Citing reports in the Washington Post and New York Times that Kerry had raised more money from paid lobbyists than any other senator in the past 15 years, Dean said the Massachusetts lawmaker was no better than Bush in that respect.

"We are not going to beat George Bush by nominating someone who is the handmaiden of special interests, " Dean told hundreds of cheering supporters at a rally in Tucson.

Kerry told reporters he had taken no money from organized groups -- only from individuals. "The only people that have contributed to my campaigns to the United States Senate are individual Americans. Now are some of those individual Americans lobbyists? Yeah, sure," Kerry said.

The Washington Post said Kerry had accepted $640,000 from lobbyists, many of them representing the telecommunications and financial services industries that had business before committees Kerry sat on.

Kerry responded: "They haven't gotten anything for it. Those guys have never, ever, ever gotten anything."

... Tauzin telephoned Valenti with his decision late Thursday night after intense salary negotiations over recent days. The 12-term lawmaker is now considering an offer from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the trade group that represents drug giants such as Pfizer Inc. and Merck & Co.

Tauzin chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecommunications, media and entertainment industries. Most recently, however, [Tauzin] was one of the principal authors of the Medicare prescription drug bill that included several provisions expected to vastly expand the market for prescription drugs among the elderly. In addition to adding hundreds of billions of dollars for drug benefits, the law bars the federal government from directly bargaining down the price of drugs, a provision PhRMA pressed for. [ The industry spent an estimated 138 million to assist in passage of the legislation. And, on top of that amount, annually the industry spends a reputed 400 million lobbying congress, which if you're interested, amounts to over 1 million per House member and senator! Reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada is also a "no no" to the industry. Citizens of the US pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world, and thus subsidize the so-called R and D of the pharmacueticals.]

PhRMA made a run at Tauzin in recent days and offered a compensation package that, if Tauzin accepts it, "would be the biggest deal given to anyone at a trade association," a source said. The organization recently announced that current president Alan F. Holmer will retire once a successor is appointed, following an ultimately successful but image-punishing battle over the Medicare legislation. ...

This link is to a video from inside an Apache helicopter in Iraq. The Apache is hovering at close range, flying no evasive maneuvers, suggesting there is no sense of threat to the bird from the ground. It shows [through forward looking infared, at close range] three vehicles that have been stopped on the road, with passengers, none of whom are armed. Then it shows (with audio from the chopper) the systematic murder of all four people, with casual "Good, okays" as each person is annihilated. These are war crimes. There is also one case in which a victim is wounded and the command is passed along (and casually obeyed) to finish him off.

This will disturb those unfamiliar with war. But pass it along anyway. People must see what is being done in their names. Also send it to you Senators and Representatives with this explanation and demand an investigation. Send it to the media and challenge them not to give the military a pass on this. This kind of thing seldom escapes the military censor, so it needs to be widely distributed and acted upon.

Download and save the video, so there is never any chance of it being made to disappear. Distribute widely and ask for a debate about the utter disrespect for life military engagements like this embody.

... [Zogby International poll shows that] 83 percent of Arab-American Muslims rate Bush's overall performance "unfavorable," according to the Zogby poll, which did not survey non-Arab Muslims. Only 10 percent said they planned to vote for Bush.

He fared somewhat better when Arab Christians were factored into the poll results: 59 percent of all Arab-Americans gave Bush an "unfavorable" rating. Twenty-eight percent said they would vote for him, while 40 percent would vote for any Democrat....

... A wake up call for Democrats came this week in the form of a media analysis conducted by The Center for Media and Public Affairs. In their analysis, "Study: Dean Trails in Race for Positive Press" [see extract below], the nonpartisan group found that "A majority of nightly network newscast evaluations of Democratic Presidential frontrunner Howard Dean were negative during the 2003 'preseason,' while three-quarters of the coverage given to the other eight candidates was favorable"....

... A majority of nightly network newscast evaluations of Democratic Presidential frontrunner Howard Dean were negative during the 2003 "preseason," while three-quarters of the coverage given to the other eight candidates was favorable, according to research conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA). The study also finds network airtime devoted to the campaign is down 62 percent from the year before the 1996 election, the last race involving an incumbent president....

Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, the US has sought not just to influence but to control all information, from both friend and foe

"Information dominance" came of age during the conflict in Iraq. It is a little discussed but highly significant part of the US government strategy of "full spectrum dominance", integrating propaganda and news media into the military command structure more fundamentally than ever before.

In the past, propaganda involved managing the media. Information dominance, by contrast, sees little distinction between command and control systems, propaganda and journalism. They are all types of "weaponized information" to be deployed. As strategic expert Colonel Kenneth Allard noted, the 2003 attack on Iraq "will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war".

Nor is information dominance something dreamt up by the Bush White House. It is a mainstream US military doctrine that is also embraced in the UK. According to US army intelligence there are already 15 information dominance centres in the US, Kuwait and Baghdad.

Both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in this country have staff assigned to "information operations". In future conflicts, according to the MoD, "maintaining morale as well as information dominance will rank as important as physical protection".

Achieving information dominance according to American military experts, involves two components: first, "building up and protecting friendly information; and degrading information received by your adversary". Seen in this context, embedding journalists in Iraq was a clear means of building up "friendly" information. An MoD-commissioned commercial analysis of the print output produced by embeds shows that 90% of their reporting was either "positive or neutral".

The second component is "the ability to deny, degrade, destroy and/or effectively blind enemy capabilities". "Unfriendly" information must be targeted. This is perhaps best illustrated by the attack on al-Jazeera's office in Kabul in 2001, which the Pentagon justified by claiming al-Qaida activity in the al-Jazeera office. As it turned out, this referred to broadcast interviews with Taliban officials. The various attacks on al-Jazeera in Kabul, Basra and Baghdad should also be seen in this context.

The evidence is that targeting of independent media and critics of the US is widening. The Pentagon is reportedly coordinating an "information operations road map", drafted by the Information Operations Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to Captain Gerald Mauer, the road map notes that information operations would be directed against an "adversary".

But when the paper got to the office of the undersecretary of defence for policy, it was changed to say that information operations would attempt to "disrupt, corrupt or usurp" adversarial decision-making. "In other words," notes retired US army colonel Sam Gardiner, "we will even go after friends if they are against what we are doing or want to do."

In the UK, according to Major Nigel Smith of the 15 Psychological Operations Group, staffing is to be expanded and strategic information operations "will take on a new importance" as a result of Iraq. Targeting unfriendly information is central to the post-conflict phase of reconstruction too. The collapse of distinctions between independent news media and psychological operations is striking.

The new TV service for Iraq was paid for by the Pentagon. In keeping with the philosophy of information dominance it was supplied, not by an independent news organisation, but by a defence contractor, Scientific Applications International Corporation (Saic). Its expertise in the area - according to its website - is in "information operations" and "information dominance".

The Saic effort ran into trouble. The Iraqi exile journalists it employed for the Iraq Media Network (at a cost $20m over three months) were too independent for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Within weeks, occupying authority chief Paul Bremer introduced controls on the IMN. He also closed down some Iraqi-run newspapers and radio and TV stations. According to Index on Censorship, IMN managers were told to drop the readings from the Koran, the vox-pops (usually critical of the US invasion) and even to run their content past the wife of a US-friendly Iraqi Kurdish leader for a pre-broadcast check. The station rejected the demands.

But this did not stop Bremer, and further incidents culminated in a nine-point list of "prohibited activity" issued in June 2003. Bremer would reserve the power to advise the IMN on any aspect of its performance, including matters of content and the power to hire and fire staff. Thus, as Index on Censorship notes: "The man in absolute authority over the country's largest, richest and best-equipped media network is also his own regulator and regulator of his rivals, with recourse to the US Army to enforce his rulings."

Attacks on al-Jazeera continue. In September 2003 the Iraq governing council voted to ban reports from al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya on the grounds that they incite violence. As evidence of this, one member of the Iraqi National Congress who voted for the ban, noted that the TV stations describe the opposition to the occupation as the resistance. "They're not the resistance, they are thugs and criminals," he said.

But the Iraqi people appear not to share this view of al-Jazeera. Those with satellite access to al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are more likely to trust them over IMN. As the experience of IMN shows, achieving dominance is not always a straightforward matter. This is precisely why the strategy for "unfriendly information" is to "deny, degrade and destroy".

...The capture of Saddam, which is meaningless at this point, has not helped Iraqis come together in a spirit of reconciliation. Rather, it has propagated and hastened Iraq's decline into a violent, inhospitable battleground between various ethnicities. While Iraqis butcher one another in the ungovernable environment systematically created by the U.S. presence in Iraq, U.S. media continues to tout the White House line that there are "good stories" coming out of Iraq. White House officials have chastised the media, in fact, for not reporting on these stories. These officials claim that Iraqis are on the verge of a new dawn, enjoying a freedom never enjoyed by any other Arab populace. Unfortunately, there couldn't be anything farther from the truth. Iraqis today are experiencing anarchy not democracy, chaos not liberty, lawlessness not security. The country is about to be torn asunder; a civil war is brewing in the north. ...

...Were people asleep and just woke up demanding a more forthright approach to journalism? No, hardly, but the answer lies in ethnocentrism, racism and pug arrogance. The ethnocentrism and racism are derived from the subconscious understanding that only Western media can tell the truth. Examine for a moment how ridiculed Al Jazeera was for its coverage of the Iraq war. They were called, flatly, liars. Why? Well, because they showed a side of the story no one in the U.S. wanted to hear. When Canadian media offered a different side to the war in Iraq, a sharp rebuke was delivered from Washington. ...