This article provides a complete view of how the Zarqawi icon built up by the miltiary reframed the 2004 presidential election, complete with Cheney's hedged statements and inserting fear of imminent death into the brains of Americans.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
October 10, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 4; Column 1; Week in Review Desk; The World: Heart of Darkness; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1782 words
HEADLINE: Who Is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?
BYLINE: By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
DATELINE: LONDON

FROM a safe house in Falluja last January, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wrote a rambling, 17-page letter to Osama bin Laden. The letter asked Mr. bin Laden to send Al Qaeda operatives to Iraq to help Mr. Zarqawi continue the guerrilla war against the American occupiers and their allies.

HuffyPost:

US AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ PREDICTS US WILL GO INTO SYRIA…

Worth the huge type:

Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, made the off the record prediction that the US will go into Syria to combat insurgents that have been using the country as a staging ground for terrorist activity in Iraq.

Ambassador Khalilzad’s comments were made at businessman Teddy Forstmann's annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend.

In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.

Zakaria is real pissed off:

As DeLay's Woes Mount, so Does Money: (NYT)

A legal defense fund established by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, has dramatically expanded its fund-raising effort in recent months, taking in more than $250,000 since the indictment last fall of two his closest political operatives in Texas, according to Mr. DeLay's latest financial disclosure statements.

The list of recent donors includes dozens of Mr. DeLay's House Republican colleagues, including two lawmakers who were placed on the House ethics committee this year, and several of the nation's largest corporations and their executives.

Among the corporate donors to the defense fund is Bacardi U.S.A., the Florida-based rum maker, which has also been indicted in the Texas investigation, and Reliant Energy, another major contributor to a Texas political action committee formed by Mr. DeLay that is the focus of the criminal inquiry. Groups seeking an overhaul of Congressional ethics rules have long complained that companies might seek the favor of powerful lawmakers by contributing to their legal defense funds.

While the disclosure forms show that the defense fund has raised nearly $1 million since its establishment in 2000 and that Mr. DeLay is continuing to pick up generous donations from House Republicans and corporate executives, the documents also suggest that the majority leader's fund-raising efforts could soon be outpaced by ballooning legal bills.

The disclosure statements show that Mr. DeLay, whose title as majority leader makes him the second most powerful Republican in the House and whose fund-raising tactics led the House ethics committee to admonish him last year, paid $370,000 in legal fees last year - $260,000 of it in the final three months of the year.

The fees were divided among lawyers in Washington and Mr. DeLay's home state of Texas, where he is facing scrutiny by a grand jury in Austin over his role in the creation and management of Texans for a Republican Majority, the political action committee that he helped establish in 2001. The committee has been accused of funneling illegal corporate donations to state Republican candidates in the 2002 elections.

That is the best thing about their gerrymandering scheme in Texas: a tasty idea that took down the leader by his own hubris. Another example of successful long term thinking, like so many others we see and hear about.

Well, the time is upon us to certify last November's election, and there are some hopeful rumors that up to three senators were favorable to objecting to the certification of Ohio's electors. Possibly the certification of other states might be challenged, as well.

I will be back at the Dungeon of the Palace of DeWitt Wallace (ie the library computer lab) on Thursday so I will try to post some more stuff up as things in Washington unfold. Yes, the site has not been getting fresh content like we had going before finals. I would simply say that:

A) I have needed some time off of writing to read more–and actually read pleasant things, not the usual endless stream of insanity

It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.

It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.

Third parties are swinging into action to get recounts going in Ohio. The Greens & Libertarians have raised a ton of money to do it, and now they're rolling...

Blue Lemur carries a story from the University of California Berkeley, where researchers have found that Bush was likely awarded an extra 130,000 to 260,000 votes via the electronic voting systems there, including an impressive 72,000 in Broward County alone.

The survey, which is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of Florida’s 2004 election results to date, found that compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show gains for Bush between 2000 and 2004.

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DemocraticUnderground.com: After a day of furious auditing Bev, Andy and Kathleen of Black Box Voting have found discrepant results in Volusia county. At this time we have had an attorny LOCK DOWN all poll tapes, memory cartridges and the GEMS central tabulator. The discrepant results were concentrated in mainly minority areas. We are currently going through trash obtained early this morning by Bev and Kathleen Wynne via a FOIA request. At one point they were threatened with arrest but avoided it narrowly (Bev will do a full report later). Black Box Voting will be issuing a press release later today. This is it folks...the first crack in Florida.

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I sent an email (and posted) a while ago about a supposed 93,000 votes in Ohio materializing from somewhere, but the morning after I sent the email the story was debunked. It seems that some Ohio county put the wrong number of total voters on their website, which a little bit of the corporate news (and some bloggers) picked up on.

Meanwhile, despite the media impressions that everything went real smoothly, there are still many unresolved stories, and rather shocking stories of voting machines counting backwards (in Florida, of course) and another story about a county in Ohio that suddenly locked down its ballot counting facilities, barring the media and official ballot observers, citing 'homeland security' concerns.

I will not get into the election irregularities stuff I've found lately at the moment, but I will quote a form email that Dan Schned sent me:

Dear friend,

Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?

If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and to help prevent this from happening again.

Members of Congress are demanding an investigation to answer this question. Join me in supporting their call, at:

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I'm about to get teased, I sense, by one of my afternoon poli. sci. professors for an email I sent out after posting the stuff below last night. Turns out that Olbermann retracted the 93,000 vote claim this morning, much to my chagrin. I got an email from Peter Gartrell suggesting that I not wrap the whole damn campus up in my conspiracy theories. Well, i never said that I was certain of the story, just that its appearance in a corporate news source proved it was more likely to have something behind it.

However, there are plenty of other stories out there that need to be examined, including the Black Box Voting issue, the optical scanner discrepancies in Florida and such things as the Ohio machine that added 4,000 votes for Bush—nearly a twentieth of his victory margin, from just one machine. That one was corrected, but how many of things happened in an unobservable fashion?