The Political Whore

With a h/t to Tampa Bay political consultant Gregory Wilson, here’s a contrarian view on scoring yesterday’s pseudo-debate on terror, Gitmo and national security. I agree with Congressional Quarterly’s assessment of Barack Obama on conventional political terms. It is a truism: When you’re ’splaining, you’re losing. And I believe Obama made no headway with the crazy left who wants to shutter Guantanamo immediately and just cut loose the terrorists or bring them on down to circuit court for good ol’ U.S. justice system trials.

But Obama won the day, make no mistake about it. He was historic, clear in his ethics, determined in his purpose that we can win against terror without becoming terrorists ourselves. He may have lost in terms of short-term public opinion but he wins the longer war. And that is what CQ, in its traditional wisdom, fails to grasp.

Having said that, reading the full CQ article makes ya think…

Excerpts from the article after the jump:

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Anybody needing a distillation of the differences between the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama on the “War on Terror” need look no further than today’s competing speeches by Dick Cheney and Obama on the subject.

Politico reports:

President Barack Obama will attempt to regain control of a boiling debate over anti-terrorism policy with a major speech on Thursday — an address that comes on the same day that former Vice President Dick Cheney will be weighing in with his own speech on the same theme.

The dueling speeches amount to the most direct engagement so far between Obama and his conservative critics in the volatile argument over what tactics are justified in detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.

The national security debate — egged on by frequent charges from Cheney that Obama is leaving the country more vulnerable to attack — is the only subject on which many Republicans believe they have been able to gain traction against a popular president and the Democratic majority that now dominate Washington.

It ought to be hilariou-scary to see Cheney defend torture and keeping Gitmo open. The key to today’s semi-debate is not whether Cheney, wildly unpopular even in his own party, wins the hearts and minds of the U.S. citizenry but whether the president can score points on the left and in the middle with his “walk a thin line” approach.

Has anyone else noticed that Dick Cheney just won’t go away?  Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has.  Her take on Cheney as the new “Rogue Diva of Doom” after the jump.

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From the Stooopid Idea Dep’t.:

Fly the backup of Air Force One, a 747, with its engines screaming, low over Lower Manhattan, F-16 trailing it, without telling New Yorkers it was all for a photo shoot and not another 9-11 attack.

The White House Military advisor has apologized.

Video after the jump.

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By Alexandra Koutsogiannopoulos
PoHo Contributor
Alex is the program director for the United Nations Association-USA’s Tampa Bay Chapter and is an occasional guest on the Political Whore podcast.

President Barack Obama recently outlined his plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The following is a brief report of his statements about what he wants to do:

In announcing a plan on Friday that could be his signature foreign policy effort, Mr. Obama said that he would send more troops — some 4,000 — but stipulated that they would not carry out combat missions, and would instead be used to train the Afghan Army and the national police.

… Mr. Obama framed the issue as one that relies on one central tenet: protecting Americans from attacks like the one that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.

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It was only a matter of time before major stars joined forces to produce Prop 8 — The Musical.

• Blame for the Mumbai terror attacks creeps closer to Pakistan.
• Speaking of Mumbai terrorists: Them boys was on some drugs!
• And now the new Secretary of Commerce.
• Will voters ever like Bush again?
• Obama breaks a campaign promise.
• Mortgage rates to hit 4.5%?
• Hot high-school trend: Self-embedding.
• The Bucs bounce Charlie Brown from ABC.

Issue: In last night’s second presidential debate, John McCain said, “My friends, some of this $700 billion ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations.” (source: CNN.com)

Facts: OK, we admit to initially being stumped by McCain’s assertion that the bailout plan, for which he suspended his campaign and went to Washington to urge lawmakers to pass, was secretly helping terrorist organizations. (Transitively, does that mean that McCain was supporting terrorist organizations? Of course not.)

But there is a possible indirect link between the bailout plan for bad mortgages and terrorism. This from Diane Francis of The National Post in Canada:

In fact, an Assyrian news website carried a story back in mid-2007 that FBI and other officials were concerned about a “growing trend of terrorist associations [involved] with mortgage fraud rings in the U.S.”
“In the past year [2007], several high-profile mortgage fraud arrests have been tied to federal terrorism investigations, most notably a ring busted up in Salt Lake City that is alleged to have direct ties to the late al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” said the story.
Money was obtained from banks fraudulently then transferred to Middle Eastern bank accounts controlled by terrorists. These cases grind through courts.

The Assyrian news story began:

A man arrested in December at the Kansas City airport with $70,000 in his bulging pockets while trying to board a Southwest Airlines flight claiming the money was actually Muslim prayer books, a San Francisco mortgage company executive who went on the run from the FBI in November, seven people arrested in September in Salt Lake City with ties to al-Qaeda, and a co-defendant in the Sami al-Arian/Palestinian Islamic Jihad trial all have one thing in common — the growing trend of terrorist associations with mortgage fraud rings in the US.

(It must be pointed out that the Assyrian account lists Al-Arian co-defendant Sameeh Hammoudeh as part of this great mortgage fraud terrorism effort, a gross misrepresentation of the mortgage fraud charge he pleaded to in court. His fraud charges related to his concealment of his employment at the Islamic Academy, and not fraud in subprime mortgages. Oh, and Hammoudeh was not a terrorist, either.)

The UK, likewise, has suspicions that terrorists used bad mortgages:

An intelligence report by the Association of Chief Police Officers said that organised crime groups used mortgage fraud to generate income and launder money from the proceeds of their operations, such as drugs, human trafficking and prostitution.

“While there is no evidence to suggest mortgage fraud directly funds terrorist acts, this area of criminality has been encountered during investigations into UK-based terrorist groups,” it said. “Mortgage fraud can be used to finance infrastructure including safe houses.”

Given this tenuous link to terrorism (if that is indeed what McCain was referring to) and misimpression that either the bailout or Wall Street aided terrorists, we judge this statement to be Bullshit.

John McCain gets a little assist from the good folks at Video Professor. I wonder if he used any of his wife’s windfall profits from the Anheuser-Bush sale to pay the shipping and handling charges?

• IndyMac customers party like it’s the Great Depression.
• Caliente Resort proves too hot for the American Association for Nude Recreation.
• The government’s terrorist watch list adds its one-millionth name.
• Starbucks announces its first 50 store closings. No Florida stores are on the list — yet.
• I know it’s called the “Home Run Derby,” but that was ridiculous, John Josh Hamilton.
• $10 million for the first Pitt-Jolie baby pictures? How much does that make the kid worth?
• Apple sells one million iPhone 3Gs in 72 hours.
• Splitsville: Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman.

One day after what he terms a “chaotic” departure from the Tampa Tribune, where he wrote for 17 years, Michael Fechter was taking it easy, lounging around the house and (at my request) reflecting on his career at the daily.

Fechter was one of the longest-serving hard news journalists left in the paper’s Metro section (along with folks such as Lindsay Peterson and William March). And while he has had his share of high-profile stories, it is the series of pieces he did on Sami Al-Arian that will forever define his career there.

The stories have been so controversial in some quarters (perhaps nowhere more so than in the pages of Creative Loafing) that Fechter’s departure warranted news stories in both morning dailies.

He is going to become editor-in-chief of Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism website. In a news release sent out late last night, Fechter was quoted:

“My decision to join the Investigative Project is based on the simple
fact that no other organization does a better job of researching and
investigating worldwide Islamist terrorist groups. Steve Emerson and his highly professional staff have consistently been ahead of the curve, even alerting the CIA and FBI to terrorism connections. At this critical juncture in our history, I consider their work to be crucial to our national security.”

This morning I got to speak at further length with Fechter, and here is a partial Q&A of our conversation:

Q: How did it come about that you joined Steven Emerson’s company?
A: “I thought it was time to move on, and was trying to figure out what I could do in the world beyond work for the Tampa Tribune, and I want to stay in Tampa for family reasons. I heard about this job and asked if it could be telecommuting.”

Q: Does the fact that you are going to work for Emerson, who is so identified as a critic of Al-Arian’s, taint your work in the eyes of the general public?
A: “It’s funny because it depends on which reader you speak of and how much overlap there may be [in terms of which newspapers they read]. If you read the Tampa Tribune and not you guys [Creative Loafing], you wonder why there is a story in the paper today.”

Q: What stories are you most proud of in your body of work?
A: “I’m proud of the Al-Arian stories and the paper’s commitment to it. In the same sense, its not the only thing I did. It just happened to play out the longest.” [He also cited his work investigating Greater Ministries and raising questions about the leader of the effort to bring the USS Forrestal to Tampa.]

Q: What do you say to the critics of his Al-Arian stories, which they call anti-Muslim and biased?
A: “It’s silly, it’s just plain silly, and your colleague [Creative Loafing's senior group editor John Sugg] is just plain silly in what he says and does. A lot of this debate has been people distorting what I wrote and what I did. We wrote that Sami had connections to people and groups that he lied about for a decade, and one of the entities that he lied to was his employer. [Fechter said the trial proved that was correct.]

“[For those who say my departure calls for a revisitation of the stories I wrote on Al-Arian,] knock yourself out, because it’s a paper trail.”

“[In the matter of his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, and his deportation hearings, Al-Arian] was lying about who [Al-Najjar] was. Did he break the law? I’ll respect the jury verdict, but he lied.”

For years, the family of imprisoned former USF professor Sami Al-Arian insisted that their nemesis and most dogged chronicler, Tampa Tribune investigative reporter Michael Fechter, was doing the bidding of anti-Arab forces.

Today, they got some more ammo for their argument in the news that Fechter has resigned from the paper to take a job working for Al-Arian critic Steven Emerson.

“It just proves what we’ve known and asserted all along,” said Laila Al-Arian, Sami’s daughter. “I can say we’re not surprised by it.”

Trib editor Janet Coats confirmed Fechter’s resignation and said his last day is today. He could not be reached for comment.

Other longtime critics of Fechter’s work were abuzz with the news. One, Ahmed Bedier of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “The Tampa Tribune should revisit his work and act accordingly.” He characterized Fechter’s reporting on Al-Arian as unobjective and slanted. “Fechter was not serving journalism but was serving the interests of an anti-Muslim agenda.”

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