against Mr. Douglas Brinkley--a history professor at the University of New Orleans, where I did my graduate studies--and Senator Kerry over a biography the former wrote of the Democratic nominee for president.

It is always sweet when something you strongly and publicly assert about a disputed issue is found to be true. So please forgive the smile on my face as I type this post. The Chicago Tribune Online requires registration (albeit free), so as not to burden you, I am going to first reproduce in full the story about Rood serving with Mr. Kerry in Vietnam, written not by himself, but by another writer for the Tribune, Tim Jones. Below that, also in full, you will find the story written by Mr. Rood, and published in the Sunday Chicago Tribune:
Swift boat skipper: Kerry critics wrong
Tribune editor breaks long silence on Kerry record; fought in disputed battle

By Tim Jones, Tribune national correspondent. Tribune staff reporter Rick Pearson contributed to this report from Crawford, Texas
Published August 22, 2004

The commander of a Navy swift boat who served alongside Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry during the Vietnam War stepped forward Saturday to dispute attacks challenging Kerry's integrity and war record.

William Rood, an editor on the Chicago Tribune's metropolitan desk, said he broke 35 years of silence about the Feb. 28, 1969, mission that resulted in Kerry's receiving a Silver Star because recent portrayals of Kerry's actions published in the best-selling book "Unfit for Command" are wrong and smear the reputations of veterans who served with Kerry.

Rood, who commanded one of three swift boats during that 1969 mission, said that Kerry came under rocket and automatic weapons fire from Viet Cong forces and that Kerry devised an aggressive attack strategy that was praised by their superiors.

He called allegations that Kerry's accomplishments were "overblown" untrue.

"The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there," Rood said in a 1,700-word first-person account published in Sunday's Tribune.

Rood's recollection of what happened on that day at the southern tip of South Vietnam was backed by key military documents, including his citation for a Bronze Star he earned in the battle and a glowing after-action report written by the Navy captain who commanded his and Kerry's task force and is now a critic of the Democratic candidate.

Rood's previously untold story and the documents shed new light on a key historical event that has taken center stage in an extraordinary political and media firestorm generated by a group calling itself the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Allegations in the book, co-authored by one of the leaders of the group, accuse Kerry of being a coward who fabricated wartime events and used comrades for his "insatiable appetite for medals." The allegations have fueled a nearly two-week-long TV ad campaign against the Democratic nominee. Talk radio and cable news channels have feasted on the story.

Animosity from some veterans toward Kerry goes back more than 30 years, when Kerry returned from Vietnam to take a leadership role in the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Anger reached a boiling point with Kerry's presidential nomination and his own highlighting of his service during the war, a centerpiece of his campaign strategy against President Bush, who spent the war stateside in the Air National Guard in Texas and Alabama.

A poll released Friday by the National Annenberg Election Survey reported that more than half the country has heard about or seen TV ads attacking Kerry's war record, a remarkable impact for ads that have appeared in only a handful of states.

Kerry strongly disputes the allegations, and on Saturday a spokesman for his campaign, David Wade, responded to Rood's account by saying, "The truth is being told, and it's the same and only truth documented by the Navy 35 years ago and remembered by those veterans without a Bush political ax to grind."

Wade added that "the real truth being told by veterans who've had the courage to stand up to the Bush Republican attack machine is all the honor John Kerry needs in his life."

Last week, Kerry called on the White House to denounce the TV ads and accused Bush of relying on the Vietnam veterans "to do his dirty work." On Thursday, Kerry challenged Bush to a debate on their respective war records. Democrats point to unresolved questions about whether Bush in fact served all the time he was credited with serving in Alabama.

The Bush campaign has denied any association with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth but so far has refused to condemn the book and the group's TV ads. It had no direct comment Saturday on Rood's version of events, instead criticizing the Kerry campaign for alleging that the Bush team was providing tacit support to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and for not repudiating all advertising by so-called 527 groups, political organizations barred by law from coordinating their efforts with campaigns.

"John Kerry knows that attack is false and baseless," said Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt. "John Kerry knows that the president has said [Kerry's] service was noble service. John Kerry knows that there is no connection between the Bush campaign and this 527 and . . . that President Bush has called on Sen. Kerry to join him in condemning all of the shadowy 527 groups that are advertising."

Schmidt said Kerry "has remained silent" while pro-Democratic 527 groups have run $62 million worth of attack ads targeting Bush.

Kerry's campaign sought to turn up the heat on Bush through an e-mail effort targeting veterans. The effort resurrects Arizona Sen. John McCain's complaints during the 2000 South Carolina Republican presidential primary about Bush's failure to disavow attacks on McCain's actions as a prisoner of war.

Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign manager, said Bush's refusal to disavow the advertising by the swift boat veterans group was "an unfortunate and classic move by a Bush-Rove campaign," citing the president's senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

A report in Friday's New York Times disclosed connections between the anti-Kerry vets and the Bush family, Rove and several high-ranking Texas Republicans. Some of the recent accounts from veterans critical of Kerry have been contradicted by their own earlier statements, the Times reported.

Rood's account also sharply contradicts the version currently put forth by the anti-Kerry veterans. Rood, 61, wrote that Kerry had personally contacted him and other crew members in recent days asking that they go public with their accounts of what happened on that day.

Rood said that, ever since the war, he had "wanted to put it all behind us--the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. . . . I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service--even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune."

"I can't pretend those calls [from Kerry] had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this," Rood said. "What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it."

Rood declined requests from a Tribune reporter to be interviewed for this article. Rood wrote that he could testify only to the February 1969 mission and not to any of the other battlefield decorations challenged by Kerry's critics--a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts--because Rood was not an eyewitness to those engagements.

Ambush scenario

In February 1969, Rood was a lieutenant junior grade commanding PCF-23, one of the three 50-foot aluminum swift boats that carried troops up the Dong Cung, a tributary of the Bay Hap River. Kerry commanded another boat, PCF-94, and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz, who was killed in action six weeks later, commanded PCF-43. Ambushes from Viet Cong fighters were common because the noise from boats, powered by twin diesel engines, practically invited gunfire. Ambushes, Rood said, "were a virtual certainty."

Before this day's mission, though, Kerry, the tactical commander of the mission, discussed with Rood and Droz a change in response to the anticipated ambushes: If possible, turn into the fire once it is identified and attack the ambushers, Rood recalled Kerry saying. The boats followed that new tactic with great success, Rood said, and the mission was highly praised.

In the book "Unfit for Command," Kerry's critics maintained otherwise. The book's authors, John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi, wrote that Kerry's attack on the Viet Cong ambush displayed "stupidity, not courage." The book was published by Regnery, a conservative publisher that has brought into print many books critical of Democratic politicians and policies.

"The only explanation for what Kerry did is the same justification that characterizes his entire short Vietnam adventure: the pursuit of medals and ribbons," wrote Corsi and O'Neill. Later in the war, O'Neill commanded the same swift boat Kerry had led. O'Neill is now a leader of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In the book, O'Neill and Corsi said Kerry chased down a "young Viet Cong in a loincloth . . . clutching a grenade launcher which may or may not have been loaded."

Rood recalled the fleeing Viet Cong was "a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore." There were other attackers as well, he said, and his boat and Kerry's boat took significant fire.

After the attack, the task force commanding officer, then-Capt. Roy Hoffmann, sent a message of congratulations to the three swift boats, saying their charge of the ambushers was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most efficacious [method] of dealing with small numbers of ambushers," Rood said.

In the official after-action message, obtained by the Tribune, Hoffmann wrote that the tactics developed and executed by Kerry, Rood and Droz were "immensely effictive [sic]" and that "this operation did unreparable [sic] damage to the enemy in this area."

"Well done," Hoffmann concluded in his message.

But more than three decades later, Hoffmann, now a retired rear admiral, has changed his story. Today he is one of Kerry's most vocal critics, saying the attacks against the ambushers 35 years ago call into question Kerry's judgment and show his tendency to be impulsive.

Rood challenges that criticism, recalling that the direction for the actions they took on the river that day came from the highest ranks of the Navy command in Vietnam.

"What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders," Rood said.

Asked for his response to Rood's account, O'Neill argued that the former swift boat skipper's version of events is not substantially different from what appeared in the book. The account of the Feb. 28 attack draws heavily on reporting from The Boston Globe, O'Neill said.

He said the congratulatory note from Hoffmann was based on the belief that Kerry was under heavy fire from the Viet Cong. But O'Neill claimed that "didn't happen." Had Hoffmann known the true circumstances of events that day, O'Neill said, he would not have issued the congratulatory note. Attempts to reach Hoffmann for comment were unsuccessful.

O'Neill said in a statement Saturday that, unlike Rood, most of the officers who served with Kerry do not support him.

"Bill Rood is one of 23 officers who served with John Kerry at An Thoi," O'Neill said. "Seventeen of those officers have condemned John Kerry."

He called Rood's criticism of "Unfit for Command" "extremely unfair" and said Rood declined to be interviewed for the book he and Corsi wrote.

"We strongly stand by the different judgments we reached as to the advisability of beaching the Kerry boat and chasing the wounded, fleeing Viet Cong teenager," O'Neill said in the statement. "We also stand by our judgment that while the action involved a degree of courage, it was not compatible with the description given to senior command nor worthy of the Silver Star. We are joined in that judgment by many Vietnam veterans who expressed similar views."

In his eyewitness account, Rood describes coming under rocket and automatic weapons fire from Viet Cong on the riverbank during two ambushes of his boat and Kerry's boat.

Praise for the mission led by Kerry came from Navy commanders who far outranked Hoffmann. Rood won a Bronze Star for his actions on that day. The Bronze Star citation from the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, singled out the tactic used by the boats and said the Viet Cong were "caught completely off guard."

Longtime debate

The war about the war between O'Neill and Kerry has raged for more than three decades. O'Neill, who became a lawyer in Houston after returning from Vietnam, was recruited by the Nixon administration in 1971 to serve as a political counterweight to Kerry, who by then had left the military and was a vocal critic of the war.

The two debated the war on the Dick Cavett television show in 1971, with O'Neill accusing Kerry of the "attempted murder of the reputations of 2 1/2 million" Vietnam veterans.

Rood acknowledged in his first-person account that there could be errors in recollection, especially with the passage of more than three decades. His Bronze Star citation, he said, misidentifies the river where the main action occurred.

That mistake, he said, is a "cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago--not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.

"But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong," Rood wrote. "While they mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in the public eye."

Copyright - 2004, Chicago Tribune
Below is the first-hand account that William B. Rood wrote for the Sunday Chicago Tribune:
FEB. 28, 1969: ON THE DONG CUNG RIVER

'This is what I saw that day'
By William B. Rood
Chicago Tribune
Published August 22, 2004

There were three swift boats on the river that day in Vietnam more than 35 years ago--three officers and 15 crew members. Only two of those officers remain to talk about what happened on February 28, 1969.

One is John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate who won a Silver Star for what happened on that date. I am the other.

For years, no one asked about those events. But now they are the focus of skirmishing in a presidential election with a group of swift boat veterans and others contending that Kerry didn't deserve the Silver Star for what he did on that day, or the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for other actions.

Many of us wanted to put it all behind us--the rivers, the ambushes, the killing. Ever since that time, I have refused all requests for interviews about Kerry's service--even those from reporters at the Chicago Tribune, where I work.

But Kerry's critics, armed with stories I know to be untrue, have charged that the accounts of what happened were overblown. The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there.

Even though Kerry's own crew members have backed him, the attacks have continued, and in recent days Kerry has called me and others who were with him in those days, asking that we go public with our accounts.

I can't pretend those calls had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this. What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it.

I was part of the operation that led to Kerry's Silver Star. I have no firsthand knowledge of the events that resulted in his winning the Purple Hearts or the Bronze Star.

But on Feb. 28, 1969, I was officer in charge of PCF-23, one of three swift boats--including Kerry's PCF-94 and Lt. j.g. Donald Droz's PCF-43--that carried Vietnamese regional and Popular Force troops and a Navy demolition team up the Dong Cung, a narrow tributary of the Bay Hap River, to conduct a sweep in the area.

The approach of the noisy 50-foot aluminum boats, each driven by two huge 12-cylinder diesels and loaded down with six crew members, troops and gear, was no secret.

Ambushes were a virtual certainty, and that day was no exception.

Instructions from Kerry

The difference was that Kerry, who had tactical command of that particular operation, had talked to Droz and me beforehand about not responding the way the boats usually did to an ambush.

We agreed that if we were not crippled by the initial volley and had a clear fix on the location of the ambush, we would turn directly into it, focusing the boats' twin .50-caliber machine guns on the attackers and beaching the boats. We told our crews about the plan.

The Viet Cong in the area had come to expect that the heavily loaded boats would lumber on past an ambush, firing at the entrenched attackers, beaching upstream and putting troops ashore to sweep back down on the ambush site. Often, they were long gone by the time the troops got there.

The first time we took fire--the usual rockets and automatic weapons--Kerry ordered a "turn 90" and the three boats roared in on the ambush. It worked. We routed the ambush, killing three of the attackers. The troops, led by an Army adviser, jumped off the boats and began a sweep, which killed another half dozen VC, wounded or captured others and found weapons, blast masks and other supplies used to stage ambushes.

Meanwhile, Kerry ordered our boat to head upstream with his, leaving Droz's boat at the first site.

It happened again, another ambush. And again, Kerry ordered the turn maneuver, and again it worked. As we headed for the riverbank, I remember seeing a loaded B-40 launcher pointed at the boats. It wasn't fired as two men jumped up from their spider holes.

We called Droz's boat up to assist us, and Kerry, followed by one member of his crew, jumped ashore and chased a VC behind a hooch--a thatched hut--maybe 15 yards inland from the ambush site. Some who were there that day recall the man being wounded as he ran. Neither I nor Jerry Leeds, our boat's leading petty officer with whom I've checked my recollection of all these events, recalls that, which is no surprise. Recollections of those who go through experiences like that frequently differ.

With our troops involved in the sweep of the first ambush site, Richard Lamberson, a member of my crew, and I also went ashore to search the area. I was checking out the inside of the hooch when I heard gunfire nearby.

Not long after that, Kerry returned, reporting that he had killed the man he chased behind the hooch. He also had picked up a loaded B-40 rocket launcher, which we took back to our base in An Thoi after the operation.

John O'Neill, author of a highly critical account of Kerry's Vietnam service, describes the man Kerry chased as a "teenager" in a "loincloth." I have no idea how old the gunner Kerry chased that day was, but both Leeds and I recall that he was a grown man, dressed in the kind of garb the VC usually wore.

The man Kerry chased was not the "lone" attacker at that site, as O'Neill suggests. There were others who fled. There was also firing from the tree line well behind the spider holes and at one point, from the opposite riverbank as well. It was not the work of just one attacker.

Our initial reports of the day's action caused an immediate response from our task force headquarters in Cam Ranh Bay.

Congratulatory message

Known over radio circuits by the call sign "Latch," then-Capt. and now retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, the task force commander, fired off a message congratulating the three swift boats, saying at one point that the tactic of charging the ambushes was a "shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy" and that it "may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers."

Hoffmann has become a leading critic of Kerry's and now says that what the boats did on that day demonstrated Kerry's inclination to be impulsive to a fault.

Our decision to use that tactic under the right circumstances was not impulsive but was the result of discussions well beforehand and a mutual agreement of all three boat officers.

It was also well within the aggressive tradition that was embraced by the late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam. Months before that day in February, a fellow boat officer, Michael Bernique, was summoned to Saigon to explain to top Navy commanders why he had made an unauthorized run up the Giang Thanh River, which runs along the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Bernique, who speaks French fluently, had been told by a source in Ha Tien at the mouth of the river that a VC tax collector was operating upstream.

Ignoring the prohibition against it, Bernique and his crew went upstream and routed the VC, pursuing and killing several.

Instead of facing disciplinary action as he had expected, Bernique was given the Silver Star, and Zumwalt ordered other swifts, which had largely patrolled coastal waters, into the rivers.

The decision sent a clear message, underscored repeatedly by Hoffmann's congratulatory messages, that aggressive patrolling was expected and that well-timed, if unconventional, tactics like Bernique's were encouraged.

What we did on Feb. 28, 1969, was well in line with the tone set by our top commanders.

Zumwalt made that clear when he flew down to our base at An Thoi off the southern tip of Vietnam to pin the Silver Star on Kerry and assorted Bronze Stars and commendation medals on the rest of us.

Error in citation

My Bronze Star citation, signed by Zumwalt, praised the charge tactic we used that day, saying the VC were "caught completely off guard."

There's at least one mistake in that citation. It incorrectly identifies the river where the main action occurred, a reminder that such documents were often done in haste and sometimes authored for their signers by staffers. It's a cautionary note for those trying to piece it all together. There's no final authority on something that happened so long ago--not the documents and not even the strained recollections of those of us who were there.

But I know that what some people are saying now is wrong. While they mean to hurt Kerry, what they're saying impugns others who are not in the public eye.

Men like Larry Lee, who was on our bow with an M-60 machine gun as we charged the riverbank, Kenneth Martin, who was in the .50-caliber gun tub atop our boat, and Benjamin Cueva, our engineman, who was at our aft gun mount suppressing the fire from the opposite bank.

Wayne Langhoffer and the other crewmen on Droz's boat went through even worse on April 12, 1969, when they saw Droz killed in a brutal ambush that left PCF-43 an abandoned pile of wreckage on the banks of the Duong Keo River. That was just a few months after the birth of his only child, Tracy.

The survivors of all these events are scattered across the country now.

Jerry Leeds lives in a tiny Kansas town where he built and sold a successful printing business. He owns a beautiful home with a lawn that sweeps to the edge of a small lake, which he also owns. Every year, flights of purple martins return to the stately birdhouses on the tall poles in his back yard.

Cueva, recently retired, has raised three daughters and is beloved by his neighbors for all the years he spent keeping their cars running. Lee is a senior computer programmer in Kentucky, and Lamberson finished a second military career in the Army.

With the debate over that long-ago day in February, they're all living that war another time.
I suggest that you click through to the Chicago Tribune and take the time to register--it's free--and see the sidebar material and graphics that accompany both of the articles above.

Chicago Tribune
 

10:02 PM / Editor / permalink    4 comments  




War Words: Who's Writing this Stuff?

Mother Jones has another must read: it's on the help that lazy journalists are lending to bush in his campaign to misinform the electorate about American foreign policy, Iraq particularly. While a number of my blessed colleagues in this profession I love are indeed beginning to wake up and take note of the rot they've been slopping up from the bushie's trough, far too many are still in a foggy stupor from it as they peck languorously at their keyboards. I will start you off with several graphs, fully expecting that you will want to click on through for a really fine essay on the state of war reportage in the 21st Century:
What do we call the enemy? George and Laura Bush were the guests on Larry King Live this Sunday. In the context of the latest fighting in Najaf, King said to the President: "We've had more today, there are more eruptions in Iraq. And it seems never-ending, does[n't] it? What does it do to you?"

The President replied:
"We've got a great leader in Prime Minister Allawi. He's a tough guy who believes in free societies. And more and more Iraqis are being trained. And more and more Iraqis are stepping up to do the hard work of bringing these terrorists, these former Baathist and some foreign fighters to justice. And that's why we are going to prevail."
So the President thinks that in Najaf we're up against Baathists, foreign fighters, and terrorists. In a similar vein, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the following of the fighting in Najaf at a recent press conference:
"In this case, the violence is being perpetrated by outlaws and by former regime elements and by terrorists who respect no truce, respect nothing except force. And as long as those individuals don't understand the spirit of peace and reconciliation, are not willing to work for democratic, free Iraq, they have to be dealt with. And so your question really should not be addressed to us. It should be addressed to those who are causing the violence, who are setting off the bombs, who are destroying the hopes of the Iraqi people."
Now statements like Powell's tend to be reported quite straightforwardly in our press even though the one thing you certainly couldn't say about the Mahdi Army in Najaf is that it's made up of former "regime elements" or "Baathists." These are, after all, the Shiites of southern Iraq whom Saddam brutally repressed in 1991 and whom we claimed our invasion was meant to liberate. It should be remembered, in fact, that the last army to reach the Imam Ali Shrine with intent to harm was Saddam's.

Should you want to imagine what the present situation looks like from the point of view of many Shiites and you're willing to search, you can probably find the odd comment buried somewhere in our torrent or Iraq reportage ("Saddam made mass graves in 1991," Abbos fumed. "Now the Americans are making mass graves in 2004, filled with Shiites again."), or you can go offshore or into cyberspace, where, for instance, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service offers the following in the Asia Times on-line, quoting (the ubiquitous) Juan Cole:
"'What's going on right now looks a lot like April 1991, when it was [Iraqi president] Saddam [Hussein] who was crushing a Shi'ite uprising. But now it's the Marines who are playing the role of the Republican Guard,' Cole told Inter Press Service, adding that US policy in Iraq was looking increasingly like 'Ba'ath-lite,' particularly under Allawi."
Or you can read the piece (mentioned above) by Scott Balduff, who has done some superb on-the-spot reporting from Najaf, and writes:
"If the Americans and Iraqi Army do end up assaulting the Shrine of Ali, they will not be the first. Hussein threw the full force of his military against the shrine in 1991 after Shiite rebels launched an abortive rebellion. Artillery barrages damaged the shrine complex and special-forces soldiers killed the rebels inside the complex itself. The brutality of this crackdown at such a holy site turned most Shiites against Hussein, even those who had defended him in the past."
Of course, the labeling of guerrillas, rebels, and insurgents, religious or otherwise, as "outlaws" and "terrorists" has a long history in European colonial wars as also, for instance, in Japanese depredations in China in the 1930s. Similarly the language in the statements coming out of our military in Iraq these days