Al Qaeda & Saddam [Jonah Goldberg] I have always been agnostic about the Saddam - al Qaeda connection stuff. I never thought it was particularly central to the case for invasion. I still feel that way.
The Connection [Jonah Goldberg ] My friend, ocassional poker buddy and the instigator of several pranks against yours truly, has finally come out with his book: The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. I've had a few verbal briefings and I look forward to reading it. Hayes claims to have the goods on the real connections between al Qaeda and Saddam. If what I've heard so far pans out, it could shred the conventional wisdom.
Seems to me that Congressional Democrats are more willing to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt over his contacts with Al Qaeda than they are to give Cheney with his post-election contacts with Halliburton.
Well, after 9/11 for people to be defending Iraq because they had "only" been having meetings, coffee klatches and the like with al Qaeda strikes me as pretty lame. No, alone in a vacuum having meetings with al Qaeda isn't cause for war. But we weren't operating in a vacuum. There were quite a few other variables involved, WMDs, deteroriating sanctions, Saddam's defiance of the UN, the need to be proactive after 9/11 etc. In other words, if we heard that France had been having get-togethers with al Qaeda, war wouldn't be an option. But Iraq — a country we were still more than technically at war with since 1991 — holds meeting with al Qaeda, that strikes me as serious, very serious. Posted at 7:21 AM
Al-Qaeda [Jonah Goldberg] More links to al-Qaeda found in a camp belonging to Ansar al-Islam militants. Here's a thought: wouldn't it be something if it turned out that Iraq doesn't have chemical weapons but does have direct ties to 9/11? It's extremely doubtful (I'm still convinced they have the weapons). But considering how everyone, including Tom Friedman, has poo-pooed the al-Quaeda/Iraq angle whenever the admistration has floated it, wouldn't it be grand if the one silver-bullet justification even the anti-war people have conceded for all these months turned out to be true?
For a guy that was agnostic, he sure did bring it up a lot.
This movie will be The Biggest Thing Ever, until the next such thing. Maybe not in ticket sales, but it will temporarily take over everything when it opens.
NEW HAVEN, Sept. 8 — Ned Lamont, who this week chastised Senator Joseph I. Lieberman for his public rebuke of President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, wrote to Mr. Lieberman at the time praising the eloquence of his speech on the Senate floor.
“I supported your statement because Clinton’s behavior was outrageous: a Democrat had to stand up and state as much, and I hoped that your statement was the beginning of the end,” Mr. Lamont, then a cable television executive, wrote in an e-mail message to the senator’s Washington office on Sept. 16, 1998, two weeks after Mr. Lieberman’s speech.
Mr. Lamont defeated Mr. Lieberman in last month’s Democratic primary in Connecticut, but will face the incumbent — now running on his own party line — in November. In an interview with reporters and editors on Wednesday night in Washington, Mr. Lamont said he shared Mr. Lieberman’s “moral outrage” over Mr. Clinton’s sexual misbehavior but thought the senator should have handled it behind closed doors before making a public speech.
“You don’t go to the floor of the Senate and turn this into a media spectacle," Mr. Lamont said of Mr. Lieberman’s remarks. "You go up there, you sit down with one of your oldest friends and say you’re embarrassing yourself, you’re embarrassing your presidency, you’re embarrassing your family, and it’s got to stop.”
At the time, Mr. Lamont wrote that he had “supported the moral outrage” Mr. Lieberman expressed reluctantly because he “thought it might make matters worse,” adding that “unfortunately, the statement was the beginning of a process that has turned more political and morally offensive.” He urged Mr. Lieberman to “stand up and use your moral authority to put an end to this snowballing mess,” and suggested that “It’s time for you to make up your mind and speak your mind as you did so eloquently last Thursday.”
“I’m the father of three and the thought that Clinton testifying about oral sex before the grand jury may be broadcast into my living room is outrageous,” Mr. Lamont wrote. “This sorry episode is an embarrassment to me as a father and to us as a nation.”
Ned Lamont's actual letter:
Medina's been pretty good on this race most of the time, but I have no idea how a responsible journalist could spin Lamont's letter into that article.
Yes, New York Times, we know you're obsessed. Still, we imagine that at some point you'd become a bit ashamed of that obsession and try to hide it. It really isn't very flattering.
I don't like people pushing any horseshit about 9/11 - though I actually tend to appreciate that people are out there asking questions even if too often they provide silly answers - but it's long past time we acknowledge something very important.
The biggest 9/11 conspiracy theorists are the lunatics in the administration who kept pushing an Iraq/9/11 connection and a news media who have failed to communicate to large numbers of the American people that Saddam Hussein was not, in fact, behind 9/11.
Occasionally there will be a report about how those "silly Arabs" believe all kinds of wacky conspiracy theories, culling crazy stuff from their media.
How crazy is it to associate Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden? Both bad guys, but other than that they didn't exactly have much in common.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.
In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.
That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.
But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Johnson declined to provide an actual number for the U.S. tally of August deaths or for July, when the Baghdad city morgue counted a record 1,855 violent deaths.
Violent deaths for August, a morgue official told McClatchy Newspapers on Friday, totaled 1,526, a 17.7 percent decline from July and about the same as died violently in June.
Whether your broadcast purports to be based on the 9/11 Report in whole - or only in part - is increasingly beside the point. The dramatic impact of a costly but carelessly produced film will invariably overwhelm the impression of any government document.
Amidst alarming reports that irresponsible theories about the events of 9/11 have begun to gain currency with the American people, you should not want to lend your personal reputation to a production which seems likely to instigate new and dangerous falsehoods. And so we ask that you use your influence to persuade ABC to withdraw the broadcast altogether. Failing that, we urge you to sever your relationship with this grossly misleading production.
Stepping back for a moment from the bias and factual errors, I'm struck by what an odd movie this is for a major network to show on the 5th year anniversary of 9/11. I'm not sure how a watching a catalog of failures - real and extra made up ones just for fun - really fits with how people want to spend the anniversary of that day.
It's really an odd choice.
The reviews are coming in (although the reviewers have tremendous audacity to review their review copies even though the movie isn't finished [/snark]) and they aren't too pretty.
This is the most anticlimactic, tension-free movie in the history of terrorist TV.
It's hard to fathom a brouhaha brewed over such a bore. ABC has received tens of thousands of letters -- including one from Bill Clinton's office -- insisting "Path" is wildly inaccurate and should not air. But ABC still plans to air the two-part movie.
Controversy could boost viewership, except "Path" is the dullest, worst-shot TV movie since ABC's disastrous "Ten Commandments" remake. It substitutes shaky handheld cameras and dumb dialogue for craftsmanship. It could not be more amateurish or poorly constructed unless someone had forgotten to light the sets.
An appalling secondary concern is the tone makes almost every pre-9/11 American look like a fool.
Look, there's a security guard yawning while terrorists plant the 1993 bomb at the World Trade Center. How dare a security guard work while tired.
Oh, hey, there's an airline agent checking in a 9/11 terrorist even though he has a carry-on bag. Stupid airline agents.
Excuse us all, writer Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham, for not acting like Hitler Youth in the glory days before ordinary Americans knew commercial planes could be turned into missiles.
Idiots.
Cheap emotions are on orange alert. Of all the people who died in the 1993 attack, who does the camera focus on? Ding-ding-ding, you are a winner if you said "a pregnant woman rubbing her belly."
NEW YORK — ABC defended a miniseries on the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks after Clinton administration officials said it distorts history so drastically that it should be corrected or shelved.
"No one has seen the final version of the film, because the editing process is not yet complete, so criticisms of film specifics are premature and irresponsible," the network said in a statement Thursday.
You sent out hundreds of screeners to get advanced publicity on the project. The movie is scheduled to be shown on Sunday. And shame on all the people on cable teevee who are pretending this even makes any sense. Yes a few things could be snipped by Sunday, but that's about the extent of possible edits.
Shame on ABC. Shame on Disney. And shame on all the people who imagine we're idiots.
She's saying don't worry, be happy, every little thing will balance out in the end, that if the 9/11 series is harsh and unfair towards Clinton, Bush will get his just as harshly and unfairly. That's because the Disney propaganda will be counterbalanced by a future, hypothetical mini-series on the Bush administration's marketing of the New Product in 2002 - the Iraq war - which will be equally inaccurate.
Once again, my mind boggles. It's a simple fact: The Disney propaganda series is laced with lies, bald-faced lies about the actions of the Clinton administration. That in no way is "balanced" by telling the harsh, despicable, and miserable truth about the Bush administration's wholesale effort to mislead the public into a pointless and ghastly war in Iraq. Real balance requires telling the truth both about what happened before 9/11* AND about the American public's bamboozlement regarding Iraq. Real balance leads to the inescapable, if frightening, conclusion that the Bush administration is incompetent, deceptive, violently delusional, and corrupt at a level that greatly exceeds any presidential administration within memory, including Nixon. (If not ever.) Real balance requires that story to be told as it is.
ABC still claiming their GOP-u-drama is "based on the 9/11 commission report." This is from an ad in the weekend supplement of the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
Except, you know, all the parts that flatly contradict that report.
Over 50,000 ThinkProgress readers have written ABC in the last 48 hours about “The Path to 9/11.” We’re going to keep the pressure on ABC, but we’re also broadening our focus today to the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC.
Disney’s Chairman of the Board is former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME). Senator Mitchell has a long and distinguished career both inside and outside government and he knows how important it is to accurately represent historical events.
We need to remind him that 9/11 was a national tragedy, and that politicizing and flagrantly misrepresenting the facts about 9/11 is wrong.
Former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman is blaming the city for not forcing Ground Zero workers to wear respirators, prompting a fiery response from the city's top lawyer.
In a "60 Minutes" interview to air Sunday, Whitman maintains that the nation's leading environmental agency did not have authority to enforce rules at the site, though the agency did warn the city about dangers in the air at Ground Zero.
"We didn't have the authority to do that enforcement, but we communicated to the people who did," Whitman says in the interview with Katie Couric.
"EPA was very firm in what it communicated and it did communicate up and down the line [to city officials]," Whitman says, referring to the city as the "primary responder."
"In no uncertain terms?" Couric asks.
"Uh-huh, in no uncertain terms," Whitman replies.
...
Despite Whitman's current claims, her remarks at the time suggested that the air at Ground Zero was not a major health hazard.
She was quoted in Newsday on Sept. 15, 2001, as saying, "There is no reason for concern," referring to asbestos measurements at Ground Zero and elsewhere in lower Manhattan. And on Sept. 16, she said, "New York is safe."
In the "60 Minutes" interview, Whitman draws a fine distinction regarding her earlier statements, saying she was referring to the ambient air around lower Manhattan, not Ground Zero itself.
"We never lied," she says.
Well, you know, other than the LIES. Wonder how many people will die because she lied.
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