Click image for the full toon.

As someone who has tried to maintain independence of thought and judgment throughout my life (with varying degrees of success and periods of misplaced good intentions), the independents I see and hear interviewed in the news baffle me.

I've dealt with voter decision processes before: the primary voters of 2004 and a few months later the so-called "undecideds".

And other papal bears defecating in the Vatican questions.

From the London Times:

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

Also, Terry Gross at Fresh Air interviewed the authors of Deception, which chronicles American complicity in the proliferation of Pakistani nuclear technology. That was two months ago. Why has this been left out of the political discourse?

Props to Bill for the article link.

UPDATE: Actually, to answer my own question and to be fair, Edmonds' allegations implicate not only the BushAdmin but the ClintonAdmin and a few other Admins down the line. There is a lot of sensitive material involved, of course, but how much is "national security sensitive" as opposed to "protecting my political ass sensitive"?

Apropos my own cartoon on the subject, David Brooks offers his own critique of the confusion independents in New Hampshire suffer between John McCain and Barak Obama:

Both Barack Obama and John McCain attract independents. Both have a candor that appeals to voters and media-types alike. Both ask their audiences to serve a cause greater than self-interest. Both offer a politics that is grand and inspiring.

But they are very different men. Their policies obviously conflict, but their skills, world views and moral philosophies set them apart, too. One man celebrates communitarian virtues like unity, the other classical virtues like honor.

As far as broad portraits of leadership styles go, Brooks' column is not bad; not great, but not totally stupid (Carpetbagger points out the stupid parts.) But to me the big difference between Obama and McCain is that Obama is against military action against Iran and wants to pull out of Iraq as soon as possible (an admittedly vague timeline) while McCain wants to use Iraq as a launching pad for a future invasion of Iran in pursuit of "democratizing" the Middle East (read: neocon imperialist misadventure.)

Meanwhile, DailyKos has created a poll based on Brooks' own admission that he deliberately "slammed" Democrats to make himself feel better while criticizing Republicans. The choices are worth a laugh.

*UPDATE: I missed this earlier today, but Jacob Weisenberg at Slate has a much more interesting article on the McCain-Obama comparison meme; he explains better than anyone why the media are so fixated upon them, the source of much confusion among those independents who can't tell the difference between them. Even with Obama's narrow loss to Clinton, he still pulled in the lion's share of independents in New Hampshire; McCain got the rest. I hope they got it all sorted out.