ODDMENTS, REALLY ODD-MENTS

Commenter "Harvey" referred to an alternet piece about some velly, velly bad reasons for Rove, Snow and Rumsfeld's dismissals. Here is page one and link. http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/60493/?page=1

A shorter version of this article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com.

It is as though I'm back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.
It is precisely the kind of work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now -- ever since 9/11, when "everything changed."
Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists put their jobs at grave risk if they expose things like fraudulent wars.


The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible -- and held accountable -- for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms, to spies, to -- not least -- open media.
Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained -- as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained -- by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
Reporting from informants

The above is in no way intended to minimize the value of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting and running clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make a crucial contribution. Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully "turned" into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a welcome relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was "regime change." (Don't feel embarrassed if you did not know this; although it is publicly available, our corporate-owned, war profiteering media has largely suppressed this key story.)

One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence Robert Baer, now reports (in this week's Time) that, according to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran; that the administration's plan to put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike; and that the delusional "neoconservative" thinking that still guides White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.
Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer's sources tell him that administration officials are thinking that "as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran's nuclear facilities."


Rove and Snow: Going wobbly?
Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing in The American Conservative, earlier noted that in the past Karl Rove has served as a counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put the brakes on Cheney's death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to Iran. And former Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked shoulder to shoulder with some of the most devoted neocons just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com) speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove's departure.



Please read the remainder. Ray McGovern is a pretty reasonable guy and hardly given to Kelso's hyperbole.

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THE FIX (we'll cross post at Forego's Nuts -- http://foregosnuts.blogspot.com -- because of cross-relevance). Tom Paxton surely quite prophetic in 1965 about electing them again-and-again, no?

As the Nikoli Davydenko allegations of match-fixing (lots of this on Forego's Nuts), i.e., retiring to Vassallo-Arguello in the 3rd set of a Sopot, Poland, tennis tournament, while having gone in as heavy favorite, bet against solidly pre-match, bet heavily even after having won first set 6-2, losing 2nd and winning 4-1 in 3rd, with every penny going on the low-ranked Vassallo-Arguello while down a set to the world's #4 may suggest something opposite to Jim Lampley's allegation in a Huffington Post comment of 2005, it also may not. The point -- and the rub -- is that money talks and bullshit walks. Again, anyone interest in a lively, layman's intro into this kind of analysis is encouraged to read the highly literate work, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS by New Yorker financial columnist James Surowiecki. [Conflict of interest alert here: Mr. Surowiecki is a friend of Kelso's.]

Plenty of background on Lampley here for those Kelso's Nuts fans who aren't sports nuts.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rls=DELA,DELA:2006-04,DELA:en&q=jim+lampley+arrested

And here is the famous Lampley Huffington Post comment.

Who Really Won?
Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Sportscaster Jim Lampley Chimes In
From the Huffington Post, here's Jim Lampley's take:
At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election. And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let's go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That's how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime.

Kelso will take this a step further, because Lampley is missing a few items that would tend to bolster -- or not depending on how you view where the playas (meaning Bushies) intensities were: money or power. Bush opened election day a -$1.25/+$1.15 favorite over Kerry meaning that if you thought Bush would win, you'd have to bet $1.25 to win $1, with your initial stake returned to you, of course. If you thought Kerry would win you could win $1.15 for every $1 you bet. Lampley has told you where the money went -- all to Kerry -- through 5PM Eastern Time on Election afternoon. Kelso had watched this very closely as a Kelso himself had laid -$1.70 to the dollar that Bush would win in 2004 the week after the "Mission Impossible" speech. Betting on this election straight up and in the futures market was available until the closure of the polls on the East Coast, around 9pm EDT. By that time the outright market had Kerry a 1/40 favorite, meaning if you thought Kerry would win, you would have to risk $40 to win $1. If you thought Bush would win you could have taken 30/1, meaning $1 on Bush would have returned you $30. The futures markets reflected the same. To "buy" Kerry you would have had to pay 97 pence to win 1 pound sterling. To "buy" Bush you could pay 5 pence to win 1 pound sterling. Millions and millons were changing hands on this, and the markets were telling you John Kerry would have his hand on the bible in January of 2005.

And we know what happened. Kerry did not even ask for an Ohio recount to which he was entitled. If anyone "knew" the fix was in, why then, to contradict Lampley, was there not late money back at huge odds for Bush? No one knows. Here are some possibilities.

1) The Ohio fix was indeed in, but to fix an election ex-ante is quite a different thing than stealing it ex-post as was alleged in Bush v Gore 2000 and Nixon v Kennedy 1960. It is much harder to do, would involve a lot of people acting in concert and would constitute very serious criminal activity, not just "politics." So, though the Republicans had it planned, they were afraid enough of a slip between the cup and the lip and decided not to bet back.

2) It was not Bush, but Kerry who was dumping. One can only speculate as to the reasons. He had put up his house to finance his campaign in early 2004. No one really knows what the financial arrangement between Kerry and his wife really is, and given the volume of wagers ON Kerry at short-odds, a Kerry sub-altern could easily have moved enough on Bush late without attracting attention so as to guarantee Kerry a very big financial score.

3) Everything was on the level. Kerry fought the campaign weakly (which he did) and fought the final hours weaker still, afraid perhaps of charges of race prejudice because the Ohio Secretary Of State, Republican Ken Blackwell's complexion matched the first syllable of his last name. Perhaps, Kerry feared embarrassment after Gore's experience and a "sore-loser" label felt worse to him personally and with regard to future ambitions -- even maintainance of his Senate seat -- more than he wanted to win.

It has just occurred to Kelso that this post has been long, boring, depressing, and arcane. So, to leaven things a bit, we suggest you check out www.crooksandliars.com and look at The Daily Show clip from August 24. And we dare you not to do a spit-take when you hear the "dildo" routine.

Back to seriousness.

A post-script. Kelso donated his undeserved Bush winnings to Code Pink and Gold Star Mothers. A post-post script. Commenter "Anita" made a good point about Kelso's trashing the 60s model in his posting of the Johnny Thunders cover of "Eve Of Destruction," so today we honor the 60s model with youtube of Tom Paxton's "What Did You Learn In School Today?". Accompanying video has some nice updated images.

Kelso's Nuts love you