#1
There were posts here about Zawahiri's order that Al Qaeda in Somalia start an Iraq-style guerrilla war against the Ethiopian army, but this article has all sorts of lovely names and identifying information.
EFL: The instant popularity of an attack video that mocked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) prompted plenty of talk this week about how an ordinary citizen can influence political discourse by tapping into the power of the YouTube culture. But the unmasking of the filmmaker as an employee of a company on the payroll of Clinton's Democratic presidential rival, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), raises questions about whether the more old-fashioned art of political chicanery was at play.
Phil de Vellis, who worked for the firm that designed Obama's Web site, Blue State Digital, says no one at the company or in Obama's camp knew he had made the video depicting Clinton as the droning voice of a totalitarian establishment.
Blue State yesterday provided a Feb. 10 e-mail in which de Vellis boasted of his role in the Obama effort: "Check out Barack's new website. . . . One shameless look at me plug, I designed the MyBarackObama toolbox that is on the front page and all the sidebar pages."
"Look at me!"
Thomas Gensemer, managing director of Blue State, a District-based online strategy firm, said he fired de Vellis Wednesday night. "This is an unfortunate situation all around," he said. Gensemer said his firm has provided only technical assistance, not creative services, to the senator's campaign. Joe Rospars, Obama's new media director, is on leave from Blue State.
De Vellis, 33, stirred controversy last year when he was in charge of Internet strategy for the successful Senate campaign of Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown. After anonymously posted criticism of Brown's Democratic primary opponent began appearing on local Web sites, an Ohio blogger reported that the writer's Internet address matched that of de Vellis. The Brown campaign acknowledged its involvement, but de Vellis denied posting the comments.
De Vellis has served as deputy director of online communications for Wal-Mart Watch, an anti-Wal-Mart group originally funded by the Service Employees International Union.
He also worked as a coordinator for Howard Deans campaign
The uncovering of de Vellis, who used the screen name "ParkRidge47," a reference to Clinton's 1947 birth in Park Ridge, Ill., was a digital-age detective story. Liberal blogger Arianna Huffington said she had 30 staffers contributing to a message board of tips and technical sleuthing that eventually led to a source who confirmed de Vellis's involvement. She then called de Vellis and persuaded him to confess on the Huffington Post. "The specific point of the ad was that Obama represents a new kind of politics, and that Senator Clinton's 'conversation' is disingenuous," de Vellis wrote. "And the underlying point was that the old political machine no longer holds all the power." De Vellis did not respond to an e-mail request for comment yesterday.
Comments keep pouring in to YouTube, some linking Obama to the video ("This was the worse thing Obama could have done," one user wrote yesterday), others praising its ingenuity ("I love that ad! Hillary Clinton is as much a part of the machine as Bush . . . Reagan."). The spot has also spawned imitators, such as a five-minute mash-up video titled "Vote Smart: a warning to all women about Hillary Clinton," which has been viewed more than 230,000 times.
"If I were a traditional media strategist, an old-school guy, I'd think, 'See, you can't trust these crazy kids,' " said Jonah Seiger, who heads the online strategy firm Connections Media. "If one of my employees did this, I'd be outraged. It would reflect badly on my company. It can't help but reflect badly on my client. . . . There's no question that this causes embarrassment to Obama."
The imbroglio highlighted not just how the power to push a message has shifted from big campaign organizations to lone operators with rudimentary video skills, but how technology makes subterfuge easier to accomplish -- and easier to detect. "You can be as anonymous as you want on the Internet," Huffington said. "But the minute you create something powerful that has impact, people are going to find out who it is."
Posted by: Steve ||
03/23/2007 13:23 ||
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#1
The moral of the story: Pandering Dem pols should never piss off Hollywood's "pink mafia"...
#2
He does have a point though. The so-called YouTube culture is extremely strong, extremely popular, and an incredibly powerful medium for getting one's message out.
A smart (or deviously clever or diabolically insane) person could take definite advantage of this in any number of ways.
Alberto Gonzales has to go. I say this with no pleasure hes a decent and honorable man and without the slightest expectation that his departure will blunt the Democratic assault on the Bush administration over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. In fact, it will probably inflame their bloodlust, which is why the president might want to hang on to Gonzales at least through this crisis. That might be tactically wise. But in time, and the sooner the better, Gonzales must resign.
Its not a question of probity, but of competence. Gonzales has allowed a scandal to be created where there was none. That is quite an achievement. He had a two-foot putt and he muffed it.
How could he allow his aides to go to Capitol Hill unprepared and misinformed and therefore give inaccurate and misleading testimony? How could Gonzales permit his deputy to say that the prosecutors were fired for performance reasons when all he had to say was that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and the president wanted them replaced?
And why did Gonzales have to claim that the firings were done with no coordination with the White House? Thats absurd. Why shouldnt there be White House involvement? That is nothing to be defensive about. Does anyone imagine that Janet Reno fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in March 1993, giving them all of 10 days to clear out, without White House involvement?
The Bush administration fired eight. Democrats are charging this was done for reasons of politics, and that politics have no place in the legal system. This is laughable. U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president and, by tradition, are recommended by home state politicians of the same party, not by a group of judges or a committee of the American Bar Association. Which makes their appointment entirely political.
OK, say the accusers, but once youve made the appointments, they should be left to pursue justice on their own. Its nice to see that Sen.Charles Schumer, who is using this phony scandal to raise funds for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, has suddenly adopted a Platonic view of justice. But the fact is that there are thousands of laws on the books and only finite resources for any prosecutor to deploy, which means that one must have priorities about which laws to emphasize and which crimes to preferentially pursue.
Those decisions are essentially political. And they are decided by elections in which both parties spell out very clearly their law enforcement priorities. Are you going to allocate prosecutorial resources more to drug dealing or tax cheating? To street crime or corporate malfeasance? To illegal immigration or illegal pollution? If you're a Democrat today, you call the choice political to confer a sense of illegitimacy. If you're a neutral observer, you call the choice a set of law enforcement priorities reflecting the policy preferences of the winner of the last presidential election.
For example, both voter intimidation and voter fraud are illegal. The Democrats have a particular interest in the former because they see it diminishing their turnout, while Republicans are particularly interested in the latter because they see it as inflating the Democratic tally. The Bush administration apparently was dismayed that some of these fired attorneys were not vigorous enough in pursuing voter fraud.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Pursuing voter fraud is not, as The New York Times pretends, a euphemism for suppressing the vote of minorities and poor people. It is a mechanism for suppressing the vote of (among other phantoms) dead people. Conservatives have a healthy respect for the opinion of dead people conservatives revere tradition, which Chesterton once defined as ``the democracy of the dead'' but they draw the line at posthumous voting.
If the White House decides that a U.S. attorney is showing insufficient zeal in pursuing voter fraud or the death penalty or illegal immigration or drug dealing it has the perfect right to fire him. There is only one impermissible reason for presidential intervention: to sabotage an active investigation. That is obstruction of justice. Until the Democrats come up with any real evidence of that and they have not this affair remains a pseudo-scandal. Which would never have developed had Gonzales made the easy and obvious case from day one.
#1
Started the article amazed Krauthammer had gone wobbly but agreed with him by the third paragraph. Gonzoles let a non scandal turn into a scandal and there is no excuse for that.
#2
Alberto is a nice enough fellow and a decent, if somewhat mediocre, AG. But The Hammer(TM) is right here, as he usually is.
If there's anything worse than a scandal, it's letting a scandal get created when there never really was one to begin with. He should have known the Dems would jump all over this given the slightest inkling of impropriety. It's unfortunate for him and totally hypocritical on the Dems part (no surprise there) but the reality is that he let his guard down on this one, lost his concentration, and they're nailing him for it.
"He had a two-foot putt and he muffed it."
In other words, it never should have happened. And that's why he needs to go.
I've tried my best to find out what happened to the man who could spark a war with Iran, but he seems to have disappeared like a diamond in an inkwell. And it makes me nervous.
General Ali Reza Asgari, a former intelligence officer in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and deputy defense minister until 2005, was last seen in public around December 7 in Istanbul. Iran says Israel and the United States kidnapped him, presumably to coerce him into telling lies about Iran. The Washington Post has reported he is in U.S. custody, spilling his guts, and more recently the New York Times reported that the German defense minister, when asked about Asgari's whereabouts, said "I cannot say anything on this issue." But both the U.S. and Israel deny having him, let alone kidnapping him.
Normally, vanished intelligence officers barely merit one short paragraph on page eight. Asgari is different, though. As the IRGC commander in Lebanon in the late '80s and early '90s, he knows dirty secrets, secrets that could be used to justify going to war with Iran. Asgari was in the IRGC's chain of command when it was kidnapping and assassinating Westerners in Lebanon in the '80s. Asgari knows a lot about other IRGC-ordered, Lebanon-based terrorist attacks, including the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
As IRGC commander in Lebanon, Asgari was also one of Hizballah's stepfathers. In the late '80s and early '90s, he was Hizballah Secretary General's Hasan Nasrallah's primary Iranian contact, and certainly in a position now to provide evidence of Nasrallah's involvement in terrorism. Asgari was the primary Iranian contact for one of the world's most lethal and capable terrorists, 'Imad Fa'iz Mughniyah. Mughniyah is indicted in the U.S. for the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the murder of a Navy diver.
The bad news for Hizballah and Iran doesn't end there. Asgari would be able to tell us about Hizballah's secret military commanders, its overseas networks, and possibly its cells in the U.S. A friend close to Hizballah's leadership tells me Hizballah has gone to battle quarters, concluding Asgari's "kidnapping" is a prelude for its next round with Israel.
The more important question is what Asgari's possible defection would mean for this Administration's plans for Iran. Nothing is certain when it comes to Iran, but here's what I think we should look for: If Asgari resurfaces in the next couple months with a detailed, convincing bill of indictment against Iran and Hizballah (unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's supposed confession), we should expect a confrontation. For instance, in the late '80s Hizballah, under IRGC orders, sent plastic explosives to secret cells around the world. Only one shipment was intercepted. The others are presumably still in place. If Asgari helps us dig one up, the Administration has a propaganda weapon it never had going into the Iraq war.
On the other hand, if Asgari remains in his inkwell, the Bush Administration may have decided to leave Iran alone.
Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is the author of See No Evil
#1
There's always WND > EUROS warning of possible regional Israeli-Syrian war this summer [2007]. Warning Assad = Syria that Israel is prepping for war. OTOH, PRAVDA > MEGATON nuke blast may save Earth from asteroid attack > Comet APHOPHIS will INEVITABLY STRIKE EARTH in Year 2036.
#5
There is apparently nothing else that will bring us to reply to Iran's thirty years war against the West. I fail to see how this fellow will make the slightest difference to our spine.
#8
I've tried my best to find out what happened to the man who could spark a war with Iran
Mr. Baer is a former CIA field officer, according to the blurb. He knows all about need to know, and he knows he has no need to know. He should be clever enough to figure things out from open sources, not openly trying to compromise operations security. Self-satisfied, blindered idiot!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
