Considering the ongoing rumor that this tape was “leaked” by a certain campagin who’s been pushing for networks to air it, I gotta say that this October Surprise is pretty lame. Here’s a bit from CNN that’s already getting ignored by the press :

“We have been unable to verify the tape’s authenticity,” the official said.

Portions of the 75-minute tape were aired Thursday evening by ABC News, which said it obtained the tape from a source known to have Taliban and al Qaeda contacts in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
. . .
A U.S. official said there were “real questions about its authenticity.”

By that, the official said, he meant that it was not clear whether the tape was prepared by someone affiliated with al Qaeda and taking orders from its leaders, or whether it was a hoax.

With the presidential election just days away, officials are wary of a possible trick by an impostor.

“Without being able to authenticate it, it’s just some guy talking on a tape,” the U.S. intelligence official said.

Indeed. The voice sounds like an American guy trying to fake a Middle Eastern accent. Atrios has the best take on this whole thing here :

Frankly, as far as I’m concerned ABC should pre-empt their prime time broadcast and show the whole damn thing. Go ahead and remind people that Bush diverted attention to Iraq and let a bunch of terrorists thrive in Pakistan/Afghanistan border areas. But, the real story here isn’t the existence of a rather bizarre video, it’s the fact that someone in the Department of Homeland Security or other federal agency is leaking to Drudge to put pressure on ABC to get them to run it. Now, that’s truly scary. Anyway, am I the only one who remembers the good old days when broadcasting these types of videos were thought to be a threat to national security? When Condi and the gang warned that the people on the videos could be sending “secret codes” to terrorists around the world, and they leaned on the networks to not broadcast them. At the time I thought those were just attempts to throw their muscle around, to prove they could, but they claimed they were serious. But, now we have someone involved with our national security leaking this stuff to an online gossip in order to put pressure on a major broadcaster. That’s a story.

Unlike “our” big news this week, there isn’t any evidence to prove the authenticity of this video in one way or another. This is just a guy talking into a video camera.

Wow. Former weapons inspector David Kay just tore apart the Bush Administration’s missing weapons arguments on Aaron Brown’s show. He confimed that the explosives were there after the invasion, that the barrels contained the HMX and RDX, and he indicted the Administration for not providing enough troops to secure these sites. I’ll post a transcript when it shows up on the CNN site.

UPDATE : Here’s the full transcript :

BROWN: I don’t know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I’ll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.

KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that’s an IAEA seal. I’ve never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You’ll see it somewhat differently.

KAY: Well, it’s interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.

And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that’s either HMX or RDX. I don’t know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.

BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn’t know what they had.

KAY: I think quite likely they didn’t know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives.

And to put this in context, I think it’s important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

BROWN: Could you — I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics.

KAY: So am I.

BROWN: I’m not sure you can necessarily. I know. It’s a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?

KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented.

Iraq had, and it’s a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

BROWN: David, as quickly as you can because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?

KAY: Oh, absolutely not.

BROWN: Thank you.

KAY: And, in fact, the loss of it is not a proliferation issue.

BROWN: OK. It’s just dangerous and it’s out there and by your thinking it should have been secured.

KAY: Well, look, it was used to bring the Pan Am flight down. It’s a very dangerous explosive, particularly in the hands of terrorists.

Y’know those missing explosives that were videotaped by embedded reporters? Well, the station has an update now that shows that they were locked under an IAEA seal (via Kos) :

A 5 Eyewitness News crew in Iraq may have been just a door away from materials that could be used to detonate nuclear weapons. The evidence is in videotape shot by Reporter Dean Staley and Photographer Joe Caffrey at or near the Al Qaqaa munitions facility.

The video shows a cable locking a door shut. That cable is connected by a copper colored seal.

A spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency told 5 Eyewitness News that seal appears to be one used by their inspectors. “In Iraq they were used when there was a concern that this could have a, what we call, dual use purpose, that there could be a nuclear weapons application.”

Here’s a pic :

Weapons have fallen into the hands of terrorists due to the incompetence of the Bush Administration. Rather than admit it, they’ve got a different excuse every day.

They’ve spent the last three days insisting that the explosives were taken from al Qaqaa before troops arrived. Well, guess what? Wrong. (via Political Wire)

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled “explosives.” Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

“We can stick it in those and make some good bombs.” a soldier told our crew.
. . .
In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name “Al Qaqaa”, the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren’t secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

“We weren’t quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn’t appear that this was being secured in any way,” said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. “It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents”.

Here’s some stills from the video in question :

So, faced with the growing evidence that tons of explosives slipped into enemy hands under our noses, the Bush campaign sent Rudy Giuliani out to deliver the new talking points :

“The president was cautious the president was prudent the president did what a commander in chief should do. No matter how you try to blame it on the president the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?”

He’s the same scumbag he was on September 10th.

I hope the troops (and their families) are picking up on this. Apparently the Bush administration’s failures to use enough troops and make a high priority of securing high-power explosives, radioactive material, and dual-use technologies is your fault.

I’ve haven’t been very diligent when it comes to fundraising appeals, but if you’ve been putting off a contribution, this is your last chance. Here’s the fundraising appeal from John Edwards :

What kind of country do we want to wake up to on
November 3?

That’s the question each of us must ask ourselves as we enter the final 36 hours of the most important fundraising drive in Democratic party history.

It is hard to imagine America making a choice that could matter more than this one — not just because the contest is so close, but because the differences between the candidates are so stark. Make no mistake about it, four more years of George W. Bush in the White House would spell disaster on many of the issues that you and I care about the most.

That’s why, whatever issues you care about, you must have one overriding priority right now — helping win powerful, persuasive victories for John Kerry and other senate candidates five days from now.

Our final fundraising deadline of the campaign is tomorrow night:

https://www.democrats.org/support/kerry.html

If you’re concerned about making America stronger and more respected in the world, we need you to step forward now. If you believe that turning a blind eye to the mistakes President Bush has made will only deepen our dilemma in Iraq, we need you to step forward now.

If you think that President Bush’s obsession with tax cuts for the wealthy is risking our economic future, we need you to step forward now. If you know we can do better creating jobs and solving America’s health care problems, we need you to step forward now.

If you want to protect the future of Social Security, we need you to step forward now. If you want to safeguard the balance and integrity of the Supreme Court, we need you to step forward now. If you realize that four more years of Bush’s environmental assaults will devastate America’s natural resources, we need you to step forward now.

Step forward now:

https://www.democrats.org/support/kerry.html

Here’s the reality. Whatever issues you care about, whichever concerns are closest to your heart, the single most important step you can take right now is helping John Kerry and other senate candidates win on November 2. Let’s not wake up on November 3 realizing that you could have made all the difference in the world.

When you mention fundraising to most people, it’s usually with language like “give to the Kerry campaign”. Framed like that, campaign contributions seem like little more than a gift to a candidate or party who, in many cases, you support for pragmatic reasons only. Needless to say, that’s not the real truth here.

In an election as important as this one, your campaign contribution is a gift to yourself and your country. While John Kerry would be the most obvious recipient of these funds, 99% of us wouldn’t be supporting him if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve all made the informed decision that John Kerry is the best person to lead America in a more positive direction.

I’ll be the first to admit that my support for John Kerry’s campaign is for strictly selfish reasons. As much pain as the last four years have caused people at home and abroad, the most important reason why I support John Kerry is because I personally don’t want to live in a world run by a dumbass. That’s what motivates me to contribute to the election of John Kerry.

Yes, it’s frustrating to contribute to a privately-financed political process that’s sucking the blood out of our democracy, but in a critical time such as this, the question we should be asking ourselves is “Would we rather face four more years of the same failed leadership, or give in to a necessary evil to help change the course of our nation?” Before you answer that question to yourself, try to imagine how you wish you’d answer it after hearing the news of a Bush victory.

https://www.democrats.org/support/kerry.html

Here’s another excerpt from John Kerry’s book A Call To Service that presents an approach to fighting terror and building democracy in the Middle East that’s unlike anything I’ve heard either candidate endorse on the campaign trail :

To appreciate fully the imperative of diplomacy in today’s world requires a deeper sense of the nature and source of the threat we face. While we must remain determined to defeat terrorism, it isn’t only terrorism we are fighting, it’s also the beliefs that motivate terrorists and the conditions that make those beliefs possible.

If you look at the countries stretching from Morocco through the Middle East and beyond — broadly speaking, the western Muslim world — what you see is a civilization under extraordinary political, economic, and cultural stress. According to Freedom House, there are no full-fledged democracies among the sixteen Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa. Jordan, Morocco, and Qatar are making progress, but Israel remains the only Middle Eastern democracy. Political and economic participation by Arab women remains the lowest in the world. More than half of Arab women are still illiterate. Public education in most of these nations is still tainted by distortions and ethnic and religious hatreds.

These countries are also among the most economically isolated in the world, with very little trade and investment and Little income apart from the oil royalties that flow to the ruling elites. They generally don’t trade with one another; most of them don’t trade with Israel, the Middle East’s economic dynamo; and they don’t trade much with the rest of the world, other than in oil. Since 1980 the share of the world trade held by the fifty-seven member countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has fallen from 15 percent to just 4 percent.
. . .
With a landscape marked by political oppression, economic stagnation, staggering unemployment levels, lack of education, poverty, refusal to integrate women into the workforce, and rapid population growth, is it any wonder these Islamic countries are recruiting grounds for terrorists?

While we must obviously continue to hunt down and destroy terrorist networks harbored in the Middle East and demand cooperation from every regime in the region, we need more than a one-dimensional war on terror. We must engage in a smarter, more comprehensive, and more far-sighted strategy for modernizing the greater Middle East. It’s no more ambitious — and no less necessary — a task than the rebuilding of Europe that we undertook at the end of World War II.

Reopening Middle Eastern economies is an especially urgent priority. If we aren’t proactive about stimulating nonpetroleum trade with and within the region, the situation is likely to get worse, not better. For one thing, existing U.S. trade preferences for countries in Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and South Africa may divert and diminish what little trade we already have in the Middle East.

We should act quickly to expand the kinds of tariff-free trade policy we extended in the African Growth and Opportunity Act — which doubled manufacturing exports to the United States during the last three years — to the greater Middle East. To qualify, these countries should agree to drop their economic boycott of Israel, end all support for terrorists, and respect basic worker rights and environmental principles, as Jordan did in the bilateral trade agreement with the United States negotiated by the Clinton administration. That United States-Jordan agreement expanded Jordanian exports to the United States from sixteen million dollars to four hundred million dollars almost overnight, creating forty thousand jobs. It would be wonderful to see that kind of economic growth flourish next door in a peaceful and senate Palestinian state that would send goods, not suicide bombers, to Israel.
. . .
As majority-Islamic countries outside the Middle East have demonstrated, there’s no inherent conflict between faith in Islam and growth in trade. In Europe, Turkey, Albania, and Bosnia have actively sought economic integration with the West. In Southeast Asia, other majority-Muslim nations like Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia are large exporters and active members of the World Trade Organization.

The urgency of building a modern economy in Iraq should provide the impetus for a regionwide effort, led by the United States and supported by international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, to liberalize regimes and reform economies. Our long-term goal must be to help these countries build senate institutions, their best chance for peace and prosperity.

While I’m sure this approach would probably enrage Kerry’s supporters on the far-left, it’s heartening to see that at least one candidate realizes that the sexism, poverty, political oppression, and lack of education are making the scourge of Islamist terror much, much worse. This sure as hell beats the current administration’s plan to keep blowing people up and hope the problem goes away.

Mithras over at DailyKos has an interesting scoop. It seems that Bush’s new campaign ad uses a photoshopped image to make it look like a crowd scene contains more soldiers than it really does :

Maybe this explains why Republicans always seem to have more support from the military. They’re just counting the same four guys over and over again.

UPDATE : After looking at the DailyKos thread, it looks like the photo was manipulated to erase Bush rather than inflate the size of the crowd. Too bad it’ll take more than mediocre photoshop skills to get rid of the real Bush, huh?

Here’s an eyewitness account of even more looting that happened under the noses of our soldiers and the Bush Administration :

I also described two particularly disturbing incidents — one I had witnessed and the other I had heard about. On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn’t know the building was important.

When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated. He shook his head and said, “I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon.” About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq’s sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad’s outskirts. They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere.

There was nothing secret about the Disease Center or the Tuwaitha warehouses. Inspectors had repeatedly visited the center looking for evidence of a biological weapons program. The Tuwaitha warehouses included materials from Iraq’s nuclear program, which had been dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War. The United Nations had sealed the materials, and they remained untouched until the US troops arrived.

The looting that I observed was spontaneous. Quite likely the looters had no idea they were stealing deadly biological agents or radioactive materials or that they were putting themselves in danger. As I pointed out to Wolfowitz, as long as these sites remained unprotected, their deadly materials could end up not with ill-educated slum dwellers but with those who knew exactly what they were doing.

This is apparently what happened. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report issued earlier this month, there was “widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq’s nuclear program.” This includes nearly 380 tons of high explosives suitable for detonating nuclear weapons or killing American troops. Some of the looting continued for many months — possibly into 2004. Using heavy machinery, organized gangs took apart, according to the IAEA, “entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment.”

Another disturbing thread I’m starting to pick up on is that our soldiers didn’t seem to know as much as they should have about their immediate surroundings or the materials they should have secured. When we’ve got soldiers spending the night at al Qaqaa or openly watching the looting of Iraq’s Disease Center, it’s clear that they weren’t well prepared for the job they were (apparently) sent to do. Making sure our troops are well-educated about this stuff is the Bush Administration’s priority and, like every other aspect of this war, they’ve failed miserably.

Mr President, do you have a message for the people who have lost their jobs and healthcare during your Administration? (via Kos)

This isn’t photoshopped. Click on the picture for a link to the video and some background.

It’s nice to see that (at least a few) ultra-conservative Christians are waking up to the fact that their “culture of life” should also apply to the living. (via Justin via Matt)

Others are like Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, where more than 2,000 people worship each Sunday. He is undecided, troubled by the bloodshed in the Middle East.

“It’s hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there,” Urcavich said.

“I’m very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion,” he added. “If I’m a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war.”

That kind of talk, coming from a conservative Christian who might ordinarily be inclined to vote Republican, could portend trouble for Bush.

An estimated 80% of the evangelical vote went to Bush in 2000. But Bush’s senior political strategist, Karl Rove, said after the 2000 election that the president might have won the race against Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites) by a comfortable margin had 4 million more evangelicals gone to the polls rather than sitting out the election.
. . .
A poll published last week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 70% of self-described evangelicals or born-again Christians planned to vote for the president, down from 74% in the same survey three weeks earlier. That was not only a slight decline, but lower than the 80% to 90% support that Bush campaign officials had been forecasting.

That last bit is probably the best news I’ve heard yet about the campaign. If Bush is looking at a 10% drop in support among his most rabid supporters in a year in which his campaign strategy almost entirely consists of firing up his base, then he’s completely screwed. I wonder how his civil unions flip-flop will affect their turnout?