- January 26: Afghanistani president Hamid Karzai signs the post-Taliban constitution into law, hailing its promise of equal rights in hopes of uniting his splintered nation and ending the reign of violence. The grand council, or loya jirga, ratified the constitution January 4. The constitution outlines a tolerant, democratic Islamic republic under a strong presidency, as sought by Karzai, with strong backing from Washington, a two-chamber parliament and an independent judiciary. It also recognizes minority language rights, although it gives few powers to its far-flung provinces. Some critics warn it could give too much power to religious hard-liners in the supreme court. (AP/New York Times)
- January 26: The newly organized Council for Sunnis in Iraq says it opposes partial elections scheduled for the summer and wants a vote taken only when American forces had left the country. The Council's statement poses new problems for the US occupation, which is already trying unsuccessfully to placate Shi'ite and Kurdish concerns about the proposed transfer of power, tentatively scheduled for June. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is already reconsidering its idea of regional caucuses to select a new government because of criticism from powerful Shi'a cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who demands democratic direct elections. At the same time, the CPA must balance the mounting frustration of the Sunni community, which although smaller than the Shi'a, has traditionally formed the ruling class and feels excluded from the political process. Sabah al-Qaisi, one of the founders of the Sunni council, says the council will not accept any elections organized by the US-led authority. The council, formed last month, is one of the first political groups to have emerged to represent the Sunni community since the Ba'ath party was outlawed last year. It comprises around 160 Sunni clerics, from moderates to extreme Islamists. "Trying to push the Sunnis away from their political rights will leave the country in a mess," says Qaisi, a cleric who spent two years and three months in jail under Saddam Hussein for following the hardline Salafi school of Islam. "We want real, free and decent elections. Elections under occupation are not the correct way to do it. We want the Americans to leave and then we will hold elections. ...Because of the security situation, I am telling you the elections will not succeed," Qaisi continues. "There will not be elections and the Sunnis will not participate in any elections." US troops raided Qaisi's mosque in Baghdad last month, arresting 32 people and seizing weapons, ammunition and computers. Eight people remain in custody. (Guardian)
- January 26: Iraqi women are fearful for their new-found freedoms, as the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council has approved replacing the country's civic family laws with Islamic Sharia. "We had a war with a tyrant regime, but now we have another kind of war," says Aida Ayeedi, a teacher at the College of Agriculture in Baghdad. "This war is with those religious men who think that women are just instruments to bear children and create the next generation." Pushed through with little discussion primarily by the Shi'ite Muslim members of the council, the measure would put women's fates out of the hands of judges and into those of clerics, most likely chosen by their husbands, who might have little commitment to protecting their rights. For many women, that would roll back what they had under Hussein, who granted them a measure of personal if not political freedom. Technically, the measure cannot go into effect until it is signed by the US civilian administrator for Iraq, and it is unlikely that Paul Bremer, a strong proponent of involving women in governance, would do so. But as soon as the United States hands over power to Iraqis this summer, it could be enacted. "We can't ever let this law be passed," says Maysun Damluji, an architect who is serving as deputy culture minister and is organizing a grass-roots movement to block it. The measure's passage highlights the danger that Iraqi sovereignty will fail to yield the pluralistic democracy with protection for individual rights that Bush has publicly set as its goal. The pre-emptory manner in which Sharia was approved also suggests that, at least for the moment, it will be difficult for underprotected groups such as women to wield political influence in Iraq. (Houston Chronicle)
- January 26: A Mother Jones details the structure of lies created by the Bush administration to justify its decision to go to war with Iraq. "It wasn't intelligence -- it was propaganda," says retired intelligence official Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." Preparations for the war go back even before the Bush team made the official transition at the Pentagon, when Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, and Douglas Feith, undersecretary for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq. Feith and Wolfowitz called on Harold Rhode to help organize the Iraq war-planning team. Rhode, a longtime Pentagon official and a multilingual specialist on Islam, set up shop in what would become Feith's office even before Feith was officially confirmed in July 2001. Rhode, like Feith and Wolfowitz a hard-core neoconservative, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neoconservative Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so." (Rhode refuses to be interviewed, saying, "Those who speak, pay.") Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Pentagon officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there." The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant. Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit, which would eventually develop into what was called the Office of Special Plans, at the Pentagon. The fledgling OSP was set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith chose to focus on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, the director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s, says, "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." That was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists. So Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist. Wurmser was the perfect choice for such an ideologically motivated task. He had loudly called for war against Iraq for years. With Perle and Feith, Wurmser and his wife Meyrav wrote a 1996 strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity." In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith. Wurmser's partner, Michael Maloof, was equally ideological. A former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, Maloof was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances -- once in late 2001 and again in spring 2003, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue [intelligence] operation" outside officiai CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels. The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, al-Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. In June 2003, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy...." Feith told officials that the OSP was an innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has also been established, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks." As the administration ramped up its efforts to bring about a consensus for war with Iraq, the intelligence outfit grew until, now led by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, the outfit officially became the "Office of Special Plans." the new unit's director was Abram Shulsky. Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neoconservative, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts who didn't fit the ideological makeup of the new unit. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans, but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House. Luti was not only an ideologue, but had direct ties to Vice President Dick Cheney; he was described by one veteran as "making Ollie North look like a moderate." Shulsky is a colleage of Richard Perle as well as a senior associate of the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative think tank which has long advocated US global dominion. Kwiatkowski says that Luti and Shulsky ran the Pentagon's Near East and Southeast Asia (NESA) unit, and the Office of Special Plans, with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to al-Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," Kwiatkowski adds. She recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." Scooter is Lewis "scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox. "Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office." Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cites the work of a US intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lieutenant Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP; the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials. According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The al-Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things." Besides Cheney, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office. As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, criminal past, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into US intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own US-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," says Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches." Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for al-Qaeda. "We gave the names of people who were doing the links," he told one interviewer. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with." In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon, leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's informants provided worthwhile intelligence. Mother Jones writes, "With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong US intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," US Army Major Ronald Hann told the Los Angeles Times, 'the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen.' Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents-documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003. 'Either the system broke down,' says former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, 'or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken.'" Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to al-Qaeda? That's complete nonsense." In the Senate, Democrat Jay Rockefeller is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea. In the House, Democrat Henry Waxman has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats, but no Republicans, in support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully," Waxman says of the Office of Special Plans. "I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions." (Mother Jones/Global Exchange)
- January 26: A Newsweek article profiling the First Battalion of the Eighth Infantry in Samarra notes that the one of biggest problems facing US troops in Iraq and their relations with Iraqi citizens is the "bloodline" attacks. Captain Todd Brown explains, "[W]hat we're seeing now is much more tribal. It's the Arabic rule of five. If you do something to someone, then five of his bloodlines will try to attack you." The insurgency is self-replicating, he says, like a virus, through the vengeance of brothers, sons, cousins and nephews. "That's Bedouin culture." (Newsweek/MSNBC)
- January 26: The Japanese government is paying approximately 10 billion yen, or $94 million, to Iraqi tribal leaders to provide bodyguards for its Self-Defense Forces in Iraq. A spokesman for the Prime Minister's office says, "It is rather cheap if we can buy security for our soldiers with that amount of money. In Iraq, oil money is distributed to those tribes. It is more important for the Japanese government to make one-time payments to the leaders than to pay them a salary. That will help their local economy and benefit Japan's foreign policy toward the new Iraq." The first contingent of Japanese troops is already in Samawah in southern Iraq. The main force is scheduled to be sent either at the end of January or in early February. (Japan Today/Unobserver)
- January 26: In one of the stranger defenses of the Iraqi invasion, Attorney General John Ashcroft tells top Austrian officials in Vienna that Saddam Hussein's past use of "evil chemistry" and "evil biology" justified the invasion. Ashcroft, in Vienna for talks with top Austrian officials on measures to fight terrorism and drug trafficking and improve air travel security, says that Hussein's arsenal remained a menace and was sufficient cause to overthrow his regime. "I believe there is a very clear understanding that Saddam Hussein continued to pose a threat," says Ashcroft. "Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of UN resolutions," he continues. (AP/Las Vegas Sun)
- January 26: Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds says she was shocked at the lack of security in the FBI's counterintelligence squad when she went to work there shortly after Sept. 11, but when she spoke up, she was fired. Now she is telling her story. Edmonds is a Turkish-American who was hired by the FBI as a translator. She notes that from the outset, the emphasis was not on expediting the mounds of untranslated material to help find information on the terrorists who perpetuated the attacks, but instead the material was used in intra-bureau wrangling and pissing matches: while the news was full of reports of heaps of untranslated material languishing inside the FBI's counterterrorism unit, Edmonds says that translators were told to let them pile up. She remembers a supervisor's instructions "to just say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations" so that the department could use the pileup as evidence to demand more money from the Senate. Another colleague she recalls saying bitterly, "This is our time to show those as*holes we are in charge." Edmonds says she was increasingly horrified by the lack of internal security she saw inside the very agency tasked with protecting our national security. In papers filed with the FBI's internal investigative office, the Department of Justice, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and most recently with the 9/11 Commission, she has reported serious ongoing failures in the language division of the FBI Washington Field Office. They include security lapses in hiring and monitoring of translators, investigations that have been compromised by incorrect or misleading translations sent to field agents, and thousands of pages of translations falsely labeled "not pertinent" by Middle Eastern linguists who were either not qualified in the target language or English, or, worse, protecting targets of investigation. When her reports went unanswered, she took her concerns to upper management. Instead of an investigation being launched, Edmonds was fired. The only cause given was "for the convenience of the government." The FBI has not refuted any of her allegations, yet they have accounted for none of them. On the morning Ms. Edmonds was terminated, she said, she was escorted from the building by an agent she remembered saying: "We will be watching you and listening to you. If you dare to consult an attorney who is not approved by the FBI, or if you take this issue outside the FBI to the Senate, the next time I see you, it will be in jail." She says, "I know about my constitutional rights, but do you know how many translators would be intimidated?" Shortly after her dismissal, FBI agents appeared at her home to seize her home computer. She was then called in to be polygraphed, a test she later found out she passed. In May 2002, accompanied by her lawyer, Edmonds took her story to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She was followed into the Senate chambers by two FBI agents; the following has continued unabated since them. "I call them my escorts," she jokes. In a lengthy, unclassified session that one participant describes as bizarre, the FBI admitted that Edmonds' allegations were correct, but refused to do anything about the situation. One investigator said incredulously, "You basically admitted almost all that Sibel alleged, yet you say there's no problem here. What's wrong with this picture?" According to GOP Senator Charles Grassley, who chaired the session, the FBI witnesses shrugged, put on their coats, and left. There was no way the FBI was going to admit to another spy scandal only months after being scorched by the Webster Report on one of the most dangerous double agents in FBI history, Robert Hanssen. "I think the FBI is ignoring a very major internal security breach," says Grassley, "and a potential espionage breach." Unlike those whistleblowers whose cause is redress of personal grievances, Edmonds impressed Grassley as passionately patriotic. "The basic problem is, heads don't roll," Grassley says. "The culture of the FBI is to worry about their own public relations. If you're going to change that culture, somebody's got to get fired." He is not optimistic, however, that Congress will act aggressively. "Nobody wants to take on the FBI." In March 2002, Edmonds filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. She was told then that an investigation would be undertaken and she could expect a report by the fall of 2002. She is still waiting. She also filed a First Amendment case against the Department of Justice and the FBI, and a Freedom of Information case against the FBI for release of documents pertaining to her work for the Bureau, to confirm her allegations. The FBI refused her FOIA request. Their stated reason was the pending investigation by Justice, which, her sources in the Senate tell her, will probably be held up until after the November election. When Edmonds continued to fight, FBI director Robert Mueller asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to assert the State Secrets Privilege in the case of Edmonds versus Department of Justice. Ashcroft obliged. The Observer calls the State Secrets Privilege "the neutron bomb of legal tactics." In the rare cases where the government invokes it to withhold evidence or to block discovery in the name of national security, it can effectively terminate the case. According to a 1982 Appeals Court ruling, "[o]nce the court is satisfied that the information poses a reasonable danger to secrets of state, even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege." Edmonds reported an attempt by a Turkish-American colleague who tried to recruit her and her husband to join one of the organizations the FBI monitors as a terrorist front; nothing was done and the colleague continued to work as a translator. "You'd think the FBI would be jumping out of their seats about all these red flags," one Congressional staffer said. Later, Edmonds discovered that her former colleague, who abruptly left the country in 2002, had managed to get hold of translations meant for Edmonds, forge her signature, and render the communications useless. "These were documents directly related to a 9/11 investigation and suspects, and they had been sent to field agents in at least two cities," says the staffer. "We discovered some amazing stuff," she remembers. The translator had deliberately mistranslated the documents and sent them to FBI field offices under Edmonds' name; she was in the process of correcting the mistranslations when she was fired. When Edmonds protested to a superior officer, the agent told her, "I'll bet you've never worked in government before. We do things differently. We don't name names, and we usually sweep the dirt under the carpet." She said another special agent warned: "If you insist on this investigation, I'll make sure in no time it will turn around and become an investigation about you." Last week Edmonds met with a New York attorney, Eric Seiff, a veteran of both the New York District Attorney's office and the State Department. He finds her case extraordinary. "We're familiar with people in big bureaucracies putting job security over doing the right thing, but not at this dramatic level —- putting job security above national security," Seiff says. He is appalled at the invocation of State Secrets Privilege. "It's the Attorney General saying to the judiciary, 'Not only don't we answer to Ms. Edmonds, we don't answer to you.'" The last resort, Edmonds decided, was the federal 9/11 commission. Maybe they would live up to their mandate to do a truly independent investigation of the security lapses that allowed our country to be invaded by terrorists supported by foreign powers, who have yet to be exposed or held accountable. She sent a full report to one of the Democratic commission members. When asked about the commission's interest in the issues raised by Ms. Edmonds' report, the member said, "It sounds like it's too deep in the weeds for us to consider, we're looking at broader issues." Edmonds's efforts to get results from the Senate Judiciary Committee have borne no fruit; committee chairman Orrin Hatch has blocked every request. "senator Hatch has been an obstacle on everything we've tried to do," she says. (New York Observer)
- January 26: While the media may be considered liberal, its owners certainly are outdoing themselves in contributions to the Republican party. Richard Mellon Scaife, the well-known conservative money source and publisher of Pittsburgh's Tribune-Review, gave $25,000 to the Republican National Committee last July, while also giving $2,000 to George Bush's re-election campaign and $4,000 to the US Senate bid of Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Pat Toomey. The Murdoch family chipped in with a $2,000 donation to the Bush-Cheney campaign from Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., who also sent $2,000 to Sen. John McCain's 2004 re-election effort and the same amount to the campaign of California Republican Congressman Bill Thomas. Murdoch's media empire includes Fox News. Wife Wendi Murdoch donated $2,000 to Thomas, while his son, New York Post Publisher Lachlan Murdoch gave $2,000 to Bush-Cheney. William Dean Singleton, CEO and vice-chairman of MediaNews Group, who also serves as publisher of the Denver Post, gave a $2,000 contribution to Bush-Cheney as well. Other contributions from members of well-known newspaper families include Michael Copley, step-son of retired Copley Newspapers chairwoman Helen Copley, who provided $2,000 to the Bush-Cheney campaign; William Scripps, great-grandson of news pioneer E.W. Scripps, who contributed $2,000 to the president's re-election campaign, as well as $2,500 to the Republican National Committee; and Roxanne Pulitzer, the infamous former wife of Herbert Pulitzer, son of newspaper legend Joseph L. Pulitzer, who gave $250 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The well-known Hearst family hit both sides of the aisle, with George Hearst, chairman of the board of the Hearst Corporation, giving $1,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and his cousin William Hearst III, grandson of William Randolph Hearst and former publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, donating $2,000 to the Joe Lieberman for President campaign and another $2,000 to VenturePac, a political action committee supporting issues related to venture capital firms. Democrats took in some media cash as well. William Block, chairman of Block Communications, which owns the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, offered two $250 contributions to the Democratic National Committee in 2003. New York's Mortimer Zuckerman, chairman and co-publisher of the New York Daily News, gave $1,000 to the re-election coffers of California Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos. (Editor and Publisher)
- January 26: A Church of England boarding school for girls has protested to the American ambassador after five members of its choir were branded potential illegal immigrants and banned from entering the US. The School of St Mary and St Anne at Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire, is due to stage a one-week tour of California next month, including a religious concert at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. But when the five teenagers went to pick up their tourist visas at the Grosvenor Square embassy in London, they were turned away on the grounds they could be planning to set up home in the US. Mary Steel, the headmistress, said the refusal was "barmy" and has written to the American ambassador, William Farish, urging him to reconsider. The banned pupils are from the Chinese mainland, as are a growing proportion of students in the independent sector. The school says they will be supervised at all times, have no relatives in the US and have paid fees of more than £15,000 a year to study in the Staffordshire countryside. "The sad comment made by the girls was, 'It's just because we are Chinese'," writes Steel. "I am sure that you do not wish the United States to gain a reputation for wholesale discrimination in this way." (Guardian)
- January 27: True to form, the Bush administration is handling the exposure of its systematic deceit over Iraq's WMDs as a public relations problem, to be cured by simply "recasting" the entire war in a new light. To that end, senior administration officials are fanning out all over the globe to justify the war as good for humanity and downplay the failure to find WMDs in Iraq. "The former dictator sits in captivity. He can no longer harbor and support terrorists, and his long efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction are at an end," Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday in a speech to political and business leaders in Rome. Today, Cheney takes the same message to the Vatican on a fence-mending mission to Pope John Paul II, who had condemned the war as a defeat for humanity and whose personal emissary failed to dissuade President Bush from attacking Iraq last spring. Cheney refused to mention recent statements by David Kay, the former chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, who said he does not believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the US-led war began. In Vienna yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that even if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq, the war was justified because Hussein can no longer resort to "evil chemistry and evil biology." Secretary of State Colin Powell seems to have trouble sticking to the administratin's message. "What the open question is, how many stockpiles they had, if any. And if they had any, where did they go? If they didn't have any, why wasn't that known beforehand?" Powell said on the weekend, en route to the Georgia capital of Tbilisi before heading to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House was adamant yesterday that the war was justified. "Saddam Hussein was a dangerous and gathering threat, and the President made the right decision to remove him from power," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. McClellan also seemed to suggest that there would be no more pre-emptive wars against rogue regimes, the controversial Bush doctrine that many regard as flouting international law. "Iraq was unique," McClellan said. "Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction on its neighbors and on his own people, and they failed to account for the weapons and weapons programs.... Given his history and given the events of Sept. 11, we could not afford to rely on the good intentions of Saddam Hussein." Most observers doubt that the recast PR broadside will blunt criticism of the administration. (Toronto Globe & Mail)
- January 27: Weapons inspector David Kay reveals, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, that his team found new evidence that Iraq had destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s. The fact that Iraq disarmed at least partially before 1998 but did not turn over records to UN inspectors even when threatened with war has led Kay to conclude that Hussein was bluffing about his weapons capability to maintain an aura of power. "If the weapons programs existed on the scale we anticipated," Kay says, "we would have found something that leads to that conclusion. Instead, we found other evidence that points to something else." Kay reiterated his view that 85% of the Iraq Survey Group's job has been completed and that "the major pieces of the puzzle" have been covered. "We will be digging up smaller pieces for the next 15 years, but we should not wait for every piece and not be able to begin to reconstruct what happened," he says, and adds that he is "afraid that ambiguity would be used as a delaying function by some people to delay trying to find out what went wrong." Kay's revelations have caused Bush to backpedal on his previous assertions that Iraq had verifiable WMDs that presented a clear and present danger to the US, as well as an acrimonious private exchange between Bush and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who is calling for an investigation to find out more about Bush's spurious charges. Kay continues to primarily blame the US intelligence community for the raft of errors and lies: "It's quite clear we need capabilities that we do not have with regard to intelligence, he says, and he admits to the Senate Armed Service Committee, "we were almost all wrong -- and I certainly include myself here," in believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."
- Democrats are blaming the Bush administration directly. Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean says, "I think the biggest problem with David Kay's resignation is that the vice president evidently went to the CIA and influenced the writing of intelligence reports. In other words, the administration did cook the books." Fellow candidate John Kerry adds, "We were told by the administration 'they [the Iraqis] have a 45-minute capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction.' They didn't. We were told that they had aerial devices that could spread these weapons over our troops. They didn't." Senator Bill Nelson says with anger in his voice, "I was looked at straight in the face and told that UAVs could be launched from ships off the Atlantic coast to attack eastern seaboard cities of the United States. [I] was given that information as if it were fact." It was because of this information that Nelson voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. Now, he is learning that those claims are lies, and that Air Force and other intelligence analysts disagreed with those claims from the outset. "We need some answers," Nelson intones.
- Kay says he believes Hussein may have been pursuing a course of "constructive ambiguity" before the war, bluffing about having weapons to give the illusion of power and to put up a deterrent. "Saddam wanted to enjoy the benefits of having chemical and biological weapons without having to pay the costs," he says. In response to Kay's revelations, White House officials and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw said yesterday that they never claimed that Hussein represented an "imminent" threat. "I think some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent,'" White House press secretary Scott McClellan says. "Those were not words we used. We used 'grave and gathering threat.'" Though Bush may have not used the term "imminent," he said in a major speech in October 2002 that waiting to confront Hussein was "the riskiest of all options." The United States, he said, "must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.... We have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring." Actually, the administration has, indeed, used or countenanced the description "immiment" on a number of occasions. On May 7, 2003, when White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked, "Didn't we go to war because we said WMD were a direct and imminent threat to the US?" he replied, "Absolutely." Similarly, in November 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "I would look you in the eye and I would say, go back before September 11 and ask yourself this question: Was the attack that took place on September 11 an imminent threat the month before or two months before or three months before or six months before? When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month... So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?" And most notably, Vice President Cheney said two days after Bush's 2003 State of the Union that Saddam Hussein "threatens the United States of America."
- Interestingly, Newsweek uses the statement, "We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself," on their cover for their next issue. Bush officials are livid at Kay's frank testimony.
- More critical information about the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons program is expected to emerge from a report to be released today in London by a senior British judge, Lord Hutton, who investigated the suicide of a scientist who had leaked information about the Blair government's white paper on Iraq. The report is expected to examine the claim that Iraq could prepare to launch its chemical weapons within 45 minutes, a charge Bush had echoed. (Washington Post, CBS News, Daily Misleader)
- January 27: President Bush is apparently backing down, without saying so in so many words, from his previous assertions that Iraq had WMDs that posed a threat to the US. Asked by reporters if he would repeat earlier expressions of confidence that the weapons would be found in light of recent statements by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, that Hussein had gotten rid of them well before the war, Bush refused, instead saying, "I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work, so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought." At the White House and on Capitol Hill, many officials say it is obvious that the intelligence reports about Iraq had been deeply flawed. They doubt that Bush will have the luxury of waiting to confront the issue. Democrats are demanding that an independent panel examine how the National Intelligence Estimate, the 2002 document that Mr. Bush used as the basis of his comments that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies, could have been so flawed. The White House has expressed no interest in the formation of such a panel. "I think it is critical that we follow up and find out what went wrong," the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said before meeting with Bush and a group of other Congressional leaders from both parties. At the meeting, Daschle notes that Congressional leaders had depended on sound intelligence in voting on the war. Bush interrupts Daschle and argues that the Iraq war was a "worthy" effort and that the administration had not manipulated the evidence. Bush also insists that he hasn't given up the search for the weapons. Bush officials are searching for a formula that would allow them to acknowledge intelligence-gathering problems without blaming the Central Intelligence Agency or the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, who approved that National Intelligence Estimate. "We spent the summer with the White House and the agency spitting at each other," says one official, recalling the arguments over who was to blame for Bush's inaccurate accusation in the State of the Union address last year that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy nuclear material in Africa. "We can't afford another of those." Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have complained that senior members of the administration continue to exaggerate evidence about unconventional weapons. "Just within the last few days, Vice President Cheney has said that it is clear that a couple of vehicles that were found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs, exactly the opposite of what David Kay is reportedly saying," says Senator Carl Levin. And Senator Jay Rockefeller says that the "overwhelming question" surrounding the intelligence issue remained "was this a predetermined war or not?" (New York Times)
- January 27: The Iraqi exile group in London which supplied British intelligence with the information about Iraq's 45-minute capability admitted that the information might have been completely untrue. Nick Theros, the Washington representative of Ayad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord in exile, said it was raw intelligence from a single source, part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6. "We were passing it on in good faith," Theros says. "It was for the intelligence services to verify it." The claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes was highlighted by PM Blair's preface to the dossier issued by the government in September 2002 in the run-up to the war. It was also at the heart of the furor between the Blair administration and the BBC after doubt was cast on its accuracy by the government weapons scientist David Kelly. Theros now says the information now seemed to be a "crock of sh*t. ...Clearly we have not found WMD," he says. (Guardian)
- January 27: Former State Department analyst and author Daniel Ellsberg, the man who revealed the Nixon administration's systematic lies behind Vietnam, says that to save both the US and Iraq from the depredations of a senseless and costly war, officials must be willing to do what he did and leak information proving the Bush and Blair administrations' duplicity. "This situation -- as in Vietnam -- is a harbinger of endless bloodletting," Ellsberg writes. "I believe American and British soldiers will be dying, and killing, in that country as long as they remain there. As more and more US and British families lose loved ones in Iraq -- killed while ostensibly protecting a population that does not appear to want them there -- they will begin to ask: 'How did we get into this mess, and why are we still in it?' And the answers they find will be disturbingly similar to those the American public found for Vietnam. I served three US presidents -- Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon -- who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our staying there. For the past year, I have found myself in the horrifying position of watching history repeat itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied -- and continue to lie -- as blatantly about their reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did about Vietnam. By the time I released to the press in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers -- 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually everything four American presidents had told the public about our involvement in Vietnam was false -- I had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew that our countries were being lied into an illegal, bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did, before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies, with documents. ...Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake." (Guardian)
- January 27: The investigation into GOP theft of Democratic computer files has resulted in an aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Republican, being asked to take leave while the investigation continues. Manuel Miranda is on leave pending the outcome of the inquiry by the Senate sergeant-at-arms. In the matter under investigation, Democratic memos stored on a computer server shared by Judiciary Committee members ended up in GOP hands. Miranda says that investigators were looking at work he performed for the Judiciary Committee before he joined Frist's office. "There was no stealing," he says. "No systematic surveillance. I never forwarded these memos -- period." Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch placed an aide on leave late last year for improperly obtaining data from the computer networks of two Democratic senators. That aide, who has not been identified, has since left government work. (Guardian)
- January 27: The nuclear plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, did stunningly well in drills designed to simulate the repulsion of terrorist attacks -- so well, in fact, that investigation of the results proves that the plant cheated to obtain them. Employees of an outside security contractor, Wackenhut, were tipped off beforehand about the impending simulations. A broader investigation uncovered more evidence of cheating during mock attacks at the plant over the past two decades, including barricades being set up before the test to alter the outcome and guards deviating from the established response plan to improve their performance. "There's no point in doing them if you have people who are going to cheat," said Richard Clarke, a former senior White House counterterrorism official. "That's ridiculous. It kind of defeats the whole point of having these tests." The department's inspector general, Gregory Friedman, issued a report concluding the June drills at the Y-12 nuclear facility were "tainted and unreliable" because two guard supervisors from Wackenhut Corp. were allowed to see computer simulations the day before the attacks. Friedman's investigators also say they received "compelling testimony" from more than 30 former and current security officers at Oak Ridge that this was part of "a pattern of actions...going back to the mid-1980s that may have negatively affected the reliability of site performance testing." Each mock attack cost as much as $85,000 to stage. The plant paid Wackenhut award fees of $2.2 million and rated its work "outstanding" for the period through July 2003. The cheating reported by the inspector general had taken place just weeks earlier. A senior vice president for Wackenhut Services, Jean Burleson, describes details in the inspector general's report as "old news," which he said "may or may not have occurred." Burleson added: "There is no impropriety right now going on. Security is better today than it has ever been." The inspector general said guards in another mock attack in late 2000 or early 2001 were improperly told which building would be attacked, the exact number of attackers and where a diversion was being staged. Investigators also said managers substituted their best security guards for others scheduled to work the day of attacks, and standby guards would sometimes be armed and used to bolster existing security guards on duty. In other cases, security guards disabled laser sensors they wore to determine whether they received a simulated gunshot. Guards removed batteries, deliberately installed batteries backward and covered sensors with tape, mud or Vaseline so they wouldn't operate properly. Such cheating is "not uncommon at all," says Ronald Timm, president of RETA Security, a consulting company that has worked with the Energy Department to analyze vulnerabilities at its plants. "Most security forces don't like to lose; they go through great lengths to cheat to win. A loss is considered a negative mark against them." "It's blatant cheating," says Peter Stockton of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based watchdog group. "It doesn't say much for the integrity of the guard forces and some managers who knew this kind of thing was going on." The Y-12 plant, about 20 miles west of Knoxville, makes parts for every warhead in the US nuclear arsenal and is a major storehouse for bomb-grade uranium. (AP/Biloxi Sun-Herald)
- January 27: An FBI informant claims to have illegally stolen mail at the behest of FBI agents as part of the government's investigation into terrorism in Detroit. Informant Marwan Farhat, who has left the country, wrote in a January 21 letter that he was asked by FBI Special Agent Robert Pertuso to steal mail from Arab Muslims whom the federal government had identified as terror suspects. Farhat, an American citizen, claimed in the leter that the FBI failed to deliver on a promise to give Farhat 25 percent of any money confiscated from the terror suspects. Farhat said he received nothing. "I worked around the clock helping and assisting the government of the United States to put Muslims in jail," wrote Farhat, who said he assisted the FBI in giving information on scores of Arabs. "My life has been destroyed, abused and used to benefit your interests." The letter was written to Pertuso but given to a US immigration agent as Farhat was readying to leave the country. Farhat is at the center of an internal investigation by the Justice Department into the conduct of Richard Convertino, the lead prosecutor in the nation's first terror case to stem from the investigation of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Convertino is accused by his employer, the US Attorney's Office, of a laundry list of offenses stemming from his aggressive prosecution of suspected terrorists. He was removed Sept. 4 from the terror case, which continues as the judge considers reversing the convictions, and temporarily is working for a US Senate committee. Convertino had recommended, and obtained, leniency for Farhat on drug charges for which Farhat received far less prison time than federal guidelines recommend. Farhat became a confidential informant after his arrest, but before his sentencing. "I was ordered by the United States attorney, Rick Convertino, to assist you (Pertuso) and (FBI Special Agent) Kevin Tyus by all means," Farhat said in his letter to Pertuso. "I followed his orders and I assisted the FBI in giving information about...Arab Muslims who are criminals, radicals and extremists." Convertino denies the allegations and calls Farhat's statements "lies." (Detroit News)
Hutton report blames BBC for intelligence problems
- January 28: The long-awaited "Hutton report" is issued in Britain. Senior appeals court judge Lord Hutton concludes, after a long investigation, that the administration of Tony Blair is all but blameless for the reports of exaggerated intelligence that were used to justify the war in Iraq. Instead, the report pins the blame directly on the BBC, who is accused of inaccurate and "unfounded" reporting; Hutton blames Gilligan for questionable reporting, and the BBC's board of governors for a lack of control and supervision. The BBC terms the report's conclusions a "catastrophe." The head of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, resigns within hours of the report's release. The next day, Director General Greg Dyke also resigns, and apologizes to the Blair administration for the mistakes made by the BBC; a Blair spokesperson later says the apology is not acceptable, and demands further apologies. The resignations have prompted spontaneous walkouts at BBC offices all over Britain. The report sidesteps any examination of the validity of the Blair administration's intelligence claims, saying that the question is outside of the report's remit. Hutton says that he is not in a position to judge the accuracy of key claims in the government's dossiers on Iraq's WMD. "Future discoveries or the absence of discoveries" will show whether the claims were based on correct intelligence, Lord Hutton says. His report continues, "The question whether intelligence approved and provided to the Government by the JIC was reliable is a very important question." However, he said, it was "an issue which does not come within my terms of reference and on which I express no opinion." In the days and weeks to come, the Hutton report will be thoroughly discredited.
- Additionally, the report says that the death of Dr. David Kelly, a weapons expert "outed" by the Blair administration as the source of a leak to the BBC, was nothing more than a suicide. Blair, whose administration was widely perceived as standing or falling on the basis of the report, claims complete exoneration; minutes after the report is released, Blair appears in front of the House of Commons and says, "The allegation that I or anyone else lied to this House or deliberately misled the country by falsifying intelligence on WMD is itself the real lie. And I simply ask that those that made it and those who have repeated it over all these months now withdraw it, fully, openly and clearly." At the center of the controversy is a series of news articles written by the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, who, after interviewing Kelly and other sources, wrote that Blair's administration was using "sexed-up" intelligence to fraudulently justify its intention of participating in the US-led invasion of Iraq. However, the report says that while Gilligan's notes from the Kelly interviews were "unclear" and an unsatisfactory source for Gilligan's claims, it is impossible to know what was said between Gilligan and Kelly during their meetings, and impossible to know how much of their conversation found its way into Kelly's report. Much of Hutton's criticism centers around the claim that Gilligan was told by a senior government official that "the Government probably knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in." (The 45-minute figure refers to the claim that Iraq could launch WMDs at the British or American mainlands within 45 minutes; Gilligan later admitted that he was wrong to make such a definitive claim.) The report also fails to comment on the grilling of Kelly by the Foreign Affairs select committee; the public "outing" and grilling of Kelly is widely believed to be the cause of his suicide, though Hutton makes no claim to know why Kelly killed himself. Hutton writes, "[I]t would not be proper for me to express an opinon on the way in which Dr Kelly was questioned before the FAC." Dyke says in his resignation statement that Hutton cannot reconcile his "bald" conclusions with the evidence presented in the inquiry. (London Free Press, BBC, CNN, Melbourne Herald Sun, Ananova, Sydney Morning Herald, BBC)
- January 28: Former chief weapons hunter David Kay has lunch with Bush and his senior staff -- Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Andrew Card -- at the White House. Bush demands to know how Kay had reached the conclusion that Iraq had no WMDs or WMD programs, and how US intelligence got it so wrong. "We missed it because the Iraqis actually behaved like they had weapons," Kay says. "And we weren't smart enough to understand that the hardest thing in intelligence is when behavior remains consistent but underlying reasons change." Kay is unusually frank and open with the president and the senior officials at the meeting. Hussein didn't have WMDs, but he wanted to appear as if he did, to deceive not only other, potentially hostile countries, but his own people. Kay believes that Hussein got rid of his actual WMD stockpiles long ago, because they would have been too easy to find. Part of the reason the CIA and other intelligence agencies concluded that Iraq had been buying materials for WMDs was that almost everything Iraq bought was through the black market, which itself was almost entirely run by Saddam's son Uday and his friends. Even more confusing for the CIA was the amazing level of corruption within Iraq's procurement agencies. The regime was so corrupt that even had it wanted to, it could not have developed serious WMDs. "How could you do this?" Iraqi scientists were asked. "Why did you lie?" The answer always was, "Everyone was lying! Everyone was out for their own." Not only the procurement and weapons processes too corrupt for anything meaningful to take place, the government itself was rotten from within.
- So why did Hussein lie for so long? Bush asks. Why had he risked his government, his very life, on such a grand deception? Partly because he never really believed the US would invade his country, Kay responds, but more because he wanted to keep the hostile Shi'a and Kurds in his country from rising up in rebellion. He feared them more than he feared the United States; they, in turn, feared his WMDs. "You know, as you have to recognize, totalitarian regimes generally end up fearing their own people more than they fear external threats," Kay explains. "It's just the history of totalitarian regimes. We missed that." It was easy to miss because the CIA lacked real human intelligence. The CIA analysts were forced to rely on satellite imagery and other technical collection methods, and the large blanks that were left, they filled in with their own suppositions.
- Kay is dismissive of the CIA's attempt at securing current intelligence, telling the assemblage that the CIA would do better to focus on long-term, strategic intelligence. "Current analysis is better if you turn on CNN or read the paper," he says. "Quite frankly, the press does a better job." Look at your own PDBs, Kay says, your daily briefings. If you respond strongly to something in a briefing, your people focus on that item for the next month. A president's expression of interest puts it on top of the agenda "If you ever respond to a PDB item, it's going to be there for a very long time with more and more information." Presidential interest suggests it's important, and the information flow just expands beyond control. Another big problem, Kay says, is that the CIA director, George Tenet, became far too involved in the political process. He lacks the distance and objectivity he needs to do his job properly, and that involvement in the political process leaches into the agency itself. For the best example of a well-running, effective intelligence agency, Kay says, look, not to Britain's MI6 or even to Israel's Mossad, but to the Chinese. "Yeah, they're always trying to steal our technical secrets," Bush grouses.
- Again, Kay is disconcerted by Bush's lack of reaction to his report, as with a previous briefing (see earlier items). "The president accepted it," Kay recalls. "There was no sign of disappointment from Bush. He was at peace with his decision to go to war. I don't think he ever lost ten minutes of sleep over the failure to find WMDs."
- After the meeting, Kay ponders what he didn't say in the meeting: that the US intelligence services were so unreliable that Bush shouldn't rely on them for anything. Rice calls Kay back to the White House for a meeting with her. She says she was struck by something he'd said about how difficult it is for any intelligence service to discern real change, to determine why someone keeps doing the same thing but for different reasons. "I should have been smart enough," she says. "When I heard you say this, I realized that was exactly the same thing that had happened in the DDR [East Germany, which had collapsed in 1988]. I should have recognized it because of that." Kay replies, "Yeah. I have a German friend who told me, 'Don't feel bad about what you missed in Iraq, because we couldn't even figure out the DDR couldn't collect its own garbage until after it fell." Kay says that intelligence services always do a poor job of trying to understand the soft side of societies -- how well the government is working and the fundamental attitudes of the people.
- There are some things Kay doesn't tell Rice. He believes Tenet is at fault because he had been brought in, not as an intelligence professional, but as what Kay thinks of as a big-picture leader, someone who had boosted morale and rebuilt the clandestine service. He had forgotten about the details and drudgery of good, solid intelligence analysis. Rice is at fault as well, since the job of guarding Bush from egregrious error had devolved onto her shoulders and she had failed. But Kay thinks the most blame should go to Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin. McLaughlin was the real intelligence professional, and Kay believes that it was McLaughlin who had fought most stubbornly inside the CIA for the belief that Iraq did possess WMDs, regardless of the evidence. McLaughlin had told Kay one time that he didn't care what the evidence showed, he would always believe the notorious aluminum tubes had been part of a nuclear program. McLaughlin's determination to believe what he chose, and dismiss the evidence to the contrary, was exactly the opposite of what a good intelligence officer should do. Later, in private, Tenet would acknowledge that as far as real evidence of WMDs, the CIA didn't have a leg to stand on. (Bob Woodward, Michael Isikoff and David Corn)
- January 28: The Pentagon is planning a new offensive to counter the expected movement of Taliban figures and al-Qaeda terrorists in several regions of Afghanistan. Defense officials have issued an order alerting troops to the planned "spring offensive" so forces can start working on logistics and getting equipment in place. The possibility exists that troops would extend operations to the Pakistan side of the border, where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has long been said to be hiding. Defense officials are particularly determined to hit al-Qaeda hard in coming months partly because of concerns over two recent assassination attempts against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whose role as a major US ally in the war on terror has angered Islamic extremists. (Guardian)
- January 28: Iraqi Kurds worry more and more that the US will once again abandon them in their aspirations to set up a free Kurdish state. Kurdish leaders and many others in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq insist that the US promised, just before invading Iraq in March 2003, that the Kurds would be granted autonomy under a federal system after the fall of Saddam Hussein. US officials say no such guarantees were made. The Kurds, who established a semiautonomous area in Irbil, Sulaimaniyah and Dohuk provinces in northern Iraq under US and British protection following the 1991 Gulf War, were among the strongest Iraqi supporters of the war that toppled Saddam Hussein. "In the last 12 years, we've had a free and democratic atmosphere. It's impossible for the Kurds to accept one scintilla less than what they have enjoyed," says Neschirwan Barzani, the prime minister of the Irbil. The Kurdish goal is to formalize their existing autonomy under a federal system and even expand it to the oil-rich area around Kirkuk, historically a mixed Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman city. Hussein expelled Kurds from Kirkuk and resettled the area with Arabs. Barzani, nephew of KPD leader Massoud Barzani, said no political party has the right to accept anything less than federalism "because the Kurdish public and the Kurdish people will not accept it."
- Paul Bremer, the US civil administrator, says that he prefers a federal system, but one based on geographical boundaries rather than ethnic composition. Barzani says that during meetings between US officials and anti-Hussein opposition groups and Kurdish leaders before the war, "it was confirmed that the Kurds will get a lions share in the new Iraq. And things gradually changed. After the war, they forgot everything. ...They came out with a new idea about how to run the situation. This in itself has become a problem," he says. He continues by pointing out that "historically, geographically" there has been an area called Kurdistan made up of areas with majority Kurdish population. "What we say is this: The borders of the federal union should be made up of areas that are called Kurdistan," he said, reiterating a demand by Kurdish leaders. The Kurdish aspirations have alarmed neighboring Turkey, Syria and Iran, which fear that granting Iraqi Kurds an ethnic enclave could incite separatist sentiments among Kurdish minorities within their own borders. Barzani also demands that Arabs, who were settled in Kirkuk and other Kurdish areas under Hussein, should be asked to leave. Then Kurds can vote in a referendum on whether they want to be part of a Kurdistan federation, he says. Ferhad Pirbal, a writer and professor at Salaheddin University in Irbil, says, "We know the Turks, the Arabs and the Americans very well. They might do the same again and betray us, like they did in the past. Americans understand the feelings and emotions of Iraqi nationalism and can use that against us." Kurds felt let down in 1991 after the US government urged them to rise against Saddam but did nothing to help them when they were brutally crushed by the Iraqi army. The Americans, however, say they plan to keep Iraq intact. "When we came we said it's going to be one nation" and "we will keep the status quo for now until we can establish a government with a constitution," says Lieutenant Colonel James Bullion with the 404th Cvivil Affairs Battalion in Irbil. He says the issue of Kirkuk was yet to be resolved and the Coalition Provisional Authority will set up a property claims commission in Irbil, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah in the coming weeks for people evicted from their towns. Bullion has advice for the Kurds: "This is the best opportunity for them to achieve their goals. But they have to be realistic. If they push too hard, they may lose that opportunity." (Guardian)
- January 28: America's ports are just as vulnerable to terrorist attacks today as they were in the days after 9/11, and the FBI confirms that they have received information about specific and serious threats to one or more US ports. "The intelligence we have certainly points to ports as a key vulnerability," says Gary Bald, inspector-deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division. He says, "I can't be more specific as to the threats of attacks...we have received information that indicates there is an interest." Senators Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein, who convened the hearing of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology and homeland security, say more has to be done. Measures to protect seaports and waterways have lagged behind efforts aimed at airports and airplanes since the 2001 terrorist attacks. "The ports are the soft underbelly of our nation's security," Feinstein notes. (AP/Sarasota Herald-Tribune)
- January 28: In an about-face of publicized administration policy, the Pentagon announces that it will invoke "emergency powers" to add 30,000 new troops to the US Army over the next four years. Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker tells Congress that while the increase is necessary because of the strain on the Army due to its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan; he says he rejects plans for a permanent increase in forces because that would undermine efforts to streamline and modernize the Army. "Right now, I've been given the authority by the secretary of defense to grow the Army by 30,000 people...under emergency powers," Schoomaker says. He said the authority from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was to last for four years. The Army is already about 11,000 soldiers over the 482,000 troop limit authorized by Congress under the emergency provision the Pentagon invoked, largely through "stop-loss" orders that block soldiers from leaving or retiring and through re-enlistment incentives. Schoomaker tells reporters after the hearing that the Army would move quickly to add nearly 20,000 more forces, saying, "We want to achieve it as quickly as we can." He says the money for the additional troops would come from the $87 billion emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan Congress passed in November. (Reuters)
- January 28: President Bush repeats an oft-refuted lie when he says once again that the US invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein did not let inspectors into Iraq. In reality, the United States called for inspections to end and forced inspectors to leave. "It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in," Bush said, further compounding the lie by claiming Hussein's supposed "refusal" to let inspectors in violated UN Resolution 1441. (AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, New York Times)
- January 28: Government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asks President Bush to institute an investigation of Vice President Cheney's confirmation of leaked classified information in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News on January 9, 2004. In an interview, Cheney referred his interviewer to a story that appeared in the Weekly Standard's November 24, 2003 issue. The story discussed a 16 page memo written by the Defense Department's Undersecretary for Policy regarding raw data and reports describing possible links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Cheney calls the Standard's story "the best information out there." Cheney provided this information despite the Pentagon's November 15, 2003 press release stating that news reports that characterized the contents of the memo were "inaccurate" and excoriated the leak as "deplorable and may be illegal." The Pentagon also stated that leaking such information does "serious harm to national security." Melanie Sloan of CREW says, "Mr. Cheney's reference to classified information and the ensuing silence from the White House shows a distinct pattern: leaking classified information that the administration deems beneficial is Standard Operating Procedure." She continues: "The deliberate delay in investigating the outing of Valerie Plame and the immediate investigation into an alleged leak by former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill the morning after Mr. O'Neill's interview with 60 Minutes shows the contrast between investigations into leaks that help with President Bush's agenda and those that damage the administration's efforts." Cheney, like the rest of the world, is well aware that the Standard's story was based on discredited and false information, and his statements of January 9 totally contradict statements made by both President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who have both admitted that there is no evidence linking Iraq to the September 11th attack. "The administration cannot play politics with classified information," says Sloan, "First, it endangers national security and second, it encourages others to leak such information. How can the American people trust this administration if they cannot handle classified information in a responsible and lawful manner? The American people deserve better." (Citizens for Ethics)
- January 28: The US Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq is planning on hiring an advertising agency to sell the Iraqi public on its plans for a new democratic government, even as US officials and Iraqi leaders struggle to decide whether that government should be formed through elections, caucuses or some combination. The occupation authority invites advertising agencies with Middle East experience to "prepare a proposal for planning, developing and executing a full communications plan in support of the Iraq electoral process." The request for proposals said the winning agency is to develop a "branding" symbol and slogan for the transition along with "informational campaign products," including tapes for use in radio and television advertisements. The plan is to "educate the Iraqi population in a non-propaganda style about the electoral process," said the occupation authority's request. Once the transition takes place, the campaign "is to quickly motivate the Iraqi people to express a positive attitude and participate in the process in order to make it a successful initiative." Judith Kipper, director of the Council on Foreign Relations Middle East program, says she would be "appalled" if Iraqis were not chosen to handle the election advertising campaign. "We are still looking at Iraq through American eyes," she says. "This is not public relation to be done by outsiders. Professional Iraqis understand the culture and what will work." She pointed to the recent award of a $96 million contract for running Iraq's former government-owned radio and television networks and national newspaper to Harris Corp., a US electronic equipment company, that turned over running the networks to a Lebanese company and the newspaper to a Kuwaiti company. "We are still not seeing any Iraqis running their own things," she notes. A previous occupation authority advertising campaign, to promote the reintroduction of Saddam Hussein's Iraq radio and television stations and national newspaper, was won by J. Walter Thompson, a major US advertising agency that did the work out of its Beirut office. The $890,000 campaign included ads on television, banners, some of which were hung from Baghdad buildings, and placards on buses in the capital city. (Washington Post)
- January 28: CBS's decision not to air a MoveOn.org ad attacking the Bush administration was apparently made because of pressure from the Bush administration to keep the ad off the airwaves during CBS's broadcast of the Super Bowl. The "carrot" from the administration seems to be the White House's push to remove restrictions on the number of local television stations that can be owned by the network's parent company, Viacom. "The CBS Eye has been closed to the truth and to fairness," says Democratic senator Richard Durbin. "CBS has a great, great legacy. It is a storied name when it comes to public information in America. This chapter is sad and disgraceful." CBS officials deny they are censoring the MoveOn ad as part of a political quid pro quo deal with a White House that has been friendly to the network's lobbying agenda, but representative Bernie Sanders, the leading Congressional critic of moves by the Federal Communications Commission to allow the "Big Four" networks to dramatically increase their ownership of local TV stations, says that the censorship of the MoveOn ad highlights the potential for abuse of the public trust by media corporations that grow large enough, and arrogant enough, to constrict the political discourse at both the local and national levels. "Denying MoveOn's 30 second spot about the federal budget deficit seems a thinly veiled political decision," explains Sanders. "I hope that Viacom's move is not in any way payback to the Bush Administration for its ongoing efforts to loosen federal rules to allow large companies like Viacom to own a larger and larger share of the media in this country. I hope it's not but the timing of CBS' censorship is troubling. Regardless, this seems to be the latest example of how concentrated power in the media system harms the public interest."
- Over 25 Democratic House members sign a letter to CBS that reads in part, "We believe this action sends a negative message to the American people about your network's commitment to preserving our democratic debate. Censoring this ad is an affront to free speech and an obstruction of the public's right to hear a diversity of voices over the public airwaves. CBS has said that the ad violated the network's policy against running issue advocacy advertising. However, the network has run a White House issue advocacy spot on the consequences of drug use during a past Super Bowl. CBS also will air a spot by Philip Morris USA and the American Legacy Foundation advocating against smoking during this year's Super Bowl. Additionally, the network profits enormously from the thousands of issue ads which air on CBS stations nationwide during election campaigns year after year. Because of these facts, we must call into question why CBS refuses the advertisement by MoveOn.org. Issue ads are commonplace and important for democratic debate. Yet, CBS seems to want to limit that debate to ads that are not critical of the political status quo, and in the case of the MoveOn ad, of the President and by extension the Republican-controlled Congress. ...The choice not to run this paid advertisement appears to be part of a disturbing pattern on CBS's part to bow to the wishes of the Republican National Committee. We remember well CBS's remarkable decision this fall to self-censor at the direction of GOP pressure. The network shamefully cancelled a broadcast about former President Ronald Reagan which Republican partisans considered insufficiently flattering. Perhaps not coincidently, CBS's decision to censor the Reagan program and to deny airtime to this commercial comes at a time when the White House and the Republican Congress are pushing to allow even greater and greater media concentration -- a development from which Viacom stands to benefit handsomely. The appearance of a conflict is hard to ignore. There may not be a fire here, but there certainly is a great deal of smoke. ...You have been entrusted by the American people as stewards of the public airwaves. We ask that you not violate that trust and that you not censor this ad." (The Nation)