• The President told NBC News that John Kerry’s service in Vietnam was heroic and he should be proud of it. “Going to Vietnam was more heroic than my flying fighter jets, he was in harm's way and I wasn't.''

• When Matt Lauer asked President Bush if the war on terror could be won in four years or ever the President replied, “I don't think you can win it. I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

• "Had we to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success – being so successful, so fast, that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in, escaped and lived to fight another day," he said to Time Magazine when asked about the aftermath of his Iraqi invasion....click here for entire article

August 30, 2004 - He was just one of those kids. You know the kind. He stood away from everybody else, with a detached, almost vacant look. You could see him there at his desk, head down, a pencil in his hand or a book spread open on the desk, never looking to the left or right. He wore tattered jeans and a faded shirt, the same one day after day. Nobody took him to the mall to get ready for school. He was always alone. He did not share in the chatter. He was never called down for talking in class. There was no one to talk to. You could see the other kinds sneak a sidelong look at him and snigger, “It’s my shirt from last year. Mom gave it to the Goodwill.” He always did well on tests but never turned in his homework. That is why he got bad grades.

His mother showed up once or twice for parent-teacher’s meetings. There wasn’t a father along. They were alone, just the two of them. Mom, she was barely 20 when he started kindergarten, hadn’t made it through high school. She supported them with what she could make slinging hash and hustling tips down to the truck stop. They made it through, but barely. The kids, and the teachers too if they could not be heard, called him “trailer trash”....click here for entire article

August 30, 2004 - "Had we to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day," President Bush told Time Magazine admitting that his administration had underestimated the chaos that had followed Tommy Franks’ splendid military campaign. This is the same President who was urging America to judge him and his administration by results. Let us look at some of those results. .

The Census Bureau reports that in each year of the Bush Administration the number of Americans living in poverty has risen. In each year of the Bush Administration the median family income of Americans has fallen. In each year of the Bush Administration the number of Americans who are without medical insurance has increased. Those are the results as recorded by the non-partisan statisticians of the Census Bureau, not the partisan sniping of an opposition party or candidate...click here for entire article

August 29, 2004 - It is again Sunday morning. On this Sunday my father-in-law will attend Church with us. It is a milestone for him and for us. Friday marked one week since his Doctor told him and us that the PET scan showed that his cancer that began in the lung had made its way to three spots in his brain and the end of his first course of radiation treatments. Let me make one thing clear. Raymond Clark is not dying of cancer, though he knows that his condition is inoperable and terminal. No, Raymond Clark has made the decision that he is living with cancer and that is why he is going to travel with us the 75 miles to the country Church he has helped to lead this many years. He will lead the congregation in thanking God for the gift his has received – the gift of living each new day. We, Linda and I and the rest of the congregation of that little church in Indianola, will join with him in his prayer of thanksgiving. It is not a time for us to grieve and be sad. There will time enough for that. It is a time for us to be glad and rejoice that we have received the gift of one more day.

There is no tragedy here. Ray’s journey upon the pathway that starts with birth and ends with death is a journey that each of us will travel. Each of us has begun the process of dying at the moment of our birth. The end of life is as natural and as much a gift from God as life’s beginning; Ray Clark is one the few who understands that. He is one of the few who have accepted and continues to accept each new day’s gift and used each gift to live that day...click here for entire article

August 28, 2004 - Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war and that war is simply politics by other means. It is no coincidence that our political contests and other sports are described using the language of war. We speak of campaigns; of the rank and file battling it out in the trenches; of candidates under siege. We wonder which candidate is leading in this or that battleground state and as the candidate and their supporting armies launch attack after attack Truth lies in the gutter; collateral damage in the political wars.

No one engaged in the battle has any interest whatsoever in objective truth. No one cares whether Lt. George W. Bush slid out of his minimal military commitment in 1972 and no one cares whether there was Viet Cong fire from the river banks while Jim Rassmann and Larry Thurlow were being pulled from the water on March 13th 1969. Those are only facts, cold, objective and immutable. Facts have little to do with Truth in a political campaign. We are uninterested in finding the facts in a political contest. Truth is a casualty, buried in a mass grave along with justice, honor and integrity; all covered over - bulldozed over with a layer of corruption so that the facts can be hidden from sight...click here for entire article

August 27, 2004 - This election in large part is about values. It is not, or rather should not be about, validating John Forbes Kerry’s exploits in his short tour as OIC of a Swift Boat It should not be about punishing his presentation to the Congress of the results of the Winter Soldier investigation. If should not be about the location of PCF 44 on Christmas 1968 or how many drills George W. Bush attended four years later.

The questions that the voters will decide on November 2nd are more basic than that. What the voters must decide is what values will guide America in the 21st Century. What principles will guide us through the coming years and enable us to pass to our children and they to their children a better, more peaceful and more compassionate world than that which was passed to us.

The human tragedy of Abu Ghraib reflects on us and our values as did the massacre at Mai Li. If American soldiers collected human ears in Vietnam as trophies it reflects on each of us and on the validity of our American ideals. For those of us who grew up learning that Americans were a virtuous people challenged and beset by inhumane and cruel dictatorships that valued nothing more than power and privilege Mai Li and now Abu Ghraib hit like an earthquake shaking the foundation of the image of America we had carried with us from our childhood. When we heard of Mai Li; when we heard of American soldiers collecting the ears from dead Vietnamese to substantiate body counts; when we counted the dead at Kent State we were sick unto death for we could not believe that Americans could be guilty of such outrages...click here for entire article

August 26, 2004 - One of the first things that you learn as a young prosecutor is that when eyewitnesses tell contradictory tales you have to look at the physical evidence to help decide which account is the accurate one. Larry Thurlow on the trailing boat of three on the left bank of the river and those who support his story claim that after PCF 3 was blasted by the remote controlled mine there was no enemy fire. He even denied that there was a second blast on the right side of the river that damaged PCF 94, injured John Kerry and blew Jim Rassmann into the river. All the men aboard PCF 94 experienced an explosion and enemy fire and the man stationed in the gunners well on Don Droz’s boat supports their account. Thurlow claims that Kerry ran upstream at high speed and only returned for Rassmann after all danger was past. Kerry’s crew says the opposite.

The Battle damage report for the March 13 action provides the physical evidence. Two starboard and one port windows in the Main Cabin were blown out. Thurlow claims that it was old damage from an ambush that took place on March 12. But that is not the only battle damage to PCF 94 that is recorded. Its radio is out. All of the remote units in the pilot house are inoperable. The AC wiring is shot and the Onan generator is no good. The after helm station steerage won’t work. The radar gear box is frozen. There is significant damage below the waterline. The propellers are curled and chipped. Significantly both engines are reduced in RPM. The boat is rated not capable of going on patrol...click here for entire article

August 24, 2004 - Benjamin Ginsberg is a lawyer for the President’s re-election campaign. He is also the lawyer for the famous 527 organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Air Force Col. Ken Cordier was a member of President Bush’s Veterans Steering Committee with his name prominently displayed on the Bush campaign web-site. While a member of the steering committee Cordier privately taped a comment for inclusion in the latest ad run by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. When someone called attention to his very public membership on the Bush committee, he very publicly resigned – after the ad made its debut.

Of course neither President Bush nor his campaign has any connection to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Certainly neither the President nor his campaign is coordinating activities with the 527 organization and especially not its attack dog ads. Why, such coordination would be illegal. Indeed the Swift Boater’s independence was demonstrated when the organization refused the President’s call to pull its ads – citing the organization’s First Amendment rights. It is only a coincidence that Mr. Ginsberg says that the Swiftees "came to me and said, 'We have a point of view we want to get into the First Amendment debate right now. There's a new law. It's very complicated. We want to comply with the law, will you keep us in the bounds of the law?' I said yes, absolutely, as I would do for anyone."...click here for entire article

August 24, 2004 - For more than two weeks, in Sadr City, in Najaf, in Basra and in points in between the Mehdi militia has held out against the combined forces of the American led coalition and the fledgling Iraqi Security Force. The insurgents are armed with small arms, assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades and mortars. For more than a year an insurgency directed at the American led coalition has struck seemingly at will. Sometimes credited to remnants of the Saddamist Sunni regime, sometimes to imported terrorist fighters and most recently to Shi`ite resistance this sustained low intensity warfare has been unremitting. The more than 150,000 allied troops and their indigenous surrogates have seemed powerless to bring an end to the resistant insurgency,

Thousands of Iraqis have been killed; both insurgent fighters and as collateral damage caught in the cross fire. The damage to infrastructure from coalition bomb runs and artillery barrages is uncounted. Even as we spend billions to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure we spend billions more to blow it up and day by day, week by week, the attacks go on and the rank and file of the regiment of the dead fills with new recruits...click here for entire article

August 23, 2004 - While the media is focused on the rhetorical contest between the men who won the medals and the men who would re-write the military history of the Vietnam War the unfinished war in Iraq goes on. The Battle of Najaf pitting the ill equipped and untrained ragtag Mehdi Militia against the United States Army, Air Force, and Marines with its Iraqi surrogates drags into its third week. It is an eerie echo of the all but forgotten Battle of Fallujah fought with bellicose rhetoric just a few weeks ago. The killing goes on, the dying goes on and the “truce talks” go on but a resolution escapes in the fog of war. Fallujah and Najaf seem destined to become this generation’s Khe San and Hamburger Hill and Hue; battles fought at great cost and then, with the spoils won, abandoned as strategically unimportant. The manhunt that started on September 11th, 2001 is dragging into its third year consigned to the margins of history.

On March 13, three young Navy Lieutenants, Junior Grade, took their Swift Boats out on patrol, their noisy diesel engines announcing their approach and inviting ambush. Standard Operating Procedure had been to firewall the throttle, escape the killing zone and when clear of the enemy, land their compliment of RVN marines to crack back at the ambush site. That was PCF doctrine, carefully worked out by staff officers far from the rivers and it had not worked. The three of them, John Kerry, Bill Rood, and Don Droz revised the SOP for this patrol. Two of them survive to speak of that patrol. The third voice that of Don Droz was stilled in another ambush just a month later....click here for entire article

August 20, 2004 - I’m tired of lies told thrice as if in the repetition they well be transformed and made into a truth. That is what our public men had made of the drive attain and retain political power in our democratic republic. They tell us that which we seek lies just around the corner and we are turning it now. They tell us that the goal is just beyond the far side of the hill, across the next river, concealed by a tangled forest. In a feigned purity they send others to speak falsehoods so that they maintain implausible deniability and say, donning an air of innocence, “Not I.”

“It don’t mean nothing.” My brother brought that phrase home with him 30 years ago; an all purpose phrase; a comment for every situation at once without meaning and full of import. It fit both death and survival in equal measure. “It don’t mean nothing” was at once a benediction for an innocence lost and a prayer for a discovered purpose. Slowly, as the years passed, that fatalistic phrase passed from his vocabulary. It was as though the wounds he bore deep within him had been exorcised and healed....click here for entire article

August 18, 2004 - As a member of the Axis of Evil, Iran takes second place to North Korea.  It’s 425,000 man army pales beside the 1.5 million that Pyongyang can muster.  It has a small, but well trained and equipped air force and a navy that boasts 8 missile firing craft and two submarines.  North Korea claims to have nuclear weapons and has demonstrated that it has the capacity to deliver them far beyond its borders.  Iran has the means of delivery, tested last week, but we don’t believe that it has a nuclear capability – at least not yet. 

 All that being said the Iranian regime has two important things that North Korea does not have.  First, it has 10% of the world’s proven oil reserves.  Second it has the Strait of Hormuz through which the world’s oil supply must pass.  With garrisons flanking the sea lanes on the mainland on the one side and island possessions on the other armed with surface to ship missiles combined with its submarine mine laying capability Iran is in a position to close that vital waterway to the passage of tankers and to severely hamper the passage of American ships of war...click here for entire article

August 17, 2004 - One of the 911 commissioners, and I forget which one, said that a major problem with out intelligence operations was a lack of imagination, a failure to imagine the threats to America and her interests in the world at large posed by stateless terrorists and the states that support them and provide them sanctuary. Let’s pause a minute and think about what that commissioner meant.

Imagine with me a Middle Eastern country, its government controlled by a Shi`ite fundamentalist regime. Imagine that the country possesses vast oil reserves and is strategically located on the Persian Gulf. Imagine that for three decades it has pursued an Anti-American posture in the world. For those thirty years it has openly supported and financed one or more terrorist organizations that have repeatedly struck at western interests in the region. Imagine that in a conflict with its neighbor it deployed and used medium range missiles and that there is some intelligence that indicates that it employed chemical weapons in that war. Imagine that it has a large, well equipped and trained army; a potent air force and a functioning navy. Imagine that has followed a concentrated program to develop a nuclear capability and last week successfully tested an intermediate range missile capable of reaching any US facility in the region as well as any point in Israel. Imagine that this country is refusing to permit IAEA inspectors acting under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty access to its nuclear facilities. It does not take a lot of imagination. The country is Iran...click here for entire article

August 16, 2004 - Somewhere in a very warm climate J. Edgar’s ghost is surely smiling and Richard Nixon’s shade is chuckling. Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are fanning out across the country taking pro-active steps to minimize the possibility that the President will be embarrassed by anti-war demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in New York. Just recently six FBI agents visited Sarah Bardwell in her Denver, Colorado home. You wouldn’t think of the 21 year old college student as a terrorist. An attractive brunette with no apparent connection to any Middle Eastern group she was targeted by the Bureau as part of a nation-wide effort to contact and shadow people who have or might in the future participate in anti-war demonstrations, especially at political events in the closing days of the Presidential campaign.

Using the authority that it claims it has under the P.A.T.R.I.O.T Act the Justice Department has launched a campaign to contact potential demonstrators, their families and friends to determine the likelihood of the commission of crimes in any demonstrations that might occur between now and Election Day. It is part of a new program that has enlisted local law enforcement in a cooperative effort to monitor and infiltrate dissenting groups. The same Department of Justice unit that issued its opinion approving of torture has put the stamp of approval on the program ...click here for entire article

August 15, 2004 - At lunch Saturday I was talking to an Illinois farmer, a friend of mine. He is the Republican County Chairman and a member of the Piatt County Board. He and I have a good relationship based on the reality that he knows he is not going to change my mind and I'm not going to change his. Still, we banter about politics and life. If the conversations grow too heated we change the subject to Illini Football, though recently that subject has been somewhat less pleasant than politics but at least we don't fill body bags after combat in Memorial Stadium.

Saturday noon he asked me if I had seen the pictures of Charley's damage. I told him that I had. He asked me if I understood that the idiots who chose to live on the Florida coast took the risk that they were going to get hit by a hurricane. I responded that we have tornados.

"I suppose", he said, "that you liberals want to run down there and hand out money right and left to pay them for being fools". I reminded him that the storm devastated Sanibel and Captiva islands - the playgrounds of the very rich ...click here for entire article

August 15, 2004 - At lunch Saturday I was talking to an Illinois farmer, a friend of mine. He is the Republican County Chairman and a member of the Piatt County Board. He and I have a good relationship based on the reality that he knows he is not going to change my mind and I'm not going to change his. Still, we banter about politics and life. If the conversations grow too heated we change the subject to Illini Football, though recently that subject has been somewhat less pleasant than politics but at least we don't fill body bags after combat in Memorial Stadium.

Saturday noon he asked me if I had seen the pictures of Charley's damage. I told him that I had. He asked me if I understood that the idiots who chose to live on the Florida coast took the risk that they were going to get hit by a hurricane. I responded that we have tornados.

"I suppose", he said, "that you liberals want to run down there and hand out money right and left to pay them for being fools". I reminded him that the storm devastated Sanibel and Captiva islands - the playgrounds of the very rich...click here for entire article

August 11, 2004 - “Lt. J.G. Kerry was assigned to this division short time but during that time exhibited all of the traits desired of an officer in a combat environment. He frequently exhibited a high sense of imagination and judgment in planning operations against the enemy in the Mekong Delta. Involved in several enemy initiated fire fights, including an ambush during the Christmas truce, he effectively suppressed enemy fire and is unofficially credited with 20 enemy killed in action. Though relatively new to the PCF he is thoroughly knowledgeable of all aspects of his boat and PCF operations. He was instrumental planning of highly successful SeaLords operations. He was cited for his performance during action against the enemy by Commander Task Force in his message 080807z Jan 69.” George M. Elliott, Lt. Cmdr, Fitness Report dated 28 January, 1969 (emphasis supplied)

The December 1968 SeaLords operation was code named Giant Slingshot. A July 1969 Navy press release described the operation: “[O]n November 16th, the Navy launched Operation Tran Hung Dao, a series of interdiction patrols on two waterways along the Cambodian border from Ha Tien to Chau Doc. Swift boats (PCFs) patrolled the western end and river patrol boats (PBRs) the eastern end. Then in December of last year, the Brown Water Navy announced Operation "Giant Slingshot", another part of Sea Lords. River Patrol boats (PBRs) and river assault craft (RACs) of the U.S. and Vietnamese Navies were dispatched to the Vam Co Dong and the Vam Co Tay rivers, which form a natural boundary around the "Parrot's Beak" section of Cambodian border protruding into Vietnam.” ...click here for entire article

The cynicism was not unfounded. The new terror alert vied with the Kerry Campaign’s post-convention for space on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Secretary Ridge took pains to include a line crediting the President’s leadership in his announcement. The timing and the specific content followed after an earlier and vague warning that Al Qaeda was poised to launch an attack timed to affect the 2004 election. It certainly was in keeping with the concerted effort of the Bush re-election campaign to frame the campaign as a referendum on the war on terror. The press briefing seemed designed to rebut the idea that the warning had more to do with the war for votes than the war against terror...click here for entire article

In May a rumor surfaced on the internet that a dramatic capture of an Al Qaeda big wig was scheduled to be announced during the last 10 days of July. In its issue that hit the newsstands on July 19th The New Republic reported claims by Pakistani intelligence officers that the US had put pressure on Pakistan to announce the capture of an Al Qaeda high value target “on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July". On July 29th, Pakistan announced the capture “some days ago” of Tanzanian Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, wanted in connection with the embassy bombings. The announcement came just hours before Senator Kerry’s acceptance speech was scheduled....click here for entire article

That was how Private David Webster of Easy Company described the death of one of the Screaming Eagles in his unpublished manuscript quoted extensively in Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. Private Webster wrote of a boy’s death in January 1945 but when I read those words this morning they grabbed me, reminding me that he was writing of things that I will never know; reminding me that war is timeless, unchanging and unclean and now....click here for entire article

I say that Jim Rassman is a liar because a group of so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say that he is. They claim that it did not happen. There was no ambush they say. The mine explosion was not an enemy action but resulted from John Kerry’s clumsy handling of a US mine. There was no fire from the banks of the river and no emergency. That is what they say in a political polemic they published and in a television ad that the Bush Campaign says they have no control over. John Kerry fabricated the whole thing, they say, just so he could harvest a Bronze Star for Valor. It that is true then the man in the water is a liar too....click here for entire article

One thing that is lurking around that corner is winter. In winter the cost of heating our homes replaces the cost of a gallon of gas as the most directly felt consequence of the record price for crude oil. The end of the summer driving season won’t end the belt tightening that the consumer has to do to stretch the paycheck to the end of the week. Our consumer economy moves on oil. When a product moves from a factory in Shanghai to a Wal-Mart in Springfield oil moves it every step of the way. It is just not the price of gasoline to power an SUV that impacts the consumer. The price of diesel fuel to power the ships, trains, and trucks that deliver goods to the store shelves is reflected on the price sticker. The airline industry that barely survived September 2001 with government help is taking a double whammy as consumer dollars flow from ticket purchases to the gas pump and the cost of fuel for their planes soars ever upward. The Federal Reserve is looking around Mr. Bush’s corner and seeing inflation. Look for a boost in interest rates next Tuesday...click here for entire article

That Cheney blames the Democrat minority is no surprise. All throughout the Bush occupation of the White House we have been told that Bush is not responsible. What the Bush campaign can’t blame on the Clintons they find a way to blame on Jimmy Carter. And if Clinton did something and it worked well then he was just reaping the benefit of George H. W. Bush’s handiwork when Poppy was Presiden...click here for entire article

The Department of Homeland Security has come under increasing fire for its vague and unspecific raising and lowering of the threat level. This time the Department avoided that criticism by making the warning target specific. Buttressing the specificity of the warning was the news that Al Qaeda had collected target specific data including security arrangements, construction details and floor plans for buildings housing key financial institutions. The implication was that the data Al Qaeda collected was current. Now it is emerging that the data on the Al Qaeda computers was as stale as Sandy Berger’s socks...click here for entire article.

We don’t usually get information as to the content of intelligence information and how it was collected. Just a few days ago Sandy Berger was under fire for his sloppy handling of stale classified information from the National Archives in large part because of fears that the sources and methods of intelligence operations might be revealed. ? Never before has the public been made privy to this kind of detailed information about intelligence operation. Why this deviation from standard doctrine in the Intelligence community?...click here for entire article.