Scrapbook

...The morning of 9/11 was a blur for many Americans and must have been for Clarke, too...

...Which means it really gets his goat whenever a "mercenary" willingly enters a war zone "because the money is DAMN good...

...In numerous studies of political and economic news, he traced liberal and negative bias to the arrogant assumption that journalists alone uphold the public interest and have a duty to unmask the claims of every other group as merely self-interested...

...Rumsfeld was in his office when the plane hit the Pentagon but not on video...

...Miller told the New York Times's David Sanger, one of the few journalists to scrutinize the Clarke narrative, that he never spoke to Rumsfeld that day...

...Texas Democrat Martin Frost, to his credit, quickly pulled his ads from the site last week after another blogger drew the Frost campaign's attention to the "screw them" diatribe...

...He started writing his political blog in the summer of 2002, and in January 2003 became partners with Jerome Armstrong, who had spent the previous couple of years helping Vermont governor Howard Dean cement his Internet presence...

...The fourth victim, burned and mutilated beyond recognition, has not been identified...

...Congressman Frost supported the President's efforts to remove Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime and stands 100% behind our troops who are fighting terrorism both abroad and right here at home...

...In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke declared that "there's no evidence of Iraqi support for al Qaeda, ever...

...v. Virginia Commonwealth University) by showing that salary differences need not imply discrimination...

...Last April, their political consultancy, Armstrong Zuniga, helped orchestrate grassroots efforts to draft Gen...

...There is no place for these disgusting remarks in this nation's discussion on foreign policy...

...They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place...

...In the words of his mentor Richard Weaver, Ted Smith showed how journalists' ideas have consequences for all of us...

...But Clarke relates in vivid detail a secure videoconference of the national security team...

...Clarke writes that another NSC staffer, Franklin Miller, told Rumsfeld on 9/11 to leave the burning Pentagon in a helicopter...

...The pentagon's "talking points" on Clarke left in a Washington, D.C., Starbucks by an aide to Donald Rumsfeld are notable for their focus on the substance of Clarke's terror-war critique...

...government were brutally murdered in Falluja, Iraq, last week—their corpses mutilated on camera by an anti-American mob—the pseudonymous Daily Kos, a star of the liberal blogger set, chimed in on his website (www.dailykos.com) with this bit of political analysis, headlined "Every Death Should be on the front page": Let the people see what war is like...

...The views expressed by that website in no way reflect Martin's positions and as stated earlier his advertising has been pulled," Frost campaign manager Jess Fassler said in an email...

...Because Daily Kos is one of the web's most popular blogs, it is able to charge between $700 and $2,000 a month to host online advertisements, almost all of which are spots for national Democratic candidates or organizations...

...But his most lasting legacy was his critique of the "Socrates syndrome" in journalism...

...The sponsors include the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee...

...Smith was a rare blend of theorist, social scientist, and activist...

...Dramatic...

...True...

...The uninitiated should know that "Kos" is not by reputation a far-left lunatic...

...A longtime board member of the National Association of Scholars, he sued his own university and succeeded in overturning its "gender equity" program in a precedent-setting case (Smith et al...

...Mike Teague, a former special operations officer and Army veteran with 12 years experience...

...There are real repercussions to Bush's folly...

...Nobody deserves to die," he said...

...Except Rumsfeld was not there...

...and Scott Helvenston, of Leesburg, Fla., who spent 12 years as a Navy Seal...

...government was "sure" that Iraqi scientists worked on chemical weapons at the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that we destroyed after al Qaeda bombed two U.S...

...As I entered the Video Center, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was taking the roll and I could see people rushing into studios around the city: Donald Rumsfeld at Defense and George Tenet at CIA...

...From what The Scrapbook could make out, Zuniga is also angry because, having been raised in El Salvador, he "actually grew up in a war zone...

...This isn't an Xbox game...

...Thus several of Clarke's implausible claims have gone almost unnoticed...

...But it didn't happen like that...

...Kos" is the pseudonym for Markos Zuniga, a 27-year-old lawyer in California...

...And last May, they signed a contract with Dean for America...

...On page 237 of his book, Clarke recounts a September 4, 2001, "principals" meeting at which "Rumsfeld, who looked distracted throughout the session, took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq, and that whatever we did on this al Qae-da business, we had to deal with the other sources of terrorism...

...That said, I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries...

...Here, then, are the names of the "mercenaries" who, at the time of their death, were providing security for food shipments into Falluja: Jerry Zovko, a 32-year-old Army veteran whose brother told the New York Times that he went to Iraq "to make it a better place...

...So he "lived in the midst of hate the likes of which most of you will never understand...

...That makes it all the harder to accept the loss of one of the best, Ted J. Smith, a prominent dissenter from the conventional campus wisdom, who recently died from a heart attack...

...But he's very much in the Democratic mainstream—or at least he was until his outburst against the four dead Americans, who worked for a North Carolina firm, Blackwater Security Consulting...

...He's a Democratic political consultant on the make...

...Speaking of diatribes, Zuniga followed up the next day with a non-apology titled "Mercenaries, war, and my childhood...

...He had come directly from a meeting with members of Congress and, after the attack, in one of the most-chronicled events of that day, went to the site of the impact to help load the injured onto stretchers...

...Very perceptive...

...But in January 1999, Clarke told the Washington Post that the U.S...

...embassies in Africa...

...The World Trade Center had been hit moments earlier...

...Clarke's Free Ride Pundits and commentators last week worked overtime decrying the Bush administration's "character assassination" of ex-NSC staffer Richard Clarke, yet we have heard nothing at all about Clarke's personal life (except from Bush-despising websites fantasizing about how low the White House is supposedly about to stoop...

...Screw them...

...He was angry because "these mercenaries" would "leave their wives and children behind" to help build the new Iraq...

...Meanwhile, journalists have done remarkably little substantive work themselves...

...Moments later, according to Clarke, NSC staffer Roger Cressey "stepped back in to the video conference and announced: 'A plane just hit the Pentagon.'" Clarke replied: "I can still see Rumsfeld on the screen, so the whole building didn't get hit...

...Nice story...

...They are there to wage war for profit...

...But he was "angry," because "these mercenaries" (the civilian security contractors) "make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month...

...Wesley Clark for president...

...Zuniga told The Scrapbook that his firm has no ties to John Kerry's presidential campaign...

...Press Critic Extraordinaire If there's any group more liberal than journalists, it's communications professors...