Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Poison Stinger

Key Evidence Cast in Doubt on a Claim of Terrorism

Federal prosecutors acknowledged possible flaws yesterday in a major piece of evidence used in their case against two leaders of an Albany mosque on charges that they supported terrorism.

[…]

Prosecutors said they were given information from the Defense Department that a notebook with Mr. Aref’s name and address had been found in what they said was a terrorist training camp in the western Iraqi desert near the Syrian border. They also said that a word in the notebook, written in Arabic, had referred to Mr. Aref as “commander.”

As it turns out, the word is Kurdish, albeit written using the Arabic alphabet, and the translation may be incorrect. “Commander” could be translated as “brother,” according to federal prosecutors.

Nijyar Shemdin, the United States representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington, reviewed a copy of the page at the request of The New York Times and said he did not see how a translation would have come up with the word “commander.”

Mr. Shemdin said that Mr. Aref is referred to with the common honorific, “kak,” which could mean brother or mister, depending on the level of formality.

[…]

In court last week, Mr. Kindlon did not have access to the note, and he expressed frustration at having to rebut the clearly ominous implications of the word “commander.”

[…]

The judge gave the prosecution seven days to give the defense a copy of the note. The prosecutors asked the Defense Department for a copy, which they received and had the F.B.I. translate independently. That brought the discrepancy to light.

Mr. Kindlon said his client would seek a new bail hearing.

He said that Mr. Aref, a Kurd, had three brothers in northern Iraq and that there was no independent verification that the note had been found in a terrorist training camp. According to court documents, United States soldiers found the document on June 12, 2003, near the town of Rawah.

The sting operation being conducted in Albany was already underway then and was not tied to the discovery of the note, according to court documents.

[…]

However, many of the conversations between the informant and the men were in Urdu, as well as in Arabic and English, and Mr. Kindlon said there might be problems with the translations of those meetings, as well.

In court documents, the government provided only snippets of the conversations already translated.

This case is another one of those travesties in the making, you can tell. It’s a bullshit sting that apparently relies on mistranslated notes the DOD conveniently found in a “terrorist training camp” in Iraq after the sting had already been initiated.

Evidently, they’ve caught all the active terrorists so they are now busy entrapping random people as a test of their loyalty. Good to know.

Deep Breath

Josh Marshall has posted an analysis by Charlie Cook that I had also planned to write about which shows that the electoral college count is still tilted slightly to Bush. He says:

A veteran politics watcher like Cook can see through that smoke and take into account the poor quality in some polls and deeper trends at work in given states. For that reason, I put a lot of stock in Cook’s opinion.

I’ve also always found Cook to be very astute and his analysis makes wonder if we Democrats aren’t in the middle of another one of those fugue states in which we start having visions of landslides and certain winners without any data to back it up. Cook writes:

In adding up all the electoral votes that are in the safe and lean columns for each candidate, President Bush has a tight 211 to 207 lead in the Electoral College. Bush also has 120 votes in the toss up column. However, if you pushed each of the 10 toss up states to Kerry — who seems to be ahead by a slight margin — he would come out on top.

I am feeling optimistic about this election, but I don’t see where everyone is getting the idea that it’s a done deal. As much as I’d like it to be so, I still see a race that’s neck and neck where anything could happen.

The crowds on the ground are very encouraging and you can’t dismiss that. But, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Democratic base is riled up this time and so it’s not all that surprising to me that more people would show up at rallies. And, we really can’t measure the Bush rallies by the same yardstick since they are completely scripted and controlled media events. We don’t know if his crowds would be just as large if he opened them up.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade and I hope just as fervently as anyone that we win in a huge landslide. But, I’m not seeing any reliable evidence of this so-called new CW that it’s “Kerry’s to lose.” It’s still tied.

Lame

Before everybody gets all upset that Kerry condemned the MoveOn ad, think about it for a minute.

Personally, I think it’s too late for this ad — the story was already losing its momentum in the mainstream media. Editorials called Bush out. Even O’Reilly was condemning the swiftboaters. The timing is off.

Mostly, I agree with Chris Bowers at MYDD that the ad itself sucks (particularly in comparison with the SBVT ad.) I think they could have alluded to the Bush guard stuff with visuals and saved the righteously indignant VO to address the swiftboat smear. A little subtlety is called for if you are taking a position from the high road while you are sticking a shiv in someone’s belly.

But, it’s done and since our side demanded that Bush condemn his ad, Kerry has little choice now but to stand with McCain and condemn the MoveOn ad and and try to make Junior look bad by comparison. Kerry refused to distance himself from Admiral Turner and General Clark who are out there as attack dogs every day on the issue, (and explicitly bringing up the Guard) so he’s not making the subject off limits.

Bush may end up looking slimy for being the only one who refuses to explicitly condemn these ads, and maybe just getting the Guard thing out there again in contrast to Kerry’s record is what they are really after. If the ad had been a little bit more clever, that might have worked better. I think the best that can be hoped is that the whole subject looks so muddy now with flying charges and counter charges that people discount the whole thing as politics, no harm no foul to either side.

I honestly think the way to attack back would have been to let the swiftless do their thing and then brutally call into question Bush’s behavior on 9/11. You want to go nuclear on these guys, that’s the way to do it. My Pet Goat, baby. That’s the soft white underbelly.

Judy In Disguise

Judith Miller got another subpoena in the Plame case over the week-end.

Strange, yes? She was, as we know, very well conected on the neocon WMD beat, wasn’t she? The question in my mind is if she was the chicken or the egg.

Exit Poll Strategy

If the media wanted to make up in some small way for their transgressions in blindly helping Bushco send this country to war based on a neocon wet dream, they should follow the advice of Paul Krugman and finance several different competing exit polling operations for this election.

If the election is anything less than a landslide on either side, the skepticism about touch screen voting machines will hinder any president’s claim to legitimacy. Now, Junior and his kool-aid drinkers don’t really care about that because he found that he could pretty much do anything he wanted without it, but it’s crucial to preserve our democracy, nonetheless.

The Georgia election in 2002 is a good example of what might happen in a number of places if good exit polling isn’t done that validates the returns. The state showed two very surprising upsets that none of the polls had predicted. Going into the election they’d all had Senator Cleland winning by 2 to 5 points and he lost by 7. In the governor’s race the swing was 16 points from the last polls to election day; Barnes had been up by 9 points and he lost by 7.

These things happen and it may very well have been a result of a last minute GOP surge. But, there is also some good evidence that the e-voting machines in Georgia were tampered with. We will never know the truth of that.

This time people on both sides are bound to question the results of these new e-voting machines if the returns show a close race. There will be no paper trail in most of them and the legitimacy of many winners is likely to be in question if there’s no data to suport the tally. Exit polls are one way to do that.

The media should spend some money and get this done, not for predictive purposes on election night, but to validate the actual election returns. Otherwise we are going to be in tin foil hat territory for a long time to come. It’s the least they can do.

Here are the Exit Poll Results for the 2000 election. You might want to bookmark it as we will start seeing more comprehensive polls over the next couple of months and it’s interesting to see where the shifts, if any, are taking place.

Thanks For Nothing

E.J. Dionne says:

[Kerry] needs a much better defense of that Iraq vote of his. It really isn’t so hard. When Bush went to Congress in the fall of 2002 for authorization to go to war in Iraq, he did so after saying he was going to the United Nations to seek international support for a war against Saddam Hussein.

Yes, the congressional resolution empowering Bush to wage war was far broader than it should have been. But when push came to shove, Kerry decided to take the chance in voting “yes” to strengthen Bush’s hand in negotiating with the United Nations. That seeking U.N. support was never really a Bush priority and that he botched the postwar planning is the president’s problem, not Kerry’s. Why can’t Kerry keep it that simple?

Does anyone in their right mind think that is simple? Has E.J. ever heard what Kerry really said? Jesus, by comparison he sounds like Forest Gump compared to that wonky blather:

Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have, but I would have used that authority, as I have said throughout this campaign, effectively. I would have done this very differently from the way President Bush has.

Now maybe there is a simpler way to say this but it sure isn’t Dionne’s meandering bullshit.

Look, this is a difficult issue for Kerry, there’s no doubt about it. I was very disappointed in him for voting for the resolution because this was entirely predictable. From a tactical standpoint, it was never clear to me why these guys thought that they could win a presidential election by supporting Bush on Iraq. If the war was perceived as a success, Bush would probably be unbeatable. It is because the war has been such a strategic disaster that he’s as vulnerable as he is. This, to me, was the only scenario in which we could win in ’04 and therefore, it was always the smart move politically (much less morally) for Democrats to oppose that goddamned war — and hammer on terrorism, the real threat, hard.

At the end of the day, the Bush people might want to rethink bringing this up everyday. Iraq is Bush’s albatross, not Kerry’s, no matter how hard they try to hang it around his neck. That big old elephant sitting over in the corner is holding a sign that says “where are the WMD?”

As for the much desired “bumper sticker explanation” that even Dionne can understand, The Howler suggests this:

I voted to give President Bush the authority. Then President Bush f*cked it up

Works for me.

Dangerous Ally

On July 30, the day after Senator John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, CNN Crossfire host Tucker Carlson stated, “His [Kerry’s] plan for Iraq, such as it is, is to have other people, dark skinned foreigners, from the Middle East fight our war for us. He said it last night in his speech. I watched his speech.

I heard that comment and I wondered what Carlson had been smoking. But I now realize that he was simply indulging in the usual right wing projection:

Few people likely paid attention last week when former President Clinton accused the Bush administration of contracting out U.S. security and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Pakistan in its zeal to wage war in Iraq. In an interview with Canadian television, Clinton asked, “Why did we put our No. 1 security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis, with us playing the supporting role, and put all our military resources into Iraq — which was I think at best our No. 5 security threat?” Clinton also observed, “We will never know if we could have gotten him [bin Laden] because we didn’t make it a priority.”

One consequence of the decision to subcontract the hunt for members of al-Qaida to Pakistan is that the terrorists appear to be regrouping. The Washington Post, quoting senior U.S. and Pakistani officials, reported “new evidence” on Aug. 14 that suggests “that Al-Qaeda is battered but not beaten, and that a motley collection of old hands and recent recruits has formed a nucleus in Pakistan that is pushing forward with plans for attacks in the United States.”

Despite Pakistan’s past role in propping up the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Bush administration — in one of its least transparent foreign alliances — continues to rely on Pakistani military and intelligence services to deliver bin Laden. Since much of the give-and-take in this relationship is covert, it is unclear exactly what is or is not taking place.

Pakistan sells nuclear and missile technology to Iran and North Korea and its internal political situation is so complex that probably half of the army and most of its intelligence service are sympathetic to al Qaeda. Yet we are depending upon that country to handle the most sensitive intelligence matters pertaining to islamic terrorism while we fiddle around in Iraq for no good reason.

The Bush Doctrine of “if you feed a terrorist, talk to a terrorist, or harbor a terrorist means you’re a terrorist” applies in every aspect to Pakistan. The country is a military dictatorship in which the general in charge suspends the constitution on a regular basis. The country is a powderkeg in a region that is a powderkeg. And yet we have put the real central front in the war on terrorism in their hands.

I know we had to keep them close, but our dependence on them has always seemed to me to be exceedingly dicey. As many commentators have pointed out recently, it’s created a dilemma for both countries in that Pakistan is motivated to keep dribbling out al Qaeda from time to time while never actually netting anything definitive or seriously meaningful because to do so would mean the end of huge amounts of American money and support. Crack diplomacy at work, once again.

One can’t help but wonder every day, for a hundred different reasons, what we could have acomplished in narrowing the threat of Islamic radicalism if we had focused our best and the best of all of our allies on that problem. It certainly would have been preferable to having Pakistan take the lead on al Qaeda while we fought a completely unnecessary war elsewhere.

It all comes back to the delusionary belief among Bush’s advisors, even after 9/11, that islamic radicalism is not as great a threat as rogue states. This fundamental error has almost driven us off a cliff and will definitely do so in the next four years if these people remain in power.

Bist meshugeh?

Ryan Lizza tells us that aside from blacks, Hispanics and catholics, Rove hasn’t managed to bring in any Jews either.

A poll out today by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research confirms that Bush has made no inroads [among Jews.] The numbers look almost identical to what VNS exit polls found in 2000. Here are the highlights:

Senator Kerry maintains a very strong lead over President Bush within the Jewish community. Senator Kerry leads President Bush by a margin of 75 percent to 22 percent. Senator Kerry’s lead is as strong as the American Jewish vote was in 2000 for then-Vice President Gore over then-Governor Bush; respondents voted in 2000 for Gore over Bush by a margin of 76 percent to 21 percent.

[…]

** President Bush is deeply unpopular among American Jews. President Bush is seen as favorable by only 20 percent of respondents; a stunning 73 percent see him unfavorably. Conversely, Senator Kerry is seen as favorable by 59 percent of the respondents, while only 27 percent view him unfavorably.

This doesn’t surprise me. Members of groups in this country who have historically been discriminated against by nativist whites and waspy elitists have good bullshit detectors. They are the last people in this country who would be fooled by this GOP flim-flam.

Rove thought they could back Ariel Sharon and American Jews would just follow Junior off a cliff. I think he spent a little too much time with the radical fundamentalists. American Jews aren’t cult members. They are cosmopolitan Americans who think for themselves and have a very long tradition of respect for liberalism and intellectualism, neither of which are concepts that Bush understands, much less stands for.

So, after three years in office and a one time 90% approval rating, Bush has wrapped up the fundamentalist and CEO vote. Quite an achievement.

Don’t Go There

Kevin Drum does a masterful takedown of Jonah Goldberg’s ridiculous assertion that the “Bush haters” are more extreme and nasty than the Clinton haters were. He reminds him of the murder charges from the WSJ editorial page, the videos about cocaine running in Arkansas and, of course, the $70 mil spent chasing Clinton’s mighty member.

But, he is too polite (and I’m not) to mention that Jonah’s dear mother was the shrill, shrieking harpy from hell who committed a litany of heinous and disgusting acts during the era and “secured her footnote in American political history as Linda Tripp’s accomplice, delightedly hawking a story to the equally spiteful New York Press about Clinton “finger-fucking” his daughter Chelsea.”

Now, when Michael Moore or MoveOn come out with sewage like that we can talk. Until then, Lucianne’s little boy ought to shut the fuck up about Clinton-haters and Bush-haters. It’s not exactly a topic that benefits the family name.

Darby’s Nightmare

When it was revealed that Joseph Darby came forward about the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, many of his friends and neighbors turned on him and his family. I’m sure they all were listening to Rush and Sean who told them it was just “blowing off steam” and Senator Inhofe who said he was “outraged by the outrage.” This is the president’s base, the heart and soul of wingnut America:

Each day, she [wife, Bernadette Darby] would catch another snippet of the hostility brewing around her. There was the candlelight vigil in Cumberland, Maryland, to show support for the disgraced soldiers, including the ones who did the torturing, about a hundred supporters standing in the pounding rain, as if beating and sodomizing prisoners were some kind of patriotic duty. Or the 200 people who gathered one night in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, waving American flags to honor Sivits, the first soldier tried in the scandal. They posted a sign in Hyndman. It said JEREMY SIVITS, OUR HOMETOWN HERO. And the mayor told reporters that even though Sivits would sometimes do “a little devilish thing,” on the whole he was “a wonderful kid.”

Where were the signs for Joe? Bernadette had to wonder. Where was his vigil? Where was his happy mayor? Where were his calls of support? Down at the gas station, Clay overheard some guys say that Joe was “walking around with a bull’s-eye on his head,” just casually, just like, oh, everybody knows Joe’s dead. Some of Bernadette’s family even let her know that other members of the family were against her now, that they couldn’t support a traitor. The more Bernadette heard, the more paranoid she became. How serious was this? Her nerves were so fried from the media onslaught that she couldn’t be sure what was serious and what was just talk. Had those cops really ignored Maxine because they were against Joe? And if so, what else would they ignore?

[…]

When they got to Bernadette’s apartment in Corriganville, they went inside, and the cats rushed to Bernadette, and she held them in her arms and talked to them while Maxine and Clay tried to give her space.

And then the phone rang.

It was a major from the U.S. Army, and he was coming over. Within a few minutes, everything began to shift around Bernadette, and it was hard to tell what was happening. She found herself in the passenger seat of an unmarked government vehicle, speeding down the highway to some unknown destination, Clay’s truck right behind her with Maxine and the kids packed inside, the whole group snatched up by military protective custody without any prior warning or even a clear idea of why. Bernadette called Virginia and said, “We’re in protective custody now. I don’t know where we’re going, but we’ll call you when we get there.”

Mrs. Darby hadn’t heard from her husband, but he’d been taken into protective custody himself, sometime before. The military knew that his life was in danger.

You know, I don’t know how much more of this Bush administration-style honor and integrity this country can take.