Monday, October 18, 2004

BULGE LINKS & THEORIES

WELCOME TO BUSH WIRED! The following is a consolidation of links to NEWS, PHOTOS, and VIDEOS past and present. If you have an interesting link that I forgot please send it my way! Submissions, tips, personal comments, to: c.shaw@mac.com

• THE OFFICIAL BUSH WIRED PHOTO GALLERY VIEW THE EVIDENCE!

There are 3 main theories to the source of THE BULGE.
•1- The "WIRED" theory: George W. Bush uses a coaching device during press conferences and more importantly, the DEBATES!
•2- The "MEDICAL" theory: President Bush has a secret medical condition and requires a device of some sort. Sounds outrageous but there are some compelling arguements.
•3- The BULGE is a device of some sort furnished by the Secret Service. The Secret Service, by policy, does not comment on these issues, so no information on that theory is on this site.
•* Many people have thought that the BULGE is simply a bulletproof vest. However this has been officially denied, therefore we don't cover that theory on this site.

For further info and opinion written as this story unfolded simply scroll down the site. BUSH WIRED hopes that you find this site informative and invites you to make up your own mind!

• The new BULGE ART GALLERY! CLICK HERE FOR BULGE ART ...just some humorous art submitted about The Bulge.

CURRENT BULGE NEWS (Oct 18):

--->>> NEW!!! • Paula Zahn Now did a surprisingly in-depth segment on THE BULGE on CNN this afternoon. No video (yet), but they covered the theories, showed numerous, pictures, and highlughted websites devoted to The Bulge (including BUSH WIRED). This was the first time I saw this story covered in the "major media" in a serious light.
--->>> NEW!!! • DAVE LINDORFF Author of the first Salon.com story speaks on his BULGE experiences and why the topic isn't receiving serious scrutiny by the media.
--->>> NEW!!! • WALL STREET JOURNAL A Brief mention of the BULGE.
• NEW YORK TIMES article (as posted in the International Herald Tribune)
• PILLGATE? from The Washington Post
• www.isbushwired.com Gets an anonymous tip from a SECRET SERVICE AGENT!!!
• TORONTO STAR article "Media Losing Battle of the Bulge"
• OPINION PIECE from the LA Times (as posted in the Salt Lake Tribune)
• DALLAS MORNING NEWS asks the question we all want an answer to.
• An article from AFRICA a different spin

RECENT and PAST NEWS ON THE BULGE PHENOMENON AND THE WIRED THEORY:

Salon.com first broke this story to the "mainstream media". Shortly thereafter the story was picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post. (Salon.com offers a free "day pass" to view the entire article... well worth the price of watching a short ad)
• Salon.Com story The original piece by Dave Lindorff.
• SALON.COM TRANSMITTER ARTICLE
• AN ABSOLUTELY AMAZING and in-depth look at the BULGE topic as a whole. Incredible information and quotes from reliable sources "confirming" the WIRED THEORY... we're all waiting for a follow-up.
• The New York Times article that covered the BULGE and broke the story to the major media is no longer available to view free of charge. Go to their site if you wish to purchase the article from their archive. NY TIMES ARTICLE

• CUEING SYSTEM The alleged earpiece apparatus
• Star Stories: How Story Weblogs are Changing the Dynamics of Building News Properties VERY INTERESTING!
• Mean Politics
• A MASTER TAILOR on the "bad tailoring" excuse offered by the Bush/Cheney Campaign.
• An ARTICLE was submitted that has the specs for this system which was "delivered to the White House"
• An interesting article on the WIRED/Earpiece subject.
•
Another article on the BULGE
• Brit Hume of FOX news weighs in on the issue, dismissing the topic because of the author of the Salon.com piece is a liberal. Shoot the messenger?
• An interesting piece from Saudi Arabia (the Author is obviously no fan of Bush)

• Another article out of the Philippines
• A very interesting opinion piece "Take Me Out to the Bulge Game":
• Another BULGE STORY
A skeptic weighs in
• A SHORT ARTICLE on Debate 3 BULGE
• Another EARPIECE link
• A POLL by The Economist. Bulge stats on page 2 & 3 (pdf)
• Jesse Jackson weighs in on the BULGE!!! BOSTON HERALD article. Jackson: Voters deserve truth about Bush's mystery bulge
• Taking the fight to the airwaves
• Washington Post article by Tina Brown (An interesting note on Bulge at the bottom)
• And another GOOD STORY that kind of sums up the whole thing, earpiece coaching or not.
• THE REGISTER did a story on the BULGE subject.
• ARTICLE discussing the Bulge
• Hoffman Wire "Sure, Bush uses an earpiece sometimes," a top Washington editor for Reuters said to me last spring. "State of the Union -- he had an earpiece for that. Everybody knows it," he said, "or assumes it." Or so says Michael A Hoffman II. Hoffman is a former broadcaster for the American Contemporary Radio division of ABC News, and a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press.
• The Daily Record (Scotland) does their own investigation

THE MEDICAL THEORY:

• NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE
• Salon.com article on the speculation of Bush's health floating around blogs everywhere.
• THE LIFE VEST DEFIBRILLATOR the alleged medical apparatus.
• WEARABLE DEFIBRILLATOR More info.
• VIDEO speculation about a debilitating condition. A comparison of Bush debate speeches from the recent debates and 10 years ago.
• Reuters article from October 6 on Bush POSTPONING HIS MEDICAL EXAM
• A DOCTORS NOTE on the subject.

VIDEO & PHOTO LINKS:

• THE OFFICIAL BUSH WIRED PHOTO GALLERY
• Some video of Bush's "wire" from the previous debate(s). THANKS!
• VIDEO 1
• VIDEO 2
• VIDEO 3... the "let me finish" scene.
• This is VIDEO of the alleged "wire", and some familiar bulges, excellent quality and in slow-motion. 35mb and a slow download, but worth it!
• More VIDEO of the first debate, the Bulge is at the end.
• 2nd DEBATE VIDEO showing the Bulge
• PRESS CONFERENCE VIDEO the "ghost voice" was recorded! This video is the subject of much debate. 17mb download
•
http://www.canofun.com/blog/videos/BushAndTheOddSync.wmv (a short, poor quality video from CNN but you can hear it clearly
• Another set of mystery bulge pics. HI-RES pics available from a gov't website, this bulge is on the lower back at waist level...
• 24 more photos of the Debate Bulge
• Another weird video... no ghost voice, but whoa... this is from last December, they're already talking about an earpiece here! • Bush acting crazy at a press conference, whats he doing? Earpiece prompting?
• discussion of above: http://www.circa75.com/showArticle.php?article=89

BULGE BLOGS and REFERENCE SITES

• www.isbushwired.com: Great content and spirited debate. A+ coverage.
• THE CANNONFIRE SITE More awesome coverage, A+
• A new BULGE SITE! BUSHBULGE.COM
• MYSTERY BULGE.COM No updates in the last few days.
• Portland indymedia blog Ongoing Discussion and speculation.

Late Night & Comedy concerning THE BULGE:

• The new BULGE ART GALLERY! CLICK HERE FOR BULGE ART
• LATE NIGHT COMEDIANS The BULGE is definitely fodder for jokes!
• Letterman's Top Ten List pertaining to the Bulge.
• MSNBC STORY on Sen. John Edwards visit to The Late Show.

posted by icone at 7:55 PM

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

dont bother with the salon day pass read it here

Getting to the bottom of the bulge
Does the Bush-is-wired story make sense? A variety of experts weigh in.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo and Gavin McNett

Oct. 15, 2004  |  The first time Joseph Cannon watched the Sept. 30 presidential debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry, he was too "nervous" to notice anything strange about the president's mannerisms, let alone his clothing. It was only on a second viewing with his girlfriend that Cannon, a graphic designer and prolific, Bush-bashing blogger in Los Angeles, saw what the world has now come to call the Bush Bulge.

"Bush seemed to have a wire, or an odd protrusion of some sort, running down his back," Cannon wrote on Oct. 2. Naturally, he searched around the Web for clues as to what the bulge could be, and, as often happens online, the evidence he found seemed to converge upon a conspiratorial, yet not-implausible hypothesis -- in this case, an old suspicion that the president receives help during speaking engagements by using an in-ear prompting device, a direct wire to advisors concealed behind the Oz curtain.

Cannon is among the handful of bloggers you'll find at the bottom of the bulge affair, one of the originators and prime exponents of the story that Bush was wired in the Coral Gables, Fla., debate. He's not a typical conspiracy theorist (he says he's not "convinced" that Bush was being prompted during the debate, only "persuaded,") and says he'd change his mind if other facts came to light. It's hard to know whether that's really the case, but Cannon sounds reasonable enough. And, indeed, many of the other Web-based proponents of this theory seem reasonable, especially when you consider their evidence and take the obvious next step by consulting expert opinion -- security guys, in-ear prompter trainers, the people who actually make and use these devices.

What one finds from talking to these people is that the question of whether Bush wears a wire is a real question, one they're willing to seriously entertain. And while many in the media are quick to wrap it in the damning weave of "conspiracy theory," equating it with such golden hits of yesteryear as the "Hillary Killed Vince Foster" tale, it's in fact much simpler and more evidentiary than that. Will we ever really know if Bush was wearing a prompter in the 2004 presidential debates? Perhaps not. But we're certain never to know if we don't look at the evidence.

Consider, for instance, the testimony of James Atkinson, the president of the Granite Island Group, a countersurveillance firm in Gloucester, Mass. Atkinson is an expert at wiretap detection and bug sweeping, whose clients include both private companies and the U.S. government. "I've done a tremendous amount of work for presidential Cabinets," Atkinson says. "I've worked for Cabinet members, plus staff and advisors ... in the [George H.W.] Bush administration, and in both terms of the Clinton administration." Whenever he's on a job, he uses a spectrum analyzer, a device used to detect signals from all possible sources -- including those used by commercially available wireless prompting systems, the kind frequently used by television broadcasters and actors. When he goes to Washington, Atkinson says he often hears ear-prompting signals coming from the White House. "I have personally sat outside the White House with lab-grade testing equipment -- and have cataloged, monitored and confirmed that wireless monitors are being used," he says. "When you go into a place to check for bugs, every frequency in the spectrum is suspect until you can identify it -- and there are thousands of frequencies. I have found wireless mike signals transmitted during [White House] press briefings, with multiple subject advisors. You'll hear the speaker, and another voice will cut in, like 'It's 28 million' -- and the speaker will repeat, 'It's 28 million.' The speaker will institute certain delays or will ask the question again, and will receive a prompt."

On a Web log of bulge news he's been keeping at cryptome.org, Atkinson wrote: "When the president visited Boston back in March 2004 he stayed at the Park Plaza Hotel. The signal from the system he was using could clearly be heard 1500+ feet away, and one of his advisors could be heard doing voice checks and then feeding him data about the school he was about to visit." Asked by Salon who heard the signals, Atkinson said, "I heard it. In Boston I was working a project several blocks away from where the president was speaking. It's archived. You want to keep archival copies of things because of liability issues -- if you sweep for bugs and a bug is later found, you can show that it wasn't there when you did the sweep."

Atkinson has agreed to review the recordings in his archive and verify a match with an official video of the event. (Details pending ...) "I've got a rep for being a straight shooter, whether or not it's embarrassing to someone. In my profession, integrity is the most important thing -- integrity and confidentiality. But this is cheating. It's one thing if an official has prompting when giving a speech, it's another if he went to Harvard, say, and had someone else write a paper for him."

Atkinson also says that it's not just Bush who's been coached -- Bill Clinton, too, received ear-prompting. John Ashcroft is "quite notorious for using wireless headsets," and Janet Reno used a system during the siege at Waco, Texas. Atkinson has documented the dozens of radio frequencies that the White House uses for its communications, and has pointed to the make and model of the prompter devices popular in the government. One of these devices is the RC-216 Receive-A-Cue system, manufactured and sold by Comtek Communications in Salt Lake City.

Jon Belgique, sales and marketing director of the firm, would not say whether Comtek sold systems to the government, but said that the devices are common and popular for all sorts of applications. TV people use them so that anchors can get breaking news feeds from producers, and correspondents out in the field can recite polished stories without the aid of a teleprompter. Actors use them to remember their lines, and to listen to "sidetone" -- the processed, amplified sound of their own voices. Businesspeople use prompting devices to give great speeches, and politicians and even members of the clergy have been known to do so as well, say several trainers in the use of these things. One ear-prompter trainer told Salon that he'd even coached politicians, but he declined to say who.

Comtek's prompting system consists of two main pieces -- a tiny earpiece and an iPod-size "induction receiver." The earpieces are tiny, roughly 1.5 millimeters in length, and a millimeter in diameter. Belgique says that Comtek's earpiece would be visible to those looking directly at the ear of a person wearing the device, but other experts say that newer devices are all but invisible in the ear. "They make them so small these days," says Rick Plastina, a Chicago-based actor and ear-prompter trainer who is called the "Ear Guru" by friends. "If you get right behind the person and look directly into the ear canal you'd be able to see it -- but otherwise you wouldn't know." The induction receiver is a small gadget that receives radio signals (coming from the person doing the prompting) and then sends the signals to an induction wire that you, the person who's being prompted, would wear around your neck. Some people claim to have seen this wire in this video. The neck loop sends audio signals to the earpiece through magnetic induction ; no visible wire connects the earpiece to the receiver. (Incidentally, people who suffer from cardiac conditions, such as Dick Cheney, can't use the magnetic induction systems, according to Atkinson.)

It's this receiver that folks suspect is the bulge beneath the president's back. But according to Belgique, the upper back -- which is where, in various shapes and sizes, the bulge has appeared in all three debates -- is the wrong place to put the receiver. "That makes no sense," he says. "That makes no sense at all. Usually it's worn on the side, in the pocket, the small of the back. There's nothing that would go on the back up there." Others who've used ear-prompting systems concur -- you'd never put a receiver on your upper back. It would be awkward there; you'd need to strap it on somehow, and, even if you managed that, it'd be far more visible than, say, in your coat pocket. Why would the president have worn it back there? (Atkinson's theory is that the president was also wearing body armor, and the upper back was the only place to put the system. The White House told the New York Times that the president was not wearing a bulletproof vest. But this could just be a standard denial, part of keeping the president secure. Calls to Secret Service offices in Miami and Washington resulted in no reply (in the latter case), and in an angry Secret Service man (in the former) saying, "Well, I'm not going to answer ANYTHING.")

But let's adjust our tinfoil hats and plunge deeper. Location is not the only reason to doubt the Bush-was-wired story. Indeed, the best reason to be skeptical of the theory is Bush's performance -- abysmal. If Bush was being prompted, why was he so bad? Why the long, awkward pauses with nothing to say? Why did he characterize Iraqi insurgents as fighting vociferously ? Why did he repeat himself so much -- working hard, hard work, working hard? Who was coaching him, Porky Pig?

Proponents of the Bush-wired meme say that the president may not have been used to using the system in an occasion such as a live debate. And this, it turns out, is a possibility. Using an ear prompter is something of a trick, because you've got to master talking and listening at exactly the same time. If you're new to it, "What's hard to get rid of is the deer-in-the-headlights look," says Don Cosgrove, an actor and ear-prompting trainer in St. Paul, Minn. "I am looking at you but concentrating on what's in my ear. You get a dead look in the eyes." Others say that another sign to watch for in ear-prompter novices is excessive blinking. Sound familiar?

Is it possible, then, that Bush's bad performance was caused by a lack of familiarity with an earpiece? It's plausible. But also it's not. That's because, trainers say, it doesn't take very long to learn to use one, and almost everyone is able to do it and look natural. Most people master ear-prompting in just one two- or three-hour course, trainers say. "The only person I've ever seen who's had trouble was a very, very intelligent woman who was trying to beat the system," says Cosgrove. "She was trying to speak with the words as she was hearing them," when what you're supposed to do is speak a split-second after you hear each word. It's virtually impossible to spot an actor who's using an ear prompter, experts say. The day Salon spoke to him, Rick Plastina, the Ear Guru, had used a prompter on a video shoot -- even the director had no idea he was being prompted (from a tape recording of the script he'd set up earlier), he says. "Marlon Brando used it on every movie he made from 1980 until he died," Plastina says. Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and many other stars have been known to use them.

Bush is no DeNiro, of course, nor even a Nicholson. But if he's been using prompting systems for a while, as Atkinson and others online have argued, then why hasn't he learned to use them well? And if he's so bad with them, why would his advisors have let him use them in a debate?

One imagines that this could all be easily cleared up with a word from the White House. Clearly, there is something weird under the president's coat. If it's not part of an ear-prompting system, what is it? Is it a back brace? Does the president have a medical condition? If so, shouldn't we know about it? Is it a security device -- if so, why is nobody in the administration suggesting that? Instead of clear answers, Bush officials only issue bizarre dismissals. "The president is an alien," Bush-Cheney campaign chair Ken Mehlman told reporters in the Spin Room at Wednesday's debate. "You heard it here first. The president is an alien. That's your quote of the day. He has been getting information from Mars. The shock of the debate will be the president's alien past will be exposed, which is why that box is there."

Are we supposed to think the White House is hiding nothing when it issues statements like that? "You have the Internet people doing their thing, and the Internet people are letting whatever the rumor of the day is go ahead," says Chris Shaw, who runs the Bush Wired blog. "But the White House is putting out their stupid rumors themselves, too."

And the story is hurting Bush. In the last week, Salon has run three pieces on the bulge, and we've been absolutely deluged by Web traffic. The story is now a regular feature on late-night comedy shows, and it's come up in the post-debate spin room several times. Just about the only site on the Web where you can't find talk of the bulge is Matt Drudge's -- but Drudge's refusal to link to the story is itself an indication of just how powerful this thing is. Drudge instead pushed a strange, competing story about Sen. Kerry allegedly removing an object from his pocket during the debate -- an object that later turned out to be a pen. Nobody knows better than Drudge (who didn't respond to requests for this story) the value of a good, believable political rumor. The idea that Bush was prompted in the debate -- like the claim that Al Gore took credit for inventing the Internet, or George H.W. Bush wasn't familiar with supermarket scanners -- resonates with people.

In politics these days, given what's happened over the past few years, "there is an anxiety that what we are seeing in public is simply being staged for the purpose of deceiving us, that the whole facade of the political process is simply a paid political message," says John Pike, a security analyst at GlobalSecurity.org who does not believe that Bush was wired, but sees how others might believe it. "There's this hope that it is not so comprehensively fake that it is beyond our power to detect the fakery -- Toto will detect the little man behind the curtain. Here you've got Dubya coming out there acting like Oz, the great and terrible. And people like to think they have seen through this huge deception." Mark Crispin Miller, author of "Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney's New World Order," half-concurs, saying that while he believes the president was probably wired, whether or not the bulge theory is true "doesn't alter the fact that what [Bush] says is carefully scripted and dishonest." "In cyberspace," Miller says, "the Bush regime stands accused of many things they may not have done. What's interesting is that so many reasonable people in the country are so agnostic on such provocative questions."

salon.com

2:02 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

here is another salon article for cheapskates that dont wat to watch ads

Bush's mystery bulge



The rumor is flying around the globe. Was the president wired during the first debate?

By Dave Lindorff

Oct. 8, 2004  |  Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in his first debate with John Kerry? That's the latest rumor flooding the Internet, unleashed last week in the wake of an image caught by a television camera during the Miami debate. The image shows a large solid object between Bush's shoulder blades as he leans over the lectern and faces moderator Jim Lehrer.

The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it's safe to say he wasn't packing. So was the bulge under his well-tailored jacket a hidden receiver, picking up transmissions from someone offstage feeding the president answers through a hidden earpiece? Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate?

Bloggers are burning up their keyboards with speculation. Check out the president's peculiar behavior during the debate, they say. On several occasions, the president simply stopped speaking for an uncomfortably long time and stared ahead with an odd expression on his face. Was he listening to someone helping him with his response to a question? Even weirder was the president's strange outburst. In a peeved rejoinder to Kerry, he said, "As the politics change, his positions change. And that's not how a commander in chief acts. I, I, uh -- Let me finish -- The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at." It must be said that Bush pointed toward Lehrer as he declared "Let me finish." The green warning light was lit, signaling he had 30 seconds to, well, finish.

Hot on the conspiracy trail, I tried to track down the source of the photo. None of the Bush-is-wired bloggers, however, seemed to know where the photo came from. Was it possible the bulge had been Photoshopped onto Bush's back by a lone conspiracy buff? It turns out that all of the video of the debate was recorded and sent out by Fox News, the pool broadcaster for the event. Fox sent feeds from multiple cameras to the other networks, which did their own on-air presentations and editing.

To watch the debate again, I ventured to the Web site of the most sober network I could think of: C-SPAN. And sure enough, at minute 23 on the video of the debate, you can clearly see the bulge between the president's shoulder blades.

Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with the claim that the Bush administration insisted on a condition that no cameras be placed behind the candidates. An official for the Commission on Presidential Debates, which set up the lecterns and microphones on the Miami stage, said the condition was indeed real, the result of  negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn't stop Fox from setting up cameras behind Bush and Kerry. The official said that "microphones were mounted on lecterns, and the commission put no electronic devices on the president or Senator Kerry." When asked about the bulge on Bush's back, the official said, "I don't know what that was."

So what was it? Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and the owner of the Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance shop in Spokane, Wash., looked at the Bush image on his computer monitor. "There's certainly something on his back, and it appears to be electronic," he said. McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge could be the inductor portion of a two-way push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a system makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that is pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is virtually invisible. He also said a weak signal could be scrambled and be undetected by another broadcaster.

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies -- notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's appearance. "They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera," Schechter said. "The Democrats weren't doing that at their convention."

Repeated calls to the White House and the Bush national campaign office over a period of three days, inquiring about what the president may have been wearing on his back during the debate, and whether he had used an audio device at other events, went unreturned. So far the Kerry campaign is staying clear of this story. When called for a comment, a press officer at the Democratic National Committee claimed on Tuesday that it was "the first time" they'd ever heard of the issue. A spokeswoman at the press office of Kerry headquarters refused to permit me to talk with anyone in the campaign's research office. Several other requests for comment to the Kerry campaign's press office went unanswered.

As for whether we really do have a Milli Vanilli president, the answer at this point has to be, God only knows.

4:30 AM  

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