Concord Monitor Poll, released today, shows Kerry over Bush 49% to 46% in New Hampshire.
--Josh Marshall
The voter suppression drive comes <$NoAd$>into clear view (emphasis added) ...
Citing a new list of more than 37,000 questionable addresses, the state Republican Party demanded Saturday that Milwaukee city officials require identification from all of those voters Tuesday.If the city doesn't, the party says it is prepared to have volunteers challenge each individual - including thousands who might be missing an apartment number on their registration - at the polls.
The move, which dramatically escalates the party's claims of bad addresses and potential fraud, was condemned by Democrats as a last-minute effort to suppress turnout in the city by creating long delays at the polls.
That's from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
--Josh Marshall
Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll, just released, shows Kerry 48%, Bush 45%.
--Josh Marshall
Quite apart from the political swirl and controversy over the new OBL tape, the analysis discussed in this article in the LA Times strikes me as on the mark and an intriguing explanation for some of the weirdly non-bin-Laden-like things said on the tape. It's worth a read.
--Josh Marshall
More from the <$NoAd$>field ...
Local and national GOP officials are distancing themselves from a Washington, D.C.-based college Republican group that has used aggressive and misleading tactics to raise millions of dollars from elderly people....
The Herald-Sun reported Thursday that the College Republican National Committee has received at least 87 percent of its North Carolina donations from people who list their occupation as retired. Most of those contacted by The Herald-Sun were in their 80s.
This campaign season, the CRNC has raised more than $6.3 million nationally, putting it in the top 15 political groups tracked by the IRS. The group raised $93,280 in North Carolina.
Because the CRNC solicits under different names, such as the National Republican Task Force and the National Republican Victory Campaign, many seniors have donated to the group repeatedly, often several times in a single day or week. Many had made more than 50 donations since January, sometimes totaling thousands of dollars.
When asked about their giving, many of them had little understanding of how much they had donated or where their money was going. The group's high-pressure mailings, which often play on senior citizens' emotions, suggest that the money would help re-elect President Bush and other Republicans. But according to the Center for Public Integrity, which monitors campaign spending, the CRNC has spent at least 83 percent of its proceeds since 2000 on direct mailings and other fund-raising expenses.
See the rest here.
Then there's this wonderful nugget from the Seattle Times ...
Some of the elderly donors, meanwhile, wound up bouncing checks and emptying their bank accounts."I don't have any more money," said Cecilia Barbier, a 90-year-old retired church council worker in New York City. "I'm stopping giving to everybody. That was all my savings that they got."
Barbier said she "wised up." But not before she made more than 300 donations totaling nearly $100,000 this year, the group's fund-raising records show.
The guy at the center of all this seems to be Scott Stewart, chairman of the CRNC from 1999 until last year.
He left to run the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign in Nevada.
--Josh Marshall
Peter Bergen on the new bin Laden tape and Tora Bora. Definitely give this a look.
--Josh Marshall
A simple point: This election is going to be won or lost on the ground, with organization and turnout. If you're part of the GOTV effort, on either side, this is in your hands.
--Josh Marshall
“The president said one time in caucus, ‘I don’t know how much you want to use this on the campaign trail, but our intelligence confirms they want me out.’ So however that bears on your view of the administration is secondary to the fact that if they think they can dislodge the president by hitting us before the election, they will."
[ed. note: Regrettably, The Republic is subscription only. And, no, I wasn't a subscriber before this evening. But, for the benefit of TPM readers everywhere, I plunked down the $8.95 weekly subscription rate and charged it to the TPM Educational, Research and Time-Wasting fund. A not of thanks to TPM reader SC.]
--Josh Marshall
A short note on the race, the polls, and what the Bush camp is calling bin Laden's "little gift."
The next few days phone polling probably amounts to one of the biggest industries in the United States.
So it's interesting to look at the results of last night's post-gift polling.
First, the four tracking polls released today and thus including roughly one-third of calls after the release of the OBL tape ...
In Zogby's, Kerry moved up one point.
In Rasmussen's, Kerry moved up one point.
In WaPo/ABC, Kerry moved up two points.
In Tipp, Bush moved up two points.
Two other national polls were released (at least that I've seen), Newsweek and Fox.
One third of the Newsweek poll was done last night. And in their poll Bush was up over Kerry by 50% to 44%. That's four points better than the Newsweek poll the previous week that had Bush over Kerry 48% to 46%.
Look, though, at the Fox poll.
Fox did one poll Wednesday and Thursday night. And then they did another poll with calls Thursday and Friday night. So the common denominator is that both polls had calls Thursday night. And half the calls in the second poll were done post-gift.
The first Fox poll had Bush up 5% (50% to 45%) and the second had him up 2% (47% to 45%).
Now, does this mean the bin Laden tape is giving a boost to Kerry? Of course, not. These are tiny changes. And it's altogether possible that this small shift is simply the result of statistical 'noise' -- numbers wobbling around within the polls' margins of error.
But it should put at least some damper on the notion that the release of the OBL tape would lead to some sudden Bush surge.
At least if the pundits are listening.
--Josh Marshall
One of the oddities of the al Qaqaa <$NoAd$>is story is why it should seem even remotely surprising to anyone who's actually been paying attention to what's been happening in Iraq over the last eighteen months. After all, almost all of Iraq's nuclear facilities -- containing both equipment of use to nuclear programs, partially enriched uranium, and other goodies for baddies -- were similarly looted at around the same time.
As Brett Wagner, a professor at the Naval War College, put it a year ago in USA Today ...
In the weeks before the invasion, the U.S. military repeatedly warned the White House that its war plans did not include sufficient ground forces, air and naval operations and logistical support to guarantee a successful mission. Those warnings were discounted — even mocked — by administration officials who professed to know more about war fighting than the war fighters themselves.But the war fighters were right. Military commanders weren't given enough manpower and logistical support to secure all of the known nuclear sites, let alone all of the suspected ones.
It wasn't until seven of Iraq's main nuclear facilities were extensively looted that the true magnitude of the administration's strategic blunder came into focus.
Why is Qaqaa surprising?
--Josh Marshall
Bush team calls bin Laden's tape a "little gift."
Does the president really see bin Laden's message as a "gift"?
I mean, okay, okay, of course he does. But to actually say it?
Not to flog a dead horse, but what would be the response if a Kerry campaign advisor made a similar or analogous comment?
Can someone ask the president about this?
--Josh Marshall
His own private mystery<$NoAd$> land ...
If you actually try to pin down the timeline of who destroyed what, when it was moved, what was moved, we are still in a mystery land about all that.David Brooks
Former Senior Editor
Weekly Standard
October 29th, 2004
Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.David Kay
Former Chief Inspector
Iraq Survey Group
October 28th, 2004
The truth is out there ...
--Josh Marshall
Which of these two statements sounds like it comes <$NoAd$>from the stronger leader?
John Kerry: In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period.George W. Bush: Earlier today I was informed of the tape that is now being analyzed by America's intelligence community. Let me make this very clear: Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. I'm sure Senator Kerry agrees with this. I also want to say to the American people that we're at war with these terrorists and I am confident that we will prevail.
You decide ...
--Josh Marshall
A journalist observed Iraqi Islamists looting weapons and explosives from al Qaqaa as late as November 2003.
"I was utterly stupefied to see that a place like that was pretty much unguarded and that insurgents could help themselves for months on end. We were there for a long time and no one disturbed the group while they were loading their truck," she says.
--Josh Marshall
I was off-line for about three hours this evening. And when I got back to my computer there were a couple hundred emails commenting from various perspectives and viewpoints about the OBL tape that ran this afternoon.
The opinions ranged the gamut, from panic to indifference, many with steadfastness and underlying optimism.
Overall, though, the letters again struck me with what is one of the Democrats' greatest weaknesses: their vulnerability to getting knocked off stride by the rush of events, their tendency to fret that all is lost, almost to indulge in it, when the car hits a simple bump in the road.
Whether this OBL tape represents no-bump, a bump, or something more damaging than a bump, I don't know. But reactions can dictate and shape outcomes, especially in such a context as this where perception is the essence of the matter.
Another way I've noticed this over the years is that Republicans are usually far more confident that their candidates are going to win given races, whether polls give reason for the confidence or not, whether the eventual outcome bears out the confidence or not.
Democrats could use more of that.
Let's look at what is happening right now.
The Bush campaign is trying to use the OBL tape to slap the Kerry campaign around, knock them off their stride, and argue that for Kerry now even to mention anything about the president's failure to bag bin Laden is the height of shamefulness.
The president's communications director even told reporters that the only acceptable thing would be for John Kerry to observe a twelve or more hour moratorium on attacks on the president, even though the president should be allowed to continue attacking John Kerry.
That is what they're playing for. (That's also the reason the Bush campaign didn't allow the Kerry campaign to be briefed on the soon-to-be-released tape until late in the day. The president knew about it early in the morning.)
If the Kerry campaign falls for this it would be the height of foolishness. In itself the bin Laden video is not a matter of controversy. What the president's campaign is trying to do is either goad the Kerry campaign into three days of passivity in the run-up to the election or fuss up a debate about the supposed outrageousness of Kerry's faulting the president for allowing bin Laden to remain at large. The Kerry folks should not play into that trap. The answer is to keep to the game-plan and remain on the offensive.
The foreign policy focus of the Kerry campaign has long been the president's failure to maintain the focus on al Qaida, as evidenced by his failure to capture bin Laden and dismantle his network. To abandon that message now would be insanity.
If you're a Democrat and you notice your fellow Democrats dipping into these spasms of fecklessness and weak-kneedism, as I've described above, I strongly encourage you to slap them around a few times and tell them to get a hold of themselves. If you're experiencing such spasms, by all means, slap yourself a few times and tell yourself the same thing.
More than 95% of the electorate has already made up its mind. This is all about how those last few percentage points of the electorate break. And that will be determined by which campaign holds the initiative, stays on the offensive for the next three days and who can mobilize their forces to win this on the ground.
Kerry, the candidate, must be forward-looking in these final days. But his surrogates should be hammering the president for his failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora and pressing the factual case that his campaign has tried so hard to deny. On hitting the indisputable failures of the president there should be no let up.
At every turn, toughness and fight have been the subtext of this election. Who has it and who doesn't. The Bush message is that all of the president's mistakes pale in comparison to the fact of his toughness and steely resolve. The conceit of the Kerry campaign and the Democrats is that they're every bit as tough as the president and his party, and more.
Now's the time for them to show it.
--Josh Marshall
An update on the Bush rules of engagement. <$NoAd$>From AFP ...
Speaking to reporters outside the campaign rally here, White House communications director Dan Bartlett said that the tape should not affect the way Bush campaigns but that Kerry should have marked a 12-hour truce."You would think that there would be a, maybe, 12 hours to let the American absorb what has just happened today," he said.
Prodded on why, if the tape ought not to affect the campaign, Kerry should have stopped criticizing the president, Bartlett revised his statement, saying that the problem was that Kerry's attack had been "discredited."
There's nothing, it seems, they won't game.
--Josh Marshall
A few more thoughts on what this all might mean.
To a significant degree we're in zero sum game mode at this late stage of the campaign. The dynamic this week has been in Kerry's favor consistently. So anything that upsets that dynamic helps Bush.
I know the consensus among pundits is that this is a godsend for Bush and that it will rekindle and put people in the mind of the period of national unity after 9/11. I'm certainly not sure but I strongly suspect that's not true.
Were bin Laden to turn the election for Bush, it would be fitting since he and Bush have fed off each others' power for more than three years.
But I don't think the public's mind right now will react to bin Laden's reemergence in way people did in 2001, 2002 or even through much of 2003. Or in the way many in the press expect.
A lot has changed.
We'll know soon enough.
--Josh Marshall
I just spoke to al Qaida expert Peter Bergen.
He mentioned the following things about the OBL tape. Bergen noted that this is the first time we've seen an unambiguously datable tape from bin Laden since December 2001. Whatever injuries he may have sustained on the escape from Afghanistan (remember the lame arm) is clearly healed. And though he still looks older than his forty-seven years, he looks robust and hardly haggard.
As for the Tora Bora issue, Bergen suggests that there were probably more journalists on the ground at Tora Bora than American troops.
--Josh Marshall
Kerry on the new OBL video ...
In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period.
From the airport at West Palm.
--Josh Marshall
Danni, Danni, Danni ...
Danielle Pletka just accused Michael Moore on CNN of 'giving aide and comfort to the enemy' because he made Fahrenheit 9/11.
He probably forgot to take the Bush Pledge.
--Josh Marshall
Can you say 'cult of personality'?
Chris Suellentrop has a <$NoAd$>half bizarre/half chilling report from the campaign trail in Florida last night. It's about what seems to be a new feature of the Bush rallies: the pledge of allegiance to President Bush.
Here's Chris ...
"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they've replaced the written oath with a verbal one.
I believe in one father, one son and one other son, who's now governor of Florida, who will take over after this son retires from office in 2009.
--Josh Marshall
Too bad the Bush team blew it at Tora Bora.
It's been more than three years. Why is bin Laden still on the loose?
--Josh Marshall
So how does this new bin Laden tape play politically in the US?
I'm really not sure.
Republicans are already trying to play this, as Drudge says now on his site, as bin Laden "campaign[ing] against Bush."
A friend tells me that the Bush-propaganda-organ Fox News is calling it bin Laden's 'endorsement' of Kerry.
On the other hand, this cuts against the Bush administration's frequent suggestions that al Qaida has been routed or that bin Laden may in fact be dead.
Much depends of course on how the press plays it. I notice for instance that as of 4:37 PM on MSNBC the front page headline momentarily had bin Laden saying "Bush cannot protect America" before correcting it to read "neither Bush nor Kerry can protect America."
[ed. note: That observation is from a rushed clicking back and forth over their site. So let me make that subject to possible later correction. But that's how it appeared.]
Clearly, Kerry has to hit the ground with a tough and emphatic statement in response to this and gear up his team's operation to go head-to-head with what will no doubt be a desperate Bush campaign's effort to use this to connect Kerry and bin Laden to shift the pro-Kerry momentum of the race in the final days of the campaign.
It seems to me that Kerry should tell voters what he's been telling them for months. That he'll take the fight to bin Laden, that he won't get distracted the way the president has, and that the one thing this tape shows is that the president hasn't gotten the job done.
If he had, there'd be no bin Laden to be making these tapes.
--Josh Marshall
With this morning's Di Rita press conference such a trainwreck, surely now must be time for a terror alert, right?
Release the hounds!
--Josh Marshall
As I've noted a few times over<$Ad$> the course of the last week, there is a real fissure running between the uniformed military and the politicals in Di Rita's office over al Qaqaa.
And as was so often the case during the run-up to the war and since then, it's fallen to two reporters at Knight-Ridder -- Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay -- to bring us this part of the story.
While Di Rita and Co. were working on today's spin operation, this story went out on the KR newswire under Landay's byline.
Note this passage in Landay's piece ...
In a new disclosure, the senior U.S. military officer and another U.S. official, who also spoke on condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that an Iraqi working for U.S. intelligence alerted U.S. troops stationed near the al Qaqaa weapons facility that the installation was being looted shortly after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.But, they said, the troops took no apparent action to halt the pillaging.
"That was one of numerous times when Iraqis warned us that ammo dumps and other places were being looted and we weren't able to respond because we didn't have anyone to send," said a senior U.S. military officer who served in Iraq.
As Landay's sourcing makes clear, this was coming out of the career military, not from the president's appointees.
Earlier this year, Strobel and Landay won the Raymond Clapper Memorial award for their prescient reporting on the Iraqi WMD question. And in an article on the award, Strobel -- Landay's colleague -- described the methods behind much of their award-winning reporting ...
Strobel says their conclusions came from a lot of extra digging and source-building they were forced to do without the red-carpet access to high-level officials that some of the nation's top media outlets enjoy."Knight Ridder is not, in some people's eyes, seen as playing in the same ball field as the New York Times and some major networks," Strobel says. "People at the Times were mainly talking to senior administration officials, who were mostly pushing the administration line. We were mostly talking to the lower-level people or dissidents, who didn't necessarily repeat the party line."
Those sources, Knight Ridder Washington Editor Clark Hoyt adds, were "closest to the information."
"I'm not saying we didn't have any top-level sources," Strobel says, "but we also made a conscious effort to talk to people more in the bowels of government who have a less political approach to things."
Their effort paid off in the fall of 2002, when a story critical of the administration's case for war generated a small, but encouraging, response. "We got two or three unsolicited calls from people in government saying, 'You're asking the right questions. Keep it up,'" Landay recalls.
...
"As the pressure built on the administration and their case got shakier and shakier, there was obviously a lot greater stress, and there was some shouting that was done at us over the telephone," Hoyt says. Some of those calls came from well-known names in high places, Bureau Chief John Walcott adds, declining to drop any names.
Around that time, the White House turned up the pressure, Strobel says, and "tried to freeze us out of briefings."
Landay adds: "I think this administration may have a fairly punitive policy when it comes to journalists who get in their face. And if you talk to some White House reporters, there is a fear of losing access." He says that fear may have played into the relatively uncritical approach of news organizations like the Times.
A little shoe-leather goes a long way.
--Josh Marshall
At a few minutes after noon, I'm watching Mr. Di Rita giving yet another round of spin about al Qaqaa. Uncharacteristically, he looked like he was on the verge of a panic attack through most of his introductory remarks. And with what followed, it's not hard to see why. The line Di Rita led off with (and I just jotted this down from hearing it once over the air, so perhaps I've got a word or two wrong) was this: "It has not been our desire to tell a particular story, only to tell the facts."
Please.
I believe this man protests too much.
The only thing accurate about this claim is that it's true that Di Rita has not been intent on telling a particular story. He's been willing to tell any story -- and has -- so long as it's a story that exonerates the White House. Even if it's a different story every day.
It's a touchy point. But it's time for someone to start making the point that the Pentagon Public Affairs office isn't supposed to be used as a formal arm of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. And for that matter if Di Rita's going to use it that way, he should at least be doing a better job of it.
Today Di Rita brought out an Army major who says his unit removed and destroyed roughly 250 tons of equipment, ammunition and explosives from somewhere in the al Qaqaa facility in early April 2003 -- that would be after the first US troops arrived but prior to the arrival of the news crew that apparently filmed much of the explosives on April 18th.
Was it the stuff in question? Di Rita kept trying to answer the questions on the major's behalf. But the major made clear that he had no idea. Did he see any IAEA seals? No, he said, he didn't.
The Fox reporter at the news conference tried to coax the major into saying more than he was saying. But to no avail. He would only say what he knew. And there was very little that he knew that pertained to the relevant question.
The other reporters on hand, apparently weary of being lied to all week, preferred to put their questions to the major directly, rather than to Di Rita. And he, the major, was straightforward enough to say that all he knew was that he had taken stuff from somewhere at al Qaqaa and destroyed it.
What does that mean? Almost nothing.
This was an unfortunate stunt, put on by Di Rita and the politicals at DOD Public Affairs. And given how it turned out, I suspect it's one they quickly regretted.
--Josh Marshall
Aaron Brown valiantly tries to carry the CNN ball into the credibility endzone, only to get dragged back by unnamed goofball colleagues who put together this piece on the CNN website.
As many of you now know, Brown had former chief weapons inspector David Kay on his show this evening and gave a rather conclusive presentation about the significance of the videotapes shot by embeds with the 101st Airborne, which clearly show large quantities of the explosives in question at al Qaqaa as late as April 18th, 2003.
They even have footage of the IAEA seal being clipped off the warehouses as they're going in.
Listen to what Kay said when Brown asked him whether the debate over when the explosives were taken is now over ...
Well, at least with regard to this one bunker, and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through, and there were others there that were sealed. With this one, I think it is game, set, and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken. And quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only was the seal broken, lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean, to rephrase the so-called pottery barn rule. If you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.
Now, note one other thing. Kay is quite cautious in noting that it's only a slam dunk for the one bunker that appears in the video he's being shown.
But look at what one of the reporters who was there when the video was shot said earlier Thursday evening on Paula Zahn's show ...
Well, I should be clear. I don't think -- I'm not saying for a minute that I know that the munitions and the explosives that we stumbled upon were in fact the munitions or the explosives in question.All I can say with certainty is that, on that day, there were bunker after bunker after bunker of explosives, tons of them, that were unguarded. We went in and looked at some of them. I don't have the sort of expertise to tell you whether or not those were exactly what they're talking about when they say that these -- how many odd tons of explosives went missing.
So, apparently, there was bunker after bunker with the same stuff Kay was sure about in the one bunker he saw video of.
And now look how CNN plays the story on their website in the early hours of Friday morning (emphasis added) ...
Two more bits of possible evidence surfaced Thursday in the mystery of the missing Iraqi explosives, but they appear to bolster two different scenarios as to what may have happened to the cache.The Pentagon released a photo showing activity before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 outside a bunker at the weapons dump where nearly 380 tons of explosives reportedly disappeared.
While the photo might lend support to but does not prove the Pentagon's theory that the high-grade explosives were moved before the war, a videotape surfaced offering another scenario.
The video, shot by a crew from KSTP-TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division, showed barrels of explosives in unguarded bunkers in the Al Qaqaa complex on April 18, 2003, nine days after the fall of Baghdad.
It was unclear, however, if the explosives in the video were of the same types as in the missing cache.
The Pentagon evidence in question is a piece of aerial photography showing two trucks near an al Qaqaa bunker in mid-March 2003. That's it. As part of some larger argument or larger body of evidence this might be suggestive evidence. But alone it means next to nothing. On top of that, the highly-respected globalsecurity.org website says they're not even the right bunkers.
And yet to CNN, it's just a he said/she said, two "bits of possible evidence" as they put it, pointing to "different scenarios." And for them the aerial photos are actually the more probative evidence, as evidenced by the structure of the sentence in the third graf above.
And then there's that last line: "It was unclear, however, if the explosives in the video were of the same types as in the missing cache."
Really?
Who wrote that line and where do they get their information? Apparently not from CNN or ABC.
Listen to what Kay said when asked about this by Brown ...
AB: Was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?DK: Absolutely nothing. It was the HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.
And then a moment later ...
HMX is in powder form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons. And particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it, that's either HMX or RDX. I don't know of anything else in al Qaqaa that was in that form.
Whatever else you can say about him, David Kay knows a thing or two about this subject. And he seems positive.
And look what fellow inspector David Albright told ABC ...
Experts who have studied the images say the barrels on the tape contain the high explosive HMX, and the U.N. markings on the barrels are clear."I talked to a former inspector who's a colleague of mine, and he confirmed that, indeed, these pictures look just like what he remembers seeing inside those bunkers," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
The Times even has this from a piece that went up late Thursday evening: "Weapons experts familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq say the videotape appears identical to photographs that the inspectors took of the explosives, which were put under seal before the war."
Apparently, at least three weapons inspectors -- probably more, including the Times -- are certain that's the material in question. But to the folks at CNN it's still an open question.
They seem to want to play by the White House rules, under which each separate ton of explosive material must be identified in videotapes from embeds and then certified as authentic by every conceivable expert under the sun before the president will have to admit that maybe something went wrong.
And of course no one can bring the issue up in a political context until the presidential commission Jeb Bush appoints in 2010 comes back with its final report two years later.
Late Update: As of this morning (10:03 AM), the CNN webscribes did a fairly aggressive edit on this piece. I've got to start saving copies of these articles before the inevitable switcheroo.
--Josh Marshall
Hmmm. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) is slipping quickly enough in the polls that it's apparently time to start calling his opponent gay.
--Josh Marshall
Is that a bulge in your jacket? Or do ya just wanna debate me?
I must say I've never been able to get my head around the idea that the president actually had some wiring device on at the debate. But Salon has a new article with an interview with a NASA imagery analyst who says he was.
They report; you decide.
--Josh Marshall
Game. Set. Match.
They got caught with a screw-up, <$NoAd$>their response was to lie, smear, obfuscate and bamboozle. And now the unimpeachable evidence is out.
It captures the administration's whole record on Iraq, only fast-forwarded and telescoped into four days as opposed to four years.
Here's former weapons inspector David Kay on Aaron Brown this evening delivering the news ...
Aaron Brown: We saw at the top of the program there is new information to factor in. Pretty conclusive to our eye. So we'll sort through this now. Take the politics out of it and try and deal with facts with former head UN weapons inspector, US weapons inspector, David Kay. David, it’s nice to see you.David Kay: Good to be with you, Aaron.
AB: I don't know how better to do this than to show you some pictures have you explain to me what they are or are not. Okay? First what I’ll just call the seal. And tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump?
DK: Aaron, about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it which, obviously, I would have preferred to have been there, that is an IAEA seal. I've never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.
AB: Was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?
DK: Absolutely nothing. It was the HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.
AB: OK now, I’ll take a look at barrels here for a second. You can tell me what they tell you. They, obviously, to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You'll see it somewhat differently.
DK: Well, it's interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this, and inside the barrels a bag. HMX is in powder form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons. And particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it, that's either HMX or RDX. I don't know of anything else in al Qaqaa that was in that form.
AB: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?
DK: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker, and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through, and there were others there that were sealed. With this one, I think it is game, set, and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken. And quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only was the seal broken, lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean, to rephrase the so-called pottery barn rule. If you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.
AB: I'm -- that raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn't know what they had?
DK: I think you're quite likely they didn't know they had HMX, which speaks to lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area, but they certainly knew they had explosives. And to put this in context, I think it's important, this loss of 360 tons, but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.
AB: Could you -- I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics. I'm not sure you can.
DK: So am I.
AB: I know. It's a little tricky here. But, is there any -- is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this, and a need to secure them?
DK: Absolutely not. For example, al Qaqaa was a site of Gerald Bull's super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well-documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented. Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the US has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.
AB: David, as quickly as you can, because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?
DK: Oh absolutely not.
AB: Thank you.
DK: And, in fact, the loss of it is not a proliferation issue.
AB: Okay. It's just dangerous and its out there and by your thinking it should have been secured.
DK: Well look, it was used to bring the Pan Am flight down. It's a very dangerous explosive, particularly in the hands of terrorists.
AB: David, thank you for walking me through this. I appreciate it, David Kay the former head US weapons inspector in Iraq.
Game. Set. Match
--Josh Marshall
Ed Kilgore (aka NewDonkey) has key new information and analysis on the GOP voter suppression effort. Set everything else aside, Ed. Keep us up-to-date on this for the next five days.
--Josh Marshall
Media Matters fact-checks the Fox 'all-stars' segment that we discussed here last night. Sisyphean job well done.
--Josh Marshall
Still more problems with Larry Di Rita's endless spinning on al Qaqaa? Globalsecurity.org seems to think so. The satellite imagery Di Rita's handing out to the press doesn't seem to match up with where the explosives were.
Of course, videotape of the explosives still on-site about three weeks later seems pretty revealing too.
Like I said last night, Di Rita's like Rather and Mapes rolled into one, crashing through all the records, looking for anything, anything, to salvage his story.
--Josh Marshall
Let's see how quickly, or if at all, CNN, <$NoAd$>MSNBC and (who knows?) even Fox pick up ABC's report which shows about as conclusively as you're ever going to be shown that the al Qaqaa explosives were there after the war. I'll be much obliged if brave souls watching these operations can send me word about what they're seeing.
And remember this passage from the piece on looters at al Qaqaa from this morning's Times?
The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.
Though the Times was there going out of its way to give the benefit of the doubt to the White House, does that caveat survive the tapes unearthed today by ABC?
--Josh Marshall
Video editors get slotted for CIA fall-guy role in latest Bush cooked up evidence flap ...
Reed Dickens, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, acknowledged the image had been adjusted but said it was done during the editing process and had not been ordered by the campaign."It was completely unintentional," he said. "The ad has already been replaced."
Priceless.
--Josh Marshall
The latest video tape of al Qaqaa <$NoAd$>unnearthed by a local ABC affiliate and now picked up nationally seems like pretty much game, set, match.
Those corrugated barrels that look like what the IAEA described as the containers for the explosives? Turns out that's exactly what they are. So say at least two former weapons inspectors.
And what about the IAEA seals that were supposed to be there? Turns out those are in the video too.
The only question now, it seems, is why the president and his advisors spent four days spinning out increasingly far-fetched excuses and tall-tales about this, hoping to brazen it out through November 2nd without fessing up.
Even CNN should be convinced. Maybe Wolf can ask the question above?
--Josh Marshall
AP: "The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co., seeking an interview with a top Army contracting officer and collecting documents from several government offices. The line of inquiry expands an earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice President Dick Cheney's former company."
Now the FBI's part of the international anti-Bush conspiracy.
--Josh Marshall
In President Bush’s 2000 convention acceptance speech, he hit the issue of troop readiness hard.
“Our military is low on parts, pay and morale,” he said. “If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report ... Not ready for duty, sir. This administration had its moment. They had their chance. They have not led. We will.”
Back on December 6th of last year, you’ll remember, the Washington Post reported that in 2004, four of ten Army divisions would not be combat ready for up to six months. Specifically, they would be rated at C-3 or C-4, the Army’s two lowest readiness levels.
Since then, Army internal reporting and a classified Government Accounting Office study of the combat readiness of all US ground forces have further underscored the problem. The Secretary of the Army and others were briefed on the GAO study, which is still under review, earlier this month. Senior uniformed Army officials are, of course, also receiving regular briefings on the situation.
The picture this reporting paints for Guard readiness is, I’m told, considerably more bleak than the December news about readiness in the Army.
Readiness in stateside Guard brigades is so poor because those brigades are essentially being cannibalized – for both men and materiel – to keep afloat brigades that are currently stationed in Iraq.
--Josh Marshall
If you look through the right-wing media universe this morning you will hear that perhaps the explosives were never at al Qaqaa at all. Or if they were there perhaps Saddam's men carted them off in March. Or if Saddam's men didn't cart them off for the insurgency then the Russians carted them off to Syria. Or if, God forbid, it really did happen as the critics say, well, President Bush wasn't there. It was the fault of the troops on the ground.
If you can't quite get your head around the audacity of that last one, that's what the president's surrogate Rudy Guiliani said this morning on one of the morning shows.
"The actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there," said Mr. Guiliani, "Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"
But, please, let's see through the snowstorm of mumbojumbo the president's handlers and liegemen are trying to toss in our eyes and focus on the essence of the matter.
The president and his advisors insisted on a warplan that had far too few troops to secure even the key facilities in Iraq that were the reason for the invasion in the first place. Remember, many of the nuclear facilities were stripped bare too. This wasn't the fault of troops streaming through on their way to Baghdad, doing a quick check for chemical and biological weapons. The error was in the planning of the war itself -- planning that came from Rumsfeld's civilians and the White House over and against the advice of the generals.
Now, in this particular case, could the White House get lucky and it turn out that the al Qaqaa munitions were actually carted off to Mars?
Sure. Even though no evidence adduced to date suggests anything but that they were looted because they were not secured.
But that would hardly change the essential issue. The administration didn't deploy adequate troops to secure these facilities and didn't even have a plan to do so. It wasn't even a concern until late Sunday evening when the issue blew up into a political firestorm and they began desperately trying to come up with some rationale, any rationale, to shift the blame off themselves.
Nor is that all.
Why was the mission so undermanned?
Part of the explanation comes from Secretary Rumsfeld's and his staff's view of military transformation, one that puts a heavy emphasis on high-tech weaponry and airpower over ground forces.
That's not the biggest reason, though.
The biggest reason is that President Bush and his chief advisors knew that it would be much harder to get the country into Iraq if the electorate knew the full scope of the investment -- in dollars, deployments and casualties -- upfront. In other words, undermanning the operation was always part of the essential dishonesty and recklessness with which the president led the nation to war.
--Josh Marshall
Mr. President, is that your final answer? Larry?
New details from a local TV film crew embedded with the 101st.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, now we seem to have the White House's third rendition of what happened at al Qaqaa. And we can find it in a nicely digestible form in this new piece from Fox News.
The headline reads: "Search Showed No Explosives at Iraqi Base Before War's End."
Down into the piece we find this: "U.S. forces searched several times last year the Iraqi military base from which 380 tons of explosives vanished — including one check a week before Saddam Hussein was driven out of power. But the military saw no signs of a huge quantity of munitions."
Now that the White House's defenders have given up on the April 10th NBC visit, they've fixed on April 3rd (stretching into the 4th) arrival of units from the 3rd ID, which we first noted late Monday evening.
Fox and Larry Di Rita (Don Rumsfeld's communications guy) are now arguing that since those units that were there on the 3rd and 4th of April didn't find a "huge quantity of munitions" that the stuff had already been taken away.
Now, once again, let's review a few points.
Remember, this is a huge facility. The fact that this particular stuff wasn't found during a brief inspection is hardly conclusive about the whereabouts of these explosives, especially since that's not what they were looking for.
More to the point though, look what they did find. This from a piece by Barton Gellman two days later ...
In the first of yesterday's discoveries, the 3rd Infantry Division entered the vast Qa Qaa chemical and explosives production plant and came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box. The engineers also found stocks of atropine and pralidoxime, also known as 2-PAM chloride, which can be used to treat exposure to nerve agents but is also used to treat poisoning by organic phosphorus pesticides. Alongside those materials were documents written in Arabic that, as interpreted at the scene, appeared to include discussions of chemical warfare.This morning, however, investigators said initial tests indicated the white powder was not a component of a chemical weapon. "On first analysis it does not appear to be a chemical that could be used in a chemical weapons attack," Col. John Peabody, commander of the division's engineering brigade, told a Reuters reporter with his unit.
And what was the white powder? Here's what the Associated Press was told the same day ...
A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant's stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.
RDX and HMX are white powders.
So after a quick search what they found mainly were thousands of vials of white powder that turned out to be an explosive, and quite probably RDX and/or HMX.
Now, does this prove that the explosives were all there on the 3rd of April and that they were then left for looters to pick over? Of course, not. Like the visit on the 10th, this was a quick inspection of a facility with hundreds of buildings. At worst it was inconclusive as far as the explosives are concerned. But there is also this contemporaneous evidence that strongly suggests that they did find some of the explosives on site.
Needless to say neither the Fox Report nor the Di Rita marching orders, which they were working from, mentioned this.
One can get mixed up in the murkiness that the White House spin-doctors are trying to create here. But that's the point. They're just trying to kick up a lot of dust.
I have to tell you, though I figure that it will ruffle feathers all around, that this desperate hopping from one explanation to another reminds me very much of those desperate days when Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were hunting around trying to find some backing -- after the fact -- for a story that turned out to have very little behind it.
The same thing is going on here. The folks at the White House were caught completely flat-footed by this whole story. It's not something that they or the civilian mis-planners of the war ever gave much thought to.
But now they realize that the way they can get out of this is to find some way to show that the stuff wasn't there when they arrived. So first they try with the NBC story. And when that falls apart they move on to this story. But it doesn't really hold up either.
Later Di Rita brought out the then-commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division (the first troops on the scene) who said that in the weeks after April 3rd when his troops came through the area on the way to Baghdad it would have been "very highly improbable" that anyone could have put together a convoy to haul the stuff away because the two roads through the area were choked with US military convoys bringing men and materiel into the country.
Perhaps small-scale looting, he said, but not a major operation.
On the face of it, that sounds persuasive.
But then former weapons inspector David Kay was on CNN just a short time later saying that he can't believe it could have happened in the short time window before or during the war either -- which is just what Di Rita is trying to suggest. And it has to be one of the other. Here's Kay ...
I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network.
So Kay not only says he doesn't think it happened in the only other possible time -- the last three weeks of March -- he also seems to think that it could have been done later without using those major roads.
Again, Di Rita and his associates in the Bush campaign certainly don't know what happened. Nor are they trying to find out what happened. What they're trying to do -- a la Rather and Mapes in those ugly days -- is try to come up with something, anything, that will provide an alternative, exonerating explanation of what happened. And as each new piece of evidence or explanation gets knocked down, they look around for something else.
As of late Wednesday evening, Drudge is reporting that the Russians carted it off just before the war. I kid you not.
Here we go again.
Late Update: Drudge's 'the Russians did it' story is up now at the Washington Times, all based it seems on the say-so of John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, whose theory about Russian involvement even Di Rita seems to be distancing himself from.
Shaw does at least provide the adminsitration's 9th or 10th theory of what happened. It had to have been taken out before the war because the US watched the place so closely no other explanation is possible. "That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Shaw told the Times. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."
You can't make this stuff up.
Or, I guess, actually you can.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the New York Times talks to some of the folks who looted the place during the early weeks of the occupation.
--Josh Marshall
I just sat down to watch a few minutes of the alternative fact universe that is the Fox News Channel. And it's really quite bracing to see the ridiculousness up close, even from folks who should know better like Mort Kondracke or even Mara Liasson. I've always been curious what sort of brainwashing they give these otherwise good people before they take up regular gigs at that place.
To hear them tell it, the most likely time the explosives disappeared was before the war started. No one knows otherwise, including the current Iraqi officials, who say they have no way of knowing when the stuff disappeared. For all those reasons, Kerry's in big trouble. And also the NYT-CBS-IAEA anti-Bush conspiracy, did we mention that?
The collapse of the only purported evidence that the explosives were snaked away under Saddam's rule doesn't seem to have gotten their attention. What's more, only a few hours ago former weapons inspector David Kay said he found it highly implausible that the materials could have been carted away in a big fleet of trucks during the brief window of time between the last IAEA inspection and the arrival of American troops less than four weeks later. That's in contrast to the Fox panel that says it's the most likely scenario, despite the absence of any evidence.
And the Iraqis? They say they don't know when the stuff disappeared either? That must be breaking news because the guy in charge there now said today that he has specific knowledge that the explosives were taken after fall of the old government. Perhaps he's part of the anti-Bush conspiracy too but at least we can do this hopeless dead-ender the courtesy of accurately reflecting his public statements.
To the White House, and thus to Fox, no one can talk about this because we still don't know precisely what happened to the stuff -- which is of course a bit of a side-effect to leaving the place abandoned for a year and a half and never mounting any sort of investigation into what happened. For them, the administration's incompetence and cluelessness amounts to their silver bullet.
--Josh Marshall
President Bush's comments today on the al Qaqaa matter are so telling, disjointed and over-the-top that it's really worth reprinting them in full (with the most rancid or ridiculous passages emphasized courtesy of the TPM editorial staff) ...
A President must be consistent. After repeatedly calling Iraq the wrong war and a diversion, Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq was a dangerous place full of dangerous weapons. (Laughter.) The Senator used to know that, even though he seems to have forgotten it over the course of this campaign. But, after all, that's why we went into Iraq. Iraq was a dangerous place, run by a dangerous tyrant who hated America and who had a lot of weapons. We've seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions, including explosives, at more than thousands of sites. And we're continuing to round up the weapons almost every day.I want to remind the American people, if Senator Kerry had his way, we would still be taking our global test.
AUDIENCE: Booo!
THE PRESIDENT: Saddam Hussein would still be in power.
AUDIENCE: Booo!
THE PRESIDENT: He would control all those weapons and explosives and could have shared them with our terrorist enemies.
AUDIENCE: Booo!
THE PRESIDENT: Now the Senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy advisor admits "we don't know the facts." End quote. Think about that. The Senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts. Unfortunately, that's part of the pattern of saying anything it takes to get elected. Like when he charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said, "The Senator's understanding of events does not square with reality," and intelligence reports place bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time.
See, our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including this one -- that explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived, even arrived at the site. The investigation is important and ongoing. And a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not the person you want as the Commander-in-Chief. (Applause.)
If you're wondering about the all the 'boo' and 'applause' lines, we're working from the White House transcript.
By the way, did you understand his <$NoAd$>answer?
--Josh Marshall
Now do you understand why the GOP is putting so much muscle into its nation-wide voter suppression campaign?
According to these polling results put out today by the Republican polling firm of Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, if Kerry gets strong minority voter turnout he'll beat President Bush fairly decisively.
--Josh Marshall
There's actually a good deal more in <$NoAd$>this AFP article we noted earlier about the missing explosives, and information that puts some concrete detail behind the Science Ministry official's claim that the explosives were not spirited before the demise of the old regime.
I'm reprinting selected portions of the piece. But by all means read the whole thing ...
"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."He said officials at Al-Qaqaa, including its general director, whom he refused to name, made contact with US troops before the fall in an effort to get them to provide security for the site.
The regime's fall triggered a wave of looting of government and private property, which US-led troops struggled to contain as they were busy securing their own positions.
...
Science Minister Omar Rashad sent a letter on October 10 to the International Atomic Energy Agency sounding the alarm about the explosives in Al-Qaqaa.
Sharaa said the letter was sent after repeated warnings and inquiries by the IAEA over the disappearance of so-called duel-use nuclear material, which could be used for either conventional or nuclear means.
"Normally we should be overseeing all sites but these responsibilities were stripped away from us under the coalition authority," he said.
The ministry was only handed oversight responsiblities of two site -- Al-Tuwaitha and Al-Wardiya -- after authority was transferred from the coalition to the interim government in June.
There is no need to simply take these assertions at face value. Certainly there may be a variety of motives in play. But these are very concrete and specific claims, ones that reporters might easily use to follow up on with administration and CPA officials. And the motive for members of the interim government to be making trouble for the president at just this moment is not immediately clear.
--Josh Marshall
Department of pleasant surprises<$NoAd$> ...
NBC reports out Drudge's 'terror tape' mumbojumbo and adds some helpful debunking details ...
U.S. officials told NBC News that the tape included now-standard militant Islamist rhetoric promising widespread destruction inside the United States. The man cannot be identified, the officials said, because his face is covered by a headdress.The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said ABC gave the CIA a complete copy of the tape Monday. They described analysts’ concern as “low” because it is not clear that the tape was recorded recently and because the man on the tape, who speaks in what appears to be an American accent, mentions no details.
“It’s unclear what this tape is — even whether the person on the tape is an American,” one of the officials said.
Surprise, surprise.
--Josh Marshall
Uh-oh ... The head of the Iraqi Science Ministry's site monitoring department says there's no way the explosives were snagged from al Qaqaa before the former regime fell.
"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa told the AFP. "The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and