Do you remember the squarish box President Bush used to wear on his back while debating Senator Kerry? Do you remember his waspish "Let me finish!" to a phantom interrupter? That story is not dead yet, it has merely been squelched, suffocated, stomped on by the GOP Public Relations machine. Dave Lindorff has assembled new evidence about the story that the New York Times was putting together but spiked during the last week of October. It is long, but juicy!
The Emperor's New Hump - [Or "BulgeGate" revisited - pbk]
By Dave Lindorff
Extra!
January - February 2005 Edition
The New York Times killed a story that could have changed the election -
because it could have changed the election.
In the weeks leading up to the November 2 election, the New
York Times was abuzz with excitement. Besides the election
itself, the paper's reporters were hard at work on two hot
investigative projects, each of which could have a major impact
on the outcome of the tight presidential race.
One week before Election Day, the Times (10/25/04) ran a
hard-hitting and controversial expose of the Al-Qaqaa
ammunition dump - identified by U.N. inspectors before the war
as containing 400 tons of special high-density explosives useful for
aircraft bombings and as triggers for nuclear devices, but left
unguarded and available to insurgents by U.S. forces after the invasion.
On Thursday, just three days after that first expos'the paper was set to
run a second, perhaps more explosive piece, exposing how George W. Bush
had worn an electronic cueing device in his ear and probably cheated
during the presidential debates.
The so-called Bulgegate story had been getting
tremendous attention on the Internet. Stories about it had also run in
many mainstream papers, including the New York Times (10/9/04, 10/18/04)
and Washington Post (10/9/04), but most of these had been light-hearted.
Indeed, the issue had even made it into the comedy circuit, including
the monologues of Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and a set of
strips by cartoonist Garry Trudeau.
That the story hadn't gotten more serious treatment in
the mainstream press was largely thanks to a well-organized media effort
by the Bush White House and the Bush/Cheney campaign to label those who
attempted to investigate the bulge as "conspiracy buffs" (Washington
Post, 10/9/04). In an era of pinched budgets and an equally pinched
notion of the role of the Fourth Estate, the fact that the Kerry camp
was offering no comment on the matter - perhaps for fear of earning a
"conspiracy buff" label for the candidate himself - may also have made
reporters skittish. Jeffrey Klein, a founding editor of Mother Jones
magazine, told Mother Jones (online edition, 10/30/04) he had called a
number of contacts at leading news organizations across the country, and
was told that unless the Kerry campaign raised the issue, they couldn't
pursue it.
"Totally Off Base"
The Times' effort to get to the bottom of the matter
through a serious investigation seemed to be a striking exception. That
investigation, however, despite extensive reporting over several weeks
by three Times reporters, never ran. Now, like the mythic weapons of
mass destruction that were the raison d'etre for the Iraq War, the Times
is thus far claiming that the Bush Bulgegate story never existed in the
first place.
Referring to a FAIR press release (11/5/04) about the
spiked story, Village Voice press critic Jarrett Murphy wrote
(11/16/04), "A Times reporter alleged to have worked on such a piece
says FAIR was totally off base: The paper never pursued the story."
Murphy told Extra! that his source at the nation's
self-proclaimed paper of record 'whom he would not identify' told him
the information about the bulge seen under Bush's jacket during the
debates, provided by a senior astronomer and photo imaging specialist at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, had been tossed onto the
"nutpile," and was never researched further.
In fact, several sources, including a journalist at
the Times, have told Extra! that the paper put a good deal of effort
into this important story about presidential competence and integrity;
they claim that a story was written, edited and scheduled to run on
several different days, before senior editors finally axed it at the
last minute on Wednesday evening, October 27. A Times journalist, who
said that Times staffers were "pretty upset" about the killing of the
story, claims the senior editors felt Thursday was "too close" to the
election to run such a piece. Emails from the Times to the NASA
scientist corroborate these sources' accounts.
Battle of the Bulge
The Bulgegate story originated when a number of alert
viewers of the first presidential debate noticed a peculiar rectangular
bulge on the back of Bush's jacket. That they got to see that portion of
his anatomy at all was an accident; the Bush campaign had specifically,
and inexplicably, demanded that the Presidential Debate Commission bar
pool TV cameras from taking rear shots of the candidates during any
debates. Fox TV, the first pool camera for debate one, ignored the rule
and put two cameras behind the candidates to provide establishing shots.
Photos depicting the bulge and speculating on just
what it might be (a medical device, a radio receiver?) began circulating
widely around the Internet, and several special blog sites were
established to discuss them. The suspicion that Bush had been getting
cues or answers in his ear was bolstered by his strange behavior in that
first debate, which included several uncomfortably long pauses before
and during his answers. On one occasion, he burst out angrily with "Now
let me finish!" at a time when nobody was interrupting him and his
warning light was not flashing. Images of visibly bulging backs from
earlier Bush appearances began circulating, along with reports of prior
incidents that suggested Bush might have been receiving hidden cues
(London Guardian, 10/8/04).
Finally, on October 8, this reporter ran an
investigative report about the bulge in the online magazine Salon,
following up with a second report (10/13/04) an interview with an
executive of a firm that makes wireless cueing devices that link to
hidden earpieces'that suggested that Bush was likely to have been
improperly receiving secret help during the debates.
At that point, Dr. Robert M. Nelson, a 30-year Jet
Propulsion Laboratory veteran who works on photo imaging for NASA's
various space probes and currently is part of a photo enhancement team
for the Cassini Saturn space probe, entered the picture. Nelson recounts
that after seeing the Salon story on the bulge, professional curiosity
prompted him to apply his skills at photo enhancement to a digital image
he took from a videotape of the first debate. He says that when he saw
the results of his efforts, which clearly revealed a significant
T-shaped object in the middle of Bush's back and a wire running up and
over his shoulder, he realized it was an important story.
After first offering it unsuccessfully to his local
paper, the Pasadena Star-News, and then, with equal lack of success, to
the Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh, where he had gone to college, he offered
it to the Los Angeles Times. (In all his media contacts, Nelson says, he
offered the use of his enhanced photos free of charge.) "About three
weeks before the election, I gave the photos to the L.A. Times' Eric
Slater, who shopped them around the paper," recalls Nelson. "After four
days, in which they never got back to me, I went to the New York Times."
Contradictory Explanations
The Times was at first very interested, Nelson
reports. There was, after all, clearly good reason to investigate the
issue. The White House and Bush/ Cheney campaign had initially mocked
the bulge story when it had run in Salon, first attributing it to
"doctored" photos circulating on the Internet (New York Times, 10/9/04),
and later claiming that the bulge, so noticeable in video images, was
the result of a "badly tailored suit" (New York Times, 10/18/04). Bush
himself contradicted this White House and campaign line when he told
ABC's Charles Gibson (Good Morning America, 10/26/04) that the bulge was
the result of his wearing a "poorly tailored shirt" to the debate.
Now Nelson's photos'the result of his applying the
same enhancement techniques to the debate pictures that he uses to
clarify photo images from space probes rendered all these official if
mutually contradictory explanations obviously false. (A November 4, 2004
report in the Washington paper The Hill, citing an unidentified source
in the Secret Service, claimed that the bulge was caused by a
bulletproof vest worn by Bush during the debates, though this had been
specifically denied by the White House and by Bush himself - New York
Times, 10/9/04. In any event, no known vests have rear protuberances
resembling the image discovered by Nelson.)
Times science writer William Broad, as well as
reporters Andrew Revkin and John Schwartz, got to work on the story,
according to Nelson, and produced a story that he says they assured him
was scheduled to run the week of October 25. "It got pushed back because
of the explosives story," he says, first to Wednesday, and then to
Thursday, October 28. That would still have been five days ahead of
Election Day.
An indication of the seriousness with which the story
was being pursued is provided by an email Schwartz sent to Nelson on
October 26 - one of a string of back-and-forth emails between Schwartz
and Nelson. It read:
Hey there, Dr. Nelson'this story is shaping up very
nicely, but my_editors have asked me to hold off for one day while they
push through a few other stories that are ahead of us in line. I might
be calling you again for more information, but I hope that you'll hold
tight and not tell anyone else about this until we get a chance to get
our story out there. Please call me with any concerns that you might
have about this, and thanks again for letting us tell your story.
But on October 28, the article was not in the paper.
After learning from the reporters working on the story that their
article had been killed the night before by senior editors, Nelson
eventually sent his photographic evidence of presidential cheating to
Salon magazine, which ran the photos as the magazine's lead item on
October 29. That same day, Nelson received the following email from the
Times' Schwartz:
Congratulations on getting the story into Salon. It's
already all over the Web in every blog I've seen this morning. I'm sorry
to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you, but I'm
very happy to see your story getting out there. Best wishes, John
Not exactly the kind of message you'd expect a
reporter to send to a "nut."
"The Bar Is Raised Higher"
In fact, Schwartz, Revkin and Broad, using Nelson's
photographic evidence as their starting point, had made a major effort
to put together the story of presidential debate misconduct and
deception. Among those called in the course of their reporting, in
addition to Nelson, who says he received numerous calls and emails from
the team, were Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried, who was asked to vouch
for Nelson's professional credentials; Bush/Cheney campaign chair Ken
Mehlman (information about this call was provided by a journalist at the
Times); and Jim Atkinson, an owner of a spyware and debugging company in
Gloucester, Mass., called Granite Island Group.
"The Times reporters called me a number of times on
this story," confirms Atkinson. "I was able to identify the object
Nelson highlighted definitively as a magnetic cueing device that uses a
wire yoke around the neck to communicate with a hidden earpiece'the kind
of thing that is used routinely now by music performers, actors,
reporters and by politicians."
He adds, "The Times reporters called me repeatedly.
They were absolutely going after this story aggressively, though at one
point they told me they were concerned that their editors were going to
kill it."
Efforts to learn more about the history and fate of
this story at the New York Times met for weeks with official silence.
Several inquiries were made by phone and email to Times public editor
Daniel Okrent over a period of three weeks, eliciting one response - an
email from his assistant asking for the names of Extra!'s sources at the
Times. He was not provided with the sources, but was given the names of
the three reporters who worked on the piece, which had been disclosed by
Dr. Nelson. (At deadline time, Okrent did finally call, and promised to
seek the answer to the story's fate. A week later, at press time, he
had yet to do so.)
One clue as to what happened at the Times is provided
by a final email message sent by Times reporter Schwartz to Nelson, who
had written to Schwartz to alert him that he had gone on to analyze
photos of Bush's back in the subsequent two debates. Schwartz wrote:
Subject: Re: reanalysis of debate images more
convincing than before Dear Dr. Nelson, Thanks for sticking with me on
this. I don't know what might convince them - and the bar is raised
higher the closer we are to the election, because they don't want to
seem to be springing something at the last moment - but I will bring
this up with my bosses.
"Voters Have a Right to Know"
Ironically, however, on November 1, the New York Times
ran a story by reporters Jacques Steinberg and David Carr, titled "Media
Timing and the October Surprise." The Times had been taking considerable
heat from conservatives and from the Bush campaign for running the
Al-Qaqaa story, an investigative piece critical of Iraq War leadership -
and thus damaging to Bush's election campaign'so close to Election Day.
While the thrust of this article was a justification for the Times'
decision to run the controversial missing-explosives story a week ahead
of the election, executive editor Bill Keller added a comment about the
seemingly hypothetical issue of running a damaging story about a
candidate as close as two days ahead of the voting:
I can't say categorically you should not publish an
article damaging to a candidate in the last days before an election. . .
. If you learned a day or two before the election that a candidate had
lied about some essential qualification for the job - his health or
criminal record - and there's no real doubt and you've given the
candidate a chance to respond and the response doesn't cast doubt on the
story, do you publish it? Yes. Voters certainly have a right to know
that.
Oddly, though, despite Keller's having taken such a
position, the Times apparently chose not to run the Nelson pictures
story on the grounds of proximity to Election Day. Even more oddly,
despite the fact that the Times had thoroughly researched and reported
Nelson's story before deciding not to run it - even after the story had
run in both Salon and Mother Jones'the Times still ducked (and continues
to duck) the whole bulge story itself, ignoring an important issue that
it knew to be factually substantiated.
No mention of the Bush bulge was made in either the
Times or the Washington Post between October 29 and Election Day - aside
from a one-line mention in a New York Times Magazine essay by Matt Bai
(10/31/04) that used the Bulgegate story as an example of the paranoia
of "political conspiracists":
A rumor that the president somehow cheated in the
televised debates - was that a wire under his jacket? was he listening
to Karl Rove on a microscopic earpiece? - flies across the Internet and
takes hold in dark corners of the public imagination.
The only subsequent reference to the bulge was a light
post-election piece by Times Washington reporter Elizabeth Bumiller
(11/8/04), who cited the anonymously sourced Hill story saying the bulge
was body armor (an odd decision by the Times, which officially frowns on
unidentified sources even for its own pieces). She reported that the
White House tailor was miffed at having earlier been blamed for the
bulge by the White House.
'A Lot of Hoops'
While the New York Times seems to have been the only
newspaper to write an investigative story on the Bush bulge and then
kill it, it was not the only paper to duck the story about the bulge and
its dramatic confirmation and delineation by Nelson. In addition to the
L. A. Times and the two local papers that showed no interest, Nelson
says that the same day he learned that his story had been killed at the
Times, October 28, he received a phone call from Washington Post
assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, famous for his investigative
reports on Watergate. "Woodward said he'd heard the Times had killed the
story and asked me if I could send the photos to him," says Nelson.
The JPL scientist did so immediately, via email,
noting that he had also been in touch with Salon magazine. He says
Woodward then sent his photographs over to a photo analyst at the paper
to check them for authenticity, which Nelson says was confirmed.
A day later, realizing time was getting short, Nelson
called Woodward back. Recalls Nelson: "He told me, 'Look, I'm going to
have to go through a lot of hoops to get this story published. You're
already talking to Salon. Why don't you work with them?'" (Several
emails to Woodward asking him about Nelson's account have gone
unanswered.)
At that point Nelson, despairing of getting the
pictures in a major publication, went with the online magazine Salon.
This reporter subsequently asked Nelson to do a similar photo analysis
of digital images of Bush's back taken from the tapes of the second and
third presidential debates. The resulting photos, which also clearly
show the cueing device and magnetic loop harness under his jacket on
both occasions, were posted, together with Nelson's images from the
first debate, on the news website of Mother Jones magazine (10/30/04).
What Should Affect Elections?
Ben Bagdikian, retired dean of U.C. Berkeley's
journalism school, held Woodward's current position at the Washington
Post during the time of the Pentagon Papers. Informed of the fate of the
bulge story and Nelson's photos at the three newspapers, he said:
I cannot imagine a paper I worked for turning down a
story like this before an election. This was credible photographic
evidence not about breaking the rules, but of a total lack of integrity
on the part of the president, evidence that he'd cheated in the debate,
and also of a lack of confidence in his ability on the part of his
campaign. I'm shocked to hear top management decided not to run such a
story.
Could the last-minute decision by the New York Times
not to run the Nelson photos story, or the decision by the Washington
Post and the Los Angeles Times not even to pursue it, have affected the
outcome of the recent presidential race? There is no question that if
such a story had run in any one of those major venues, instead of just
in two online publications, Bulgegate would have been a major issue in
the waning days of the campaign.
Given that exit polls show many who voted for Bush
around the country listed "moral values" as a big factor in their
decision, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some would have
changed their minds had evidence been presented in the nation's biggest
and most influential newspapers that Bush had been dishonest.
"Cheating on a debate should affect an election," says
Bagdikian. "The decision not to let people know this story could affect
the history of the United States."
Investigative journalist Dave Lindorff is a regular
columnist for CounterPunch. His latest book is This Can't Be Happening:
Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage
Press).
His writings can be found at
www.thiscantbehappening.net.
Spiking the Bush Bulge Story: Confirmed
As Extra! went to press, New York Times public editor
Daniel Okrent posted a message on his website (12/21/04) confirming that
his paper had, in fact, killed a story about the device under George W.
Bush's suit. Here is the text of Okrent's message:
President Bush and the Jacket Bulge
Online discussion of the famous bulge on President
Bush's back at the first presidential debate hasn't stopped. One
reporter (Dave Lindorff of Salon.com) asserted that the Times had a
story in the works about a NASA scientist who had done a careful study
of the graphic evidence, but it was spiked by the paper's top editors
sometime during the week before the election. Many readers have asked me
for an explanation.
I checked into Lindorff's assertion, and he's right.
The story's life at the Times began with a tip from the NASA scientist,
Robert Nelson, to reporter Bill Broad. Soon his colleagues on the
science desk, John Schwartz and Andrew Revkin, took on the bulk of the
reporting. Science editor Laura Chang presented the story at the daily
news meeting but, like many other stories, it did not make the cut.
According to executive editor Bill Keller, "In the end,
nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story
beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a
quiet, unlamented death."
Revkin, for one, wished it had run. Here's what he
told me in an e-mail message:
I can appreciate the broader factors weighing on the
paper's top editors, particularly that close to the election. But
personally, I think that Nelson's assertions did rise above the level of
garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. Here was a
veteran government scientist, whosedecades-long career revolves around
interpreting imagery like features of Mars, who decided to say very
publicly that, without reservation, he was convinced there was something
under a president's jacket when the White House said there was nothing.
He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line (not to
mention his job) in doing so and certainly with little prospect that he
might gain something as a result - except, as he put it, his preserved
integrity.
Revkin also told me that before Nelson called Broad,
he had approached other media outlets as well.
None - until Salon - published anything on Nelson's
analysis. "I'd certainly choose [Nelson's] opinion over that of a
tailor," Revkin concluded, referring to news reports that cited the man
who makes the president's suits. "Hard to believe that so many in the
media chose the tailor, even in coverage after the election."
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