Bush's Mystery Bulge: Was Bush Wired at the First Debate?
By Dave Lindorff, Salon.com
Was George W. 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.
…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 Bush's
shoulder blades.
…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 Bush 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 Bush 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.”
(To read the complete article and to see a picture of the bulge, click here.)
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