Stung by Exiles' Role, C.I.A. Orders a Shift in Procedures: "American intelligence officials who before the war were sifting through claims that Iraq had illicit weapons were generally not told that much of the information came from defectors linked to exile organizations that were promoting an American invasion, according to senior United States intelligence officials. The claims, which have largely proved to be unsubstantiated, included those from a defector who was identified as early as May 2002 as a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, reports based on his debriefings arranged by the Iraqi National Congress found their way into documents and speeches used by the Bush administration to justify the war. The nondisclosure of the source's connection to an exile organization was 'standard practice' under the procedures in place at the time, intelligence officials said on Thursday. But that episode and others have prompted the Central Intelligence Agency to order a major change in its procedures. Operations officers will now be required to tell analysts more about sources' identities and possible motivations.…" So deeply held was the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons — within the intelligence community and beyond — that it took American interrogators several months to concede that Iraqi prisoners who repeatedly said Iraq did not have such arsenals might be telling the truth, current and former intelligence officials said in recent interviews. "They denied that there were weapons, and so we polygraphed them," a senior intelligence official said. "And even when they passed, our first response was to say, wow, they really are good at deception." As early as May of last year, the month that major combat operations ceased, senior Iraqi officials and scientists in American custody were uniformly denying knowledge of any chemical or biological weapons production or reconstituted nuclear program, senior intelligence officials said. But the administration gave its first public hint that the suspected weapons stockpiles might not exist only in October, in an interim report by David A. Kay.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/politics/13INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Bush's Duty, and Privilege: "Mr. Bush has been nothing if not consistent. He has always been about the privileged few. And that's an attitude that flies in the face of the basic precepts of an egalitarian society. It's an attitude that fosters, that celebrates, unfairness and injustice. More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, another war of choice that was marketed deceitfully to the American people. Mr. Bush's experience in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam years is especially relevant today because it throws a brighter spotlight on who he really is. He has walked a charmed road, with others paying the price of his journey, every step of the way." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13HERB.html

Op-Ed Columnist: The Real Man: "To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics — the pictures. By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River." It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential. The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office. Operation Flight Suit was only slightly more over the top than other Bush photo-ops, like the carefully staged picture that placed Mr. Bush's head in line with the stone faces on Mount Rushmore. The goal is to suggest that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president, and to use his heroic image to block any substantive discussion of his policies. In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets in the nation's history — the other three are the budgets released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no money for postwar Iraq — and how administration officials waited until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of $87 billion in extra costs? Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses only through September. But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant deceptions in their budgets — or, for that matter, about the use of prewar intelligence — their response, almost always, is to fall back on the president's character. How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man of such unimpeachable integrity? And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official image.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13KRUG.html

Trippi's Two Americas: "In this political season, technology keeps cutting both ways. Productivity is up, keeping the market moving forward, corporate profits up and interest rates down. But that same efficiency also maintains the jobless recovery. So too does broadband, virtualization and outsourcing. Where Edwards' Two Americas are classic Democratic haves and have-nots, Trippi's are The Onlines and The Offlines. And the same dynamics that brought Dean to prominence also served to accelerate his decline. The transparency of the network that allowed rapid fundraising and bubble-up communications within the campaign also allowed Kerry, Edwards and Clark to cherry-pick voter lists and redirect them to their own volunteer corps of handwritten letter authors.… " Trippi didn't have the luxury of waiting out the down cycle. The Dean campaign was primed to counter the front-loaded primary schedule designed by DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe to wrap up the nomination by early spring. If anything, Trippi was too successful, peaking too soon. Though an experienced operative, he violated the fundamental rule of salesmanship: Once you've closed the sale, shut up. We all know how quickly things fell apart once the campaign went off the rails. But Trippi made it clear he understood from the beginning the fundamental disconnect between the Internet and political crowds. "The Internet community doesn't understand the hard realities of American politics," he said, and the political press doesn't get the Internet. Of course, Trippi then tarred the mainstream media with the "broadcast-politics" brush, charging the networks with purveying entertainment, not information, with 933 replays of Dean's infamous scream speech. To Trippi, what the media did in taking the speech out of context was damaging—"not what the Governor did.…" http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3048,a=118842,00.asp

The President's Guard Service: "The payroll records released yesterday document that he performed no guard duties at all for more than half a year in 1972 and raise questions about how he could be credited with at least 14 days of duty during subsequent periods when his superior officers in two units said they had not seen him. Investigative reporting by The Boston Globe, our sibling newspaper, revealed in 2000 that Mr. Bush had reported for duty and flown regularly in his first four Texas Guard years but dropped off the Guard's radar screen when he went to Alabama to work on a senatorial campaign. The payroll records show that he was paid for many days of duty in the first four months of 1972, when he was in Texas, but then went more than six months without being paid, virtually the entire time he was working on the Senate campaign in Alabama. That presumably means he never reported for duty during that period" Mr. Bush was credited with 14 days of service at unspecified locations between Oct. 28, 1972, and the end of April 1973. The commanding officer of the Alabama unit to which Mr. Bush was supposed to report long ago said that he had never seen him appear for duty, and Mr. Bush's superiors at the Texas unit to which he returned wrote in May 1973 that they could not write an annual evaluation of him because he had not been seen there during that year. Those statements are so jarringly at odds with the payroll data that they demand further elaboration..… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/opinion/11WED1.html

Chicago Tribune | Bush releases military records: "But the documents also show gaps of weeks and months in Bush's service record that the White House could not explain, making it unlikely that these records will resolve a heated election-year debate over whether Bush fulfilled his commitment to the Guard or received special treatment from military officials.…" No records prove Bush showed up for duty in Alabama, and the commanding officer of that unit, retired Gen. William Turnipseed, maintains that he never saw Bush. The documents released Tuesday included pay records that spelled out which days Bush reported for duty in 1972 and 1973. But they do not indicate where Bush worked on those days. The White House said it has not been able to find anyone who served with Bush who could verify that he worked at the Alabama unit.… http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0402110328feb11,1,3170943.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

An Antiwar Forum in Iowa Brings Federal Subpoenas: "To hear the antiwar protesters describe it, their forum at a local university last fall was like so many others they had held over the years. They talked about the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they said, and how best to convey their feelings about Iraq into acts of civil disobedience." But last week, subpoenas began arriving seeking details about the forum's sponsor — its leadership list, its annual reports, its office location — and the event itself. On Monday, lawyers for the sponsor, the Drake University chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, went to court in an effort to block the federal prosecutors' demands. Those who attended the forum, at least four of whom said they had received subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury on Tuesday, said that they did not know what to make of the inquiry and that they feared it was intended to quash protest. Late on Monday, prosecutors in the United States attorney's office for the southern district of Iowa took the unusual step of issuing a confirmation of the investigation, stressing that its scope was limited to learning more about one person who had tried to scale a security fence at an Iowa National Guard base in a protest a day after the forum. "The United States attorney's office does not prosecute persons peacefully and lawfully engaged in rallies which are conducted under the protection of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," a written statement issued by the prosecutor here, Stephen Patrick O'Meara, said. Prosecutors also delayed the grand jury appearances by a month, a move local civil liberties officials interpreted as a sign that the government might be backing away from the investigation. "I'd say the prosecutors are recognizing the groundswell of reaction that has happened in the face of this extraordinary thing they've done," said R. Ben Stone, executive director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union. Still, the protesters, their lawyers and some national civil liberties advocates described the investigation into the attendance rolls and leadership lists of the lawyers' group as highly unusual in recent years. Some said it could send a chilling message far beyond Iowa, leaving those who consider voicing disapproval of the administration's policy in Iraq, or anywhere else, wondering whether they too might receive added scrutiny.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/national/10PROT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Op-Ed Columnist: Lost in Credibility Gulch: "Samuel Butler said, 'I care about truth not for truth's sake but for my own.' Mr. Bush presented himself in 2000 as an honest, straight-shooting Texan, an aw-shucks kind of guy whose word, unlike that of the sitting president ('I did not have sexual relations . . .'), could always be trusted." The credibility that he enjoyed during that campaign, and which reached a peak in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, has steadily eroded since then. He said he was a compassionate conservative, but he has hammered programs designed to assist the poorest and most vulnerable among us. His administration has taken a blowtorch to the environment. And his fiscal policies are so outlandish that liberals, moderates and conservatives are asking if he's taken leave of his senses. During the run-up to war, the public heard ominous references to mushroom clouds and was encouraged to believe there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11. It's time to put an end to the fantasies and the deceit, which have landed us in a quagmire overseas and the equivalent of fiscal quicksand at home. It's not too much to ask that the president of the United States speak the clear truth about his policies and their implications.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/09/opinion/09HERB.html

Chicago Tribune | AP: Kerry Pocketed Speaking Fees: "Back when federal lawmakers legally could be paid for speaking to outside groups, John Kerry collected more than $120,000 in fees from interests as diverse as big oil, tobacco, the liquor lobby and unions, records show. Between 1985 and 1990, Kerry's first five years in the Senate from Massachusetts, he pocketed annual amounts slightly under the limits for speaking fees set by Congress. Unlike many colleagues, he donated a speaking fee to charity only once, according to annual financial disclosure reports reviewed by The Associated Press. " One of the companies to pay Kerry $1,000 for a speech in 1987, Miami-based Metalbanc, was later indicted, along with two executives, on charges it helped the Cali drug cartel in Colombia launder money in the United States. The charges eventually were dropped because the firm was defunct. At the time of the 1987 speech to Metalbanc, Kerry was chairman of the Senate subcommittee that investigated drug trafficking and money laundering. Kerry, now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he didn't learn about the drug connection to the company or its executives, who also gave him political donations, until The Boston Globe informed him of it in 1996. He donated several thousand dollars to charities to make amends. Kerry's ethics reports show he made more than 90 paid speeches between 1985, when he first took office, and 1990, when Congress began the move to end honoraria. The senator's campaign acknowledged Sunday that he accepted the speaking fees, but said he also gave several speeches a year for free. "He gave these speeches to address what he saw as the important issues at the time such as the growing national deficit," spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said. "In compliance with the law, he accepted small speaking fees from some of the groups he spoke to, and, in at least one case, donated that money to charity." At the time Kerry could accept speaking fees, senators were forced to abide by annual limits, which ranged from $26,568 to $35,800. A number of veteran lawmakers often collected more than $100,000 in a single year but had to give everything over the limit to charity. For instance, former House Ways and Means committee chairman Dan Rostenskowski once donated $155,000 of his speaking fees in one year to charity.… A longtime federal election regulator said Kerry's extensive speaking efforts after he arrived in Washington followed a path taken by many new lawmakers who were not wealthy. With congressional salaries half what they are today, many lawmakers pressed to find outside income from special interests. "Members were often pulled almost like a magnet into a circle of lobbyists who were very willing to pay large honoraria for them to give a brief speech or a talk to their organization or group," said Kent Cooper, former public disclosure chief for the Federal Election Commission who now runs a Web site that studies political donations and lobbying. "This provided instant cash to a member and at the same time built a relationship with that lobbyist or organization," Cooper said.… http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/elections/sns-ap-kerry-speaking-fees.story

Making the Facts Fit the Case for War: "In 1846 President James Polk announced that Mexican troops had fired on American soldiers on American soil, and he took the country to a war that eventually gained it California, New Mexico and Arizona. Was the disputed soil ours? Probably not. Did Polk distort the information he had? Almost certainly. He wanted the territory, and he needed a war to get it. A first-term representative warned that if you 'allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . you allow him to make war at pleasure.' For these words, Abraham Lincoln received the usual reward of political courage: he forfeited any chance of a return to Congress and was retired to private life for more than a decade. (Although he would do quite well after that.) Our current dispute over the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq seems to be yet another illustration of this eternal principle: presidents and other decision makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn't mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that they must be viewed with skepticism.…" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/opinion/08GOOD.html?pagewanted=all&position=