There's always too much news to fit into a 24-hour day -- especially when the national media is focused on the crucial election-year topics of windsurfing and “values” voters. But under the radar were all sorts of unanswered questions and unnoticed stories. Here are four of the most interesting.
The Sound of Silence
Where was the Democratic Party when the Republicans had their convention?
During the Democratic national convention in Boston, the GOP was almost scarily successful at making sure its message was as loud and clear as the Dems'. When the Fleet Center festivities commenced, Republican flacks were inescapable on the cable news networks. (Ralph Reed was the first commentator that CNN turned to for a response to John Edwards' speech on Wednesday, while the next day, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ed Gillespie served as the network's go-to guy for John Kerry's speech.) It could be fairly said that if the Republicans didn't actually dominate the Democrats' convention, they effectively addressed and reframed virtually every important speech delivered there.
Fast-forward to late August, as the Republicans mounted their four-day hate parade in the Big Apple. The Democratic National Committee (DNC), and leading Dem lights like Hillary Clinton, had hyped their own war-room communications shop that would disseminate the party's response. As the week progressed, however, all one heard was the sound of silence.
TAPPED searched out elusive DNC rapid-response headquarters and queried defensive party spokespeople about the weird lack of Dem presence at the festivities. Matthew Yglesias showed up at the DNC's office and found it virtually empty. Garance Franke-Ruta tracked down DNC spokesman Matt Bennett, who explained that to put party leaders on TV to comment on the convention would have amounted to “overkill”
When the networks were dominated by Republican commentators following Dick Cheney's Wednesday-night speech and the president's the next day, we at the Prospect were ready to decry the media's bias. But this wasn't really a matter of media bias; it was a matter of Democratic somnolence. The only thing the DNC seemed intent on addressing forcefully that week was the very observation that it was MIA, which merely underscored the problem.
-- Sam Rosenfeld
Swift Boat Thefts for Truth?
Gerald Nicosia, author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, started out the year in possession of the only known copy of the FBI files on Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The 20,000-plus pages included extensive surveillance reports on John Kerry, revealing details both flattering and unpleasant for the candidate. On March 25, somebody cracked open the sliding glass doors leading to Nicosia's kitchen and made off with three boxes and some files Nicosia had extracted and left on the table.
The initial suspicion (inasmuch as any existed) focused on the Kerry campaign, which had just been forced to offer an embarrassing retraction about one event cataloged in the files. But Nicosia, who had offered to let the Kerry campaign know of any potentially damaging stories, told the Prospect that he “never bought that.”
And in August, just before the Corte Madera police consigned the burglary to their cold-case files, a more likely consumer for the stolen info appeared: the then-Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (later the Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth). Its book, Unfit for Command, and some of its later advertisements denounced Kerry's anti-war activity -- and included some information, such as details of Kerry's two trips to meet with a Vietnamese delegation in Paris, that Nicosia believes was only available in the files. “In the end, the Swift Boat guys did use a lot of material that was in those files,” Nicosia says. “They really milked that stuff.”
Did any of the stolen material fall into John O'Neill's lap? Could the burglary have been tied to the Swift Boat group? If we can't even discern how closely it was tied to the Bush administration, we'll certainly never answer those questions. Then again, that's how it seemed to George McGovern's supporters in 1972.
-- Jeffrey Dubner
Spying Softly
One fine day in May, U.S. troops made the unexpected move of joining with Iraqi security forces on a raid of Ahmad Chalabi's home and his offices at Iraq's National Council. Officially, this raid was part of an Iraqi investigation of alleged corruption on the part of council officials, but sources inside the U.S. government immediately leaked word that there was another angle, according to numerous press report: Chalabi and his associates were responsible for passing classified information to the government of Iran. Chalabi's initial reaction to the allegations -- going on vacation in ... Iran -- apparently lent credence to the story.
And then ... nothing. Chalabi apparently lost his U.S. support but quickly forged new ties with radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (himself a recipient of Iranian aid) and with more mainstream Shia Islamist parties, eventually finding his way to the No. 10 spot on the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's United Iraqi Alliance,, which is currently the favorite to win the January elections for the National Assembly. The underlying issue -- was (and is) Chalabi an Iranian spy? -- was never resolved.
-- Matthew Yglesias
Just South of Sudan
For the past 18 years, the renegade Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda has waged a brutal campaign against the civilian population. Led by an enigmatic and cultish figure, the LRA is notorious for forcibly conscripting children as soldiers and sex slaves. The United Nations estimates that about 90 percent of the LRA's fighters are children between the ages of 10 and 15, and that since fighting began in 1986, the LRA has abducted some 30,000 children. Since failed peace talks two years ago, the LRA has stepped up its campaign against the children of northern Uganda, kidnapping an estimated 10,000 since June 2002.
Each evening, approximately 44,000 children -- the “night commuters”-- make the dangerous trek from their rural villages to the relative safety of the towns to avoid being kidnapped. While war crimes of northern Uganda do not amount to genocide, it is this kind of systematized brutality against children that distinguishes northern Uganda in a region already over crowded with horrific conflict.
Though death and devastation continue on a daily basis, events in the last year have made a lasting resolution of this 18-year conflict seem possible. In the winter of 2004, the president of Uganda asked the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity in northern Uganda. Last week, a secret Norwegian effort to broker a peace, an “Oslo channel” between the Ugandan government and LRA, was disclosed.
-- Mark Leon Goldberg
