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 [censored] 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."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Farhad Manjoo is a staff writer for Salon Technology & Business.
Gavin McNett is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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