Open Season on Non-White Males in London

Targeted Assassination in London

Kurt Nimmo
Saturday July 23rd 2005, 8:40 am

“We need to await the inquiry to learn the full facts. But if this man [executed in Stockwell] was unarmed and not carrying a bomb, it will raise worrying questions—not least that if we behave as badly as the terrorists don’t we risk losing the moral high ground in the war against them?” opines the Daily Mail. It appears he was not only not carrying a bomb or armed but he was chased by “undercover” cops, that is to say cops dressed in civvies. “It is not true to say that police officers must identify themselves or shout a warning when confronting a suspect believed to pose a grave and imminent threat,” notes the BBC, citing a manual published by the Association of Police Officers. “The manual says that that procedure ’should be considered’ but recognizes that the key aim of an operation is to ‘identify, locate, contain and neutralize’ the threat posed.”

In other words, execution is not only permitted, but in this case, for a South Asian man we are told was followed from a house connected to “suicide bombings,” it was the preferred method for “confronting a suspect believed to pose a grave and imminent threat,” even if the available evidence reveals he wasn’t a grave and imminent threat. “The appropriateness of the tactics deployed at Stockwell and the intelligence on which they were based will now be considered by the Independent Police Complaints Commission,” reports the BBC. “Its inquiry may well redefine the ground rules for the use of lethal force to protect Britain against the threat from suicide terrorism.” In short, targeted assassination will now likely become routine in Britain, as it is in Israel. It sends the preferred message to Muslims. “The tragedy is that when indiscriminate murder is planned by fanatics in our midst, the security authorities are increasingly likely to be forced into such life-or-death decisions,” concludes the Daily Mail. Of course, we have no idea who planned this “indiscriminate murder” and the Brit authorities have no conclusive evidence it was the work of suicide bombers.

Next up: targeted assassination of “militants” in “Londonistan” of the caliber of targeted assassinations in the West Bank and Gaza. Recall the “Right Honorable” David Blunkett, Labor Party politician, telling us he “didn’t give a damn” how many foreign suspects (or for that matter South Asian British citizens) are detained without due process in Britain (under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act) and insinuating that the “airy-fairy, libertarian” views of human rights advocates endanger Britain. “The terrorist attacks in London on 7 July and today provide an opportunity for us to reflect on our systems and practices to ensure they are sufficient to counter such unprecedented events,” declared Ken Jones, Chairman of the ACPO Terrorism and Allied Matters Committee, and Chief Constable of Sussex, after meeting with Tony Blair yesterday. It now appears, after the incident at Stockwell, the “practices… sufficient to counter such unprecedented events” will include targeted assassination of individuals who do not pose a threat to the people of Britain. However, in the expanding “war on terrorism,” in essence a war on Islam at the behest of a small camarilla of Straussian-Machiavellian neocons, all Muslims are a threat and will be eliminated accordingly.

Can't Take it Anymore?

Fake al-Qaeda Claims Responsibility
for Fake Bombings

Kurt Nimmo
kurtnimmo.com
Friday July 22nd 2005,

2:50 pm

Remember Howard Beale, in Sidney Lumet’s classic movie Network, screaming at the top of his lungs that he can’t take it anymore? Well, that’s how I feel about the corporate media these days, especially in the last few days, as the lies, distortions, and scary campfire stories about al-Qaeda gone wild spread unchecked like a nasty viral infection.

“An Al-Qaeda-linked group said today it carried out the latest attempted bomb attacks in London yesterday, warning it will not relent until all ‘infidel’ forces leave Iraq, according to an internet statement,” reports Forbes, a behemoth media corporation you’d think would know better.
In short, they will pull off ineffectual “suicide bombings” (spreading unidentified white powder and giving people asthma attacks) until the infidels are petrified—or stampeded into allowing the state to completely trash the Bill of Rights and set up an authoritarian dictatorship.

But let’s get serious here.

It appears the “terrorists” who “failed to detonate bombs” yesterday did so because they didn’t want to wreck more expensive mass transit machinery. In other words, the real “terrorists” (not the Stepford Muslim pasties) work for the state and there is no sense destroying more stuff unless absolutely necessary, especially considering how this would negatively impact the stockholders of Metronet (a consortium of corporations).
Government knows what side of its bread gets the butter. So it is off to al-Qaeda fairyland again with fallacious “internet statements” and the like. You’d think people would simply refuse to put up with this nonsense anymore. You’d think they’d throw open the windows and scream, like Howard Beale, they’re not going to take it anymore. Instead, there is a deafening silence, or at best an outraged murmur growing in the background.

As We Prepare for War

As Canada Prepares for Battle

As Canada again prepares to do battle as a proxy force for its Imperial masters,
perhaps it's wise we know exactly what we're in for.

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As Canada Prepares for Battle
C. L. Cook

July 21, 2005

In recent months, the Canadian government has rejigged foreign policy; foreign policies that have stood since the end of the Second War, more than sixty years ago. "Integration" is the catchword here, and whether through NATO, or directly with the U.S. as in the Northern Command and Missile Defense, it means suborning both our soldiers and diplomats to the dictats of the United States and their "national interest."

This new direction for Canada is most perfectly illustrated by both the redefining of Canada's mission in Afghanistan, seeing thousands of reinforcements beginning to be shipped out this week (JUL 21) and the redeployment of the current force in-country from the relative stablity of the Kabul area to the volatile west and southern reaches, (where a resergence in Taliban resistance to the occupation makes Afghanistan look more like Iraq every day) and through the public displays of our new number one military man, General Rick Hillier. Hiller held forth recently before the press, veritably foaming at the mouth with his anxiousness to go get the Afghani "scumbags." By that of course, he means "send someone's sons and daughters to "Go Gittim!" Hillier will be directing the charge from the comfortable rear in Otta/Washington.

"Peacekeep THIS mo' fo!"

Up 'til now, Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan have been fortunate, not in small part due to the nature of their mission, locale, and perhaps because Canadians have so far taken a different approach to rapproachement with the people; different that is from the generally witnessed "shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out!" American philosophy. There have been Canadians killed, most tragically when bombed accidentally by a speed-crazed reservist pilot who just couldn't Say No to dropping his bombs on a field training exercise, despite desist orders. But, our government's mission redefinition promises to change that luck.

Well, if we are to become our southern cousin's little emulator, perhaps we can first learn from their myriad missteps. You know, do a little homework on our enemy-to-be, BEFORE we make one of them.

There has been a marked upsurge in violent, "Iraq-style" attacks in Afghanistan over the last few months. As ever, our "public" broadcaster has been loathe to bring bad news into your living room, (try a CBC.ca search on Canada-Afghanistan) the fact is: We are marching our young men and women into a fully blossoming Iraq sequel, (do Canadians really want a part of that? Who asked you!) best described by one of the men leading it.

Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban "military coordinator" talked to the camera's of Al-Jazeera a couple days back and had some interesting things to say. They were not available on Canadian airwaves, the CRTC ruling our collective ears too sensitive for the likes of foreign sourced news. Pity, because Ottawa's nabobs may have found it instructive.

When asked, "What is the rational behind the sudden escalation of Taliban operations in Afghanistan?" Dadullah said,

"Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders have already stated that attacks against the infidels and the apostate government of Afghanistan would escalate as soon as the harsh winter weather gives way to warmer one. There have also been significant changes in tactics, types of weapons, financial support, and support of the Afghan people."

The "significant" change in "types of weapons" may be point to stress to the troops before their Private Lyin' landing on the beaches of Afghanistan. At least two U.S. helicopters have "crashed" in recent weeks. The Taliban press pool bragged of "new weapons" after a Chinook carrying a near-platoon of special force types was shot down a few weeks back, but the U.S. flacks decided it was likely a Rocket Propelled Grenade's "lucky" shot that brought down the chopper. Another Chinook "crashed" last week. Luckily, Canada doesn't have many helicopters capable of sustained flight, so that may not be a worry; unless, those freakishly-fortunate "RPG's" get pointed at other stuff.

But, you may say: "The States are an ally. They wouldn't lie. Would they?"

The Mullah thinks so. He informed Al-Jazeera:

"Americans have lied from the beginning and continue to lie, especially about their casualties. The number of Americans killed by Mujahideen in Afghanistan is much greater than what the American media disclose."

One unfortunate American scout captured by the "Mujahideen," (remember Sly Stallone's Rambo Does Afghanistan? The Mujahideen are those guys. The ones that toppled the other evil empire.) rumoured by the Pentagon as having been rescued brought this response from the dubious Dadullah:

"The Americans did not ask for his release and we knew that they would not because they do not want to admit to the fact that we captured one of their own and they are not able to free him. It is part of hiding their casualties and part of their false propaganda about winning the war in Afghanistan.

Propaganda galore; enough for all sides. Which side do you want to believe?

The Bush administration's credibility is certainly no greater than Mullah Dadullah's: We know they've lied about...Everythng! Knowing your enemy is always a good idea, but knowing your allies is even more vital.

Back to General Hillier and his Pattonesque enthusiasm for the coming carnage. Who will those scumbags be that Canadians will bomb, bag, and bugger for Uncle Sam? Mullah Dadullah explains:

"All Afghan people are Muslims; they all have weapons and know how to use their weapons. The majority of them are supporter of Taliban and their Jihad against the enemies of Islam. Few have been drawn to the dollars. There are also Arab Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Faithful Muslims will always join the fight to eradicate the enemies of Allah."

Great.

The real tragedy of all this is not that it never need have happened, but now that it has, the best we can come up with after two generations of knife-edged Cold War diplomacy and third world despotism is Rick Hillier's mad dog antics for the camera, and Mullah Dadullah. Quite a pair. They should take their act on the road.

There are solutions to the problems dividing the peoples of the world; solutions that allow we all live and thrive in peace, but are there the people to pick them up and employ them?

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. He also serves as contributing editor to PEJ.org.

Killing the 'Good Earth'

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Killing the 'Good Earth': China's Peasant Uprising

PEJ News - C. L. Cook - The fouling of China's rural water and airsheds by factories situated near villages far from the furtile real estate markets of the city threatens to kill the "Good Earth' and the long-enduring way of life it sustains. Frustrated with government inaction, the "peasants" have taken the fight to the gates of the offending factories, where demonstration has led to riots and death on both sides. And, the movement is spreading.

Killing the 'Good Earth'
Unrest in China's Countryside
C. L. Cook

PEJ News
July 20, 05

China's rapid industrial development has brought with it all the banes familiar to the rest of the post-industrial world: Crowding, sprawl, poverty and crime. But, it's not in the cities where the worst side-effects of the mushrooming manufacturing economy are being felt. Much of the damage being done is to the environment, and most acutely experienced in China's agricultural heartland, where the tillers and toilers see little benefits to the destruction of their fields and livelihood.

Chinese authorities spent the weekend battling with farmers and citizens protesting a local factory's pollution is destroying them. Xinchang is a few hundred kilometers down-wind of Shanghai, where a local pharmaceutical plant has been repeatedly cited by the population as posing an environmental threat to them. They've been assured by bribed officials their concerns will be addressed, but frustrated with protracted inaction, they've taken things in hand.

Rural insurrection is in the air right now throughout China, and the residents of Xinchang, knowing of similar civil actions taken in neighbouring areas suffering similar problems and the fate of those demos, were wily in their approach to this event.

Crossing the fields and backways, more than fifteen thousands managed to elude road blocks and other impediments to gather at the gates of the Jingxin Pharmaceutical Company, the site of a recent deadly explosion and release of poison gas. Met with riot police and tear gas, the protesters fought back, killing an admitted six police, wounding many others.

No details on civilian casualties are presently verifiable.

The explosion proved the spark for an already primed atmosphere where crop failures and illness are being blamed on the plant's variously toxic effluents. An unidentified woman living near the plant, (locals say they're afraid to reveal their identity for fear of arrest), says: "Our fields won’t produce grain anymore... We don’t dare to eat food grown from anywhere near here.”

Last Sunday, (JY 17) pitched battles broke out between demonstrators and authorities bussed in to the scene. The crowd overturned police cars, threw stones and bottles, and engaged police. Monday, crowds returned, though in lesser numbers, vowing a determination to continue blockades until the plant is shut-down.

China's political environmental too is to millions a disaster. Occuring throughout China's "miracle economy" are masses of dispossessed peasants, driven from the land to a Dickensian industrial nightmare, destined to toil endlessly for survival in conditions promising less. Staying in the country often means victimization at the hands of local crony pols, the remnants of China's communist legacy now comprising a network of 21st century company towns.

But that network has been shaken by thousands of big and small expressions of resistance.

The Xinchang rebellion is just the latest and biggest of a wave of militant responses to the radical restructuring of Chinese society seen in recent years. As Reuters reports, last year there were 74,000 "incidents" of insurrection reported. They attribute the heightened social unrest with the failure of the central government to deal with local grievances, most concerned local corruption. And, the usually tacit central authority is listening.

Earlier this month, the Party's deputy director, Li Jingtian, criticized elements of the Party's "grassroots cadres," saying: "some of them are probably less competent, and they are not able to dissipate these conflicts or problems."

Not exactly fighting words, but self-criticism is neither a common sight for the Party, that remains the first and last word in China.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. He's also a contributing editor at PEJ.org.

Gorilla Radio for July 18th, 2005

Gorilla Radio for Monday, July 18, 2005

This week former Wall Street Journal columnist and reporter, Paul Craig Roberts on the Bush legacy in America.

And; Dave Zirin on the politics of professional sport past and present.

And too, Janine Bandcroft bringing us up to speed with all the good things going in and around the south island.


Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org.

You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com

If there is still anyone with the merest modicum of intelligence on this planet who still believes George W. Bush’s “rationale” for beginning the bloody war and occupation of Iraq was for any other than the basest, self-serving motives, today’s show should dispel you your illusions.

That every single thing the current administration has said in reference to Iraq has proven false; every word a lie designed to deceive the American people and the world comes as no surprise to my first guest. Paul Craig Roberts is an economist, journalist, and co-author of the book, ‘The Tyranny of Good Intentions.’ Roberts describes himself still as a conservative Republican, though left behind by what the Bush administration and its policies are making of America.

Paul Craig Roberts in the first half.

And; ding dong the strike is dead! Yes, after sacrificing the 2004-5 hockey season, the NHLPA and The League have inked a deal to play hockey next season. The strike has divided sports fans, leaving the burning question: Does anyone give a damn about hockey?

Dave Zirin is a columnist and editor for the Prince George’s Post newspaper, and author. His Edge of Sports column is a unique marriage of sport and politics that reminding of the tradition of gritty, lay journalism that’s widely republished from football.com to The International Socialist Review.

His new book, ‘What’s My Name, Fool!: Sports and Resistance in the United States’ is fresh off the press and published by Haymarket Books.

Dave Zirin and “Whither sport?” in the second half.

And, Janine Bandcroft may be here at the bottom of the hour, reporting from her annual pilgrimage to the Vancouver folk festival, held over the weekend.

But first, Paul Craig Roberts and the tyranny of good intent.

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the mainstream media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, William Blum, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Susan George, Stan Goff, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, William Rivers Pitt, Sheldon Rampton, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Dave Zirin, and many others.

Was Rove Set-Up?

Rove Set-Up?

PEJ News

C. L. Cook
July 16, 2005


Known as the ultimate political dirty fighter,
is it possible the Mayberry Machiavelli was himself set-up
to take the fall in the Valerie Plame outing case?

www.pej.org

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Was Karl Rove Set-Up?
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
July 16, 2005

As difficult to believe as it may seem, Karl Rove, the political dirty trickster that makes Richard Nixon's famous transgressions look absolutely Boy Scoutish appears to be taking a fall for the real culprits behind the felony offence disclosure of the identity of deep-cover CIA agent, Valerie Plame-Wilson.

The Plame-Wilson affair has simmered these past two years just beyond the media's range of acceptable stories. That all changed last week when Patrick "Bulldog" Fitzgerald's demand that recalcitrant Grand Jury witness, New York Times reporter, Judith Miller's incarceration for contempt was granted. Miller is in prison yet, still not talking, but the move prompted Time Inc. to fork over the notes of Matthew Cooper, another reporter facing jail time for refusing to reveal his White House source of the Plame-Wilson identity. Those notes implicated Karl Rove, aka "Bush's Brain."

Rove is a difficult person to feel sympathy for; he has, over the course of his career managing George Bush to the Texas State House and White House, employed every dirty trick in the book, and invented a few new ones. So, it may be understandable that Rove's many enemies in political circles and the press are gleefully trumpeting his impending fall from grace, but that joy could be the biggest impediment to getting to the bottom of the affair and revelations of a larger crime against the American people and the world of which the Plame-Wilson outing is but a single strand.

The criminal release of classified information is generally thought to have been a stab at Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, the man Vice-President Dick Cheney's office sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate claims contained within a document handed over to U.S. authorities through the offices of Italy's CIA counterpart SISMI claiming then-Iraq President Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium from that country. Yellowcake is the foundation ore for the development of nuclear fissile material. The claims were one part of the Bush administration's PR campaign to launch attacks against Iraq.

Wilson debunked the claims, but they were later reiterated as fact in George Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech in the months leading to the U.S. invasion. Hearing the speech, Wilson wrote an Op-ed piece, published by the New York Times, essentially calling Bush a liar and so, it's thought, was targeted by Rove, as have many other dissenters. But, the focus on Rove may be providing a smokescreen obscuring the true nature of the crimes commited and the identities of the culprits.

The crux of the case lies in the nature of the information released into the public sphere. There's no reason to believe Rove, despite his close relationship with Bush, would know the classified identity of Plame-Wilson. She was a deep-cover agent working on nuclear and WMD proliferation. It's the kind of information not bandied about to political strategists, or any others without a defined "need to know."

It's clear, Rove did discuss Plame-Wilson with Cooper at least, but he contends, through his lawyer, that he learned of her double-life through conversations with right-wing columnist and television commentator, Robert Novak. Novak is a long-time acquaintance of Rove's and has served his political interests in the past. Novak authored the first article on Plame-Wilson, thus beginning the scandalous escapade.

So, where did Novak get his information? Curiously, it's a question overlooked. There is speculation that Novak has already given testimony to the Grand Jury ex Parte (not for public consumption) and so has been spared the ordeal of Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper.

Justin Raimondo, at antiwar.com speculates Novak's source is none other than controversial Bush nominee for the ambassadorship of the U.N., John Bolton. Bolton, in a previous political incarnation served as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, a position that would see him receiving intelligence briefings based on the work of Valerie Plame-Wilson.

Raimondo ties Bolton and his friends at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a heavy-hitting political think tank whose membership is a veritable Who's Who of the current administration, and Dick Cheney's Office of Special Plans, a parallel intelligence organization long at odds with the CIA and State Department. Raimondo suggests, the outing of Plame-Wilson was not a simple matter of malice, but a broader swipe at the CIA; a serious blow to their intelligence gathering capabilities that weakened the security of the nation.

Rove will fall through this affair, but his descent will be only one of many to follow. The question now is: How far will the tear run?



Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. He also serves as a contributing editor at PEJ.org.

The Spiggot Behind Rove's Leaks

Rove-gate: Who Leaked
to the Leakers?



This isn't about Karl Rove
by Justin Raimondo
July 15, 2005

What if Karl Rove isn't guilty of knowingly leaking Valerie Plame's name as a covert CIA agent involved in nuclear proliferation issues? What if Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, is correct when he says that he's been assured by prosecutors that his client is not a target of the ongoing investigation into Plame-gate? I'm going to swim against the tide, here, and against the expectations of my readers, by suggesting that this investigation isn't about Rove – and, furthermore, that Rove is a victim, in an important sense, someone who was used and abused by the real culprits. And who are these mysterious culprits? We'll get to that in a moment, but first some background…

One thing that has always struck me as odd about this whole affair – and I wasn't the only one – is a seemingly minor detail: why did Novak's original column, which started all this brouhaha, identify Valerie Plame by her maiden name? After all, most married women – even in this era of Women's Liberation – defer to the tradition of taking their husband's name, but I have to admit that, even after wondering about it for a brief moment, I shrugged and moved on. As it turns out, however, this is an important detail, because now we have Rove's lawyer saying that he at no time gave out Valerie Plame's name: but if Rove identified her as Joe Wilson's wife, what the heck is the difference?

The difference is that, as Valerie Plame, Mrs. Wilson was affiliated with a CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, engaged in tracking and stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As soon as her name was made public, the implications for U.S. national security amounted to a grave breach – far more of a crime than merely violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which has only had a single prosecution since its passage in 1982. As the Washington Post reported when the Plame scandal broke:

"A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities. 'That's why the agency is so sensitive about just publishing her name,' the former diplomat said."

The publication of her maiden name not only endangered Valerie Wilson, but also blew the cover of a CIA front and imperiled anyone she might have come in contact with during her stint overseas. This isn't just a matter of of violating a statute that, at most, entails a 10-year jail sentence and a fine – this is a question of possible espionage.

What also seems fairly clear is that Karl Rove would not have had direct knowledge of Plame-Wilson's covert activities on behalf of the CIA, and that only a very few people high up in the national security bureaucracy had the clearance to get access to her name. So who was it? If Rove leaked to Novak, and half a dozen Washington reporters, then who leaked to the leakers?

This isn't about Rove.

It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.

The neocons had a fix on their target; now the question was how to get someone else to pull the trigger. The leakers, in order to protect themselves, "laundered" the leak through journalists (Judith Miller, one of their favorite conduits) and Bush operatives – Rove. In his book, The Politics of Truth, Joe Wilson says as much:

"Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had created for the administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable tension between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President.

"The rumors swirling around Rove, Libby, and Abrams were so pervasive in Washington that the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, was obliged to address them in an October 2003 briefing, saying of Rove: 'The president knows he wasn't involved. … It's simply not true.' McClellan refused to be drawn into a similar direct denial of Libby's or Abrams's possible involvement, however."

Suddenly, the complacent – and often complicit – American media seems to be waking up. Reporters are now publicly pillorying White House spokesman Scott McClellan:

"QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott…

"(LAUGHTER)

"… because after the investigation began – after the criminal investigation was under way – you said, October 10th, 2003, 'I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,' from that podium. That's after the criminal investigation began. Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation.

"MCCLELLAN: No, that's not a correct characterization. And I think you are well aware of that."

Reporters who heard McClellan's assurances back in October 2003 weren't being deceived so much as lulled to sleep, and that really didn't take much of an effort on the part of the administration, now did it? They were basically asleep anyway, and weren't really listening to what was being said. Some people were paying attention, however, and taking notes, Joshua Marshall for one:

"So, when McClellan was asked to be more clear, he opted for a meaninglessly vague statement and then fell back on the 'leaking of classified information' dodge. Can we all take note of this now? That denial wasn't what it seemed to be. In fact, I doubt it was a real denial at all.

"There's more there. Why not find it?"

Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is now in the process of finding it – and Rove is not his real quarry, although he and some others in the White House could wind up as collateral damage. By all indications, Bulldog's real target points more in the direction of the Office of the Vice President. Ambassador Wilson knows who his enemies are, and he pointed to them in his book and in an interview with Joe Conason in Salon:


"Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most plausible scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from different sources, has been that there was a meeting in the middle of March 2003, chaired by either [Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby or the vice president – but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter – at which a decision was made to get a 'work-up' on me. That meant getting as much information about me as they could: about my past, about my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is abominable. Then that information was passed at the appropriate time to the White House Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go ahead and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York Times."

"Salon: You mention two other names: John Hannah, who works in the Office of the Vice President, and David Wurmser, who is a special assistant to John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and national security. Last Wednesday, their names both appeared on a chart that accompanied an article in the New York Times about the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the war cabal within the Bush administration. Did these people run an intelligence operation against you?"


"Wilson: I don't know if it's the same unit, but it's very clear, from what I've heard, that the meeting in March 2003 led to an intelligence operation against my family and me. That's what a work-up is – to try to find everything you can about an American citizen."

After the War Party met in solemn conclave, and the command went out from Cheney: "Bring me the head of Joe Wilson!", there was only one logical place for Cheney's minions to go. Who in the administration would've had access to the specific information regarding Plame-Wilson's role in a deep-cover CIA operation involving nuclear proliferation? Why, the man who was the State Department deputy secretary in charge of "weapons of mass destruction" – the somewhat irritable if not downright reckless John Bolton, would-be ambassador to the UN, who played a central role in promulgating the Niger Uranium Myth.

Conveniently, two of Bolton's assistants, David Wurmser and John Hannah, also worked in Cheney's office. A story by UPI's Richard Sale, published last year, points at Cheney's office and specifically at Hannah as having played a key role in all this:

"Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

"According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said. … The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said."

Hannah is Cheney's Middle East policy point-man, and before that was director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Middle East expert Juan Cole shines his reportorial flashlight on what's under that particular rock:

"Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC [National Security Council], which helps underpin Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war.…"

The AIPAC connection should raise a red flag: AIPAC is already at the center of a case involving espionage conducted by Israel against the United States, with Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin indicted [.pdf] for passing classified information on to longtime AIPAC leader Steve Rosen and his aide Keith Weissman, with an Israeli embassy official, chief political officer Naor Gilon, directly involved. In both cases, which involve the unlawful dissemination of sensitive U.S. secrets, the defense is claiming that "everyone does it" and that the classified information they're accused of leaking – or, in AIPAC's case, directly handing over to the Israeli government – is supposedly "common knowledge."

Treason is nothing to these people, because their real allegiance is not to the U.S., but to their own cause, which is perpetual war. Libby and Hannah were the enforcers who made sure that the lies put out by this administration to bamboozle us into war with Iraq were strictly adhered to within the government. Libby was a frequent visitor over at CIA headquarters, along with his boss, and, as Juan Cole writes:

"[H]annah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came – Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it."

In short, Hannah was at the center of that vortex of deception that swept us into a disastrous war. When Ambassador Wilson came out with his famous debunking of the infamous "16 words," Hannah was well positioned to go after the heretic.

If we look at the passing of this leak as we would a ball game, as "super smart commenter Sara" pointed out on Digby's blog, the probable trajectory of the ball as it makes its way to the goal goes something like this: "Bolton to Wurmser and Hannah, to Cheney (and/or Libby) to Rove."

In this case, however, unlike soccer or basketball, possession of the ball is not an asset: according to the rules of this game, the last man holding it loses.

I do not believe for a moment that this lengthy and increasingly controversial investigation is centered around alleged violations of a rarely invoked statute, incurring a penalty that hardly seems proportionate to the energy expended to get a conviction. It is extremely hard to prove that someone has violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; there are all sorts of conditions and sub-clauses that provide a legal escape route for anyone so charged: that can't be what all this is about.

If, however, Fitzgerald can prove there was a conspiracy inside the government to collect and selectively reveal classified information in order to crush political opponents, and shape U.S. policy, then the charges could be much more serious. By all accounts, the Plame investigation is said to be widening, and I would venture to say that by this time it is wide enough to include charges of espionage. The mere existence of a highly placed cabal that was engaged in collecting and utilizing highly sensitive information – a kind of intelligence bank that existed outside of normal governmental channels – would be of great interest to the FBI's counterintelligence unit, and word is out that they've been plenty busy lately. Who made withdrawals from this Intelligence Bank, and did any of these account holders include foreign governments – such as Iran, which received an intelligence treasure trove from neocon poster boy Ahmed Chalabi, and Israel, which is already under suspicion because of the Franklin affair, and has close links to several of the suspects in the Plame-gate investigation?

And then there is the question of the Niger uranium forgeries themselves: who forged the documents that fooled a president? Wilson's exposure of the Niger uranium ploy angered whoever introduced those documents into the U.S. intelligence stream – it was Hannah and Libby, by all accounts, who fought to keep these allegations in the president's speech, in spite of opposition from the CIA and the State Department. The same crowd that pushed this phony intelligence must have known something about the murky origins of what turned out to be a crude forgery.

Forging "evidence" that helped get us into a war – what are the penalties for that?

The fast developing scandal seemingly centered around Rove and a few journalists has only begun to unfold. By the time it is over, we'll have the War Party – or, at the very least, a few high profile representatives – in the dock, and then the fun will really begin. So forget "Rove-gate" and get ready for "Cheney-gate." I'll gladly forgo the pleasure of seeing the president's chief political advisor frog-marched out of the White House for the prospect of seeing our vice president, along with his top staffers, led out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in handcuffs.


– Justin Raimondo

Hot Night in the Cite: U.N. Massacre Caught on Tape

Hot Night in the Cite: U.N. Haiti Massacre Caught on Tape

PEJ News - C. L. Cook - Frustrated perhaps with their inability to control the population of Cite Soleil, one of Port-au-Prince's most desperate neighbourhoods, on July 6th United Nations "peacekeepers" launched a full military offensive against locals they describe as "bandits." In the ensuing mayhem, at least twenty people were killed, most unarmed citizens going about the arduous business of daily survival in Haiti's capital city. Portions of the attack were recorded on video, contradicting the U.N.'s official version of events, and prompting charges of massacre against the U.N.

www.pej.org

U.N. "Massacre" Caught on Tape
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
July 15th, 2005

The United Nations says the military offensive mounted against Cite Soleil was necessary to stop "gang" violence. They've admitted to killing five people, "bandits" resisting the onslaught that included tanks, helicopters and troops.

They came before dawn to this depressed slum, a political stronghold of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas party, looking for Dread Wilme, political activist/notorious gang leader, depending on whose story you listen to. But, the U.N.'s crediblility has come into question in the wake of the attack.

U.N. Casualty declarations, and the nature of the raid, are both belied by video taken on the scene and aired by Democracy Now! The video, recorded by a resident was given to a labour and trade delegation sponsored by the San Francisco Labor Council visiting Port-au-Prince. Now they, and other human rights organizations are charging the U.N. with commiting a massacre.

More than seven thousand U.N. "peacekeepers" are currently deployed in Haiti, sent in to ostensibly reorganize the western hemisphere's poorest nation following the U.S. engineered coup d'etat that removed the democratically elected government of former priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February of last year.

Aristide was spirited out of the country under the threat of death by U.S. military personnel and transported to the Central African Republic (CAR). Aristide, currently living in exile in South Africa, has charged the U.S. kidnapped him to serve the interests of Haiti's elite and international business. The coup effectively put an end to peace and reconciliation efforts in the country following decades of despotic rule by U.S.- sponsored father and son dictators, Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier.

Thousands have been killed, imprisoned, and disappeared in the eighteen months since the fall of the legitimate government, though little is known of the situation in North America. The press has been slow to come to the story, perhaps because the coup was sponsored by both the United States and Canada. France too has played a large role in the ouster.

For its part, the U.N. is not commenting on the raid, further than denying a massacre occurred.



Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. He also serves as a contributing editor at PEJ.org. You can check out the GR Blog here.

Evidence Mounts of a U.N. Peacekeeper Massacre in Haiti
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/7_12_5.html

Haiti's Canada-backed coup: Interview with Jean Saint-Vil
http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1453

RIGHTS-HAITI:
Group Charges ”Massacre” in U.N. Raid
Haider Rizvi
http://www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=29506

Eyewitnesses Descibe U.N. Massacre in Haitian Slum
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/11/1351253


Aristide in Exile
Naomi Klein
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0715-03.htm


Canada Haiti Relations (DFAIT)
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/latinamerica/haitirelations-en.asp

Who's Jihad?

Global Eye
By Chris Floyd
July 15, 2005
Issue 3209. Page 112.

They were still scraping body parts out of the blasted carriages in the London Underground last week when the terrorists brazenly announced a harvest of blood fruits from their murderous campaign. The declaration -- bone-chilling in its moral nullity, its brutal cynicism -- was made in the fearsome name of Jihad.

That would be Asim Jihad, of course, spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Yes, just one day after London's agony, the state terrorists who perpetrated the ongoing mass atrocity of aggressive war in Iraq celebrated an important victory in their campaign of violence and fear: 11 juicy oil fields are being put up for tender to international investors, AdnKronos International reports.

The corporate cornucopia of these fertile fields in oil-laden southern Iraq -- 3 million barrels per day, said Jihad -- will surpass the nation's entire current output of 2.2 million bpd: rich pickings for the oil barons whose branch office in the White House has done such outstanding advance work for them. With oil prices soaring past $60 per barrel -- on their way to the $100 mark in the near future, some experts say -- the $25 billion ante that the Iraqis are seeking will be a small price to pay for a seat at this game.


But goodness gracious me -- as Pentagon pump-jockey Don Rumsfeld would say, in that prim spinster patois he likes to affect when wiping blood off his hands -- nobody in their right mind believes all that money will actually go to the Oil Ministry, which will maintain ostensible control of the sold-off fields for the alleged benefit of the Iraqi people. Heavens to Betsy, no!

Some of the loot will be skimmed by Bushist-favored bagmen in the new Baghdad regime. Some will be siphoned off to fund the death-dealing, torture-happy goon squads now operating on behalf of various factions in the government. Some will be kicked back to the oil barons. And some will be smuggled into slush funds for covert ops, mercenaries, campaign hijinks in the Homeland and "retirement packages" for good and faithful servants of the Bush war machine.

How do we know this will happen? Because it has already happened to Iraqi oil money that fell into the hands of the profiteer-in-chief, President George W. Bush. According to detailed audits and investigations by Congress, the Pentagon, the General Accountability Office, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, more than $8.8 billion in Iraqi money under Bush's control simply went walking between October 2003 and July 2004, the London Review of Books reports. These were revenues supposedly earmarked for the Iraqi government -- but no one knows where they actually went, except for a few dollops that investigators found were bankrolling many of the worthy endeavors outlined above.

And this epic rapine -- looting on a scale not seen since the days of the Mongol Horde -- is just a single rivulet in the vast delta of corruption draining the conquered land. Christian Aid estimates that an additional $4 billion in unmetered oil export revenue was sold off under the counter, Saddam-style, to coalition cronies. Then there were the planeloads of cold cash spread around by Bush's "Provisional Authority" -- off the books, natch -- to "couriers," brokers, Western contractors, tribal leaders, "intelligence assets" and anyone else who had the moxie to put their hands out at the right time.

All of this money was stolen from the Iraqi people. In fact, every bit of Iraq's oil money was seized by Bush and transferred to New York's Federal Reserve Bank in May 2003. Perhaps this was the operation Bush was referring to in his ballyhooed "Mission Accomplished" declaration that same month. (He certainly couldn't have been talking about the military mission -- not with "major combat operations" still being launched even as we speak.) And oil revenues kept flowing to Bush's bank account after the conquest. All told, by the time Bush's personal viceroy, Jerry Bremer, did his "last days of Saigon" bug-out from Baghdad last year, the Crawford Caligula had run through $20 billion of Iraq's oil money.

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No one has been brought to justice for this monstrous -- indeed murderous -- thievery. And the oil barons preparing to feast on the new tenders needn't worry about such "quaint" notions as legality either. That's because Bush -- hugger-mugger as usual -- recently renewed his infamous Executive Order 13303, the blanket immunity for all U.S. corporate interests involved in any way with Iraq's oil, the Deep Blade web log reports. The original edict was issued in that fateful, fruitful month of May 2003.

Bush's ukase applies to all traffickers in Iraqi oil -- as long as their loot finds its way, by hook or crook, into the coffers of "United States persons or entities." Bush declares flatly that any "judicial process" launched against these protected entities -- not excluding criminal proceedings for, say, fraud, corruption, extortion, even murder -- "shall be deemed null and void." But what if some rogue nation still clinging to the outmoded principle of law and order tries to take Bush's cronies to court? Not to worry: one of the many agencies authorized to "employ all powers" to "carry out the purposes of this order" is none other than Spinster Rumsfeld's own little parlor -- the Pentagon.

Money and power, grabbed through violence and deceit: that's the real point -- the only point -- of Bush's "war on terror." It is in fact a war of terror, where both sides use senseless murder and mass slaughter to advance their degraded ambitions. No doubt the innocent victims of the London bombing are happy to have died in the service of such a noble cause.

Storming the Sporting Bastille

Storming the Castle:
Why We Need To Know Our Radical Sports History

Dave Zirin
July 14, 2005

In High School, I was a 5' 10" inch center for the fearsome Friends Seminary Quakers in New York City. It wasn't pretty, but I lived for it and didn't care if the opposing center could spit on my head. I just loved sports. My walls were shrines to Magic Johnson, Lawrence Taylor, and Keith Hernandez. Every stat, every record, and every rule existed only to be memorized. Weekends were for playing ball until sunset.

But somewhere along the way, I got a life. 'Operation Desert Storm', and the L.A. Riots burned across my TV screen. As the world seemed to turn upside down, sports began to seem meaningless at best, and at worst, against any concept of social justice. This became jarringly clear during the 1991 Gulf War when I saw "my team's" mascot thrash a person in an Arab suit at half court while the jumbo-tron encouraged chants of U-S-A. Limping away from the arena, I concluded, that sports were part of the problem, and cheering blindly was like going to see 'Rambo' to admire the special effects while ignoring the Vietnamese villagers Stallone was stamping out like bugs.

Then in 1996, a basketball player named Mahmoud Abdul Rauf refused to stand for the National Anthem. Rauf believed the flag to be "a symbol of oppression and tyranny," and was willing to suffer the consequences. His courage was stunning, but even more shocking was the howling cries for his head. When Rauf was suspended, some news reports resembled lynch mobs. But others likened him to Muhammad Ali, whose title was stripped for being a draft resistor during the Viet Nam war. This was a history I barely knew. As Rauf began to buckle under the tremendous pressure of right wing bombast, it became clear that our side needed a history of the resistance in US pro sports. To aid this effort, I started writing a column called Edge of Sports, and just completed my first book "What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States."

When some friends back home heard what I was writing, a Friar's Club Roast seemed to spontaneously generate. These guys seemed to magically morph into a gaggle of Henny Youngmans in baggy jeans. "Pro Sports and radical politics?" one budding Borscht Belter smirked. "That will make a helluva pamphlet!" Or "What's your next book, Dick Cheney's Diet Tips? John Ashcroft's Favorite Black History Moments?"

Everyone had a jibe. But my buddies are like Shaquille O'Neal's free throws: simply way off. The history of how social struggles have exploded onto the playing field is vibrant, thrilling and very real. More importantly, it's a tradition that arms us with the ability to challenge the dominant ideas in that swoosh adorned ivory tower . The problem is that its political teeth have been so thoroughly extracted that the most compelling parts of our history, the parts that have the most to show and teach us today, reside forgotten on the ESPN cutting room floor.

For example, we may know that baseball was segregated until 1947. But we don't know the story of Lester "Red" Rodney, the sports editor of the Communist Party's newspaper the Daily Worker. Rodney ran his 1930s sports page as an organizing center to fight for baseball's integration. This campaign garnered over a million signatures, collected at ballparks around the country. ["Red" Rodney is still with us at age 95, and interviewing him for this book was an experience I will never forget].

We may know that Jackie Robinson was the first player to integrate baseball. But we know him only as a kind of quiet suffering black saint, who did it "the right way," under the paternal eye of Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey. We don't know him as the person who thought, "'To hell with Mr. Rickey's noble experiment. To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create.' I could throw down my bat, stride over to the dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches, and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all."

We may know that the great boxing champ Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Viet Nam. But we don't know he consciously stood with the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, - the resistance - saying, "The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice freedom, and equality."

We may know about the famed Black Power Salute, of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. But we don't know that they wore beads to protest lynching, went without shoes to protest poverty, or that John Carlos wore his shirt open because as he said to me, "I was representing shift workers, blue-collar people, and the underdogs. The people whose contributions to society are so important, but don't get recognized."

We may know about Billie Jean King's "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match against Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome. But we don't know how intertwined that tennis match was with the fight for Title IX, one of the enduring victories of the women's liberation movement of which King was proudly a part. We also don't know that King was far more than a symbol. She also started a union for women's tennis players to fight for equal pay.

We need to know this history because it is a living history - which is precisely what makes it so threatening. As Carlos said to me, "So much is the same as it was in 1968. Look at Mississippi or Alabama. It hasn't changed from back in the day. Look at the city of Memphis and you still see blight up and down. You can still see the despair. It's alive"

He's right. But it's also alive anytime athletes today attempt to use their platform to speak on social issues or draw inspiration from struggles in the street. It's alive when NBA Most Valuable Player Steve Nash says, "The war in Iraq is based on oil," while wearing a t-shirt that reads "No War! Shoot For Peace." It's alive when then-Toronto Blue Jays slugger Carlos Delgado made clear that he wouldn't stand on the steps during the seventh inning stretch to God Bless America because the war in Iraq is "murder based on lies". It's alive every time when the NBA's Etan Thomas shows up at anti-death penalty events to read his slam poetry; poetry that calls out the racism of the system in utterly stark terms. And it's alive when the US Congress feared calling Barry Bonds to testify on steroids for concern that he would say to them what he has been saying to reporters, namely "Why is steroids cheating but making a shirt in Korea for 50 cents and selling it here for $150 isn't?"

Knowing this history positions us to support and embrace athletes who go out on a political limb, risking their careers for principle. This method allows us not only engage and embrace the Etan Thomases, Carlos Delgados, and other 21st century Athletic Rebels but also the fans that thrill to their exploits.

My friends believe that having a "some kind of theory" or analysis drains the life out of sports. The opposite is in fact the case. By confronting the messages pumped out through our play, we can dissect what we like, what we dislike, and begin to challenge sports - and our society - to change.

When warplanes fly overhead we can ask how many physical education classes are cut to pay for each Blue Angel.

When college athletes are pilloried for taking under-the-table payoffs, we can ask whose blood, sweat, and tears paid for the brand spanking new enormo-dome that grace their campuses.

When insanely sexist commercials trade on women's oppression for the high cause of selling beer, we can make clear that this has no place in sports.

When the announcers on Fox become as aghast as a Southern belle when a touchdown dancer gets raunchy, we can ask why a network that pays Bill O'Reilly millions and promotes shows like Who's Your Daddy? and The Littlest Groom has the right to be the purity police.

When our cities are soaked by sleazy stadium deals, we can stand up as sports fans and say, "Hey, we love baseball, but I'm not going to give a billionaire a $350 million present for the privilege of watching it."

By speaking out for the political soul of the sports we love, we do more than just build a fighting left that stands for social justice. We also begin to impose our own ideas on the world of sports - a counter morality to compete with the rank hypocrisy of the pro leagues. These are ideas that can embrace and cheer competition. That can appreciate the artistic talents of athletes and the strategy of coaches and players alike. That can thrill to seeing Barry Bonds swinging a bat, or Michael Vick shredding a defense, or Mia Hamm kicking a soccer ball. But unlike the mainstream sports jabber, it's a morality that recognizes male and female athletes - and all women - as human beings with minds as well as bodies.

It also needs to understand that the incentive of athletes to speak out for social justice lies not in their individual brilliance but in our ability to build a struggle outside the arena and in the streets. If we want more Muhammad Alis, more John Carlos', and more Billie Jean Kings - if we want to see a gay male athlete have the courage to risk his neck by coming out - then we need to build a broader movement for social justice outside the arena, so our "heroes" will also have people to look up to.

In that fight we need every drop of history, experience, and tradition we can get our hands on. As Tommie Smith himself said about his famed Black Power salute, "It's not something I can lay on my shelf and forget about. My heart and soul are still on that team, and I still believe in everything we were trying to fight for in 1968. [It] has not been resolved and will be part of our future."

Dave Zirin's new book "What's My Name Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States is now in stores.. You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by e-mailing edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com. Contact him at dave@edgeofsports.com.

Still to Come

"Still to Come...": Media Rovings

PEJ News - C. L. Cook
- The Media Machine is humming on Karl Rove's current catastrophe.
Employing 'Full Spectrum Dominance' of the airwaves,
the White House message/marching orders are out. As are its dutiful messengers.

Still to Come:
Media on its Knees

C. L. Cook
PEJ.org
July 13, 2005

Incredibly, across what passes for a public information system, the Lamestream and STate TV Admin. allies far and wide tonight were flushed from the comfort of their fortified hedgerows to answer the clarion-call muster to the defense of Baron von Turd Blossom.

Today, the corporate media ran their take(s) on the alleged dirty doings of Karl Rove (nee Roverer). Without exception, each organ tip-toed around the issue at issue, focussing instead on arcane legal lingo, and other trivialities; the core of the matter left yet ill-attended.

Even as the blogosphere (bs) is blasting the RoveGate affair, corporate PR and "professional media workers" loyal to the administration media echo-chamber continue to contend their boss' innocence. Lawyers, especially of the variety of "what does 'is' mean, are chowing down on prospects, while the "project" goes on.

But, is that a dash of mayo I see on Aaron Brown's cheek?

Yes, while damning and sourcing the 'scourge of journalism,' Aaron manages to shrug off the bulk of the litany of gross, criminal violations commited by this sitting administration. At this late hour, following a bitter long trail of betrayal, the (bs) voices most Americans count on for their daily news continue; they can still not find the courage to call Spades.

Rove has nothing to fear from the pup press wolf packs in D.C. and New York. ThePenultimate word in media manipulation sees his greatest threat HERE. And the myriad mirrors on the net.


Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada, every Monday between 5-6pm pacific time. You can check out the GR Blog here. He also serces as a contributing editor to PEJ.org.

Brain's Back Story: Mad Rovings

www.sanderhicks.com

George Bush's Brain
Sander Hicks

Heads Magazine, Toronto

Karl Rove, America's top kingmaker is a college drop-out, a former consultant to big tobacco giant Philip Morris, a self-taught historian and George W. Bush's brain. He doesn't blink. He doesn't hesitate before the kill. If not for Rove, and if not for his ruthlessness, the hapless preppie George W. Bush would not be in the White House today.

Rove is a burly, folksy character. During the primary season, he persistently took control of television discussions. When challenged by the McCain camp on his unethical campaigning, Rove turned the tables. Piece by piece, week after week, he took apart John McCain in the media, and then went on television and shifted the blame onto McCain's staff. Soon, the public was left with an image of McCain as as hot-tempered, war-damaged veteran. McCain's underdog groundswell for a campaign finance reform was scuttled by Karl Rove.

A HISTORY of DIRTY TRICKS

Karl Rove got his start in politics when he ran for president of the College Republicans, and met Lee Atwater in 1972. Shortly afterward Rove was investigated by the Republican National Committee for teaching political campaign "dirty tricks" to college students. Young George W. Bush worked with Atwater and Rove to create the Willie Horton scandal that scuttled Dukakis in 1988.

After Atwater died of brain cancer, Rove and Bush went on to blindside the popular Democratic incumbent Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas governor's race. Rove carried on the strategy from Atwater: scare-tactics, shocking TV ads and personal attacks. Rove minimized Bush's public appearances and limited the spontaneous public speaking of the tongue-tied Bush, a tactic Rove reprised in the recent race for President.

Rove used Governor Bush's re-election campaign in 1998 as an opportunity to launch Bush's White House career. Democrat Gary Mauro was a weak target, but Rove needed a landslide to create the impression of a racially-diverse, popular mandate. He and Bush campaigned hard to decimate an already weak opponent and win the support of minorities usually hostile to the right wing agenda. Rove claimed that Bush's popularity among Latinos was proof that a Compassionate Conservative could "erase the gender gap, open the doors of the Republican Party to new faces and new voices, and win without sacrificing principles."

Bush won almost 50% of all Hispanic votes, according to his own "fuzzy math." The Bush machine trumpeted that Bush had created "political history," with 49% of the Hispanic vote, and 27% of the black vote, citing the exit poll conducted by Voter News Service of New York.

However, a co-designer of the Voter News Service survey, political scientist Bob Stein, said that the actual data on Bush's Hispanic vote was somewhere between "the high 30s and low 40s." He said Bush's percentage among black voters was probably in the low 20s. The Willie Velasquez Institute in San Antonio's exit poll showed Bush got 39%, and a local El Paso poll, conducted by a professor at the University of Texas, showed Bush with 37% of Hispanic voters. When the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram called the Bush campaign with questions about this discrepancy, they were referred to the "governor's consultant," Karl Rove. The paper glumly stated, "Attempts to reach Rove were unsuccessful."

Compassionate Communist

At what point did the Republicans change from being the starched old white men of golf courses and martinis to the merciless, tech-savvy, media manipulators? After eight years of Bill Clinton, the Republicans were eager for blood, and a change in tactics was badly needed. For Campaign 2000, Marxist-turned-Reaganite David Horowitz handed the Republicans a little book called The Art of Political War, which claimed that the Left had a monopoly on strategy, aggression and tactics. The Republican Party would not reclaim the White House until they crushed their opponent with the mercilessness of total war.

Rove adopted the book as his own political Bible. Horowitz wrote The Art of Political War to call on Republicans to create a politics that appealed to the masses: the working families, gays, unions, etc. Karl Rove praised The Art of Political War as indispensible and provided the cover blurb. ("A perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield"-Karl Rove") It is recognized today as the genesis of "Compassionate Conservatism" and is used nation-wide by the Republican Party Chairs in 32 states.

Horowitz took what he learned in the late sixties, and put it in the service of the same people he once referred to as "pigs." [footnote: Radical Son, pp. TK also, for legalization advocates: note that as recently as this 1997 memoir, Horowitz recalls his brief use of cannabis in the late 60's as "the experience was seductive-but I remained skittish."] Certain fundamentals of Horowitz's politics have remained the same througout his time: politics is war by other means, and one thing you can rely on in America is that people tend to root for the underdog. But since only 10% of the country identifies themselves as "hard Republicans," Horowitz realized that the right-wing agenda would be unpalatable to the majority, unless it was wrapped in a different package. Compassionate Conservatism was born, a new brand indentity for the intolerance, fear and hate of the right-wing.

Karl Rove became the salesman and Bush was the fun and fuzzy mascot. Rove is the perfect salesman: a ballsy top dog who swaggers like the old Texan he is. He used the language of the people to promote his candidate with maximum aggression. He understood that the agenda was to promote inclusiveness, and openness, at least until the White House is taken.

Karl Rove is known for discipline and hard-right ideological rigor. Yet, he is also known to burst spontaneously into song. Like Bush, he speaks in the common tongue. On the television discussions of the campaign, he would taunt his McCainite opponents, calling them "Man." His salty use of late 60's youth culture slang obscures the fact that he's a leading conservative.

He shrinks at the dynamism and inclusive energy of modern thought. When asked what political writers he is most influenced by, he states Myron Magnet, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and James Q. Wilson.

Over the course of the campaign, George W. Bush also made somewhat dubious claims to have read Myron Magnet. But was this just a rote answer handed him by his senior advisor?

Magnet, in his book, The Dream and the Nightmare, states that the late 60's counterculture was a huge social disaster because it set a bad example for the underclass. The hippies encouraged indulgence and laziness instead of the virtues of hard work and competition. Yet, Bush doesn't seem to have the same harsh memories of the 60's. On Newshour with Jim Lehrer on April, 27th, 2000, Bush seemed to not quite understand what Magnet could have been talking about. Bush spoke about "responsible behavior" being the legacy and the political consciousness of the 60's. As Mark Crispin Miller points out in his excellent The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (coming out this June from Norton), Bush stated, "I'm a strong candidate because I come from the baby boomer generation recognizing that we've got to usher in an era of responsible behavior."

Mark Crispin Miller writes "that inversion of the Myron Magnet thesis was the opposite of what Bush had meant to say-and what he did say all the time." Perhaps. Or perhaps Bush's memories of the 60's were a lot of pot and cocaine, so much so that a theory based on hate just didn't compare. [for more on David Horowitz, see Sanderhicks.com's confrontational feature on him, here >> ]

FORTUNATE FELONIES

When the media stumbled upon a story regarding George W. Bush's 1972 cocaine possession arrest, Rove had to find a way to kill the story. He did so by destroying the messenger. Pop culture biographer J.H. Hatfield was on hand, traveling in and out of Texas at the time, interviewing Rove and other Bush aides to research the premier Bush biography "Lone Star Rising." The book that was later titled Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President, a more critical title that reflects its turbulent publishing history.

One of Hatfield's acquaintances and primary sources was longtime Bush friend and schoolmate, Clay Johnson, a longtime Dallas businessman. When Hatfield was convicted of a felony in the late 80's, it’s likely Johnson learned of it.

When Hatfield approached them to research Bush, the Bush campaign already had the upper hand by knowing Hatfield’s felony record: a perfect way to discredit all stories of Bush's drug past. In October 1999, St. Martin's published Fortunate Son amidst a lot of buzz and hope of positive attention from major media. However, St. Martin's was hit with a one-two punch.

First, the New York Times refused to give the book the coverage St. Martin’s was counting on. So, St. Martin's dragged Hatfield into a meeting and leaned on him to reveal the confidential Bush campaign sources that told him the cocaine story. Fearing retribution, and honoring his journalistic code, Hatfield refused.

Then, St. Martin's learned that the Dallas Morning News was about to break news about Hatfield's felony record. The Bush Campaign began to publicly make legal threats against the book, and the media uproar about Hatfield's felony record killed the book, and the cocaine story. More than 70,000 copies of Fortunate Son were withdrawan.

"They're heat! Furnace fodder!" snapped the vitriolic St. Martin's Vice President Sally J. Richardson. The media focus shifted from reporting on Hatfield's Bush story to loud, loose talk about Hatfield's felony. The major media tended to sing the same chorus: "How ironic, this Hatfield character who was involved in a dirty plot to kill his boss in 1987 is trying to verify these rumors about young Bush being arrested for cocaine possession in 1972.

But this story couldn't be true, of course, since Hatfield's a criminal...right?"

I borrowed one of the rare, repossessed copies of the book from a friend and read it on a bus trip. I traveled with a pack of sticky notes and hit every page with something relevant and newsworthy and under-reported about Bush’s past. Pretty soon, the book overflowed with the edges of sticky notes poking out like the feathers of a peacock.

Bush dodged the draft, was a C student at Yale, lost a lot of other people's money in boom times in the Texas Oil market, was investigated by the S.E.C. for insider trading. What a garish life of special favors, what a clear colorful pattern of cut corners, what blurry values. I came back to New York and maneuvered my company, Soft Skull Press, Inc. to step in and acquire the rights to the book. Meanwhile, Hatfield was in hiding.

The tabloids were after him. Camera crews camped on his front lawn for two weeks. The phone rang off the hook. They all wanted to know who the confidential sources were who fed him the story, but Hatfield stuck to his journalist code. His sources were confidential. They had talked to him under condition of anonyminity. But J.H. Hatfield, our man in Arkansas, was coming to New York.

Two months after the bloody October of Hatfield’s public destruction, it was a crisp sunny winter day in New York City. Although Hatfield had the flu, he taped his portion of 60 Minutes early in the morning, and I went in later. Leslie Stahl, the elegant host of the program, had pointedly asked me on tape if I knew the sources. I said no, but that Hatfield had promised to reveal them to me. After the taping, we walked through the Lower East Side.

I had taken Hatfield and his lawyer, and my coworker to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. I needed to hold Jim Hatfield to his promise to share the sources with me; I needed to see the phone and travel records. I needed to know the whole thing wasn't a big sick joke. I needed to be 100% sure. My gut had me already believing in Jim Hatfield.

He believed in what we were doing. He stood behind all his research. He admired me for making a maverick decision, and attempting to redeem his battered book. Hatfield stopped on the corner of Ludlow and Rivington and turned to me in the bright light. His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his Navy peacoat. He looked tired, but determined. He looked down the street. "You've got to take this information with you to your grave. You've got to swear." I swore not to repeat it to anyone. I also knew that the truth is bigger than one person.

We would both choose to reveal the sources publicly when the time was right, when we had no other choice. When we no longer had anything left to lose.

The Eufaula Connection?

That was Karl Rove. The other top Bush advisor was Clay Johnson. The Bush confidante, was his minister, Mayfield. Now you know. Remember, you’ve got to swear now....

THE RACE IS NOT TO THE SWIFT

By February 2000, McCain was gaining on Bush in terms of charisma, message and experience. His promises of campaign finance reform struck a chord nationwide, and on the first of February, 2000, he blew Bush away in the New Hampshire primary.

McCain defeated the New York Republican Party establishment in the courts, and forced the Bush-loyal party bosses to put him on the ballot for the upcoming New York primary. Bush appeared at the rightwing Bob Jones University, in an attempt to get his campaign back on track by appealling to the party's extreme right. Showing his true colors as a politician, McCain's campaign desperately phoned Catholic voters with a recorded message that implied Bush was anti-Catholic by association with the pope-haters at Bob Jones University.

Depite his acrimony on television, Rove knew that McCain's manueveurs were the desperate acts of a campaign in its death throes: Bush would sweep all major primaries from here on in, and take the Republican Nomination in July. By the end of February, Rove was homing in on Gore. By the end of February, New Hampshire was in the distant past. Rumors were circulating (from who knows where?) that McCain was a bit crazy and had a bad temper from being a P.O.W. in Viet Nam.

Al Gore clearly had Bush beat on experience, intelligence and gravitas. While Bush had lost $371 million of other people's money in bad investments and bankrupt oil companies, Gore had served as a Senator and later a Vice President. While Texas had the worst air pollution of any state, Gore was a moderate interested in developing new energy alternatives. Part of Rove's strategy was to trip the cumbersome Gore up on petty questions about Gore's minor factual errors.

Instead of attacking Bush, Gore spent time countering minor barbs about whether he had lied in statements about inventing the Internet or attending a Texas fire disaster site. Perhaps this shows that Gore didn't have as shrewd a top strategist.

While the Democrats watched polls and tried to create a likeable, casual personality for their stiff candidate, Rove kept harping on Gore's for being "a serial exaggerator" and kept Gore in the stereotype of an uncoordinated egghead. On October 8 with both campaigns slinging mud feverishly, Rove went on NBC's "Meet the Press," and accused Gore of being "a man who has difficulty telling the truth. He constantly exaggerates and embellishes."

Rove's strategy of disinformation follows the pattern set by all masters of public opinion of the 20th Century. Rove is the kingmaker. He is the man behind the man. Today, he works in the White House, in a job invented just for him: the Office of Strategic Initiatives. What does that mean? It means anything Mr. Rove wants it to mean.

Gorilla Radio for July 11th, 2005

Gorilla Radio for Monday, July 11th, 2005

This week on GR:

Patricia Goldsmith of Long Island Media Watch on America's coming Medicaid Wars

Chris Hedges, author and former war correspondent for the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor and what every person should know about war.

And, Janine Bandcroft bringing us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria this week.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org.

You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com

Gorilla Radio
July 11, 2005
5-6pm pdt

With so many outrages perpetrated by the Bush administration, it’s easy to miss one or two; especially on the domestic front.

Consistent with the privatization regime he would force on the vanquished denizens of the empire’s outpost, at home too the ruthlessness of “the project” demands the weak and needy be catapulted from sight, stranded upon the merciless ice floes of the market economy.

The latest victims to be cast adrift are the millions receiving Medicaid.

In a move that may ring familiar in Canadian ears, the Fed has starved transfer payments to States-administered health care systems, referring them to privatization. Patricia Goldsmith is with Long Island Media Watch, a New York-based grassroots watchdog group. Her writing appears in, among other places, the progressive websites, Dissident Voice.org and Democratic Underground.com

Patricia Goldsmith and the looming Medicaid Wars in the first half.

And; enjoying a sunny summer’s day in North America, you wouldn’t know we are at war.

Right now, soldiers serving the interests of both Americans and Canadians are on the field of battle in foreign lands. What we citizens do see of these wars is first run through a media laundry, scrubbed and pressed into palatable packages that allow we sleep soundly as our agents maim and destroy far off lands.

As Londoners discovered last week, occasionally, our collective actions return as spasms of extreme violence. There and then, the media displays the blood and guts essence of what war means, the pathetic fate of random victims, the waste and violation of humanity, but never do they continue the conversation, exploring the nature of this beast writ more large, or the devastation wreaked upon the innocent lives we routinely ravage.

Chris Hedges is a former war correspondent and author. He spent more than fifteen years reporting from various fields of battle for The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and America’s National Public Radio. He shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and that year’s Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. His books include, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and What Every Person Should Know About War.

Chris Hedges and getting to know war in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that’s good to do in and around Victoria this week.

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the mainstream media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, William Blum, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Susan George, Stan Goff, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, William Rivers Pitt, Sheldon Rampton, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Dave Zirin, and many others.

Frog March Chorus Warms for Rove

http://www.ibrewster.com/gallery/albums/album05/
The_WB_Frog_Warner_Brothers_Looney_Tunes.jpg

Frog March Chorus Warms for Rove

The Nation - David Corn - At a public meeting in the summer of 2003, Joseph Wilson, responding to a question about the leak, quipped that it would be interesting "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." He then had to pull back from that comment and concede he had no evidence to support his hunch that Rove was one of the leakers. With Newsweek's latest article, we may be getting closer to frog-marching time.

copyright 2005- David Corn- (used by permission of Agence Global)

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=4924

David Corn Sun Jul 10, 2005 1:28 PM ET
UPDATE: The Newsweek story I described below is out. Reporter Michael Isikoff has obtained a copy of an email that Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper sent his bureau chief, Michael Duffy, on July 11, 2003--three days before conservative columnist Bob Novak first published the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Wilson/Plame. In that email, Cooper wrote that he had spoken to Rove on "double super secret background" and that Rove had told him that Joseph Wilson's "wife...apparently works at the agency on wmd issues." "Agency" means CIA. Read the full Newsweek piece here, and read the item below for why it is so important.

Time to get ready for the
Karl Rove frog-march?

David Corn
The Nation
July 9, 2005

I don't usually blog on Saturday evenings. But I've received information too good not to share immediately. It was only yesterday that I was bemoaning the probability that -- after a week of apparent Rove-related revelations--it might be a while before any more news emerged about the Plame/CIA leak. Yet tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official -- told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger.

To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it's only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I'm told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove -- despite his lawyers claim that Rove "did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA" -- did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson's wife was in the CIA.

No wonder special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursued Cooper so fiercely. And Fitzgerald must have been delighted when Time magazine -- over Cooper's objection--surrendered Cooper's emails and notes, which, according to a previous Newsweek posting by Michael Isikoff, named Rove as Cooper's source. In court on Wednesday, Fitzgerald said that following his receipt of Cooper's emails and notes "it is clear to us we need [Cooper's] testimony perhaps more so than in the past." This was a clue that Fitzgerald had scored big when he obtained the Cooper material.

This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should). If what I am told is true, this is proof that the Bush White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson -- even classified information related to national security -- to pursue a vendetta against Wilson, a White House critic. Even if it turns out Rove did not break the law regarding the naming of intelligence officials, this new disclosure could prove Rove guilty of leaking a national security secret to a reporter for political ends. What would George W. Bush do about that?

On September 27, 2003 -- after the news broke that the Justice Department, responding to a request from the CIA, was investigating the Plame/CIA leak -- White House press secretary Scott McClellan said of the Plame/CIA leak, "That is not the way this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing." He also declared that the allegation that Rove was involved in this leak was "a ridiculous suggestion, and it is simply not true." Days later, Bush issued a straightforward statement about the Plame/CIA leak:

There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. If there's leaks out of my administration, I want to know who it is, and if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.

Perhaps Bush won't have to "take care of" Rove if this new evidence does not lead to a prosecutable violation of the law. But Bush also called on any government official with knowledge of the leak to "come forward and speak out." Has Rove done so? No. So it seems he violated a presidential command. Would Bush be obliged to fire him for insubordination? And there's another key point to consider: whether Rove told the truth when he testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has acknowledged that Rove appeared before the grand jury, and Luskin has said that Rove did speak to Cooper prior to the publication of the Novak column. But what did Rove tell Fitzgerald and the grand jury about this conversation with Cooper? And -- here's the big question -- does Rove's account jibe with the new documentary evidence that Newsweek is scheduled to disclose? If it does not, Fitzgerald would have a good start on a perjury charge against Rove.

At a public meeting in the summer of 2003, Joseph Wilson, responding to a question about the leak, quipped that it would be interesting "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." He then had to pull back from that comment and concede he had no evidence to support his hunch that Rove was one of the leakers. (By the way, Novak cited two unnamed Bush administration officials when he published the Plame/CIA leak.) With Newsweek's latest article, we may be getting closer to frog-marching time.
******

By the way, for other recent pieces I've written on the Plame/CIA leak case, please check out my own blog at www.davidcorn.com.