1. Your reading my comment 2. Now your saying/thinking thats a stupid fact. 4. You didnt notice that i skipped 3. 5. Your checking it now. 6. Your smiling. 7. Your still reading my comment. 8. You know all you have read is true. 10. You didnt notice that i skipped 9. 11. Your checking it now. 12. You didnt notice there are only 10 facts Copy and paste to 1 video, tomorrow will be your best day ever! no matter what
Thomas Knapp is running for Congress in Missouri (on the Libertarian and Boston Tea Party tickets) and he supports the Ni4D. He's also running for the vice presidency as a member of the Boston Tea Party.
The National Initiative for Democracy is a proposed law developed by The Democracy Foundation, over the past decade, along with a plan to get it enacted by the people (not by the government) creating, for the first time, a government "by you, the people."
The "old democracy"? Hate to break it to you, but we're not a "democracy". We're a constitutional tripartite republic, which is something quite different than a simple democracy. Democracy leads to mob rule, where the rights of the minority are trampled in the process - 51% of the people dominate over the other 49%. Our republican form of government, when it's operating as designed, protects the rights of the minority - something that a democracy never does. So there is a significant difference.
No. Because the CTR has been surreptitiously co-opted. We want a return to the originally conceived CTR, with its checks and balances restored, NOT a pure democracy.
I'd love to be in america when all this kicks off. good luck with ...returning to the origionally conceived constitutional triparite republic with all your cheeks and balances restored in a way that is not a pure democracy...
heh, I got you way back the first time. I'll leave the needless pedantry to the you-know-what party.
This doesn't just have to take place in America either. No party or country has ownership of the fundamental principles of liberty. Those claiming ownership merely devalue the concept that they claim to defend.
This is all about self-determination. You don't need smancy-fancy words to understand that.
fuck off.....stop buying shit period! or the majority of humans will NEVER have a fulfilling life and will therefor NEVER truely live. stop buying shit!
That was not me. Continue on you're campaign to rid the world of consumerism on you're PC...Using Comcast..On Youtube..While living at you're stepdads...you dumbass.
People must make stuff in order to live and people must buy stuff in order for other people to live. If everyone stops buying, we have a depression. People are put out of work and don't have money. Obviously, there needs to be ways out and ways in. One possible transition is the National Initiative for Democracy.
"fuck off.....stop buying shit period! or the majority of humans will NEVER have a fulfilling life and will therefor NEVER truely live. stop buying shit!"
I hope Polis and Kiernan will succeed in winning their respective congressional elections and get the ni4d enacted so that things can be accomplished.
@gravel2008 Thank you for the information (I'm so glad that there are two congressional candidates supporting the ni4d who have a chance of winning). It gives me hope that I can have a voice in spite of the insanity of Obama/McCain.
I'm definitely joining the ni4O in 2014 (I'll be old enough to run for Congress in my district).
@ 0613162k I am not very enthusiastic about Nader because he's too selfish (he never bothered helping Gravel fund his campaign) and he only put the ni4d after receiving pressure from people. A real ni4d candidate would be an altruist. A Nader presidency wouldn't depress me because at least Nader is anti-war, but Nader is just trying to get votes. Gravel has taught me a lot, and I support Gravel's post-election projects. Jesse Johnson supports the ni4d and is more altruistic than Nader.
The only mentions of the NI4D I have seen in the Nader campaign are from responses to Gravel supporters on the subject and through attempts to get votes after the Libertarian convention. This is much bigger than anyone's candidacy, so I'd like to see a greater commitment to a broader audience rather than just Gravel supporters. It doesn't take a lot of courage to make vague references to the NI4D to please Gravel supporters. Gravel stuck to his principles even in the instances where it hurt him.
Also his only mention of Mike Gravel, the founder of the Democracy Foundation and Philadelphia II who has devoted his life to this cause, is in this single sentence of the whole description:
"Switzerland is rightly termed, by Senator Mike Gravel, "the greatest democratic republic" in the history of the world."
If he wants to be NI4O, he needs to take more initiative of his own towards enacting it. This is about about putting the message before yourself as a candidate like Gravel did.
I am referring to his issues page on votenader. org. It's good to see that he put it there, but I'd like to see more of a commitment to it. I already knew he was receptive to the idea, and I have been a bit puzzled by his silence since he formed his exploratory committee. I wrote to the campaign along with several people, but he never talked to Gravel while making his decision. I made a GraNade video along with other people and Gravel responded openly to Davis Fleetwood's video.
It's good that Nader put mention of the National Initiative after several Gravel supporters wrote to the campaign about it, but he doesn't even give a link to any of the National Initiative websites where you can read the text of the law and vote on it (NI4D. US OR VOTE. ORG) in his general description of the proposal. Also he doesn't mention Citizen Power which details the NI4D, which I find a bit curious since he wrote the foreward for it a while back before running for president.
I agree. I doubt it has anything to do with lack of commitment to the issue as it is complety consistent with his lifes work in citzen activism to push legislation through Congress in the people's interest not the corporate interst. The Nader campaign website is not very detailed, but they tend to operate more via youtube to state his position on Iran & wiretappingetc. E-mail the youtube team to ask for a merging of Nader & Gravel & campaign on informing people on Ni4D & the websites.
Vote Ralph Nader. The only Presidential candidate who joins Gravel in supporting implementation of Ni4D. He has always trusted citizen partcipation over the judgement of corporate corupted politicians.
Please read my comments if you support the NI4D and want an honest viewpoint from someone who supported Gravel's presidential candidacy. Maybe we can help each other. I continue to support Gravel's efforts even though he is no longer a presidential candidate. The issues he is raising are relevant to anyone who is fighting for justice against a corrupt system.
At this time, I'm only working on the ni4d because I want to make laws on the issues I deem vital. I support Kiernan and Polis in enacting the ni4d in order to improve human governance.
We have to remove money and political parties from politics. Then it may become a more honest profession if the goal is to solve problems. We must believe in ourselves ultimately in order to stop the insanity of the world. We have advanced in medicine, technology, but there has to be a reason why human governance is still stuck in the stone age.
Milke Gravel supporters support Ralph Nader. He is the only Presidential candidate remainig supporting Ni4D. Help petition to get him on your state ballot and into the Presidential debates.
A 2006 Pentagon study found that eighty percent of the Marines killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. More than 300 young Americans might still be alive today if the Pentagon had based its pre-war planning on facts instead of spin.
Even after it was clear that U.S. troops were fighting a widespread insurgency, Rumsfeld reassured a fawning press that resistance came from a small number of Baathist "dead-enders." While troops began hanging their crotch protectors under their arms to protect their sides, Rumsfeld did nothing to address the lack of body armor.
Military officials now say the Pentagon's extremely optimistic predictions about the stability of post-Saddam contributed to the failure to provide the troops with adequate body armor and vehicles that could withstand IEDs.
Chalabi's rosy prediction not only fooled the media, it also tragically blinded the Pentagon to the possibility of a post-Saddam insurgency. Instead of listening to General Eric Shinseki's warning that occupying a country the size of California would require several hundred thousands soldiers, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz sent an underpowered force that was able to oust Saddam's government but incapable of restoring order.
The embezzler/fugitive was a great salesman. In an appearance on ABC News, Chalabi, who hadn't lived in Iraq since the 1950s, promised that the Iraqi people would greet U.S. troops as liberators and offer little resistance. Cheney and other Administration officials soon began parroting Chalabi's optimistic prediction which rattled around the media echo chamber and became the conventional wisdom.
Yet the U.S. government gave Chalabi's anti-Saddam group $4.3 million in American taxpayers' money, which he immediately began to embezzle. In the lead up to war, the Pentagon gave Chalabi a whopping $100 million. What did the Pentagon get in exchange? Chalabi fed the White House, State Department, military intelligence, and the press any story that helped sell the case for war.
The Administration's campaign to convince Americans that Saddam had crossed the nuclear threshold depended on a thoroughly corrupt dissident for hire, Ahmed Chalabi. Since the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, the U.S. government paid Chalabi vast sums to lead a so-called Iraqi resistance group even though he had not lived in Iraq for four decades and was a fugitive from Jordan after being convicted of embezzling $70 million from a bank he founded.
On August 26, 2002, Dick Cheney admitted that proving Saddam had chemical or biological weapons might not be enough to scare Americans into launching a preemptive war on Iraq, "I am familiar with the arguments against taking action in the case of Saddam Hussein. Some concede that Saddam is evil, power-hungry, and a menace—but that, until he crosses the threshold of actually possessing nuclear weapons, we should rule out any preemptive action."
Two weeks after 9/11, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that just six percent of the American public thought that Saddam collaborated with Al Qaeda. Two years later, after hearing the Big Lie rattle around the echo chamber, sixty-nine percent of the American public believed Saddam helped the 9/11 terrorists. Talk about Mission Accomplished!
Cheney got away with deploying such unsubstantiated rumors and accusations because the press was not doing its job. Like Tim Russert, most of the media bowed down to Cheney, left his falsehoods unchecked, and echoed them. The result was nothing short of mass delusion.
Not only did Cheney ignore Havel's warning and continue repeating the story of the Prague meeting, but he also continued to deploy it even after the Times reported it to be false. Only after the 9/11 Commission officially refuted the story in 2004, did Cheney stop using the story.
On October 21, 2002, James Risen of the New York Times revealed in early 2002 that Czech president Vaclav Havel quietly revealed to the White House that there was no evidence of a meeting between Atta and Czech intelligence in Prague. Havel did not go public with the information because he did not want to embarrass Administration officials, like Cheney, who were aggressively pushing the story as fact.
Cheney was the master of an old propaganda tactic "The Big Lie," which Adolf Hitler defined in Mein Kampf as a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." The trick is to tell a lie big enough and often enough that people assume it must be true, despite the facts.
Russert could have challenged Cheney on any of his claims or demanded more specifics, but in the end he passively allowed Cheney to "leave it right where it's at" by pretending that he'd said too much already.
Russert then ended the interview allowing Cheney to dance around the question about a direct link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Cheney was surely relieved. He knew most of his claims came from suspect informants who were already being challenged by American intelligence agencies and foreign governments. Cheney was clearly throwing everything he had against the wall, hoping something would stick.
Cheney: "I can't. I'll leave it right where it's at. I don't want to go beyond that. I've tried to be cautious and restrained in my comments, and I hope that everybody will recognize that."
Cheney: "When they dug into that, though, he'd shot himself four times in the head. And speculation has been that, in fact somehow, the Iraqi government or Saddam Hussein had him eliminated to avoid potential embarrassment by virtue of the fact that he was in Baghdad and operated in Baghdad. So it's a very complex picture to try to sort out. And—"
We know that Saddam Hussein has, over the years, been one of the top state sponsors of terrorism for nearly twenty years. We've had this recent weird incident where the head of the Abu Nidal organization, one of the world's most noted terrorists, was killed in Baghdad. The announcement was made by the head of Iraqi intelligence. The initial announcement said he shot himself.
Cheney: "We know that Saddam Hussein has, over the years, been one of the top state sponsors of terrorism for nearly twenty years. We've had this recent weird incident where the head of the Abu Nidal organization, one of the world's most noted terrorists, was killed in Baghdad. The announcement was made by the head of Iraqi intelligence. The initial announcement said he shot himself."
Cheney: "There is, again, I want to separate out 9/11 from the other relationships between Iraq and the Al Qaeda organization. But there is a pattern of relationships going back many years. And in terms of exchanges and in terms of people, we've had recently since the operations in Afghanistan—we've seen Al Qaeda members operating physically in Iraq and off the territory of Iraq.
Russert then cut Cheney off. He could have asked Cheney to clarify the CIA's assessment of whether Atta met with Iraqi intelligence. But Russert wasn't interested in challenging Cheney or probing into the CIA's doubts. Instead he prompted the vice president for more on the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection, "Anything else?"
The CIA had already dismissed the story of a meeting between Atta and Saddam's intelligence agents in Prague, but Cheney presented it as fact. Cheney managed to both lie and evade the question when Russert asked, "What does the CIA say about that and the president?" Cheney answered, "It's credible. But, you know, I think a way to put it would be it's unconfirmed at this point. We've got—"
Cheney: "We've seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn't he there. Again, it's the intelligence business."
Cheney: "Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the other hand, and the Al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.
In the same interview Russert once again tried to coax Cheney to tie Saddam to 9/11, "Has anything changed [since Cheney's last appearance] in your mind?"
In the months after 9/11, everyone in the White House was talking tough (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even the miscast Ari Fleischer), and the press loved it. Russert seemed to have gotten into the trash-talking macho act.
It sounds like speculating about Saddam's 9/11 connections was precisely why Cheney was on Meet the Press that morning. And Russert was there to excitedly prompt Cheney through all his speculation about Saddam's connection with the anthrax letter. Russert even contributed his own anti-Saddam hyperbole asking about "wiping him off the face of the earth."
Cheney: "...It's the fact that we've also seen him in these other areas, in chemicals, but also especially in biological weapons, increase his capacity to produce and deliver these weapons upon his enemies."
Cheney: "But come back to 9/11 again, and one of the real concerns about Saddam Hussein, as well, is his biological weapons capability; the fact that he may, at some point, try to use smallpox, anthrax, plague, some other kind of biological agent against other nations, possibly including even the United States. So this is not just a one-dimensional threat. This just isn't a guy who's now back trying once again to build nuclear weapons.
Nine months later on September 8, 2002, days before the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Cheney again went on Meet the Press to connect Saddam with terrorism.
Russert then asked a "question" that supported Cheney's claims, "What we do know is that Iraq is harboring terrorists...that Abdul Ramini Yazen, who helped bomb the World Trade Center back in 1993, according to Louis Freeh, was hiding in his native Iraq.... If they're harboring terrorists, why not go in and get them?" Russert not only pushed the connection between Saddam and terrorists in the question, he enthusiastically suggested invading Iraq to "go in and get them."
Cheney continued, "Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point. But that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue."
Two months later, on December 9, 2001, Cheney chose Russert's show to voice for the first time evidence of a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection, "Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's been pretty well confirmed, that [Muhammad Atta] did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."
On the face of it, Russert was simply doing his job. A Saddam/Al Qaeda connection would have been important news, but there was much more to Russert's solicitous questioning. During the Scooter Libby trial, Cheney's Communications Director testified that when the vice president's office needed to do damage control over Libby's outing of Valerie Plame, "I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format."
The Administration did not start the public discussion of the Al Qaeda/Saddam connection. The media did. In this case, Tim Russert raised Saddam's possible links to 9/11 even when Dick Cheney unambiguously denied any evidence of such connections.
When Cheney appeared on Meet the Press five days after 9/11, Russert started with the discussion of an Al Qaeda/Saddam connection: "Saddam Hussein, your old friend, his government had this to say, 'The American cowboy is rearing the fruits of crime against humanity.' If we determine that Saddam Hussein is also harboring terrorists, and there's a track record there, would we have any reluctance of going after Saddam Hussein?"
Russert, the host of the longest running, highest-rated political talk show, acquired the reputation for being a hard-nosed interrogator of his guests. His supposed tenacity and jowly countenance led many in the echo chamber to call him a "bull dog," but an analysis of his spots with Dick Cheney during the lead-up to Iraq reveals Russert to be more of a lap dog than bulldog.
Chief of Staff Andrew Card acknowledged this PR campaign in an interview with the New York Times in September 2002. Card explained that although the Administration had a good case against Saddam that summer, it would have to wait until the fall because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." The anniversary of 9/11 that September provided a great moment for this product launch.
The group's work blurred the lines between marketing strategy and national security and between slogan and fact. Like any marketing campaign, every speech and talking point that came out of WHIG massaged the facts to sell the product. In this case the product was war.
Meeting weekly in the Situation Room, WHIG's regular participants were either communications specialists like Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and Scooter Libby or national security experts like Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen J. Hadley.
A senior official who participated in WHIG called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities." "Responsibilities" meant selling the Iraq War.
The White House understood how vulnerable the media was to manipulation. When they decided to invade Iraq in the summer 2002, a task force was formed called White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to "educate the public" about Saddam's threat.
Even without any evidence of such collaboration, the Administration could fudge things rhetorically. That's why they came up with the brand name "War on Terror." Saddam Hussein and many others could be guilty of terror even if they weren't terrorists. Ultimately the Administration didn't need credible evidence of Saddam/Al Qaeda alliance. They just needed a credulous media and an echo chamber that repeated the brand "War on Terror" and splashed it across American TV screens every night.
In order for the Bush Administration to channel the anger over 9/11 toward Saddam Hussein, they tried to find evidence of an alliance between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Rumsfeld gave his Undersecretary Douglas Feith responsibility for heading two Pentagon groups charged with drawing up talking points outlining the rumored ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Colin Powell received these crackpot memos and started privately referring to Feith's operation as the Gestapo.
Today, after five years of bloodshed in Iraq, one might expect Kristol would finally be dismissed as a charlatan. But in December 2007, the New York Times welcomed Kristol to its prestigious slate of regular columnists—another example of someone "failing his way to the top."
Even before the war turned into a disaster and all of Kristol's optimistic predictions turned out to be wrong, anyone who actually understood the complexities of the Middle East knew that he was delusional. A Western military occupation of Iraq was inevitably going to breed terrorism and chaos, not democracy and regional harmony.
Kristol was obviously a zealot and a neo-con ideologue, but the media treated him like a profound think and a journalist who possessed a well-informed, nuanced view of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Debates over an Iraqi constitution reveal "the willingness on the part of the diverse ethnic and religious groups to disagree—peacefully and then to compromise" (March 22, 2004). "It is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same or improved in either case. Republicans will benefit from being the party of victory" (November 30, 2005).
"I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq" (March 5, 2003). "There has been a certain amount of pop sociology...that the Shiia can't get along with the Sunni...there's almost no evidence of that at all" (April 4, 2003). "The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably" (April 28, 2003).
He was also always ready to offer reassuring predictions of war's impending success: "[The war in Iraq] could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East" (September 18, 2002). Removing Saddam "would start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy" (November 21, 2001). "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president" (March 1, 2003).
When the Administration launched its campaign for war on Iraq in the fall of 2002, the media hailed Kristol as the "intellectual architect" of Bush's policy of using the military to spread democracy in the Middle East. Kristol went on the talk show circuit pushing the same rumors and faulty intelligence that the Administration was simultaneously peddling.
Richard Clarke, head of counter terrorism under Clinton and Bush, was baffled by all the talk about Iraq during meetings on 9/11. Clarke knew Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq. But Don Rumsfeld saw 9/11 as an opportunity to fulfill PNAC plans. When Pentagon intelligence agents reported back to him that there were no ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld sent them back to look again.
A day after 9/11, PNAC members Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and his undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz began planning military operations against Iraq.
The PNAC report conceded that its plan for world domination would take decades "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." On September 11, 2001, Kristol and the neo-cons got their wish.
The report called for unprecedented hikes in military spending, a proliferation of military bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, toppling of resistant governments, scraping international treaties, controlling the world's energy sources, militarization of outer space, dominance over cyberspace, and the possible use of nuclear weapons on anyone who opposed hegemony. Quite a tall order, unless....
In September 2000, the PNAC issued a blueprint for a Pax Americana called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century."
In 1997, Kristol leveraged his reputation as a big thinker to form a conservative think tank called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). His idea was to bring together "great minds" like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz to concoct plans for a new world order in which the United States would use its vast technological and financial advantage over the rest of the world to secure control over the planet's natural resources—meaning oil.
In the brain-dead of American mainstream media, William Kristol is considered an intellectual. If he had been the son of "Joe Pickup Truck" instead of Irving Kristol, he would be just another neo-con whacko. The media began fawning over William Kristol in the 1980s when he was writing speeches for that intellectual giant Dan Quayle. He penned Quayle's absurd denunciation of TV's single mom Murphy Brown as a symptom of the permissive society.
Fast forward to the 2008 presidential election campaign where Bill Clinton tries to counter Barack Obama's opposition to Bush's invasion of Iraq by claiming he also opposed it back in 2003. Not only is this false (Clinton vocally and enthusiastically supported Bush's war), but Clinton started the war on Saddam Hussein. George Bush just escalated the war with an outright invasion.
Even before the Bush Administration began to sell the war, a September 2001 Washington Post poll found thirty-nine percent of respondents thought overthrowing Saddam must be done "even if he is not linked to the 9/11 attacks," and that was before the Bush PR machine kicked into gear.
By the time Bush began his own marketing campaign for an invasion of Iraq, a compliant, lazy media and an ignorant public had already signed on to war with Iraq—a war that Americans had been tacitly supporting without discourse, debate, or dissent since the Clinton administration.
Had the media conducted a genuine exploration of Clinton's policies, the public would have had to look war in the face and accept responsibility for its brutal consequences. The echo chamber's silence on the morality of Clinton's Iraq War insulated Americans from reality and kept them oblivious like a bunch of children.
When the television media did cover the story, they simply ran video of the cruise missiles being shot from ships thousands of miles out to sea or jets lifting off from bases in Kuwait. The media filtered images of blown up Iraqis and let the American public off the hook of grappling with the consequences of these bombing operations. Americans also did not see the effects of the sanctions on the sick in Iraqi hospitals that had no medicines.
Clinton's war on Iraq was cowardly, not because it was done with cruise missiles and other weapons designed to avoid American casualties (the military should always employ technology to limit casualties); Clinton's war on Iraq was cowardly because the media spared the American public from having to grapple with the horror their leaders inflicted on innocent people.
Coalition forces bombed Iraq on more than 100 days in 1999, sometimes making several bombing runs per day. In the first three months of 1999, U.S.-led forces hit Iraq with 241,000 pounds of bombs—just shy of the 253,000 pounds George Bush dropped in the eight months leading up to the final U.N. resolution authorizing his war on Iraq.
Over Bill Clinton's final three years in office, the U.S. and Great Britain dropped 1.3 million pounds of bombs in response to violations of the no-fly zones and anti-aircraft fire. In a January 1999 attack, twenty-five missiles hammered Iraq and killed an unknown number of civilians. Clinton said the attack was in response to four Iraqi planes violating the no-fly zones.
Surely Bill Clinton knew a military confrontation with Iraq would provide the media with a distraction from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He also understood that the American public would reflexively rally around him just at the moment when the Republican Congress was set to impeach him.
Former chief U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter claimed in his book, War on Iraq, "Inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis." Why might Clinton want to provoke Saddam?
Saddam Hussein, along with much of the international community, was aware of this CIA operation and understandably refused to tolerate covert U.S. intelligence operations in his country. By authorizing the CIA infiltration, Clinton sabotaged the inspections and then lied to the public about why the Iraqi dictator refused to allow the U.N. inspections to proceed.
Saddam would have continued to allow the U.N. inspectors to perform their investigations had Bill Clinton not infiltrated the U.N. inspection teams with CIA agents.
The echo chamber dismissed this possibility and parroted Clinton's justification for the bombing operation—punishment for Saddam's interference with the U.N.'s weapons inspection. The reality, however, was a lot more complicated than what the media chose to report. Throughout the 1990s, U.N. inspectors had successfully tracked down whatever weapons remained after Saddam destroyed most of his stockpiles in compliance with U.N. mandates.
The day before Congress voted to impeach Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal in December 1998, Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets. Immediately there were suggestions that Clinton was engaging in a "Wag the Dog" media stunt to distract the public from his sex scandal.
Seven years later, Bill Clinton committed the U.S. to ousting Saddam. The news media coverage of this momentous change was light and whatever discussion arose was overwhelmingly favorable. Why so little debate? In the fall of 1998, the media and the public were much more interested in Bill Clinton's Oval Office fling with Monica Lewinsky.
Back in 1991 when George H. W. Bush called an end to the first Gulf War, he and his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney explained that removing Saddam would necessitate a long military occupation and unleash uncontrollable forces that would destabilize the region.
Under the terms of the Iraq Liberation Act, he U.S. became officially committed to ousting Saddam: "It is the sense of the Congress that once the Saddam Hussein regime is removed from power in Iraq, the United States should support Iraq's transition to democracy." The House passed the act, 360 to 38; the Senate approved it unanimously. In 2002, George W. Bush repeatedly mentioned this Clinton-backed act as justification for his plans to invade Iraq.
By officially labeling Saddam a war criminal, Bill Clinton eliminated any opportunity for diplomatic negotiation and compromise. Saddam knew he would still be a criminal no matter what he did according to American and international law. There could be no peaceful coexistence between the United States and Saddam Hussein.
The act also authorized Clinton to call upon the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal to indict, prosecute, and imprison Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials "who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law."
The Liberation Act authorized Clinton to assist dissident groups by funding anti-Saddam radio and television broadcasts, training anti-Saddam paramilitary forces, and aiding Saddam's political opponents including the corrupt Ahmed Chalabi.
Clinton also set the U.S. on the road to eventually invading Iraq by supporting the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which placed into law the policy of "regime change." The act stated, "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."
Throughout his two terms, Clinton enforced the no-fly zones by pounding Iraq with America's longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. During this period, the media devoted virtually no attention to what was really going on in Iraq. As usual the mainstream media rallied around the Commander in Chief during this international confrontation—no matter how senseless and cruel the policy actually was.
Bill Clinton is responsible for more Iraqi deaths than George Bush. During his administration, Clinton maintained a murderous sanctions policy on Iraq that resulted in the deaths of at least half a million Iraqi children. He also started bombing Iraq shortly after taking office in 1993 and never stopped.
These books blame the obvious culprits: George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove. However, there are other important culprits in the media echo chamber and government who are also guilty of leading America into the Iraq fiasco.
Now that the Iraq War has killed 4,000 Americans and 150,000 Iraqis, there have been many fine books critiquing the media for allowing Bush to sell the war. Most noteworthy is Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold, aptly subtitled The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America.
Had the media done its job in the after 9/11 and exposed the American intelligence community's failures leading up to the attacks, along with the Bush Administration's lies, the public might have been more skeptical toward the neo-con case for war on Iraq. In the leading up to the Iraq War, the media once again echoed he Administration's storyline, and the American public embraced a war that was unnecessary and disastrous.
The Congress, held hostage by energy-related special interests, may find it impossible to act in a timely way on the environmental threat. If the American voters are empowered as lawmakers, they certainly would establish a carbon tax and aggressively pursue much of the above programs. After all, they are the ones to suffer the consequences.
"The looming peak in global production of conventional crude oil is being played out against the backdrop of two other potentially destabilizing forces: the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and around the world and increased warming of the Earth's climate from the burning of fossil fuels. The synergistic effects of each of these phenomena on the others will be critical in determining the prospects for human civilization in the coming century."
There is no ecosystem that is safe from our exploitation and despoliation. If we cannot touch them directly, we certainly disrupt them through our waste disposal on land and in the sea.
IN CONCLUDING, one may reflect upon the preceding paragraphs and wonder if I have articulated an energy policy or an environmental policy. The answer is the two are inextricably intertwined. Such has not always been the case. Nature could renew here resources faster than man could exploit them, prior to industrialization. But with the advent of the atomic era, man has shown and is now proving that he can thwart the best efforts of nature to ensure the livability of our planet.
Use of lunar and other non-terrestrial resources. Our moon has abundant supplies of most materials required to construct facilities and human habitats in space.
Delivery of power at competitive costs, including to the currently poorly served in developing countries.
Most importantly, if the media seriously examined the contradictions between what the White House officials said about 9/11 and the Commission report, they would have had to question the veracity of the same officials who got us into the Iraq War. After two years of going along with the Administration's lies and spin about Iraq, the media would have had to examine their own failures. And there were plenty.
Rather than pursue questions about Bush's veracity about 9/11, the press was feeding off lies about John Kerry not deserving the medals he'd won as a captain of a swift boat in Vietnam. In an attempt to appear "fair and balanced," the national press bent over backwards and lost their balance.
The U.S. has been the leader in space-related development from the time of President Kennedy. It is time to exercise space leadership again. I call on the U.S. to lead a global space development effort to deploy working space-based solar energy systems by 2020 that deliver significant power to user nations and that provide the following:
Low-cost launch, including consideration of space elevators and other advanced technology.
To open this line of questioning less than five months before Americans went to the polls would generate accusations of playing politics. Many Americans would have read a sustained reporting of three-year-old Bush Administration lies as a partisan hit job.
Pursuing the story about the Administration's false statements about 9/11 would have meant calling into question Bush's honesty in the middle of an election campaign. A media storm on this story may have turned the tide in favor of John Kerry, but the mainstream media prides itself in its supposed non-partisanship.
By the summer of 2004, the most influential journalists had moved on to more immediate storylines like the souring war in Iraq and the contentious presidential election. Also the media owned the original storyline that "no one could have imagined 9/11." The fact that the 9/11 report contradicted the original storyline meant that the media would have to revise their initial reporting and admit that they blew the biggest story since Pearl Harbor.
thanks mike!
willtrib 2 years ago
This has been flagged as spam show
willtrib 2 years ago
Let's do it ! Beats the lies we have now.
byrd34mick 3 years ago
Until they stop growing epsilon semi-morons things will continue to decay.
SlaveStorm 3 years ago
Thomas Knapp is running for Congress in Missouri (on the Libertarian and Boston Tea Party tickets) and he supports the Ni4D. He's also running for the vice presidency as a member of the Boston Tea Party.
jandrewmurphy 3 years ago 2
very informative site (the link you posted)
The National Initiative for Democracy is a proposed law developed by The Democracy Foundation, over the past decade, along with a plan to get it enacted by the people (not by the government) creating, for the first time, a government "by you, the people."
NaderGonzalez2008 3 years ago 4
That video was epic.
choosenow 3 years ago
Now I wish I lived in Michigan or Colorado. :(
But I do have relatives in Michigan!
LittleRachael 3 years ago
I'd love to be in america when this all kicks off. good luck with ...overthrowing the old democracy? I think that's it. we need some of that :P
SamdeSquirell 3 years ago
The "old democracy"? Hate to break it to you, but we're not a "democracy". We're a constitutional tripartite republic, which is something quite different than a simple democracy. Democracy leads to mob rule, where the rights of the minority are trampled in the process - 51% of the people dominate over the other 49%. Our republican form of government, when it's operating as designed, protects the rights of the minority - something that a democracy never does. So there is a significant difference.
daisym555 3 years ago
...wow, my bad.
I'd love to be in america when all this kicks off. good luck with ...overthrowing the old CONSTITUTIONAL TRIPARITE REPUBLIC. happy now?
SamdeSquirell 3 years ago 2
No. Because the CTR has been surreptitiously co-opted. We want a return to the originally conceived CTR, with its checks and balances restored, NOT a pure democracy.
daisym555 3 years ago
ok... one more time? thank you
I'd love to be in america when all this kicks off. good luck with ...returning to the origionally conceived constitutional triparite republic with all your cheeks and balances restored in a way that is not a pure democracy...
I feel too politicy
SamdeSquirell 3 years ago
heh, I got you way back the first time. I'll leave the needless pedantry to the you-know-what party.
This doesn't just have to take place in America either. No party or country has ownership of the fundamental principles of liberty. Those claiming ownership merely devalue the concept that they claim to defend.
This is all about self-determination. You don't need smancy-fancy words to understand that.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
?
I thought switzerland had something simalour to NI4D
SamdeSquirell 3 years ago
Yeah, it does. I think that supports the point I was trying to make. I was poking a bit at the LP (and jingoism in general).
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
oh, all's well and good :P
SamdeSquirell 3 years ago
tripyyyy
curlyfry1106 3 years ago
BOYCOTT Budweiser Beer!!! They just sold out the American worker to Belgium
onerpone 3 years ago 3
VOTE FOR THE NATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR DEMOCRACY!!!
Your vote COUNTS there more than in any other election!
ni4d(dot)us
vote(dot)org
citizen-power(dot)us
nationalinitiative(dot)us
VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! NOW!!!!
"FREEDOM IS PARTICIPATION IN POWER" - Cicero
NatureLegalized 3 years ago
Spread the word about the National Initiative!
mistaspot1 3 years ago
Everybody become politicians!
mistaspot1 3 years ago 2
what a bullshit
ChicoCuts 3 years ago
FISA~Another Good Reason To Enact The NI4D, PEOPLE!!!
watch?v=Pa9ujJhUATk
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
1100 or so view, 1100 comments. WTF?
daveyork0 3 years ago
fuck off.....stop buying shit period! or the majority of humans will NEVER have a fulfilling life and will therefor NEVER truely live. stop buying shit!
RubiconJohn 3 years ago
I like how you're typing this from a computer. LOLOLOL Dumbass
windex72 3 years ago
mmm yes, now thumbdown my comment you ignorant little man.
RubiconJohn 3 years ago
That was not me. Continue on you're campaign to rid the world of consumerism on you're PC...Using Comcast..On Youtube..While living at you're stepdads...you dumbass.
windex72 3 years ago
People must make stuff in order to live and people must buy stuff in order for other people to live. If everyone stops buying, we have a depression. People are put out of work and don't have money. Obviously, there needs to be ways out and ways in. One possible transition is the National Initiative for Democracy.
gravelin08 3 years ago
"fuck off.....stop buying shit period! or the majority of humans will NEVER have a fulfilling life and will therefor NEVER truely live. stop buying shit!"
How Aristotelean...and true.
uncreativejackass 3 years ago
Barack obama is brown because he is full of shit.
johncantees 3 years ago
Ahhhhh-deeeah!
BobForehead 3 years ago
I hope Polis and Kiernan will succeed in winning their respective congressional elections and get the ni4d enacted so that things can be accomplished.
katuru1 3 years ago
It's looking more and more like Polis will win his race, and Kiernan is working harder than anyone I know of.
We may just have two congresspeople supportive of NI4D next session.
gravel2008 3 years ago
cool
brainpuppy 3 years ago
@gravel2008 Thank you for the information (I'm so glad that there are two congressional candidates supporting the ni4d who have a chance of winning). It gives me hope that I can have a voice in spite of the insanity of Obama/McCain.
I'm definitely joining the ni4O in 2014 (I'll be old enough to run for Congress in my district).
katuru1 3 years ago
@ 0613162k I am not very enthusiastic about Nader because he's too selfish (he never bothered helping Gravel fund his campaign) and he only put the ni4d after receiving pressure from people. A real ni4d candidate would be an altruist. A Nader presidency wouldn't depress me because at least Nader is anti-war, but Nader is just trying to get votes. Gravel has taught me a lot, and I support Gravel's post-election projects. Jesse Johnson supports the ni4d and is more altruistic than Nader.
katuru1 3 years ago
The only mentions of the NI4D I have seen in the Nader campaign are from responses to Gravel supporters on the subject and through attempts to get votes after the Libertarian convention. This is much bigger than anyone's candidacy, so I'd like to see a greater commitment to a broader audience rather than just Gravel supporters. It doesn't take a lot of courage to make vague references to the NI4D to please Gravel supporters. Gravel stuck to his principles even in the instances where it hurt him.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Great Vid, Power to the People
RedStarRevolver26 3 years ago
excellent video!
rx2008 3 years ago
Also his only mention of Mike Gravel, the founder of the Democracy Foundation and Philadelphia II who has devoted his life to this cause, is in this single sentence of the whole description:
"Switzerland is rightly termed, by Senator Mike Gravel, "the greatest democratic republic" in the history of the world."
If he wants to be NI4O, he needs to take more initiative of his own towards enacting it. This is about about putting the message before yourself as a candidate like Gravel did.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
I am referring to his issues page on votenader. org. It's good to see that he put it there, but I'd like to see more of a commitment to it. I already knew he was receptive to the idea, and I have been a bit puzzled by his silence since he formed his exploratory committee. I wrote to the campaign along with several people, but he never talked to Gravel while making his decision. I made a GraNade video along with other people and Gravel responded openly to Davis Fleetwood's video.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
It's good that Nader put mention of the National Initiative after several Gravel supporters wrote to the campaign about it, but he doesn't even give a link to any of the National Initiative websites where you can read the text of the law and vote on it (NI4D. US OR VOTE. ORG) in his general description of the proposal. Also he doesn't mention Citizen Power which details the NI4D, which I find a bit curious since he wrote the foreward for it a while back before running for president.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
I agree. I doubt it has anything to do with lack of commitment to the issue as it is complety consistent with his lifes work in citzen activism to push legislation through Congress in the people's interest not the corporate interst. The Nader campaign website is not very detailed, but they tend to operate more via youtube to state his position on Iran & wiretappingetc. E-mail the youtube team to ask for a merging of Nader & Gravel & campaign on informing people on Ni4D & the websites.
0613162k 3 years ago
Vote Ralph Nader. The only Presidential candidate who joins Gravel in supporting implementation of Ni4D. He has always trusted citizen partcipation over the judgement of corporate corupted politicians.
0613162k 3 years ago
Please read my comments if you support the NI4D and want an honest viewpoint from someone who supported Gravel's presidential candidacy. Maybe we can help each other. I continue to support Gravel's efforts even though he is no longer a presidential candidate. The issues he is raising are relevant to anyone who is fighting for justice against a corrupt system.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
In the presidential sphere, Ralph Nader supports the NI4D as well.
Antigen07 3 years ago 2
A lot of comments...Go Gravel!
Indecisive0As0Always 3 years ago
Thanks, James!!!!!
Keep in touch!
L&G
themorningshowlive 3 years ago
Great Video
Vote YES on the NI4D
wentrikin 3 years ago
At this time, I'm only working on the ni4d because I want to make laws on the issues I deem vital. I support Kiernan and Polis in enacting the ni4d in order to improve human governance.
I want some control in the future of my country.
katuru1 3 years ago
Vote Ralph Nader. The only Presidential candidate remaining that supports Ni4D.
0613162k 3 years ago
We have to remove money and political parties from politics. Then it may become a more honest profession if the goal is to solve problems. We must believe in ourselves ultimately in order to stop the insanity of the world. We have advanced in medicine, technology, but there has to be a reason why human governance is still stuck in the stone age.
katuru1 3 years ago
Why don't you fit in?
Because you're integerous, thats enough not to fit in in politics
politician may not be the worlds olderst profession but the results are the same
RevolutionaryJam 3 years ago
GRAvel for PRESEdent OR in the Futer fx2008 Ralf not sure what ure second name islol!
jkty776 3 years ago
Milke Gravel supporters support Ralph Nader. He is the only Presidential candidate remainig supporting Ni4D. Help petition to get him on your state ballot and into the Presidential debates.
0613162k 3 years ago
This is great. Congressional candidates who support the ni4d will save us from the insanity of Obama/McCain.
katuru1 3 years ago
Support Independent Ralph Nader. He joins Gravel in support of implementing Ni4D.
0613162k 3 years ago
sweet. at least 2 candidates for office this year support the National Initiative.
Whoo69 3 years ago
Most people want change, but most of them are too afraid to stand up for it.
Lucidtomr 3 years ago
A 2006 Pentagon study found that eighty percent of the Marines killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. More than 300 young Americans might still be alive today if the Pentagon had based its pre-war planning on facts instead of spin.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago 2
Even after it was clear that U.S. troops were fighting a widespread insurgency, Rumsfeld reassured a fawning press that resistance came from a small number of Baathist "dead-enders." While troops began hanging their crotch protectors under their arms to protect their sides, Rumsfeld did nothing to address the lack of body armor.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago 2
Military officials now say the Pentagon's extremely optimistic predictions about the stability of post-Saddam contributed to the failure to provide the troops with adequate body armor and vehicles that could withstand IEDs.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago 2
Chalabi's rosy prediction not only fooled the media, it also tragically blinded the Pentagon to the possibility of a post-Saddam insurgency. Instead of listening to General Eric Shinseki's warning that occupying a country the size of California would require several hundred thousands soldiers, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz sent an underpowered force that was able to oust Saddam's government but incapable of restoring order.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago 2
The embezzler/fugitive was a great salesman. In an appearance on ABC News, Chalabi, who hadn't lived in Iraq since the 1950s, promised that the Iraqi people would greet U.S. troops as liberators and offer little resistance. Cheney and other Administration officials soon began parroting Chalabi's optimistic prediction which rattled around the media echo chamber and became the conventional wisdom.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago 2
Yet the U.S. government gave Chalabi's anti-Saddam group $4.3 million in American taxpayers' money, which he immediately began to embezzle. In the lead up to war, the Pentagon gave Chalabi a whopping $100 million. What did the Pentagon get in exchange? Chalabi fed the White House, State Department, military intelligence, and the press any story that helped sell the case for war.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Administration's campaign to convince Americans that Saddam had crossed the nuclear threshold depended on a thoroughly corrupt dissident for hire, Ahmed Chalabi. Since the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, the U.S. government paid Chalabi vast sums to lead a so-called Iraqi resistance group even though he had not lived in Iraq for four decades and was a fugitive from Jordan after being convicted of embezzling $70 million from a bank he founded.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney was right, most Americans would have tolerated an Iraq with chemical or biological WMDs. But a nuclear bomb was another story.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
On August 26, 2002, Dick Cheney admitted that proving Saddam had chemical or biological weapons might not be enough to scare Americans into launching a preemptive war on Iraq, "I am familiar with the arguments against taking action in the case of Saddam Hussein. Some concede that Saddam is evil, power-hungry, and a menace—but that, until he crosses the threshold of actually possessing nuclear weapons, we should rule out any preemptive action."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Ahmed Chalabi: Dissident for Hire
Iraq's alleged nuclear program was the other Big Lie that convinced a majority of Americans to support the war.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Two weeks after 9/11, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that just six percent of the American public thought that Saddam collaborated with Al Qaeda. Two years later, after hearing the Big Lie rattle around the echo chamber, sixty-nine percent of the American public believed Saddam helped the 9/11 terrorists. Talk about Mission Accomplished!
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney got away with deploying such unsubstantiated rumors and accusations because the press was not doing its job. Like Tim Russert, most of the media bowed down to Cheney, left his falsehoods unchecked, and echoed them. The result was nothing short of mass delusion.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Not only did Cheney ignore Havel's warning and continue repeating the story of the Prague meeting, but he also continued to deploy it even after the Times reported it to be false. Only after the 9/11 Commission officially refuted the story in 2004, did Cheney stop using the story.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
On October 21, 2002, James Risen of the New York Times revealed in early 2002 that Czech president Vaclav Havel quietly revealed to the White House that there was no evidence of a meeting between Atta and Czech intelligence in Prague. Havel did not go public with the information because he did not want to embarrass Administration officials, like Cheney, who were aggressively pushing the story as fact.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Dick Cheney's Big Lie
Cheney was the master of an old propaganda tactic "The Big Lie," which Adolf Hitler defined in Mein Kampf as a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." The trick is to tell a lie big enough and often enough that people assume it must be true, despite the facts.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert could have challenged Cheney on any of his claims or demanded more specifics, but in the end he passively allowed Cheney to "leave it right where it's at" by pretending that he'd said too much already.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert then ended the interview allowing Cheney to dance around the question about a direct link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Cheney was surely relieved. He knew most of his claims came from suspect informants who were already being challenged by American intelligence agencies and foreign governments. Cheney was clearly throwing everything he had against the wall, hoping something would stick.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert: "But no direct link?"
Cheney: "I can't. I'll leave it right where it's at. I don't want to go beyond that. I've tried to be cautious and restrained in my comments, and I hope that everybody will recognize that."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney: "When they dug into that, though, he'd shot himself four times in the head. And speculation has been that, in fact somehow, the Iraqi government or Saddam Hussein had him eliminated to avoid potential embarrassment by virtue of the fact that he was in Baghdad and operated in Baghdad. So it's a very complex picture to try to sort out. And—"
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
We know that Saddam Hussein has, over the years, been one of the top state sponsors of terrorism for nearly twenty years. We've had this recent weird incident where the head of the Abu Nidal organization, one of the world's most noted terrorists, was killed in Baghdad. The announcement was made by the head of Iraqi intelligence. The initial announcement said he shot himself.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
(quoted)
Cheney: "We know that Saddam Hussein has, over the years, been one of the top state sponsors of terrorism for nearly twenty years. We've had this recent weird incident where the head of the Abu Nidal organization, one of the world's most noted terrorists, was killed in Baghdad. The announcement was made by the head of Iraqi intelligence. The initial announcement said he shot himself."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney: "There is, again, I want to separate out 9/11 from the other relationships between Iraq and the Al Qaeda organization. But there is a pattern of relationships going back many years. And in terms of exchanges and in terms of people, we've had recently since the operations in Afghanistan—we've seen Al Qaeda members operating physically in Iraq and off the territory of Iraq.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert then cut Cheney off. He could have asked Cheney to clarify the CIA's assessment of whether Atta met with Iraqi intelligence. But Russert wasn't interested in challenging Cheney or probing into the CIA's doubts. Instead he prompted the vice president for more on the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection, "Anything else?"
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The CIA had already dismissed the story of a meeting between Atta and Saddam's intelligence agents in Prague, but Cheney presented it as fact. Cheney managed to both lie and evade the question when Russert asked, "What does the CIA say about that and the president?" Cheney answered, "It's credible. But, you know, I think a way to put it would be it's unconfirmed at this point. We've got—"
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney: "We've seen in connection with the hijackers, of course, Mohammed Atta, who was the lead hijacker, did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center. The debates about, you know, was he there or wasn't he there. Again, it's the intelligence business."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney: "Well, I want to be very careful about how I say this. I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. I can't say that. On the other hand, since we did that interview, new information has come to light. And we spent time looking at that relationship between Iraq, on the other hand, and the Al Qaeda organization on the other. And there has been reporting that suggests that there have been a number of contacts over the years.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In the same interview Russert once again tried to coax Cheney to tie Saddam to 9/11, "Has anything changed [since Cheney's last appearance] in your mind?"
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In the months after 9/11, everyone in the White House was talking tough (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and even the miscast Ari Fleischer), and the press loved it. Russert seemed to have gotten into the trash-talking macho act.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
It sounds like speculating about Saddam's 9/11 connections was precisely why Cheney was on Meet the Press that morning. And Russert was there to excitedly prompt Cheney through all his speculation about Saddam's connection with the anthrax letter. Russert even contributed his own anti-Saddam hyperbole asking about "wiping him off the face of the earth."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert: "But if he ever did that, would we not wipe him off the face of the earth?"
Cheney: "Who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim? We don't know."
Russert: "Could it have been Saddam?"
Cheney: "I don't know. I don't know who did it. I'm not here today to speculate on or to suggest that he did."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney: "...It's the fact that we've also seen him in these other areas, in chemicals, but also especially in biological weapons, increase his capacity to produce and deliver these weapons upon his enemies."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
MIKE GRAVEL = HERO
mistaspot1 3 years ago
Cheney: "But come back to 9/11 again, and one of the real concerns about Saddam Hussein, as well, is his biological weapons capability; the fact that he may, at some point, try to use smallpox, anthrax, plague, some other kind of biological agent against other nations, possibly including even the United States. So this is not just a one-dimensional threat. This just isn't a guy who's now back trying once again to build nuclear weapons.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Nine months later on September 8, 2002, days before the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Cheney again went on Meet the Press to connect Saddam with terrorism.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert then asked a "question" that supported Cheney's claims, "What we do know is that Iraq is harboring terrorists...that Abdul Ramini Yazen, who helped bomb the World Trade Center back in 1993, according to Louis Freeh, was hiding in his native Iraq.... If they're harboring terrorists, why not go in and get them?" Russert not only pushed the connection between Saddam and terrorists in the question, he enthusiastically suggested invading Iraq to "go in and get them."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Cheney continued, "Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point. But that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Two months later, on December 9, 2001, Cheney chose Russert's show to voice for the first time evidence of a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection, "Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's been pretty well confirmed, that [Muhammad Atta] did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Meet the Press was Cheney's "best format" because Russert was a hawk on Iraq from the very beginning. Cheney knew that.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
On the face of it, Russert was simply doing his job. A Saddam/Al Qaeda connection would have been important news, but there was much more to Russert's solicitous questioning. During the Scooter Libby trial, Cheney's Communications Director testified that when the vice president's office needed to do damage control over Libby's outing of Valerie Plame, "I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Administration did not start the public discussion of the Al Qaeda/Saddam connection. The media did. In this case, Tim Russert raised Saddam's possible links to 9/11 even when Dick Cheney unambiguously denied any evidence of such connections.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert then pestered Cheney on the supposed Al Qaeda/Saddam connection, "Do we have evidence that he's harboring terrorists?"
Cheney admitted, "There have been some activities related to terrorism by Saddam Hussein." But he insisted, "At this stage the focus is on Al Qaeda."
Russert kept pressing, "Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?"
Cheney responded with an unambiguous "No."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
When Cheney appeared on Meet the Press five days after 9/11, Russert started with the discussion of an Al Qaeda/Saddam connection: "Saddam Hussein, your old friend, his government had this to say, 'The American cowboy is rearing the fruits of crime against humanity.' If we determine that Saddam Hussein is also harboring terrorists, and there's a track record there, would we have any reluctance of going after Saddam Hussein?"
Dick Cheney replied, "No."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Russert, the host of the longest running, highest-rated political talk show, acquired the reputation for being a hard-nosed interrogator of his guests. His supposed tenacity and jowly countenance led many in the echo chamber to call him a "bull dog," but an analysis of his spots with Dick Cheney during the lead-up to Iraq reveals Russert to be more of a lap dog than bulldog.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
"Beat the Press" with Tim Russert
No member of the media bears greater responsibility for helping the Administration sell the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection than Tim Russert.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Chief of Staff Andrew Card acknowledged this PR campaign in an interview with the New York Times in September 2002. Card explained that although the Administration had a good case against Saddam that summer, it would have to wait until the fall because "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." The anniversary of 9/11 that September provided a great moment for this product launch.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The group's work blurred the lines between marketing strategy and national security and between slogan and fact. Like any marketing campaign, every speech and talking point that came out of WHIG massaged the facts to sell the product. In this case the product was war.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Meeting weekly in the Situation Room, WHIG's regular participants were either communications specialists like Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, and Scooter Libby or national security experts like Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen J. Hadley.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
A senior official who participated in WHIG called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities." "Responsibilities" meant selling the Iraq War.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Marketing the War
The White House understood how vulnerable the media was to manipulation. When they decided to invade Iraq in the summer 2002, a task force was formed called White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to "educate the public" about Saddam's threat.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Even without any evidence of such collaboration, the Administration could fudge things rhetorically. That's why they came up with the brand name "War on Terror." Saddam Hussein and many others could be guilty of terror even if they weren't terrorists. Ultimately the Administration didn't need credible evidence of Saddam/Al Qaeda alliance. They just needed a credulous media and an echo chamber that repeated the brand "War on Terror" and splashed it across American TV screens every night.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Branding the "War on Terror"
In order for the Bush Administration to channel the anger over 9/11 toward Saddam Hussein, they tried to find evidence of an alliance between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Rumsfeld gave his Undersecretary Douglas Feith responsibility for heading two Pentagon groups charged with drawing up talking points outlining the rumored ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Colin Powell received these crackpot memos and started privately referring to Feith's operation as the Gestapo.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Today, after five years of bloodshed in Iraq, one might expect Kristol would finally be dismissed as a charlatan. But in December 2007, the New York Times welcomed Kristol to its prestigious slate of regular columnists—another example of someone "failing his way to the top."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Even before the war turned into a disaster and all of Kristol's optimistic predictions turned out to be wrong, anyone who actually understood the complexities of the Middle East knew that he was delusional. A Western military occupation of Iraq was inevitably going to breed terrorism and chaos, not democracy and regional harmony.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Kristol was obviously a zealot and a neo-con ideologue, but the media treated him like a profound think and a journalist who possessed a well-informed, nuanced view of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Debates over an Iraqi constitution reveal "the willingness on the part of the diverse ethnic and religious groups to disagree—peacefully and then to compromise" (March 22, 2004). "It is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same or improved in either case. Republicans will benefit from being the party of victory" (November 30, 2005).
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
"I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq" (March 5, 2003). "There has been a certain amount of pop sociology...that the Shiia can't get along with the Sunni...there's almost no evidence of that at all" (April 4, 2003). "The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably" (April 28, 2003).
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
He was also always ready to offer reassuring predictions of war's impending success: "[The war in Iraq] could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East" (September 18, 2002). Removing Saddam "would start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy" (November 21, 2001). "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president" (March 1, 2003).
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
When the Administration launched its campaign for war on Iraq in the fall of 2002, the media hailed Kristol as the "intellectual architect" of Bush's policy of using the military to spread democracy in the Middle East. Kristol went on the talk show circuit pushing the same rumors and faulty intelligence that the Administration was simultaneously peddling.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Richard Clarke, head of counter terrorism under Clinton and Bush, was baffled by all the talk about Iraq during meetings on 9/11. Clarke knew Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq. But Don Rumsfeld saw 9/11 as an opportunity to fulfill PNAC plans. When Pentagon intelligence agents reported back to him that there were no ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld sent them back to look again.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
9/11: The New Pearl Harbor
A day after 9/11, PNAC members Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and his undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz began planning military operations against Iraq.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
fuck yea Mike. lets get this party Started!
oldhacks 3 years ago
The PNAC report conceded that its plan for world domination would take decades "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." On September 11, 2001, Kristol and the neo-cons got their wish.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The report called for unprecedented hikes in military spending, a proliferation of military bases in Central Asia and the Middle East, toppling of resistant governments, scraping international treaties, controlling the world's energy sources, militarization of outer space, dominance over cyberspace, and the possible use of nuclear weapons on anyone who opposed hegemony. Quite a tall order, unless....
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In September 2000, the PNAC issued a blueprint for a Pax Americana called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In 1997, Kristol leveraged his reputation as a big thinker to form a conservative think tank called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). His idea was to bring together "great minds" like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz to concoct plans for a new world order in which the United States would use its vast technological and financial advantage over the rest of the world to secure control over the planet's natural resources—meaning oil.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Kristol seems to specialize in hyping fictitious bogeymen whether they are unwed sitcom characters or paper tiger dictators like Saddam Hussein.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
William Kristol: Neo-con Artist
In the brain-dead of American mainstream media, William Kristol is considered an intellectual. If he had been the son of "Joe Pickup Truck" instead of Irving Kristol, he would be just another neo-con whacko. The media began fawning over William Kristol in the 1980s when he was writing speeches for that intellectual giant Dan Quayle. He penned Quayle's absurd denunciation of TV's single mom Murphy Brown as a symptom of the permissive society.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Fast forward to the 2008 presidential election campaign where Bill Clinton tries to counter Barack Obama's opposition to Bush's invasion of Iraq by claiming he also opposed it back in 2003. Not only is this false (Clinton vocally and enthusiastically supported Bush's war), but Clinton started the war on Saddam Hussein. George Bush just escalated the war with an outright invasion.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Even before the Bush Administration began to sell the war, a September 2001 Washington Post poll found thirty-nine percent of respondents thought overthrowing Saddam must be done "even if he is not linked to the 9/11 attacks," and that was before the Bush PR machine kicked into gear.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
By the time Bush began his own marketing campaign for an invasion of Iraq, a compliant, lazy media and an ignorant public had already signed on to war with Iraq—a war that Americans had been tacitly supporting without discourse, debate, or dissent since the Clinton administration.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Had the media conducted a genuine exploration of Clinton's policies, the public would have had to look war in the face and accept responsibility for its brutal consequences. The echo chamber's silence on the morality of Clinton's Iraq War insulated Americans from reality and kept them oblivious like a bunch of children.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
When the television media did cover the story, they simply ran video of the cruise missiles being shot from ships thousands of miles out to sea or jets lifting off from bases in Kuwait. The media filtered images of blown up Iraqis and let the American public off the hook of grappling with the consequences of these bombing operations. Americans also did not see the effects of the sanctions on the sick in Iraqi hospitals that had no medicines.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Clinton's war on Iraq was cowardly, not because it was done with cruise missiles and other weapons designed to avoid American casualties (the military should always employ technology to limit casualties); Clinton's war on Iraq was cowardly because the media spared the American public from having to grapple with the horror their leaders inflicted on innocent people.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Coalition forces bombed Iraq on more than 100 days in 1999, sometimes making several bombing runs per day. In the first three months of 1999, U.S.-led forces hit Iraq with 241,000 pounds of bombs—just shy of the 253,000 pounds George Bush dropped in the eight months leading up to the final U.N. resolution authorizing his war on Iraq.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Clinton's Cowardly War
Over Bill Clinton's final three years in office, the U.S. and Great Britain dropped 1.3 million pounds of bombs in response to violations of the no-fly zones and anti-aircraft fire. In a January 1999 attack, twenty-five missiles hammered Iraq and killed an unknown number of civilians. Clinton said the attack was in response to four Iraqi planes violating the no-fly zones.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Surely Bill Clinton knew a military confrontation with Iraq would provide the media with a distraction from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He also understood that the American public would reflexively rally around him just at the moment when the Republican Congress was set to impeach him.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Former chief U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter claimed in his book, War on Iraq, "Inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis." Why might Clinton want to provoke Saddam?
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Saddam Hussein, along with much of the international community, was aware of this CIA operation and understandably refused to tolerate covert U.S. intelligence operations in his country. By authorizing the CIA infiltration, Clinton sabotaged the inspections and then lied to the public about why the Iraqi dictator refused to allow the U.N. inspections to proceed.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Saddam would have continued to allow the U.N. inspectors to perform their investigations had Bill Clinton not infiltrated the U.N. inspection teams with CIA agents.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The echo chamber dismissed this possibility and parroted Clinton's justification for the bombing operation—punishment for Saddam's interference with the U.N.'s weapons inspection. The reality, however, was a lot more complicated than what the media chose to report. Throughout the 1990s, U.N. inspectors had successfully tracked down whatever weapons remained after Saddam destroyed most of his stockpiles in compliance with U.N. mandates.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Wag the Dog
The day before Congress voted to impeach Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal in December 1998, Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets. Immediately there were suggestions that Clinton was engaging in a "Wag the Dog" media stunt to distract the public from his sex scandal.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Seven years later, Bill Clinton committed the U.S. to ousting Saddam. The news media coverage of this momentous change was light and whatever discussion arose was overwhelmingly favorable. Why so little debate? In the fall of 1998, the media and the public were much more interested in Bill Clinton's Oval Office fling with Monica Lewinsky.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Back in 1991 when George H. W. Bush called an end to the first Gulf War, he and his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney explained that removing Saddam would necessitate a long military occupation and unleash uncontrollable forces that would destabilize the region.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Under the terms of the Iraq Liberation Act, he U.S. became officially committed to ousting Saddam: "It is the sense of the Congress that once the Saddam Hussein regime is removed from power in Iraq, the United States should support Iraq's transition to democracy." The House passed the act, 360 to 38; the Senate approved it unanimously. In 2002, George W. Bush repeatedly mentioned this Clinton-backed act as justification for his plans to invade Iraq.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
By officially labeling Saddam a war criminal, Bill Clinton eliminated any opportunity for diplomatic negotiation and compromise. Saddam knew he would still be a criminal no matter what he did according to American and international law. There could be no peaceful coexistence between the United States and Saddam Hussein.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The act also authorized Clinton to call upon the United Nations to establish an international criminal tribunal to indict, prosecute, and imprison Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials "who are responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other criminal violations of international law."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Liberation Act authorized Clinton to assist dissident groups by funding anti-Saddam radio and television broadcasts, training anti-Saddam paramilitary forces, and aiding Saddam's political opponents including the corrupt Ahmed Chalabi.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Clinton also set the U.S. on the road to eventually invading Iraq by supporting the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which placed into law the policy of "regime change." The act stated, "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Throughout his two terms, Clinton enforced the no-fly zones by pounding Iraq with America's longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. During this period, the media devoted virtually no attention to what was really going on in Iraq. As usual the mainstream media rallied around the Commander in Chief during this international confrontation—no matter how senseless and cruel the policy actually was.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Bill Clinton's War
Bill Clinton is responsible for more Iraqi deaths than George Bush. During his administration, Clinton maintained a murderous sanctions policy on Iraq that resulted in the deaths of at least half a million Iraqi children. He also started bombing Iraq shortly after taking office in 1993 and never stopped.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
These books blame the obvious culprits: George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove. However, there are other important culprits in the media echo chamber and government who are also guilty of leading America into the Iraq fiasco.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Now that the Iraq War has killed 4,000 Americans and 150,000 Iraqis, there have been many fine books critiquing the media for allowing Bush to sell the war. Most noteworthy is Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold, aptly subtitled The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Selling the War on Iraq
Had the media done its job in the after 9/11 and exposed the American intelligence community's failures leading up to the attacks, along with the Bush Administration's lies, the public might have been more skeptical toward the neo-con case for war on Iraq. In the leading up to the Iraq War, the media once again echoed he Administration's storyline, and the American public embraced a war that was unnecessary and disastrous.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Kingmakers
Chapter Two
War Drums Pounding in the Echo Chamber
"We are all neo-cons now."
MSNBC's Chris Matthews, April 2003
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
PHEW!
PoliticalAnalysis 3 years ago
c. Connect solar, wind and geo-thermal generators to the grid.
d. Explore nuclear fusion with China's Tokamak.
5. Protect the environment and U.S. industry's competitiveness through the implementation of regulations via the WTO.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
3. Transportation CO2 reductions:
a. Euro IV-CAFE standards and increased hybridization.
b. Crash program for hydrogen-powered vehicles.
c. Mass transit-high speed intercity rail (maglev)
d. Electrification of rail trunk lines for freight.
4. Power generation:
a. Create a SuperGrid to distribute hydrogen and electricity.
b. Develop carbon-free space-based solar power generation capability and a space industrialization infrastructure.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
An Environmental/Energy Policy
1. Environmental policy based upon:
a. Reducing greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions.
b. Protecting and rejuvenating fresh water resources.
c. Protecting and enhancing ecosystems that are significant "carbon sinks."
2. Cap global warming with a Global Carbon Tax used to fund international R&D to develop commercially-viable renewable energy technologies.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
The Congress, held hostage by energy-related special interests, may find it impossible to act in a timely way on the environmental threat. If the American voters are empowered as lawmakers, they certainly would establish a carbon tax and aggressively pursue much of the above programs. After all, they are the ones to suffer the consequences.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
"The looming peak in global production of conventional crude oil is being played out against the backdrop of two other potentially destabilizing forces: the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and around the world and increased warming of the Earth's climate from the burning of fossil fuels. The synergistic effects of each of these phenomena on the others will be critical in determining the prospects for human civilization in the coming century."
redstateupdate 3 years ago
---End of Chapter 1---
The Kingmakers
by Mike Gravel and David Eisenbach, PhD
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Perhaps Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation of Economic Trends, states it most presciently:
redstateupdate 3 years ago
There is no ecosystem that is safe from our exploitation and despoliation. If we cannot touch them directly, we certainly disrupt them through our waste disposal on land and in the sea.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
IN CONCLUDING, one may reflect upon the preceding paragraphs and wonder if I have articulated an energy policy or an environmental policy. The answer is the two are inextricably intertwined. Such has not always been the case. Nature could renew here resources faster than man could exploit them, prior to industrialization. But with the advent of the atomic era, man has shown and is now proving that he can thwart the best efforts of nature to ensure the livability of our planet.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
Use of lunar and other non-terrestrial resources. Our moon has abundant supplies of most materials required to construct facilities and human habitats in space.
Delivery of power at competitive costs, including to the currently poorly served in developing countries.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
Most importantly, if the media seriously examined the contradictions between what the White House officials said about 9/11 and the Commission report, they would have had to question the veracity of the same officials who got us into the Iraq War. After two years of going along with the Administration's lies and spin about Iraq, the media would have had to examine their own failures. And there were plenty.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Rather than pursue questions about Bush's veracity about 9/11, the press was feeding off lies about John Kerry not deserving the medals he'd won as a captain of a swift boat in Vietnam. In an attempt to appear "fair and balanced," the national press bent over backwards and lost their balance.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The U.S. has been the leader in space-related development from the time of President Kennedy. It is time to exercise space leadership again. I call on the U.S. to lead a global space development effort to deploy working space-based solar energy systems by 2020 that deliver significant power to user nations and that provide the following:
Low-cost launch, including consideration of space elevators and other advanced technology.
redstateupdate 3 years ago
To open this line of questioning less than five months before Americans went to the polls would generate accusations of playing politics. Many Americans would have read a sustained reporting of three-year-old Bush Administration lies as a partisan hit job.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
9/11 and the 2004 Election
Pursuing the story about the Administration's false statements about 9/11 would have meant calling into question Bush's honesty in the middle of an election campaign. A media storm on this story may have turned the tide in favor of John Kerry, but the mainstream media prides itself in its supposed non-partisanship.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
By the summer of 2004, the most influential journalists had moved on to more immediate storylines like the souring war in Iraq and the contentious presidential election. Also the media owned the original storyline that "no one could have imagined 9/11." The fact that the 9/11 report contradicted the original storyline meant that the media would have to revise their initial reporting and admit that they blew the biggest story since Pearl Harbor.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago