Disturbing News

Reading the news at Daily Kos and Josh Marshall today is just ... disturbing.

Worst of all is the concerted effort by media outlets like CNN, NBC and of course FOX to spin the GOP line that the 380 tons of Al Qaqaa explosives had already disappeared before US troops arrived on April 9th. As Josh points out, there is no evidence to support this and ample evidence to refute it. A reporter with the unlikely name of Lai Ling Jew, who was embedded with the 101st Airborne, Second brigade that reached Al Qaqaa that day, said the soldiers made no attempt to secure the weapons:

There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away.

This version of events has now been backed up by the unit's commander:

"We were still in a fight," he said. "our focus was killing bad guys." He added he would have needed four times more troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps he came across.

And Charlie Duelfer, Chief of the Iraq Survey Group, says the Al Qaqaa issue is nothing to get workup up about!

"It's hard for me to get that worked up about it," Duelfer said in a phone interview from Baghdad, adding that Iraq is awash in hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives.

Well, that's reassuring, isn't it? Here's how Kerry expressed it:

"What did the president have to say about the missing explosives? Not a word. Complete silence. Despite devastating evidence that his administration's failure here has put our troops and our citizens are in greater danger, George Bush has not offered a single word of explanation. His silence confirms what I have been saying for months: President Bush rushed to war without a plan to win the peace. He didn't have enough troops on the ground to get the job done. He didn't have enough allies to get the job done. He failed to secure Iraq and keep it from becoming what it is today - a haven for terrorists.

Meanwhile, Kos has a few more scare stories from the US Domestic front...

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals...

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day." [...]

In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were using the lists or other means of intimidating voters, we filmed a private detective filming every "early voter" - the majority of whom are black - from behind a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

The private detective claimed not to know who was paying for his all-day services.

On the scene, Democratic Congresswoman Corinne Brown said the surveillance operation was part of a campaign of intimidation tactics used by the Republican Party to intimate and scare off African American voters, almost all of whom are registered Democrats.

Some of the black vopters on the "cage list" are even servicemen stationed at a nearby Naval Base. If that's not disturbing, how about this: Rachel Schultz is the superintendent of Richland Center School District in Wisconsin (where students were told not to wear any Kerry regalia during Bush's visit). Turns out Rachel is married to Dale Schultz, Republican candidate for Congress in the 3rd Congressional District in Wisconsin.Reassuringly, however, Kos points out that both Arnold Schwarzennegger and Iyad Allawi are distancing themselves from the Bush campaign, while the latest LA Times poll shows Bush and Kerry locked at 48-48. Time for a terror alert?