[MLUG - DISCUSSION] Was the president wired during the first debate?

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I put the key photo here:

http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/pics/misc/bush_back.jpg

See the article appended below.  Believe me, my friends and I noticed that 
bulge during the debate and were very suspicious.  I recalled an 
interesting case of radio-based "channeling" fraud from the late 1980s:

http://www.bible.ca/tongues-popoff-39-17Mhz.htm

Why would Bush do such a thing?  Why wouldn't he do it?  Having immediate 
access to a team of experts should be helpful.  It's a tight election and 
he needs any advantage he can get.  I don't trust him and I don't think it 
is at all far-fetched to suspect him of doing this.  --Mike

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/08/bulge/index.html

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Bush's mystery bulge

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

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By Dave Lindorff

October 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.

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About the writer

Dave Lindorff is the author of the new book "This Can't Be Happening! 
Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy." Reach him at 
EMAIL:PROTECTED
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