Stealth sponsorship of talking heads and op-ed columnists is surprisingly common, says Business Week.

In the opinion industry, pundits who present themselves as independent voices sometimes turn out to be quietly financed by powerful interests. The latest example BusinessWeek has unearthed: The Hill, a Washington newspaper read closely in Congress, published an opinion piece last June extolling “payday loans.” Readers weren’t told that the author, Tom Lehman, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, had taken money from the industry that pushes these controversial high-interest loans.

In other instances, BusinessWeek Online has recently identified Douglas Bandow and Michael Fumento, two prolific authors of newspaper opinion pieces who received undisclosed payments from business interests they wrote about. Both lost their nationally syndicated columns as a result. Fumento acknowledged just last week that in 1999 he benefited from payments totaling $60,000 from agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. (), a subject of praise in Fumento’s opinion columns and a book. Scripps Howard News Service canceled his column. Bandow resigned last month from Copley News Service after he admitted writing as many as two dozen op-eds for which he was paid $1,000 to $2,000 each by embattled Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Read The Full Article Here

David Sirota elaborates on this phenomenon with this article on The Huffington Post

So, for instance, if you read the newspapers or listen to a congressional hearing, you might think that organizations like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute are just naturally occurring organizations sprouting up from the a supposed overall extreme conservative economic slant of the American public. These institutions - which D.C. is teeming with - are cited as official-esque sources, described only in ideological terms as “conservative.” They are almost never labeled according to which industries fund them, just as the politicians who spew corporate PR are almost never identified in the media as having taken huge sums of cash from the industry being shilled for. It is as if naming the funders would be to offer the public too much truth about who owns their political debate - a major Establishment taboo.

Read The Full Article Here

Highly recommended expose by writer Dave Zirin, author of “What’s My Name, Fool?” about the history of politics in sport.

“I don’t believe it,” seethed Ann Coulter.

Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was “f***ing illegal” and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman’s death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as “an American original–virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article’s source was Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary.

So why does Mary Tillman hate America?

The very private Tillmans have revealed a picture of Pat profoundly at odds with the GI Joe image created by Pentagon spinmeisters and their media stenographers. As the Chronicle put it, family and friends are now unveiling “a side of Pat Tillman not widely known–a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books…to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.” Tillman had very unembedded feelings about the Iraq War. His close friend Army Spec. Russell Baer remembered, “I can see it like a movie screen. We were outside of [an Iraqi city] watching as bombs were dropping on the town…. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f***ing illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.” With these revelations, Pat Tillman the PR icon joins WMD and Al Qaeda connections on the heap of lies used to sell the Iraq War.

Tillman’s transition from one-dimensional caricature to critically thinking human being is a long time coming. The fact is that in death he was far more useful to the armchair warriors than he had ever been in life. When the Pro Bowler joined the Army Rangers, the Pentagon brass needed a loofah to wipe their drool: He was white, handsome and played in the NFL. For a chicken-hawk Administration led by a President who loves the affectations of machismo but runs from protesting military moms, this testosterone cocktail was impossible to resist. The problem was that Tillman wouldn’t play their game. To the Pentagon’s chagrin, he turned down numerous offers to be its recruitment poster child.

Tillman was a *real* American hero because he was about serving an America that was real, not some deluded bull***t neo-con fantasy version of one. One in which founding American principles and constitutional law were the what we strived for, and not for theocracy and empire where might makes right.

The full article can be read here…
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/zirin

The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
November 6th, 2005

    It would be a compelling story,” Patrick Fitzgerald said of the narrative Scooter Libby used to allegedly mislead investigators in the Valerie Wilson leak case, “if only it were true.”

    ”Compelling” is higher praise than any Mr. Libby received for his one work of published fiction, a 1996 novel of “murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow” called “The Apprentice.” If you read the indictment, you’ll see why he merits the critical upgrade. The intricate tale he told the F.B.I. and the grand jury - with its endlessly clever contradictions of his White House colleagues’ testimony - is compelling even without the sex and the snow.

    The medium is the message. This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case - the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam’s mushroom clouds - was only the first of its genre. Given that potboiler’s huge success at selling the war, its authors couldn’t resist providing sequels once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day approaches, we need to remember and unmask those scenarios as well. Our troops and their families have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war.

    If there’s a tragic example that can serve as representative of the rest, it is surely that of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who famously volunteered for the Army in the spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay something back to his country by pursuing the enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war in Iraq that he didn’t see coming when he enlisted because the administration was still hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he “personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun.”

    It would be a compelling story, if only it were true. Five weeks after Tillman’s death, the Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing details, that he had “probably” died from friendly fire. Many months after that, investigative journalists at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times reported that the Army’s initial portrayal of his death had been not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of something darker. “The records show that Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath,” Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December 2004. “They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman’s commanders.”

    This fall The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered still more details with the help of Tillman’s divorced parents, who have each reluctantly gone public after receiving conflicting and heavily censored official reports on three Army investigations that only added to the mysteries surrounding their son’s death. (Yet another inquiry is under way.) “The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,” said Patrick Tillman, Pat Tillman’s father, who discovered that crucial evidence in the case, including his son’s uniform and gear, had been destroyed almost immediately. “This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels.”

    His accusations are far from wild. The Chronicle found that Gen. John Abizaid, the top American officer in Iraq, and others in his command had learned by April 29, 2004, that friendly fire had killed their star recruit. That was the day before the Army released its fictitious press release of Tillman’s hillside firefight and four days before a nationally televised memorial service back home enshrined the fake account of his death. Yet Tillman’s parents, his widow, his brother (who served in the same platoon) and politicians like John McCain (who spoke at Tillman’s memorial) were not told the truth for another month.

    Why? It’s here where we find a repeat of the same pattern that drove the Valerie Wilson leak a year earlier. Faced with unwelcome news - from the front, from whistle-blowers, from scandal - this administration will always push back with change-the-subject stunts (like specious terror alerts), fake news or, as with Joseph Wilson, smear campaigns. Much as the White House was out to bring down Mr. Wilson because he threatened to expose its prewar hype of Saddam’s supposed nuclear prowess, so the Pentagon might have been out to delay or rewrite a story that could be trouble when public opinion on the war itself was just starting to plummet.

    It was an election year besides. Tillman’s death came after a month of solid bad news for America and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign alike: the publication of Richard Clarke’s book about pre-9/11 administration counterterrorism fecklessness, the savage stringing up of the remains of American contractors in Falluja, the eruption of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in six Iraqi cities, the first publication of illicit photos of flag-draped coffins. In the days just after Tillman’s death, “60 Minutes II” first broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos, Ted Koppel read the names of the war’s fallen on “Nightline,” and the Pentagon’s No. 2, the Iraqi war architect Paul Wolfowitz, understated by more than 200 the number of American casualties to date (722) in an embarrassing televised appearance before Congress.

    Against this backdrop, it would not do to have it known that the most famous volunteer of the war might have been a victim of gross negligence or fratricide. Though Tillman himself was so idealistic that he refused publicity of any kind when in the Army, he was exploited by the war’s cheerleaders as a recruitment lure and was needed to continue in that role after his death. (Even though he was adamantly against the Iraq war, according to friends and relatives interviewed by The Chronicle.)

    ”They blew up their poster boy,” Patrick Tillman told The Post; he is convinced that “all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script” the fake narrative (or, as he puts it, “outright lies”) that followed. Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary Tillman, was offended to discover that even President Bush wanted a cameo role in this screenplay: she told The Post that he had offered to tape a memorial to her son for a Cardinals game that would be televised shortly before Election Day. (She said no.)

    In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Mary Tillman added: “They could have told us upfront that they were suspicious that it was a fratricide but they didn’t. They wanted to use him for their purposes. It was good for the administration. It was before the elections. It was during the prison scandal. They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that.”

    Appalling but consistent. The Pentagon has often failed to give the troops what they need to fight the war in Iraq, from proper support in manpower and planning at the invasion’s outset to effective armor for battle to adequately financed health care for those who make it home. But when it comes to using troops in the duplicitous manner that Mary Tillman describes, the sky’s the limit.

    Pat Tillman’s case is itself a replay of the fake “Rambo” escapades ascribed to Pfc. Jessica Lynch a year earlier, just when Operation Iraqi Freedom showed the first tentative signs of trouble and the Pentagon needed a feel-good distraction. As if to echo Mary Tillman, Ms. Lynch told Time magazine this year, “I was used as a symbol.” But the troops aren’t just used as symbols for the commander in chief’s political purposes. They are also drafted to serve as photo-op props and extras, whether in an extravaganza like “Mission Accomplished” or a throwaway dog-and-pony show like the recent teleconference in which the president held a “conversation” with soldiers who sounded as spontaneous as the brainwashed G.I.’s in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

    As Mr. Bush’s approval rating crashes into the 30’s, he and the vice president are so desperate to wrap themselves in khaki that on the day of the Libby indictment, they took separate day trips to mouth the usual stay-the-course platitudes before military audiences. If this was a ploy to split the focus of cable news networks and the public, it failed. Perhaps Scooter Libby is hoping that a so-called faulty-memory defense will save him from jail, but too many other Americans are now refreshing their memories of what went down in the plotting and execution of the war in Iraq. What they find are harsh truths and buried secrets that even the most compelling administration scenarios can no longer disguise.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Treating policy as product to be marketed to the electorate is no great stretch for a president who fashions himself the CEO of White House Inc. But in its zeal to promote sales of the Bush brand, this administration has crossed the line that separates honest brokers from snake oil salesmen.

Bush and company sold Americans defective goods in clear violation of federal law. Yet Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hasn’t budged. Instead, the man charged with enforcing our laws has tasked his army of lawyers to throw a legal shield around the White House, telling the administration to ignore investigations by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which repeatedly has blasted Team Bush for using taxpayer money to fund “covert propaganda.”

In its latest report, issued on Sept. 30, the GAO’s federal auditors scolded the White House for squandering American tax dollars to hire fake news reporters and unleash a pre-packaged new blitz in advance of the 2004 elections. The GAO found the White House violated the law by hiring pundit Armstrong Williams to shower praise on Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, while interviewing administration officials on the air.

The GAO also uncovered a previously undisclosed case in which the Education Department commissioned an article carried by several newspapers that extolled the administration’s role in promoting science education. Readers were not informed of the government’s role in the writing of the article.

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 forbids the domestic dissemination of government-authored propaganda or “official news” deliberately designed to influence public opinion or policy. The law singles out materials that serve “a solely partisan purpose.” The GAO has now found on at least four separate occasions that administration agencies violated this and other federal restrictions when they disseminated news written by the government or its contractors without disclosing the conflict of interest.

Read the full article here…
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051011/a_snake_oil_president.php

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
The Associated Press
October 14th, 2005

Washingotn - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday’s vote on a new Iraqi constitution.
“This is an important time,” Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. “The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you.”

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit - the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“I’m going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me,” Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.

“OK, so let’s just walk through this,” Barber said. “Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?”

“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.

“Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.

“Captain Kennedy,” the soldier replied.

And so it went.

“If the question comes up about partnering - how often do we train with the Iraqi military - who does he go to?” Barber asked.

“That’s going to go to Captain Pratt,” one of the soldiers said.

“And then if we’re going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit - the hometown - and how they’re handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?” she asked.

Before he took questions, Bush thanked the soldiers for serving and reassured them that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the mission was complete.

“So long as I’m the president, we’re never going to back down, we’re never going to give in, we’ll never accept anything less than total victory,” Bush said.

The president told them twice that the American people were behind them.

“You’ve got tremendous support here at home,” Bush said.

Less than 40 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll taken in October said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq. Just over half of the public now say the Iraq war was a mistake.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Thursday’s event was coordinated with the Defense Department but that the troops were expressing their own thoughts. With satellite feeds, coordination often is needed to overcome technological challenges, such as delays, he said.

“I think all they were doing was talking to the troops and letting them know what to expect,” he said, adding that the president wanted to talk with troops on the ground who have firsthand knowledge about the situation.

The soldiers all gave Bush an upbeat view of the situation.

The president also got praise from the Iraqi soldier who was part of the chat.

“Thank you very much for everything,” he gushed. “I like you.”

On preparations for the vote, 1st Lt. Gregg Murphy of Tennessee said: “Sir, we are prepared to do whatever it takes to make this thing a success. … Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We’re really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they’re doing everything.”

On the training of Iraqi security forces, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo from Scotia, N.Y., said to Bush: “I can tell you over the past 10 months, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in the capabilities and the confidences of our Iraqi security force partners. … Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations.”

Lombardo told the president that she was in New York City on Nov. 11, 2001, when Bush attended an event recognizing soldiers for their recovery and rescue efforts at Ground Zero. She said the troops began the fight against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and were proud to continue it in Iraq.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Bush said, and then joked: “I probably look familiar to you, too.”

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a “carefully scripted publicity stunt.” Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

“If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can’t do it in a nationally televised teleconference,” Rieckhoff said. “He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that’s not a bunch of captains.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Buying of News by Bush’s Aides Is Ruled Illegal
By Robert Pear
The New York Times

October 1st, 2005

Washington - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, “The Bush administration/the GOP is committed to education.”

The auditors declared: “We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.”

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

When that arrangement became public, it set off widespread criticism. At a news conference in January, Mr. Bush said: “We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.”

But the Education Department has since defended its payments to Mr. Williams, saying his commentaries were “no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public.”

The GAO said the Education Department had no money or authority to “procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition” in federal law.

The ruling comes with no penalty, but under federal law the department is supposed to report the violations to the White House and Congress.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the “declining science literacy of students,” was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government’s role in the writing of the article, which praised the department’s role in promoting science education.

The auditors denounced a prepackaged television story disseminated by the Education Department. The segment, a “video news release” narrated by a woman named Karen Ryan, said that President Bush’s program for providing remedial instruction and tutoring to children “gets an A-plus.”

Ms. Ryan also narrated two videos praising the new Medicare drug benefit last year. In those segments, as in the education video, the narrator ended by saying, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.”

The television news segments on education and on Medicare did not state that they had been prepared and distributed by the government. The GAO did not say how many stations carried the reports.

The public relations efforts came to light weeks before Margaret Spellings became education secretary in January. Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the secretary, said on Friday that Ms. Spellings regarded the efforts as “stupid, wrong and ill-advised.” She said Ms. Spellings had taken steps “to ensure these types of missteps don’t happen again.”

The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. Mr. Lautenberg expressed concern about a section of the report in which investigators said they could not find records to confirm that Mr. Williams had performed all the activities for which he billed the government.

The Education Department said it had paid Ketchum $186,000 for services performed by Mr. Williams’s company. But it could not provide transcripts of speeches, articles or records of other services invoiced by Mr. Williams, the report said.

In March, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that federal agencies did not have to acknowledge their role in producing television news segments if they were factual. The inspector general of the Education Department recently reiterated that position.

But the accountability office said on Friday: “The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing.”

The office said Mr. Williams’s work for the government resulted from a written proposal that he submitted to the Education Department in March 2003. The department directed Ketchum to use Mr. Williams as a regular commentator on Mr. Bush’s education policies. Ketchum had a federal contract to help publicize those policies, signed by Mr. Bush in 2002.

The Education Department flouted the law by telling Ketchum to use Mr. Williams to “convey a message to the public on behalf of the government, without disclosing to the public that the messengers were acting on the government’s behalf and in return for the payment of public funds,” the GAO said.

The Education Department spent $38,421 for production and distribution of the video news release and $96,850 for the evaluation of newspaper articles and radio and television programs. Ketchum assigned a score to each article, indicating how often and favorably it mentioned features of the new education law.

Congress tried to clarify the ban on “covert propaganda” in a bill signed by Mr. Bush in May. The law says that no federal money may be used to produce or distribute a news story unless the government’s role is openly acknowledged.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Mas Payola
The Stakeholder (DCCC)
September 6th, 2005

From George Miller…

DEPT. OF EDUCATION PAYS FOR OP-EDS, ADS THAT PROMOTE BUSH POLICIES, DO NOT REVEAL FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AS FUNDING SOURCE

Rep. Miller Calls for Recovery of Funds and for More Information in Response to Report Showing Irresponsible Use of Taxpayer Dollars, Systemic Covert Propaganda

WASHINGTON, D.C. The Department of Education has paid education advocacy groups to produce newspaper opinion pieces, advertisements, and other public materials that reached audiences all over the country without revealing that the government paid for their production and distribution, according to a report issued late last week by the Department’s Inspector General that concluded that such practices were improper.
Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, requested the report in January. Miller said the report raises two key concerns: first, that it describes the consistent use of covert propaganda by the Department of Education over a period of years; and second, that it shows a disturbing pattern of neglect on the part of the Department when it comes to properly overseeing its grants and contracts.

For example, opinion articles appearing in an untold number of newspapers all over the country were written and placed by authors paid by the federal government who failed to disclose this relationship in their columns. These writers offered opinions ˆ sometimes strident ones ˆ about controversial areas of federal education policy.

The IG report names the Dallas Morning News, Sacramento Bee, Mobile Register, Grand Island (NE) Independent, Al Dia, and En USA as publications that published government-funded op-eds whose authors failed to disclose the government’s financial sponsorship. Separately, Miller’s office also determined that additional opinion articles ran in the New York Sun and the Charleston Gazette.

Out of 11 relevant grants made by the Department to different groups and reviewed by the Inspector General, only one of them was made to a grantee that identified the federal government as its funding source on all materials it developed and disseminated. The other ten either always failed to disclose the governments role or only did so inconsistently.

Miller disagreed with the Inspector General’s conclusion that these failures do not constitute covert propaganda. The Inspector General said that the Department would have to intend for these organizations and individuals to mislead the public for its actions to constitute covert propaganda.

“The Department is trying to define itself out of trouble by setting the bar very high for what constitutes covert propaganda,” said Miller. “But on multiple occasions, education groups used taxpayer money — unbeknownst to taxpayers — to promote controversial federal policies.

“The Department allowed this egregious use of taxpayer dollars to continue with such consistency that it cannot now claim that it was ignorant of the practice. Either the Department is grossly incompetent when it comes to awarding grants and contracts, or it is misleading investigators and engaging in a cover up,” Miller said.

The Inspector General did conclude that it was improper for organizations to use Department of Education grant money to produce and disseminate public materials without including a disclaimer about funding, and said that the appropriate course of action is to recover grant monies paid to the organizations.

Miller also said that the Department has displayed near-total incompetence when it comes to managing its grants and contracts. The Department was unable to produce a number of the deliverables that it was promised under two grants and four contracts. At best, Miller said, this means that the Department has taken no care to see that it got what it paid for; at the worst, Miller said, it raises the possibility that the Department is trying to hide information.

“This was an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars, and the taxpayers ought to be made whole again,” said Miller. “But that’s only part of the story. People looking at advertisements or reading their local newspapers would have had no idea that what they were reading was bought and paid for with their tax dollars. No matter which way you slice it, that is propaganda.”

In response, Miller plans to demand the Department recoup tax dollars unlawfully spent by venders; insist the Department of Education provide to Congress the information it refused to provide to the Inspector General’s office; and demand that the Department report to Congress on how it is revamping its shoddy contracting and grant-making processes.

Miller asked for the report in January 2005 after it was revealed that the Department of Education had paid $240,000 to Armstrong Williams, a media commentator, to promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his and other television programs without indicating that he was being paid by the government to do so.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Frustrated: Fire Crews To Hand Out Fliers For FEMA
By Lisa Rosetta
The Salt Lake Tribune

September 6th, 2005

ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: “What are we doing here?”

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Federal officials are unapologetic.

“I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country,” said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

The firefighters - or at least the fire chiefs who assigned them to come to Atlanta - knew what the assignment would be, Hudak said.

“The initial call to action very specifically says we’re looking for two-person fire teams to do community relations,” she said. “So if there is a breakdown [in communication], it was likely in their own departments.”

One fire chief from Texas agreed that the call was clear to work as community-relations officers. But he wonders why the 1,400 firefighters FEMA attracted to Atlanta aren’t being put to better use. He also questioned why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security - of which FEMA is a part - has not responded better to the disaster.

The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for “austere conditions.” Many of them came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.

“They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter. “We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.”

The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.

On Monday, two firefighters from South Jordan and two from Layton headed for San Antonio to help hurricane evacuees there. Four firefighters from Roy awaited their marching orders, crossing their fingers that they would get to do rescue and recovery work, rather than paperwork.

“A lot of people are bickering because there are rumors they’ll just be handing out fliers,” said Roy firefighter Logan Layne, adding that his squad hopes to be in the thick of the action. “But we’ll do anything. We’ll do whatever they need us to do.”

While FEMA’s community-relations job may be an important one - displaced hurricane victims need basic services and a variety of resources - it may be a job best suited for someone else, say firefighters assembled at the Sheraton.

“It’s a misallocation of resources. Completely,” said the Texas firefighter.

“It’s just an under-utilization of very talented people,” said South Salt Lake Fire Chief Steve Foote, who sent a team of firefighters to Atlanta. “I was hoping once they saw the level of people . . . they would shift gears a little bit.”

Foote said his crews would be better used doing the jobs they are trained to do.

But Louis H. Botta, a coordinating officer for FEMA, said sending out firefighters on community relations makes sense. They already have had background checks and meet the qualifications to be sworn as a federal employee. They have medical training that will prove invaluable as they come across hurricane victims in the field.

A firefighter from California said he feels ill prepared to even carry out the job FEMA has assigned him. In the field, Hurricane Katrina victims will approach him with questions about everything from insurance claims to financial assistance.

“My only answer to them is, ‘1-800-621-FEMA,’ ” he said. “I’m not used to not being in the know.”

Roy Fire Chief Jon Ritchie said his crews would be a “little frustrated” if they were assigned to hand out phone numbers at an evacuee center in Texas rather than find and treat victims of the disaster.

Also of concern to some of the firefighters is the cost borne by their municipalities in the wake of their absence. Cities are picking up the tab to fill the firefighters’ vacancies while they work 30 days for the federal government.

“There are all of these guys with all of this training and we’re sending them out to hand out a phone number,” an Oregon firefighter said. “They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste.”

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Catapulting The Propaganda: The President, Cindy Sheehan, and How Words Die
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

August 28th, 2005

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
— George Bush, “President Participates in Social Security Conversation in New York,” May 24, 2005

Forced from his five-week vacation idyll in Crawford by the mother of a dead boy he sent to war, the President has recently given two major speeches defending his war policies and, between biking and boating, held a brief news conference at Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, Idaho. On August 22nd, he addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City for 30 minutes; on August 24th, he spoke for 43 minutes to families of the Idaho National Guard in the farming community of Nampa, Idaho.
As his poll figures continue on a downward spiral, he has found it necessary to put extra effort into “catapulting the propaganda.” Though he struck a new note or two in each speech, these were exceedingly familiar, crush-the-terrorists, stay-the-course, path-to-victory speeches. That’s hardly surprising, since his advisors and speechwriters have been wizards of repetition. No one has been publicly less spontaneous or more — effectively — repetitious than our President; but sometimes, as he says, you “keep repeating things over and over and over again” and what sinks in really is the truth rather than the propaganda. Sometimes, just that extra bit of repetition under less than perfect circumstances, and words that once struck fear or offered hope, that once explained well enough for most the nature of the world they faced, suddenly sound hollow. They begin to sound… well, repetitious, and so, false. Your message, which worked like a dream for so long, goes off-message, and then what do you do?

This is, I suspect, exactly what growing numbers of Americans are experiencing in relation to our President. It’s a mysterious process really — like leaving a dream world or perhaps deprogramming from a cult. Once you step outside the bubble, statements that only yesterday seemed heartfelt or powerful or fearful or resolute truths suddenly look like themselves, threadbare and impoverished. In due course, because the repetitious worldview in the President’s speeches is clearly a believed one (for him, if not all of his advisors) and because it increasingly reads like a bad movie script for a fictional planet, he himself is likely to look no less threadbare and impoverished, no less — to use a word not often associated with him — pathetic and out of touch with reality to some of those who not so long ago supported him or his policies.

Under these circumstances, it’s worth taking a close look at his recent speeches and comparing his linguistic landscape with that of Cindy Sheehan, at the moment a stand-in for the mute (and previously somewhat hidden) American dead from his war as well as an encroaching Iraqi catastrophe.

George’s World of Words

George Bush’s speech-world remains anchored in the defining moment of his life, the attacks of September 11th, 2001 (cited 5 times in his VFW speech, 4 times in Idaho). It offers a landscape of overwhelming threat, but also of remarkable neatness. It paints a picture of a world embroiled in the first war of the 21st century, a war on a global scale, a war — a word that peppers every statement he makes — with multiple theaters (”from the streets of the Western capitals to the mountains of Afghanistan, to the tribal regions of Pakistan, to the islands of Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa”). In his vision of our planet, a vast struggle on the scale of the Cold War, if not World War II, is underway, a Manichaean battle between two clear-cut sides, one good, one evil, in which you are either for or against. There can be no other choices between our mega-enemy, the terrorists, and us. As he put the matter in Idaho in reference to Iraq, the central theater in his global war, “The battle lines… are now clearly drawn for the world to see, and there is no middle ground.”

The problem is that what the President “sees” and what Americans are now seeing seem to be diverging at a rapid rate. For George, the details matter not at all. You won’t find any Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds at each other’s throats in the President’s Iraq, or unable to agree on a constitution, or at the edge of internecine warfare, or living in a country lacking electricity, oil, and jobs, or potentially installing an Islamic government in Baghdad allied to the neighboring Iranian fundamentalist regime, or any of the other obvious features of the present situation, most of which can finally be caught any night on the national news. In his Salt Lake City and Idaho speeches, the only “Iraqi” George even mentioned was a Jordanian, “the terrorist Zarqawi,” against whom, in at least the President’s fantasy life and in his recent radio address, Sunni and Shia Iraqis actually come together in mutual defense in a touching show of national unity.

In the President’s world, there is just them, the enemy, aka the terrorists, and us, the people who (in a nearly copyrighted phrase) spread freedom to the rest of the world. When you look, for instance, at his speech in Idaho, the word terror (war on, sponsored, will be defeated) is used 13 times; terrorist or terrorists (threats, attack, murdered, harbor a, cells, defeat the, converged on Iraq, defiance of the, have sworn havoc, can kill the innocent, victory over, were to win, will fail, Zarqawi), 33 times; and terrorism (safe haven for), once — for a total of 47 uses. (Now that’s repetition for you!) However, in the remarkably equally balanced linguistic struggle between good and evil that weaves through the President’s speeches, freedom (they despise our, spreading, spread the hope of, advancing the cause of, the march of) appears 37 times and, when free is thrown in, a triumphant total of 48 times. In addition, while the terrorists skulk in the shadows, freedom is no passive thing. It confronts, defeats, prevails, and conquers. No wonder they despise it so. (In the shorter VFW speech, the linguistic balance remains the same: terror and its cognates: 33; freedom with its fleet of frees, 36.) Add together the Idaho totals for the struggle — 95 — and you’re talking about 1 out of every 48 words in that speech being either terror or freedom, with us or against us.

Admittedly, the President’s speeches do sometimes show small signs of change at moments when reality forces its way onto the premises. For obvious reasons, for instance, weapons of mass destruction have disappeared from his speeches when the focus is Iraq (though mention Iran and…). Recently, Cindy Sheehan made herself such a thorn in the Presidential side that his speechwriters were forced to let him acknowledge the actual numbers of American dead. (”We have lost 1,864 members of our Armed Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and 223 in Operation Enduring Freedom.”) And the growing debate about withdrawal from Iraq, which began with unapproved statements from his own military, has forced the President’s speechwriters to create a new jingle to describe our plan for the Iraqi future: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

In speaking off-the-cuff, as to the reporters in Donnelly last week, he repeats his usual words, phrases, and lines, mix-and-match style; still, it’s easier in such a session (no matter how weak the questions lobbed at him) to sense an edge of confusion about how to make his world stand in some relation to reality. For instance, in the Donnelly exchange, which lasted 12 minutes including the niceties — “Q: Any fishing? THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know yet. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m kind of hanging loose, as they say. (Laughter.)” — he offered this strange, new explanation for the development of terrorism in the Iraqi neck of the woods:

“[W]e had a policy that just said, let the dictator [Saddam Hussein] stay there, don’t worry about it. And as a result of dictatorship, and as a result of tyranny, resentment, hopelessness began to develop in that part of the world, which became the — gave the terrorists capacity to recruit.”

However, in his speeches, those perfect artifacts from another universe, delivered only before the most receptive audiences, usually under campaign-like conditions, everything is as the President wants it to be. There, at present, he inhabits a world that begins with the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 — imagine how a Democrat might be pilloried for comparing the making of the already tattered “Islamic” constitution of Iraq (just hailed by Iranian Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads that country’s ultra-conservative Guardian Council) to ours — passes through World War II (where we successfully occupied two countries, Japan and Germany) and more or less ends in the glory days of the Cold War. Missing, of course, is the one “small” conflict that, right now, is on everyone’s mind all over Washington, not to say the U.S. — Vietnam. You won’t find that name, nor words like “quagmire” or “bogged down” either.

The President’s speech-world is a world of the will in every sense. (The terrorists typically try to break ours and get us to retreat.) In Idaho, he used will, as in “will of the majority,” 6 times, but the will of the willed act (we will not allow the terrorists, America will not wait to be attacked again, will confront emerging threats, will stay on the offensive, will fight, will win, will be on the hunt, will prevail) 34 times. There may never have been political speeches that used the word in all its senses (except as a document of bequeathment) so often. In this tic, his speeches catch perhaps the most striking aspect of his administration since September 11, 2001 — its driving urge to impose a worldview by force on the rest of the planet.

In speeches like those in Utah and Idaho, he offers up a warrior’s world of words. The word war itself appears in his Idaho speech 26 times, along with attack, attacks, attacked (11), fight, fighters, fighting (10) , battle lines, battlefronts (2), struggle (2), strike (2), and one of his absolute favorites, the phrase on the hunt or alternately hunt down (we will stay on the, side by side with Iraqi forces, our common enemies), used 3 times. Of course, no war would be worth much if you didn’t win (the war on terror, in Iraq), used twice, for which you need to defeat (the terrorists), wielded 9 times.

In the President’s speeches, the world of “the enemy” or “the terrorists” is imposingly frightening, terrifying enough to fit the bill for any Evil Empire. Here is just a partial list of words associated with it from the Idaho speech:

Enemy (fight the, in our midst, across the globe, on many fronts): 6
Threat, threatened: 8
Fail (what terrorists will do in the end)/failed (as in, states — what terrorists cause): 7
Brutal, brutality: 5
Violence (brutal, and extremism): 5
Kill: 5
Retreat (what they want us to do, back into the shadows): 5
Murder, murdered: murderous: 4
Destroy/Destruction (our way of life, havoc and, death and): 4
Hateful, hate-filled: 3
Dangerous (times, enemies): 2
Plotted, plotting: 2
Crushing/crushes (blow, all dissent): 2
Havoc: 2
Death: 2
Assassination: 2
Intimidation: 1
Extremism: 1
Evil (seen freedom conquer): 1

Between the two sides in this global war stand the innocent and, as it happens, we do share one thing in common with the terrorists in relation to the innocent — a strategy (we’ve followed a clear), 4; (they have a, crushing blow to their), 2.

Fortunately, on our side of the ledger in support of our strategy to spread freedom and destroy the terrorists, can be mustered a powerful set of words that are ours alone:

Help, helped, helping: 10
Defend: 9
Protect, protecting (your neighbors, all Americans, the American homeland, our people, our cities and borders and infrastructure, against every threat): 8
Security (of every American, false sense of, to our own citizens, forces, for our children and grandchildren, for the election, of our country): 7
Democracy (link to any of the above as in “freedom and…”): 6
Hope (usually connected to freedom): 6
Secure (democracy, their freedom, the peace): 3
Mission: 3
Victory: 3
Homeland (American, the): 2
Progress: 1

On our side of the ledger, even God makes a series of cameo appearances (4).

You could yourself take the above words and phrases and, as you might a deck of cards, shuffle them into some of the countless combinations that make up any Bush speech or meeting with the press. And yet there is still a study to be done of how words live and die in given moments. After all, this President has spoken the words terror, war, and freedom literally hundreds of thousands of times since September 11th, 2001, and yet now they are visibly dying on the lips.

Cindy’s World of Words

For a long time, George had a knack for speaking to audiences and seeming so personal, no matter how large his crowds, impersonal the setting, or scripted his performance. It was this sense of him that Cindy Sheehan seems to have begun to crack open. Put her words up against his — she’s willing to be no less repetitious, no less fierce in her view of the world — and hers are the words that now feel personal, that come from the heart and cut to the bone, that connect. They seem like telegrams sent directly from reality, and from an irrefutable core of loss — of lives, of safety, of security, of well-being — that ever more Americans are beginning to fear is what George’s world is all about. That’s undoubtedly why the normal set of right-wing attacks and smears launched against Sheehan, however successful against others in the past, have simply not penetrated. Who, after all, can deny the reality of the individual world of the mother of a war-dead son?

And let’s remember, we’re talking about a woman who most distinctly does not live on a fantasy planet. Here’s how she describes Bush’s newest reason to stay in Iraq — to honor those who already died there: “Since the Freedom and Democracy thing is not going so well and the Iraqi parliament is having such a hard time writing their constitution, since violence is mounting against Iraqis and Americans, and since [George Bush’s] poll numbers are going down every day, he had to come up with something.” Put that up against the President comparing the ethnic and religious horse-trading inside Baghdad’s Green Zone to the American Constitutional Convention.

To illustrate her language, I’ve taken two brief, recent passages she wrote around the time the President made his speeches in Utah and Idaho. The first is a mere 225 words on “Coming Back to Crawford”; the second, just over 1,000 words and entitled “One Mother’s Stand”. I’ve treated them as a single document. Place this set of words against the President’s above:

Son/sons (my, their, have been killed): 6
Daughters: 1
[Her son] Casey (Camp, love of): 7
Mother/mom (to feel the pain we feel, Gold Star, regular): 8
Parent/parents: 2
Children (lose their, my other): 2
Country (our, my, an innocent): 4
Grief (unbearable): 1
Pain (as much as I am, feel the, and heartache, feel their): 4
Heartache: 1
Love/loved (of Casey, peace and, ones): 6
War (senseless, George Bush’s, his, insane): 4
Invade (an innocent country): 1
Monstrosity (of an occupation): 1
Lies (his): 1
Misuse and abuse (of power): 1
Killed/killing (in George Bush’s war, Americans, continue the): 6
Died (Americans have, my son, others who have): 5
Death/deaths (sent him to, meaningless): 3
Responsibility (the president’s): 1
Accountable (hold George Bush): 1
Cojones (I do have the… to tell the world that our “emperor” has no clothes): 1

It seems that George Bush was right. “You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in.” He (and his advisers and his speechwriters) simply forgot that others might also do the repeating.

The Wordless Dead Offer Their Own Form of Testimony

Increasingly, the American, if not Iraqi, dead are entering our world and, after a fashion, making themselves heard. Their eloquence lies in their very names, which appear daily in our papers, as they have for two years now. Here, for instance, are the names of the American dead, all thirteen from Arcand, Elden to Seamans, Timothy, reported by the Pentagon for the three days beginning with the President’s VFW speech and ending with his Idaho speech. These were presented in a little box on an inside page of the New York Times with the following explanation: “The Department of Defense has identified [number] American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the deaths of the following Americans yesterday:”

August 23, 2005

Bouchard, Nathan K., 24, Sgt., Army; Wildomar, Calif.; Third Infantry Division.
Boyle, Jeremy W., 24, Staff Sgt., Army; Chesterton, Md.; Third Infantry Division.
Fuhrman, Ray M. II, 28, Specialist, Army; Novato, Calif.; Third Infantry Division.
Seamans, Timothy J., 20, Pfc., Army; Jacksonville, Fla.; Third Infantry Division.

August 24, 2005
Arcand, Elden D., 22, Pfc., Army; White Bear Lake, Minn.; 360th Transportation Company, 68th Corps Support Battalion, 43rd Area Support Group.
Cathey, James J., 24, Second Lt., Marines; Reno, Nev.; Second Marine Division.
Morris, Brian L., 38, Staff Sgt., Army; Centreville, Mich.; 360th Transportation Company, 68th Corps Support Battalion, 43rd Area Support Group.
Nurre, Joseph C., 22, Specialist, Army Reserve; Wilton, Calif.; 463rd Engineer Battalion.
Partridge, Willard T., 35, Sgt., Army; Ferriday, La.; 170th Military Police Company, 504th Military Police Battalion, 42nd Military Police Brigade.
Romero, Ramon, 19, Pfc., Marines; Huntington Park, Calif.; Second Marine Division.

August 25, 2005

Díaz, Carlos J., 27, First Lt., Army; Juana Díaz, P.R., Third Infantry Division.
Hunt, Joseph D., 27, Sgt., Army National Guard; Sweetwater, Tenn.; Third Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry.
Lieurance, Victoir P., 34, Staff Sgt., Army National Guard; Seymour, Tenn.; Third Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry.

—————-

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (”a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Novak Recycles Gannon on ‘Plame-Gate’
By Robert Parry
Consortium News

August 2nd, 2005

Right-wing columnist Robert Novak’s new attack on former Ambassador Joseph Wilson - that he was “discarded a year ago by the Kerry presidential campaign” - recycled a disputed report from Talon News correspondent Jeff Gannon, who was unmasked earlier this year as a pro-Republican operative working under an assumed name.
In an Aug. 1 column, Novak cited the Kerry campaign’s supposed rejection of Wilson to further denigrate the former ambassador, who has become a bete noire to Republicans since he charged in an opinion article on July 6, 2003, that the Bush administration “twisted” intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

Eight days later, on July 14, 2003, Novak exposed the fact that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, an outing of a covert officer that has sparked a two-year investigation into whether Bush administration officials violated legal prohibitions against disclosing the identity of a CIA officer.

Novak has refused publicly to answer questions about his role in the case - including what he may have told a federal grand jury about his administration sources - but he penned the Aug. 1 column to challenge former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow for claiming that he warned Novak about the potential danger in naming Plame.

Assault on Wilson

Novak’s column also resumed the Right’s long-running assault on Wilson’s credibility. Near the end of the column, Novak wrote that “Joseph Wilson was discarded a year ago by the Kerry presidential campaign after the Senate [intelligence] committee reported that much of what he [Wilson] said ‘had no basis in fact.’”

However, Novak’s sentence appears to be wrong on both its points. The Senate Intelligence Committee did not conclude that Wilson’s statements about the Iraqi intelligence “had no basis in fact.” That was a phrase that Novak culled from “additional views” of three Republican senators.

The full committee refused to accept that opinion written by Sen. Pat Roberts and backed by two other conservative Republicans - Christopher Bond and Orrin Hatch - yet Novak left the impression that the phrase was part of what he called “a unanimous Senate intelligence committee report” released in July 2004.

The other part of Novak’s attack on Wilson - about his supposed repudiation by Sen. John Kerry’s Democratic campaign - can be traced back to a story by Talon News’ former White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert.

On July 27, 2004, just over a year ago, a Talon News story under Gannon’s byline reported that Wilson “has apparently been jettisoned from the Kerry campaign.” The article based its assumption on the fact that “all traces” of Wilson “had disappeared from the Kerry Web site.”

The Talon News article reported that “Wilson had appeared on a Web site www.restorehonesty.com where he restated his criticism of the Bush administration. The link now goes directly to the main page of www.johnkerry.com and no reference to Wilson can be found on the entire site.”

A Web Redesign

But Peter Daou, who headed the Kerry campaign’s online rapid response, said the disappearance of Wilson’s link - along with many other Web pages - resulted from a redesign of Kerry’s Web site at the start of the general election campaign, not a repudiation of Wilson.

“I wasn’t aware of any directive from senior Kerry staff to ‘discard’ Joe Wilson or do anything to Joe Wilson for that matter,” said Daou, who now publishes the “Daou Report” at Salon.com. “It just got lost in the redesign of the Web site, as did dozens and dozens of other pages.”

Gannon/Guckert, who wrote frequently about the Wilson-Plame case in 2003-2004, came under suspicion as a covert Republican operative in January 2005 when he put a question to George W. Bush at a presidential news conference that contained a false assertion about Democrats and prompted concerns that Gannon/Guckert was a plant.

Later, liberal Web sites discovered that Gannon was a pseudonym for Guckert, who had posted nude photos of himself on gay-male escort sites. It also turned out that Talon News was owned by GOPUSA, whose president Robert Eberle is a prominent Texas Republican activist.

Though Gannon/Guckert had been refused a congressional press pass, he secured daily passes to the White House press briefing under his real name, Guckert. As a controversy built over the Bush administration paying for favorable news stories, Gannon/Guckert resigned from Talon News on Feb. 8 and its Web site effectively shut down.

However, a copy of the Talon News article about Wilson and his supposed rejection by the Kerry campaign remains on the Internet at FreeRepublic.com.

Novak vs. the CIA

Besides taking swipes at Wilson, Novak’s Aug. 1 column lambasted supposed “misinformation” from former CIA spokesman Harlow.

Novak wrote that Harlow’s “allegation against me is so patently incorrect and so abuses my integrity as a journalist that I feel constrained to reply.” But Novak’s complaint against Harlow looks like a classic case of splitting hairs.

Novak notes that Harlow told the Washington Post that Plame, who worked as a CIA officer on weapons of mass destruction, “had not authorized” sending her husband on a mission to Niger to investigate suspicions that Iraq was trying to buy processed uranium, called yellowcake. Novak said he never wrote that Plame “authorized” the trip, but only that she “suggested” it.

Harlow also said he warned Novak that if he did write about the Niger issue, he shouldn’t reveal Plame’s name. Novak said he recalled Harlow saying that identifying Plame would cause “difficulties,” but Novak insisted that he wouldn’t have exposed Plame if Harlow “or anybody else from the agency had told me that Valerie Plame Wilson’s disclosure would endanger her or anybody else.”

Novak argued that the fact that Plame had played a role in suggesting her husband for the mission to Niger justified naming her.

“Once it was determined that Wilson’s wife suggested the mission, she could be identified as ‘Valerie Plame’ by reading her husband’s entry in ‘Who’s Who in America,’” Novak wrote.

But the overriding question has been why Plame’s role in suggesting her husband for the Niger trip was so important that it justified exposing not only an undercover CIA officer but the company that provided her cover and possibly agents around the world who had assisted her in tracking down sources of WMD.

Retaliation?

Some administration sources have said the Plame disclosure was an act of retaliation against Wilson for being one of the first mainstream public figures to challenge Bush for abusing WMD intelligence to justify invading Iraq. In his original column, Novak wrote that he was informed about Plame’s CIA job by “two senior administration officials.”

In September 2003, a White House official told the Washington Post that at least six reporters had been informed about Plame before Novak’s column appeared on July 14, 2003. The official said the disclosures were “purely and simply out of revenge.”

Since last month, the Plame-leak controversy has focused on George W. Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove.

Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper told a federal grand jury that Rove was the first person to tell him that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA on WMD issues and that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was a second source.

Since Novak’s column in July 2003, the Republican assault on Wilson has concentrated on the strange point about his wife supposedly arranging the fact-finding trip to Niger, though it’s never been clear why the Republicans consider this question so important.

Who authorized the trip wouldn’t seem to have much bearing on Wilson’s conclusion that the Iraqis weren’t seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger - an assessment that turned out to be correct.

Yet, the Republican National Committee has continued to focus its fire on this small part of the controversy. On July 14, 2005, the RNC posted “Joe Wilson’s Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements,” which leads off with an RNC inaccuracy about the trip, claiming that “Wilson insisted that the Vice President’s office sent him to Niger.”

But not even the RNC’s own citation supports this accusation. To back up its charge, the RNC states, “Wilson said he traveled to Niger at CIA request to help provide response to Vice President’s office.”

That’s followed by a quote from Wilson: “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the Vice President’s office.”

The RNC then quotes Cheney as saying, “I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson.”

But nothing in the comments by Wilson and Cheney are in contradiction. Wilson simply said CIA officials sent him on a mission because of questions from Cheney’s office. Cheney said he doesn’t know Wilson. Both points could be true, yet the RNC juxtaposed them to support a charge of dishonesty against Wilson.

Novak has now reintroduced another slur against Wilson - Jeff Gannon’s supposition that the Kerry campaign disowned the former ambassador.

When it comes to Joe Wilson, it seems that Bush loyalists never tire of beating a red herring to death.

—————

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)